Day 131 - Sex Change

Because Logo has become my new favorite channel, not only do I enjoy the documentaries and RuPaul's shows (Drag U and RuPaul's Drag Race), but I also love seeing the movies that they show.  Most of the movies that they show deal with gender/sexuality issues, and they are movies that other channels don't show.  The movie "Normal" is one such movie.  The premise of the movie is that a man (Roy) in a small town, whose been married to a woman for 25 years, active in his church, has 2 children (Patty Ann and Wayne), and has been an exemplary member of the community makes the announcement to his wife (Irma) and pastor in a counseling meeting that he feels like he's a woman trapped in a man's body.  

Needless to say, this announcement (and the subsequent living out of such) shakes Irma and the small town in some interesting ways.  As Roy goes through his transition, both with the hormones and in his attitudes/actions, he runs into issues at home, at work, and in church.  Initially, Irma puts him out of the house when he makes the announcement.  He's hassled at work when he wears perfume and earrings.  When he decides to sing soprano, he's put of the choir.  And when he comes to church in a dress, he's asked to leave the church.  And the dynamic with his family creates some tension as well.  When he, Irma, and Patty Ann go to his parents' house for his father's birthday, we see a bit of the depth of Roy's pain and having to hide, as his father (though slightly senile) talks about catching Roy in his sister's clothes and making him stand naked in the barn all night to correct such behavior.

But the focus of the movie isn't necessarily Roy.  The movie seems to focus on Irma and her response to all of it and the journey that she makes with him.  She is the character who spoke the deepest to me and the reason why I'm blogging about this today.  When the announcement was first made, she was naturally blown away and angry.  She didn't understand, and she put Roy out, upset by his selfishness.  She and the pastor kept in close proximity, trying to figure out how to fix it.  The pastor initially blamed women's rights and that movement, implying that Irma may have emasculated Roy by doing the taxes for the house, so she tried to figure out what she had done wrong.  It is clear that this is not an easy situation to deal with for her, but as time passes, she softens toward him, and it's clear that she still loves him.  She takes him back into the house (after an interesting incident), and she decides to live with it.  The dynamics of the household change drastically as there are, in effect, 3 women living in the house, one going through menopause, one becoming a woman with hormones, and one teenage girl beginning her period.  When Wayne comes home for Thanksgiving dinner, gender roles come into question and cause confrontation.  
But through all the issues, there are some lines in the movie that challenged me to think about love in a new way.  After Roy was put out of church (and Irma walked out with him), the pastor visits and shares the concern of the other parishioners, asking if she needs work done around the house or if they should bring her some food, to which she responds that she is not a widow.  The pastor then apologizes for implying that she caused this in any way (because he's done some research about the condition).  But the kicker comes when he says that as her pastor, he gives her permission to separate and leave without guilt or regret.  [Now, I wanted to laugh right then and there, because I thought it was funny that he thought she needed his permission to do such a thing.  In my mind, such "permission" need only come from God, but I do tend to be liberal in my thinking.]   Her response: "but he's my heart..."  I thought, wow.  This was a possible "way out," but she chose to continue in relationship with the person she loved, because to her, Roy/Ruth was still the same person, even if the form of the person changed.
Something else profound that she said came in the midst of a conversation when she was  helping him pick out clothes from a catalog.  "I've given you my youth, I have given you your children, and now I'm giving up everything so you can feel complete.  And if I look at it hard enough, you've done the same for me..."  She came to a place of understanding that, as difficult as this was for her, it must have been equally difficult for him trying to live a "normal" life when he felt the way he did for so long.  In a sense, he had lived his life to this point to give her the husband she wanted/needed to make her feel complete, and so now, she could allow him to be what he needed to be as a show of love in "returning the favor."  
Undoubtedly, this is a complex situation, and I cannot even begin to imagine what this would feel like in my own life.  While Irma is not a lesbian, she made the choice to stay with Roy and said that she planned to stay even when Roy became Ruth.  The last scene of the movie is their 26th wedding anniversary.  They have a candlelit dinner at their house where they exchange gifts, and Irma gives Ruth a pearl necklace.  Then they are seen in the bed (presumably after sex), and Irma asks to see him one last time (since his operation will be the next day).  Then she says, "Sweet Roy. Sweet soul. What we do for love."  
Now, for me, this is an example of a deep and abiding love.  Once again, the complexities of such a situation are mind-blowing, but it says something about loving the person you are with and who they are at the core of their being.  It's said that Roy's condition - gender dysphoria - is just that, a medical condition in which a person believes (from a very young age) that he or she was born into a body with the wrong gender.  And it is interesting to me that in the marriage vows, there is a line about "through sickness and health."  Now, some people may say that this is stretching it and that Roy becoming Ruth is not the same as Roy getting something like cancer, and I would have to agree.  
But this whole thing does ask some questions: what are the limits of love?  When is the person you love no longer the person that you love?  What would change them for you: drug abuse, an illness, a job change, a sex change, a different religion (or even different beliefs within the same religion)?  What makes a person that person and where does love fit with all of that?