Middle-aged?
Back in the seventies we would have lunch at a table fabricated by my father from a golden sheet of salvaged timber and legs of iron plumber’s pipe. Ingredients were assembled at its centre, from which we collated our meals. Sliced rye loaves, crispbread, pickled onions, olives; lettuce and tomato slices in an earthenware bowl. Celery sticks perched in a clear plastic cup, taken and crisply dipped in tiny mounds of salt on the rim of our plates.
The wireless was perched nearby, broadcasting Saturdays through our home. Listening as we ate, my favourite program was an etymological variety show, led by writer-comedians Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, partnered in teams of two with Anne Scott-James and Dilys Powell. Those names, which I have not heard mentioned in thirty years, are imprinted upon my mind, the show’s compere having announced them over the hundreds of weekends across which we enjoyed their banter.
The moment I remember most clearly was when Muir began a story by reluctantly conceding that he was fast approaching the beginning of the first signs of the foothills of early middle age. The studio audience chortled at this point, for both men were well into their fifties.
Now at that age myself, I am discovering its gendered – and transgendered – complexities.
*
One of the warmest moments in my gender journey came when I saw, for the first time in a long while, the gay couple who live with a friend of mine in her rambling house. They have differing gradations of grey hair, and strong bodies. Gentle people and enthusiastic partygoers, they tend a spinney of bonsai that nestle outside their room. Both are around my age and knew me a little before transition. With a gorgeous smile, one declares that I come across as a very elegant, sophisticated middle-aged woman.
My heart swells. There is nothing I aspire to more than this. I feel my shoulders straighten; an imperceptible ripple of pride, as though a butterfly had grazed the surface of my pond.
Later, driving home in the night, I have other thoughts. I wonder: in our culture, do we not devalue and turn our attention away from the “middle aged woman”? And is it not the case that “elegant and sophisticated” are proxies for wealth and privilege? My acquaintance’s praise, unambiguously affirming as it was, makes me wonder about my position in society, through the lens not only of gender but also of class. Am I visible because of the rights afforded me through money and education; but also erased by my gender? But then, am I really subject to the disregard imposed on women, given my cisgender life before now?
What a distinctive space this transwoman occupies, to be able to, without reservation, delight in middle-agedness. It has me doubting that I can possibly have confronted the lived experience of mature women, in a society that has only its fingertips on what it means to centre them equally with others.
How has my previous fifty years of middle-class male life distorted my experience of feminine middle age? So many women talk of it as rendering them invisible. But a person of my height, with a physiognomy that blends male and female, does not exactly foster invisibility. Indeed, for those who are made uncomfortable by trans people, my distinctive appearance creates a paradox: their discomfort might make them prefer that I was indeed not visible, but of course by then it is too late. Their feelings arise precisely because of my visibility; I have impinged on their consciousness.
On the other hand, I have sometimes experienced subtle disregard. I read the tale of one older woman, snubbed by the young staff in a retail electronics store, who dealt with their disregard by going round the shop – still apparently unnoticed – turning off the televisions and stereos they had on display, one by one. Like her, I have occasionally noticed that I am not attended to in some settings quite as readily as I was as a younger, professional man.
But there is little solidarity for me in that. Because my response to any such gender-based neglect, far from confirming my middle-aged womanhood, instead marks out my privilege and heritage of masculinity. For I do not tolerate being ignored. I march swiftly to front counters. I have a large smile and approach with intent. Do you suppose that it is the way I propel my body through space, and the eye contact I have already prepared, that triggers an involuntary, gendered, response in those approached? It was as a man that I learned to move like this; it was a man who formed expectations of what attention to expect. In restaurants, I am not a glancer – I am a stander-upperer and, if that is not enough, I walk to the kitchen, or wherever it appears that the staff are lurking, and ask, always very politely, for what I want.
So. Class as much as gender, yes. But, still driving through the darkness after receiving this compliment, I experience another layer of doubt. Is my very idea of gendered middle-age invisibility itself a decade out of date? Have boomers and second wave feminists, as they transformed our society in the course of their lives, created a legacy of respectful relationships with women of all ages? Perhaps female middle-age is no longer invisible in the way of a generation ago?
This thought – formed without evidence – grabs me because, if it were so, I could be making what philosophers call a category mistake. Self-doubt drags me toward this notion. Could I be failing to distinguish ageism and sexism from something else altogether? I am a late-transitioning trannie, taking no hormones, wearing outfits hastily assembled from op shop racks in the most recent three percent of my life. I do not even have a sister, memories of whom might serve as a retrospective female role model. When I experience service-industry-staff-avoidance-behaviour, is it not because I am a middle-aged woman, but because I am not a middle-aged woman? Do the floorwalkers at the furniture and whitegoods stores see an older man, strangely overdressed in cheap drag? Have they gone all twitchy, unsure what the protocol might be? Have they glanced across then shrunk back, thinking: is that cross-dresser over there safe out on his own? What if he’s someone who forgot to take his medications this morning? Worse, what if he breaks into a rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive?
These seeds of doubt can be insidious, but they seldom take root. Because, everywhere I go, I am overwhelmingly treated with warmth and happiness and generosity of spirit. Each day I experience the kindness of strangers, to which I am more attuned than ever.
*
What do you reckon: if a child is fed a diet of bourgeois BBC radio performed by people in their fifties and sixties, are they going to be rendered middle-aged right from the age of twelve? I’m not sure. Throughout my life there have been occasions when I felt I was not a peer of my peers, as it were. But I doubt the casts of My Word and The Goons are to blame.
However, if that is indeed what happened, then it’s time to celebrate, because my moment has come. Recently, a good friend decisively declared, “you have nailed middle-aged professional woman”, and I felt sure that she was right.
*
(For more about the invisibility of women - including the tale from the electronics store - you can read Julie-Anne Davies’ ‘The mysterious case of the disappearing women’.)
