Going to Trinidad by Martin J. Smith

Author:Martin J. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bower House
Published: 2021-03-18T23:15:17+00:00

Finding a New State

Claudine Griggs was committed to discovering happiness in life, even if she reluctantly had to accept that hers would forever be the life of a transgender woman. For several years after her 1991 surgery in Trinidad, she’d waited for some new dawn that would leave her feeling like “I would just be me,” rather than a woman born a man and then surgically sculpted into the body of a woman. It never really came. Eventually, her expectation of that new dawn faded.

“I realized I still have to go to work, I still have to eat, I still have to deal with prejudice, I still have struggles,” she says. “It was not magic. [My life] was much better, and I think it got better year by year by year, simply because at some point I just had to accept that I have one life, and that life is trans, and that I’d better make the best of it.”

She’d lived her life before surgery in a fortified closet. A few people knew she’d transitioned from male to female, including work colleagues and her lover Carolyn, but generally she felt that her genitalia was nobody’s business but her own. Surgically removing her male genitalia, though, had diminished the pain of living a life in which she considered herself a misfit. In time, Stanley Biber’s artfully crafted new vagina gave her the confidence to guard the closet door a little less fiercely.

I am trans, she thought. I’m not going to stamp it on my forehead, but when it comes up and it’s necessary to divulge, it’s OK.

In the first couple of years after her surgery, Griggs turned about forty or fifty pages of the personal record she’d kept about her experience undergoing gender confirmation surgery in Trinidad into a four-hundred-page manuscript that “just poured out on the page.” It looked very much like a book manuscript. Eventually, she worked up the nerve to show one of her writing professors a copy.

She certainly hadn’t written it with publication in mind. She’d simply wanted a record of the experience. But, she admits now, she had ambitions as a writer and, as an English major, was “infatuated” with idea of publication. Her instructor was not just enthusiastic about the manuscript, but adamant that she find a publisher.

The thought both appealed to and repelled her. Publication would represent the culmination of her writing dreams. But it also would mean crossing a cherished divide between private and public. For someone who considered privacy the central safeguard in her life, it would mean an enormous personal step.

“Biber said a lot of his patients just disappeared,” Griggs says. “And a lot of psychologists said if you want to be happy you have to escape the transsexualism and just go and move and change your name and not tell anybody, except maybe your spouse—and some don’t even do that. That was still something I thought about back in those days. I knew publishing the book would eliminate even the fantasy of disappearing to a new life where I could just be Claudine.

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