NAMING THE UNNAMEABLE

Several years ago I was invited to make a presentation at a 3 day workshop on facilitating creative organizational change. I took as my theme, “Gender Change Management in an Organizational Context”. But I asked them not to advertise my theme, choosing instead to describe me as “Director of Literature Board talking about narrative, conversations and organizational change.” My discussion would be over lunch on the 3rd day. For me it would be a test of my ability to have such a discussion amongst people with no prior knowledge of gender dysphoria.

I got there at 9.20 and walked in on a group already under way. I was scared. My way of handling fear in public is to put forward the most stylish face I can.  I’d got up early and given myself a mud mask, washed and blow-dried my hair, chosen my tight Escada skirt and form-fitting Hugo Boss jacket, used my best beauty products. I felt good about myself and knew I looked good and that gave me the confidence to walk into this group of total strangers and prepare to strip myself naked.

For 3 hours I was just “Josephine Emery, Participant”. Then, over lunch, I showed the 20 minute DVD cut of my gender change documentary. It begins with a very uptight, suffering man with receding grey hair and a lined and worried face, saying, “A transgendered person is someone who wakes up in the morning, looks at their body and says, ‘Get me out of this’.” It ends with me standing on a hillside as the sun sets, saying, “I’ve given myself up to my mother’s love and through her love to universal love…”

Along the way it visits my memory of watching a woman raped and murdered when I was two, and thus learning fear and terror around, “what it would mean to be a woman”.

At the end of the DVD the 30 participants were silent. Of the 15 women, not one did not have a tear-stained face.

I then talked about living the change in the public arena; about the differences between men and women in anger expression; in the use of voice in corporate power; etc.

Afterwards half of the women spoke to me privately, 1-on-1. “You have made me realize what I have not valued in myself as a woman. You have empowered me.” “You spoke about the real differences between men and women that are not acknowledged in the corporation.” These were the reactions I had anticipated.

But they also said to me, “You have named the unnameable for us. The fear of rape is always present somewhere in a woman’s mind. It’s there whether you are at work or on the train or walking down the street. You have brought it out and made it visible. Thank you.”

The next time I flew I watched the news on the video console. A report on a celebrity murder where a beautiful young woman was thrown off a cliff by her lover. An acid attack somewhere in the world on some women. A brutal rape and an appeal for ‘the public to come forward with information’. A well-groomed woman read all this into the camera and smiled at the end.

We landed and retrieved our work bags with their little wheels and headed off to our meetings, all of us corporate women looking so smart and in control. The men in the boardrooms all waiting, smirking and easing their crotches as we approached. And that whisper in the back of our minds…