Naomi's story

Buddhism and gender

This article has been checked with Naomi and approved by her as reflecting the way she sees things. It also reflects my efforts at understanding a dimension of life that is new to me.

“My name is Naomi. That is what I would like you to call me, Naomi. It’s the name I have chosen for myself and I like it. That is what I answer to, that is what I identify with. Naomi. I know you used to know me as Robert but I have changed. I am Robert no longer, can’t you see? Is it not obvious that now I am a woman? And if you continue to call me Robert out of habit all that tells me is you are not actually relating to ME. You are stuck with an old idea of me and you are not connecting to the way I am right now. In my view, the only reason anyone could get stuck in that way must be because they are not interested in knowing who I really am and how I feel. Somewhere inside, they don’t want to know me. It’s too threatening.”

I have “known” Naomi for almost thirty years, first as Robert, of course, and over the last couple of years as Naomi. She is six foot tall with a slim build and very long arms, long legs and size 12 feet. She has now grown her hair long sometimes tying it back in a pony tail and sometimes letting it hang freely around her face. She often wears make-up and jewellery and her beautifully painted bright red nails really struck me that day, I think because I had not painted mine.

I had decided to discuss the process of transitioning with her in some detail because I had to admit I failed to understand it. In fact, my ignorance had multiple facets. First, I didn’t really understand the notion of gender at all because it is not something I grew up with or learned at any point of my life. Second, I didn’t really understand why anyone would go to such lengths to change from being a man to a woman, so I felt the need to explore the psychology behind it. And third, I had not worked out what a Buddhist perspective on such a change could be. Naomi had been a practising Buddhist for almost thirty years so I was curious to see whether that had impacted her decision and how she understood gender change in the light of the Buddhist teachings.

Meeting Naomi to talk it through

Naomi lives in Lerab Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist community in the south of France to the west of Montpellier. I drove up the hill to see her. In the valley it was a sunny autumn day and the leaves were just beginning to turn copper and yellow. Autumn is one of the most beautiful seasons in those parts, not too hot, not too cold, and on some days like that one with luminous blue skies. I continued to climb along the hillside and reached the Col du Pertus where a narrow, winding road cuts through the base of the cliffs and takes one to the top of the plateau. That is where the weather changed dramatically. Up there it was cloudy and very windy, and by the time I arrived at the entrance of Lerab Ling there was also driving rain. It felt like Wuthering Heights, where the elements are wild and powerful, and human lives are moulded by forces unseen.

I walked along the muddy path to the wooden chalet she built for herself overlooking the Tibetan temple which is cradled at the bottom of two converging hills. I was dripping wet. She took my umbrella and my coat and welcomed me warmly. It felt good, and the warmth of the wooden stove made it feel even better.

I had always found Robert an exceptionally kind and gentle person, always willing to help me and others in practical ways. He/she is particularly good with computers, which I am not, and has always proved to be willing and available when people need support. As Naomi her personality and qualities are the same, and yet I had conflicting thoughts and feelings as I settled down at the table in her sitting room. Part of me felt I knew Naomi, and another part of me knew that I did not. In addition, it is quite puzzling for me to switch to ‘Naomi’ and to ‘she’ pronouns, but I tried and continue trying. For people of my generation that mental switch is hard. Curiously, of all the points she made that afternoon, that is the one I found most touching of all: her appreciation of the fact I am trying.

“A lot of people don’t dare to have such a conversation with me”, Naomi remarked.

“Why do you think that is?” I asked.

“They don’t want to understand, that’s one thing. And another is that they don’t want to appear to be intolerant. Whatever position people choose to take it leads to a reluctance to communicate. If they support me they imagine that having a conversation about it is not a supportive thing to do; and if they don’t support me they avoid any conversation because it would show up their antagonism.”

“That’s a lot of silence”, I said.

“Yes.” She paused.  “I find it surprising, you know. There was a friend I recently met again for the first time since 2004 and she recognized me, of course, and was quite friendly, but she said nothing at all about my transitioning. It was the big elephant in the room. It’s obvious that people are afraid to go there.”

As Naomi is surrounded by would-be Buddhists such reactions are quite surprising. One would have thought that Buddhists might respond differently. It turns out that nobody outside a very small circle of close friends had been curious enough to sit down for an in-depth exploration of what all this meant to her. I could feel the pain that caused. It became clear that this big silence around her life is one thing she had not anticipated at all.

Why she decided to change

Naomi/Robert was born in Austria into a “very normal household” in a very conservative and predominantly Catholic country where the social roles of male and female had not evolved with the times. Robert’s father was a businessman and his mother was a housewife. He had a good education and shone at school especially in mathematics and science. He was even part of the Austrian Olympic team in physics. After his masters in maths he travelled the world – going to Spain, Mexico and New Zealand – and did his Ph.D. at Boston University in the USA.  It was in the final year of his doctorate that he encountered Tibetan Buddhism.

The kettle had boiled and Naomi made me a wonderful cup of tea poured from a china teapot. She also offered me a slice of fruit cake which she had baked earlier. I definitely found her convincing in her role as hostess; she played it well, with care and love, and clearly enjoyed it immensely. It was an interesting experience for me to see that; the quality of her welcome was so different from the way most people behave – making tea as a routine and offering cakes and biscuits that had been baked in a factory.

“From very early on”, she told me, “I felt a sense of dissatisfaction and unease about my social role as a man. I didn’t really fit in with the other boys. I couldn’t relate to what they wanted to do – competitive sports, mainly, or hanging out to get girls. The biggest thing that made me uncomfortable was their competitiveness; every group would basically establish a social ranking. None of this made sense to me. Still to this day I find it puzzling that people enjoy competition in sport.”

“You were more intellectual than sporty, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but I always felt a bit of an outsider”, she continued. “My brother was always on the inside and I was on the fringes. I was barely accepted because I didn’t buy into the same things as the other boys. For example, I liked hanging out with girls but that was because I felt more comfortable being with them, not because I wanted to conquer them.”

“What was it about the girls that you found more comfortable?”

“Their conversation was more intellectual, and I guess they were softer. I just noticed that the people I felt close to, and who I could talk to, were girls. I always experienced life a bit differently from other boys, but it’s true that I never actually checked back with any of them to ask them how they felt. We just assume, don’t we? Normally we don’t investigate other people in any depth.”

“Right. So it was more of a feeling you had, a feeling of being on a different wavelength?”

“Exactly. And that includes a lot of things: values and priorities, for example, and what you like and don’t like to do.”

I mirrored back to her to make things clear. “So you found more affinity with women because they were softer and more intellectual.”

“Yes. As teenagers women are more developed than men, they develop quicker, they have a bigger view. And then, of course, I went into the natural sciences which are totally asexual. It’s only about the intellect, nothing else. Both men and women are in that field but sex doesn’t come into it much. It’s about whether or not anyone can solve a problem. Gender is irrelevant.”

“That is another aspect to this story, isn’t it? In your work gender was insignificant. Did that mean you felt comfortable in that world?”

“Yes. We were all peers, we were all good at the same thing. We had a strong common denominator and common language.”

“In your adult life, how was your unease with being a man experienced then?”

“I definitely had a strong desire to wear women’s clothes.”

“Why?”

“Because they made me feel good. They feel more natural. I just wanted to try them out to see how they felt. And as an adult the same unease re-appeared in the workplace. For example, I would do my best to avoid being in a meeting room full of men. Whatever the project we were working on, the same macho competitiveness would surface as soon as men got together, and conversation would often be all about football. I felt completely out of place. Basically, I had nothing to contribute. Of course, we all want to be accepted socially, we all want to be part of the group, but I couldn’t be. It didn’t work for me. There was nothing I had to offer that would get me accepted.”

“The problem was that you did not share common ground with them.”

“Yes, people need to share some common ground or at least pretend they do. You know, men are quite different when they are together without women present. They tell stories and show off. It’s all based on competition. I can understand women better and relate to their way of thinking. They understand a bit more who I am and how I think.”

There were some aspects of Naomi’s narrative that didn’t make sense to me. One mystery was the way she characterized women. In my experience, not all women are soft and kind; some women can be bitches, they can be jealous and competitive, they can manipulate men badly and break their hearts just as men can to women. I couldn’t go along with the rosy image she was painting of what women are like. It didn’t fit the reality I knew. In my experience things were much more mixed.

“I have a problem with what you are saying. Softness and open intelligence are not qualities that are found in all women, and they are not qualities that are only found in women”, I ventured, “men can have them, too. And for me, if a man is gentle and kind that does not make him any less of a man.”

Strangely, perhaps, she agreed.

The difference it makes

I was trying to understand why anyone might wish to change gender mid-life, and any argument about the qualities that characterize each sex felt quite inadequate to me. In my experience, the full range of human qualities can potentially be present in both men and women, at least to the extent that it is not a good enough criterion to use for choosing one’s gender. However, Naomi’s point about wanting to wear women’s clothes was of a different order, quite personal and real. Coincidentally, the next thing Naomi said echoed what was going on in my own mind.

“We are having a logical discussion right now, but I did not transition as a result of a logical conversation in my head. It was about feeling, a strong, gut feeling – the feeling that this is what I had been looking for all my life.”

“How do you understand the concept of gender?” I asked. I thought we should establish a definition of what we were talking about to avoid misunderstandings and to see how we might relate it to Buddhist thought.

“When I grew up there was no gender. There was just sex: male or female, two boxes you had to tick. All I know about gender has come from reflections that are really quite recent based on the fact that it is coming up in society. Basically, it’s one of the first things we notice when we meet someone. If you are walking alone at night in the city and someone is coming towards you, gender is automatically the first category you would put them in. Only after that would you categorize them as black or white. That’s how we operate, isn’t it? We have to simplify our perception in order to have a handle on things, so we use labels and gender is the first of these labels. Depending on a person’s gender we behave quite differently towards them. I know this from experience, because when people see me as a woman the treatment they give me is very different from when they see me as a man.”

“But now you are equating gender with sex?” I was confused.

“With 99% of the people you interact with, it is really no matter what sex organ they have because you never get to see it or interact with it. So what we actually get to relate with is gender, not sex. Gender is the social concept we have of sexuality. It is about how we treat each other personally and socially. You could say it is the social expression of the sexes. It is the way people see you, treat you, address you and think of you. It includes social roles, like women do the cooking and men do something else, right?”

“That means that gender is very culturally specific?”

“Yes, it is a man-made distinction. It is human beings who have decided what a man ought to be and what a woman ought to be within a given social context. There is a debate about whether there is a physiological basis to such distinctions and I think there is, partly. For example, hormonal treatment has changed a lot of things for me: it changes how you experience situations and how you react to them.”

“How did you experience this difference with your hormones?”

“Basically, the testosterone was suppressed and estrogen was added. After that, I could sense that my competitive urge just fell away. It was such a relief and very noticeable. I was at ease and felt no need to prove myself all the time. That had a profound emotional effect.”

“And were there any physical changes?”

“Yes. I am less strong than I used to be. I used to be able to lift things easily, I was stronger than most men, but that has definitely changed now; my muscles are weaker.”

“You have mentioned two big changes. The first is that you feel less competitive and that affects the way you relate to other people. It means there is more peace and harmony in the feeling you have with other people. And the other change is about how you are with yourself: you talk of experiencing a huge relief, a relaxation inside.”

“I can’t tell you precisely what happened, but something fell away inside me. It’s as though I had always been fighting against something and suppressing it, and suddenly it had just gone.”

“Could that be an ego-based aggression?”

“Yes, probably. It was like a fundamental tendency that tries to push you in a certain way or a certain direction.”

“Was there any other change on the physiological level?”

“Yes. I think I have had a sense of disconnection from my body my whole life. I never felt at ease with my body, including my sexual organs. I have a vivid memory of a movie I watched in my twenties. There was an Englishman engaged in battle in time of war, and the whole experience really shocked him. The next day he woke up and had been transformed into a woman. He woke up as a woman and continued living as a woman. I still have that image in my mind, and it’s like ‘that’s what I want’.”

“So becoming a woman became for you a state of being free of a lot of things you could not connect with in male hood. The solution to your unease was to become a woman.”

“Exactly.  I don’t have a complete explanation of the process but I can see that being a woman fits me better somehow. It is a better wavelength for me. And I find the way people treat me as a woman much more pleasant than the way I was treated as a man.”

Her Buddhist connection

One thing that intrigued me about Naomi’s story was that despite her close connection with Buddhism, it transpired that Buddhist thinking had not been an important part of her transitioning process. As she had said, it was more about feeling. There are many pages of Buddhist scriptures that address questions around personal identity and that examine the status of body and mind in our attempt to identify. She was familiar with this and yet it seemed not to have played a critical role in her process to change gender. Our conversation therefore raised unexpected questions in my mind: what does it mean to identify as a Buddhist if certain areas of our lives are untouched by a Dharmic approach? That question applied not only to Naomi herself but also to her silent Buddhist friends.

In fact, my questioning went further than this because I could see it applied not only to the gender change but to the very way she related to Buddhism. Talking with Naomi I realized that one can be a practising Buddhist without being steeped in the psychological treatises of Buddhist scholars. One can meditate without in-depth study. Naomi was familiar with the Buddhist analysis of the five aggregates but in the end it had not really helped.

It was up to me, then, to talk about how all of this can be explained by Buddhist psychology and philosophy. One initial problem is that, traditionally, Buddhist thinkers did not address the social dimension of personal identity. They were more interested in soteriology: whether the ego really exists or not. They were also interested in the psychological mechanisms that lead us to misidentify with aspects of the body or the mind, which then gives rise to an entire life founded on delusion and selfishness. Interestingly, Naomi disagreed with me on this.

“Didn’t the Buddha discard the caste system? That is an action which rejects social conventions based on fixed hierarchies that declare that some people are inherently and morally different on account of the caste into which they are born. The Buddha effectively said ‘No’ to that; he treated everyone equally. Certain untouchables were ordained by him as monks and given equal status within the monastic community. And another thing that was revolutionary at the time was that the Buddha treated men and women equally, too, as far as social mores allowed. The fact that he accepted women to be ordained was a giant step in that direction. What he taught was that the differences between people that are significant are those that are associated with the qualities of mind and heart. The very fact that the Buddha made these stands and defied social custom is huge to my mind. But to my knowledge, not many Buddhists have debated these points since, or deliberately applied these principles.”

“Right. Buddhist teachers who are traditional thinkers”, I replied, “tend to say that the social dimension of identity is not terribly important because it is simply a convention and does not help us connect with our true nature. And yet this is quite problematic for us today in the West where the social dimension of identity is the main one that concerns people. All social media discussion is about how others see us and how socially acceptable we see ourselves. Modern people are not interested in metaphysics or enlightenment, most of them do not spare a moment to think about whether or not we have a soul and, if we do, what its properties are. Most of us define ourselves through our interaction with others.”

“People find it unbearable to be on their own”, Naomi added. She is someone who has done several retreats in solitude, spanning a month or more. “People need others to be around them in order to feel okay about themselves. I have found that is especially true of Americans; there is a sense that they cannot stand to be quiet, they need constant reflection back from others. ‘How do you see me?’ is a constant. That is what social media play on. It’s all about what we can do to get others’ attention.”

Both of us could relate to this trend and were part of it ourselves. And the irony, we agreed, is that this need for an external confirmation of our existence is coming at a time when social interaction is much more difficult than before. ‘In the old days’ there were families, even large extended families, and people lived within local communities. Today we spend hours each day interacting at a distance, on our screens. So, I wondered, how does gender come into that?

“With virtual communication bodies are not involved directly, but pictures of bodies are. There are a lot of pictures of bodies and body parts on social media. In fact, an enormous amount of interaction is about how you look, or how you make yourself look. It has nothing to do with feeling, though. You might look as though you are smiling but that is not necessarily what you feel at all. Even when people share about how they feel – how their day has been, and so on – that is not necessarily how they actually feel. As for gender, I think it is the baseline, it sets the expectation I have for how the person will express themselves. And then I think, does this person fit my image of a man/woman? It’s as though I subconsciously grade people on the curve of my expectations.”

Hormone treatment and meditation

I wanted to move on to talking about how her hormonal treatment related to the Buddhist understanding of the mind.

“From a Buddhist point of view, one sits on a cushion to cultivate various qualities of mind and heart. There are lots of different practices and methods, not just meditation but physical yogas as well. We have all heard about how meditation can bring a sense of peace and well-being. However, you have done something very different: you have changed the biochemical balance of your body in order to change how you feel about yourself. The relief and relaxation you mentioned are chemically based, or chemically induced.”

“I wouldn’t say that is entirely true but they are certainly influenced by the chemical changes. But every doctor will tell you that our hormones influence our sense of well-being. We can all experience that. And I believe that mental practices such as meditation influence our physiology and lead to the release of certain hormones and chemicals that make us feel in a different way. Experiments have shown this.”

“But Buddhism does not have a physicalist view of the mind. It has a more subtle theory of the mind insofar as it distinguishes between that part of the mind that is affected by the body, and that part that exists without the body and continues after the death of the body. So everything you have been describing concerns the aspect of the mind that is intimately connected to the body. Of course, we all need to understand that mind and learn how to manage it but, at the end of the day, Buddhists are more interested in the nature of mind itself, and the mind that continues after death.”

Naomi nodded.

“Do we agree that your concern about identity is entirely focused on what Buddhists would call the conventional side of your existence?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

And then Naomi opened up about her Buddhist practice in a way that enabled me to fathom how she did indeed connect gender change with the Dharma, albeit without referring to psychological theories.

“When I do a personal retreat for a month, alone and in silence, gender does not come up for me at all. Gender is completely irrelevant. My starting point might be more relaxed than it used to be, but quite quickly how I feel ceases to be so dominant in my mind. The inherent wisdom and clarity of the mind become stronger and all the ideas around gender become less important. They don’t matter so much. You have an awareness that is of a different order. Ideas like that just fall away.”

That was an important insight from my point of view. It was an example of how ideas get in the way if we take them too seriously, lose our perspective and take their truth to be the only one there is. If we allow them to do so, the ideas and labels we cling to so tenaciously peel away and dissolve like morning mist.

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