Being Human (eBook)

A Biography of overcoming Limitations

Alice Claudia Oehninger (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 2. Auflage
454 Seiten
Books on Demand (Verlag)
978-3-7562-4522-2 (ISBN)

Infos

An intimate, empathic exploration of the life of Alice Oehninger. For fourteen years, she grows up in traditional Tanzania and Zimbabwe of the 1980ies. She is white. And transgender. She looks like a boy, and is expected to act the part. At twenty, she returns to her native Switzerland and finds herself a stranger there, too. She navigates culture shock, love and rejection, earns a living, discovers the powerful wish to be a parent. In the role of a man, she marries and finds contentment in Germany, until crisis destroys her fragile world. Where others break, Alice rises. She is driven by enabling other people to be their best possible selves. She becomes a learning coach for youths and young adults, a mentor and a counsellor. And ultimately, it is this drive that has led to this book, that it may touch and enrich as many lives as possible. With her richness of insights and experiences, Alice understands the parallels and similarities in the joys and struggles of people across the globe. The appreciation that life is finite, and infinitely precious. How we are all united in this. Alice explores human needs so fundamental, they rule our choices and interactions. Our ancestral urges for dominance and survival pitch us against each other, define how cultures and genders interact. She delicately but implacably points out how much time and effort we dedicate to defending and preserving our comfort zone. Alice breaks taboos. Suggesting what we might require to solve emotional double-binds. Or live and thrive despite ambivalences and insecurities. What it takes to overcome biological dichotomy, the conditioning of childhood. How we all yearn for recognition, security, and love. Alice is clear in her expectations of us: identify our own constraints, conditioned by society or self-imposed. And in their stead, engender understanding and mutual empowerment. She asks that we become role models for a society we want to live in tomorrow. J.C.

An intimate and empathic exploration of the life of Alice Claudia Oehninger. For fourteen years, she grows up in traditional Tanzania and Zimbabwe of the 1980ies. She is white. And she is transgender. She looks like a boy, and is expected to act the part. Returning to Zurich at twenty, the city of her birth, she realizes that she is a stranger there too. Navigating her way past culture shock, through love and rejection, learning to earn a living, discovering the powerful wish to be a parent. This leads to a life in the role of a man, of marriage and contentment in Germany, until crisis destroys the fragile world Alice and her Love live in. Time to initiate changes. Enabling other people to be their best possible selves is what drives Alice. It led to her becoming a vocational trainer, a learning coach for youths and young adults, a mentor and a counsellor. And ultimately, it is this drive that has led to this book, in the hopes that it touch and enrich as many lives as possible. As you read deeper into her life, she tells of being raised among a multitude of cultures. How that has gifted her with a richness of insights and experiences. Understanding for the parallels and similarities in the joys and struggles of people across the globe. The appreciation that life is finite, and infinitely precious, and how we are all united in this. Alice explores human needs that are so fundamental to what we are, that they rule our choices and define how we interact with one another. Most particularly, how cultures interact with each other, and how our ancestral urges for dominance and survival pitch us against each other, instead of uniting us. She delicately but implacably points out how much time and effort we dedicate to defending and preserving our comfort zone. She discusses what it takes to break taboos. She suggests what we might require to solve emotional double-binds. Or live and thrive, despite the ambivalences and insecurities life throws our way. What it takes to overcome the limitations of biological dichotomy, and the conditioning of our childhood. And she casts a light on how we all yearn for recognition, security, and love. Alice also makes demands. She hopes that we evolve beyond the arena of survival, and in doing so, become role models for a society we want to live in tomorrow. She expects us to identify constraints, those imprinted by our society, or the self-imposed. And in their stead, engender understanding and mutual empowerment.

Textauszug

Switzerland, 1970

I was born into a biologically male body. It was in a hospital near Zürich, and from what my parents have related, I broke my first gender-pattern there and then. Or perhaps, they broke it for me? Apparently, my Dad had quite the row with the nurses, who disputed the name chosen for me by my parents, saying it was an inappropriate name for a boy (it is a unisex name in a lot of countries).

Gender patterns and friction

I was a girl in kindergarten.

Pretty much everyone, with whom I have ever spoken about this, has asked me “how do you know?” As a matter of fact, every one of my therapists asked me at some point, what gives me the assurance and the security, that I am trans* gender? That I am female?

My first, rather impulsive answer would be, “Um… …how do you *not* know?!?”

How can any person not know what gender they are? And, yes, I did (and do) in fact tell my therapists, that I do not know how to define what I feel. That I cannot pinpoint what it is that gives me the sure knowledge that this soul of mine was born into the wrong body. I had extensive discussions with all my therapists, obviously, since this is the therapists’ jobs. Nevertheless, the bottom line is, I cannot pinpoint why I feel the way I do. It just is.

Okay, so that is not really helpful. How *can* I be so sure?

I suppose, a dead give-away is the fact that, the feeling that I was a girl in kindergarten turned out *not* to be a phase I would outgrow. In fact, it accompanied me well through my pubescent years, regardless of whether I got to wear dresses or not. My point being, my behaviour was consistent over several decades.

A feeling of wrongness, a feeling of this body not reflecting who I am, a feeling of this body being somehow ill-fitting and always one step removed. Like wearing a left glove on a right hand. You can make it fit, but it is far from comfortable, and it always hinders your senses and restricts your self-expression.

To the point of where it *hurts*.

From a very early age, I developed strategies and coping mechanisms to deal with the feeling I had no name for. Not looking at my own body. From the age of six right through to the age of twenty. No looking down. No checking in the mirror. Nothing. For fourteen years. Instead, I regularly used the mirror to make myself up. In the absence of any eyeliners or lid-shades, I used water soluble colour pencils I had. Yes, I am aware, stereotype, and not exclusive proof of femininity. But there you have it. It was what I needed to feel more myself.

Of course, my parents did not dress me in dresses or offer me girl-gendered clothing, this was not something parents did in the 1970ies. But I remember lucidly, that we had a huge trunk of dress-up clothes, cloths, shawls and accessories in our Kindergarten. I was a regular and a great enthusiast for dressing up. And always as a girl. So, yes, I was a total cross-dresser as a child. Although I would certainly hesitate to diagnose a child with gender dysphoria simply because they enjoy dressing up across gendered borders at the age of four.

I gave myself a female name and requested of my nursery schoolteachers and the other children in kindergarten address me by this name. Some of those said playmates got on easily with the fact that I was a “boy with a female name”. They took in stride the fact that I liked dresses and shawls and they never seemed to be perturbed by the fact that the adults called me by a different name. We painted lots, sometimes pictures on paper, and sometimes each other. We crafted dolls houses and cars from cardboard-boxes, we ran round screaming and climbed trees. We played “Cops and robbers”, where I was invariably the “suave blonde”. As much as you can be suave when you are four or five years old. And we played “family”, where I was invariably the mother or the daughter. Yeah, totally stereotyping, but hey, these were the 1970ies and broadening horizons was a work still in its baby shoes.

So, you might be asking, since I knew I was a girl with such surety, why I did not pursue this with more vehemence or tenacity?

My deviation from my assigned gender caused immense friction in some children. Looking back, I would assume that there were only a few actual extremes. But this was kindergarten. And children do happen to be uninhibited and impulsive, highly susceptible to mob psychology. This culminated in my being pursued and harassed by the outright majority. There were enough children, who took extreme offence at my self-expression of being a girl. And they made this *very* clear. On multiple occasions. Of course, the other explanation would be, that they were trying to cope with some other deep anxiety or injury, and this was their way of venting the stress. But the outcome was the same. Their direct feedback to my crossing borders of gender and mixing stereotype roles was such, that I became very careful about to whom I opened up, and with whom I spent my time.

We had a “snoozing room” which was strewed with a kind of semi-hard pillows, stuffed with unprocessed cotton. The smell of unprocessed cotton still makes me want to curl up into a dark, tight ball of silence and pretend I am not there.

They have found me. Shouting and shoving. More than I can quickly count. Running is not an option. I know that from experience.

I pretend not to care. Pretend they are interested in something else, and try to slip past them.

There is always one. One who pushes the first shove, throws the first punch. Aims the first kick.

There are faces shouting and screaming at me, hands clawing. They cling to me, holding my arms, holding my legs. Panic rises hot and tight in my throat. I drop any pretence of being unperturbed and try to make a break for it. I struggle as hard as I can, I try to run, but there are too many holding onto me.

I fall. They drag me down, piling on top. So heavy I can’t breathe.

I try to crawl forward. Away. There are fingers in my face. In my hair, pulling. I feel that they are tearing off my clothes. I scream. I have lost my pants. I feel the cold air. I scream harder. I feel hands on the back of my head, pushing my face into a pillow. I cannot breathe. My chest hurts. It burns. My head pounds. I kick my legs to try to break free, but the others are too heavy. I feel hands grabbing my *anatomy* and yanking hard. They scream into my ears, “You are not a girl, you are a boy,” over and over.

So yes. I can confirm, that when you are being asphyxiated, your sense of hearing is the last thing to go.

And, yes. I spoke up about this. I spoke with the nursery schoolteachers.

Once. Maybe twice. I do not remember clearly.

I went to see Erika. She was the child- minder to whom I had the deepest rapport so far. I remember her, saying, “But you *are* a boy.” And, “Oh don’t be ridiculous, they would never do that.”

I became a *very* quiet child after that.

And I was extremely careful to whom I spoke about who I felt I was. Fact remains; I did not address this topic directly with my parents for another forty years. Decades later, when we were talking about my childhood in another context, my Dad confided in me, telling me that the supervising nursery-school teacher did in fact suggest to my him, that he take me to see a child-psychologist. I understand my Dad avoided this at quite some effort.

You might think that an interview with a specialist, experienced in interacting with children, might have actually been the right thing and saved me from a lot of grief. I will gently remind you, that in the 1970ies, the degree of enlightenment in things concerning sexual diversity and identity awareness was still at a point, where it was considered a crime against nature and a psychological illness to be homosexual. As for trans* gender? Whether or not such a thing actually existed, was still being hotly debated. It was only four years later that one of the specialists, who later interviewed me for a psychiatric evaluation, would leave the Gender Identity Clinic in Baltimore. He would take up residence in the University Clinic of Hamburg-Eppendorf, and later become one of the most widely known specialists concerning gender dysphoria.

In the meantime, I have spent several years supervising and counselling youths who are either questioning their gender or are decidedly trans* gender. And the things they tell me about some of their so-called specialists and therapists make me *very* angry. Even taken with a pinch of salt to account for youthful exaggeration, some of those statements require me to take a deep breath, and then go speak to my own therapist, Dr Chamberlain, for supervision. That fact that we are twenty-odd years into the new millennium has apparently done appallingly little to improve either the mindfulness or empathy of said school-specialists. Nor has it done much to provide for increased breadth of training for child- and youth therapists, or raising awareness over what some of humans can go through.

I am overall so very grateful that my Dad protected me.

Make no mistake. Those children in my kindergarten cannot be blamed for their behaviour. They behaved and performed precisely as they were preconditioned to do. By society, by the people around them, by their families and clans, by their peers.

From infancy on up, humans are raised according to the maxim, that you need to be strong, you need to be tough, you need to assert yourself, you need to be better than the rest. And. If...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.10.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie
• Schlagworte: Empowerment • Equity • Life-Hacks • Role model • self-care • Self-determination • Transgender
• ISBN-10: 3-7562-4522-5 / 3756245225
• ISBN-13: 978-3-7562-4522-2 / 9783756245222