269) A Trans Girl Playing Chess

Well….some personal good news to share! I’ve made the cut for the Canadian national championship, in chess.  Pretty darn excited about it, I must admit.  

This is the first time in my life I can honestly say I am truly pursuing Excellence in something.  Not just ‘getting by’ or ‘doing a pretty good job’, or even ‘putting my heart into it’, which would have been true for my teaching in the past and was the best engagement-with-life that I had ever known. 

But this?  This is putting my soul into it.  It’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, finally becoming real in my life.

And you know, it’s interesting to look back on my life before, pre-transition-Dan, and compare it to now, post-transition-Clara.  Because the simple truth is, “Dan” would never have done this.  For several reasons, but I’d like to describe two of the key ones. I think they carry some deep lessons for any person, some life lessons, and definitely some insights into the experience of many trans people.

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Reason #1: You can’t pursue excellence when you are only half-alive, when you spend your life half-in-a-fog, when your time passes in large swaths of dissociation.  You just can’t.  You can ‘do your best’, sure, and I give Dan credit for that, at least some of the time.  But Excellence?  Nope, not possible.  The level of dedication it requires, the level of focus, the stamina of pushing through frustrations and confusion and uncertainty and mental exhaustion, the sometimes-mind-numbingly-dull attention to the nuances and fine details that separate “good” from “great”, and even moreso, “great” from “excellent” — you just cannot do those things when you are half-present.  

I think about this sometimes with the whole “trans athletes” debate.  The right-wing paints a picture of trans athletes being practically a damn tidal wave of unfairness.  But it just isn’t true, for two reasons that I’ll mostly leave for another post someday. 

First, careful performance research on trans athletes leads to the conclusion that there is, in fact, no performance advantage, even for trans girls, counter to most people’s extremely strong expectations. This will surprise everybody if they bother to take the research seriously. It surprised me! So yes, we’ll unpack this in depth in a future post.

Second, there just aren’t that many trans athletes.  I mean, trans people make up something like 0.5% of the population, depending on the stats you look at.  It goes up a little, down a little across various estimates and age groups, and there are many reasons why a lot of trans-ness is likely not measured, hidden, suppressed, or unknown.  But still, for our purposes here, let’s say it’s 0.5%.  

There are about 8 million high school athletes in the United States. Therefore, there should, statistically speaking, be about 40,000 trans athletes.  And while I’m not sure how many trans guys there are, you know how many trans girls are high school athletes?

Two, according to the most recent estimate I have seen.

Just 2.

Similarly, there are around 500,000 athletes in NCAA college sports in the US.  Therefore, there should be about 2500 trans athletes.

You know many there are?  According to the NCAA president, less than 10.

When you grow up disconnected from yourself, it is hard to pursue excellence.  To put yourself out there.  And sure as hell to believe in yourself.

Which takes us to the next reason that “Dan” would never have pursued excellence.

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Reason #2: Believing in yourself, believing that you deserve it.  

“Dan” most certainly did not believe that “he” deserved good things.  Certainly not excellent things.  Certainly not Excellence.

There are many reasons for this, and they also make a great deal of sense through a trans lens.

Practically all trans people growing up, experience a substantial degree of bullying, social rejection, and ridicule.  Unless they hide their trans-ness well enough to escape the toxicity.  But instead, they feel fake, unreal, and like they don’t fit in.  Anywhere.  Self-hate is very, very common as a result.

It’s perhaps not surprising that somewhere around 80-85% of trans people go through periods of serious suicidal ideation.  Estimates of actual suicide attempts are around 40%.

In addition, many trans people grow up rejected or threatened-with-rejection within their own families.  Abuse is a very common part of their lives.  Or again, they prevent this by rejecting themselves so deeply that they live a fake life and present a fake self to the world, which leaves them as a prisoner, living behind their self-imposed internal walls, because at least being half-alive feels better than being exposed to a world you have a lot of evidence will likely hate you.  

I did not grow up as an obviously trans person.  I grew up inside my prison.  Which is why, anyone who knew me personally in high school, would remember some sense of how close to disaster I constantly flirted.  How many blackout nights I had.  How many weekends I was a hair’s breadth from the hospital.  How much I struggled to get through school, not intellectually for which I am grateful, but just showing up and doing enough work to pass.  

We were allowed to miss 16 classes, per semester if I remember correctly.  Many semesters, I missed more than 25 classes per course, well over 100 classes altogether.  I only passed grades 10, 11, and 12 because, well, I have no idea really.  I think I had some very compassionate teachers who bent the rules and looked the other way, so that I didn’t simply drop out.  Which I would have.

So yes, growing up trans?  I fully expect that one is more likely to grow up self-harming, than “pursuing excellence.”  I know I did.  I’ve never, other than to my therapist (my ninth therapist, to be exact), described the extent of self-harm.  But I’m very lucky to be alive, and only with some long-term scars and formerly broken bones.  

* * * * *

So now, I am in training.  Sincerely.  I’ve got almost 2 months, and I hit the national stage of competitive chess.  I feel honoured, and…well…lots of things that I would need to write a lot more words to express.  It’s “wild” to see myself stepping into a world of Excellence.  Who’da thunk it?  Definitely not me.

It takes me back to the things I used to talk to students about when teaching Positive Psychology.  Things like Flow states.  Intrinsic motivation.  “Arête.”  

I taught those things because I KNEW they were the way to live.  I didn’t know how, for myself, to live that way, but I knew the theories and the literature across many centuries, and I sure wanted to know what that would feel like.  I wanted to feel fully Alive.  I wanted to take all those books on Zen, and personal growth, and self-actualization, and humanistic philosophy, and all the rest, that I had read over the years, and instead of “thinking about them”, LIVE them.  I hoped that in sharing this collected wisdom, perhaps we could all stumble forward a little bit better and live a little bit more fully.

I understand much more deeply now, that you cannot TRY to live with wisdom.  Kind of like Yoda said, “Do or do not; there is no try.”  You cannot TRY to be authentic.  You can just be authentic, or not.  Because the simple truth is, if you are not fully connected within yourself, if you are not plugged into your Self, if you are not grounded in Love, then everything is half-hearted. 

And as Rumi says, “Half-heartedness does not reach into majesty.”

But I do know the way forward now.  It’s very simple.  You go deep, deep into your mind, your feelings, your body, your self-ness, and you just keep at it, until you find your own Love.  For you.  Not a feeling.  Not a “should”.  Not a desire to love.  Not a theory.

But Love.  The beating heart of your soul that has loved you, forever.  You find something that I can only call Authenticity.

It might take days. Weeks. Years. Many moments of solitude. Maybe depression. Feeling lost. Questioning yourself. Sitting with yourself. Reflecting. Journaling. Who knows? There are many tools that help one discover Who they are. As I’ve written about before, practicing walking in different ‘gendered’ ways was one of the key breakthroughs for me personally.

But THAT is the path to liberating, enlivening Authenticity. “Know thyself”, as the ancient wisdom says. And then, Excellence becomes a path that unfolds in front of you.

Not everything becomes perfect all of a sudden. I certainly haven’t. And I still lose my full-heartedness sometimes.  After all, a lifetime of programming and habit simply does not disappear just because you touch some degree of personal awakening.  

But the habits and programming do fade. And the path of excellence does become more visible, more solid, and more sustained.

* * * * *

So yeah, national chess championship!  Pretty cool eh?  I’m expecting to get destroyed, just being realistic here.  I know very well my objective skill level vs. the masters.  I have a looooooong way to go before I’m really at their level. But it doesn’t matter, you know?  It’s really not about winning.  It’s about taking those moments of ‘battle’, and fully engaging, being fully present, fully alive, fully THERE.  

That is the reason to be at the board in the first place.  And together, you and your opponent create something amazing — like a work of art, expressed in the movements of 32 pieces around a 64-square board.  At that kind of phenomenological level, there is no winning or losing; the concepts are, pretty much entirely, meaningless.

Besides, afterwards I’ll have some great games to learn from, some beautiful works of art to study.  And then….next year — who knows?