I wrote a great deal during the years of transition, and whilst it felt like forever, suddenly I am realising that this is the sixth Christmas without my family. I have grown a significant distance from the urgency of transition, and it it quite difficult to actually remember life before. I do sometimes come across photographs of that former existence. It isn’t a former self, not a separate former life, just me before I found peace with myself and the world. I hardly recognise it as me, and yet I am very much the same inside. And so it is that I find myself at times caught between not wanting to need to tell my story, and understanding how important it nevertheless is.
I know that my life marks me out forever, and that in places, or in future times, it may almost become an important secret to keep. There are places in the world, where politics, religion and culture are becoming better educated, and others where science and knowledge are becoming subservient. This lengthy blog will remain to inform and help, even if I add little to it beyond some poetry and occasional comment like this. It will turn some away from people like me too, because it invites challenge to preconceived ideas.
But is this blog, this story, just ‘thought-provoking’?
I do want to provoke thought, but I also want to change it. I was in a situation recently where a topic of discussion was a third sex option being offered for intersex people in Germany. The language presents difficulties, because whilst in English ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ have become differentiated in use, there is only one word in German. ‘Social sex’ more or less means gender presentation, but already suggests something optional rather than innate. And so the conversation came to include transgender people as well. Ah, but how comes I knew so much about a topic others were new to? There is only one honest answer, so I gave it, and passed on the URL to this blog. I can digest the experience of transgender, or the research, by way of explanation, but I think people have to find their own path, perhaps with story that touches, rather than facts that educate.
I don’t think anyone will ever say they read all of this. I guess it’s actually tedious. But I hope it invites a bit more reading and thinking, not just a first dip.
Meanwhile, at work, I still don’t know who knows my back story. If they do it doesn’t matter. But if they don’t, I still feel some concern that I could be accused of being deceptive for not saying.
I still think that very few non-trans people really grasp what it is and what it means, and I still wonder what my lost family and friends think and feel now. There has been so much opportunity in the media to see different perspectives, from trans people of all ages, in documentary, comedy and story, but I wonder whether those who chose never to meet me ‘like this’, or who resented it so much, or who could not adapt their own ideas – or who simply needed me not to be trans – even want to move on in understanding.
And so I need to be both visible but also not visible. I want to show that someone as ordinary as I am, represents a majority of trans people; that we are not dodgy, suspect, something to be uncertain and unsure about. We are just people whose biological make-up has been deliberately suppressed in the interests of social conformity and for particular reasons. Being invisible proves that, but doesn’t tell it. And it doesn’t make fellow human beings nice, kind or just towards us, especially towards those who find it hard, or just don’t want, to conform to one gender anyway.
I will never know the minds and the changes in those who wanted me to go on living and looking as I used to. I hope they do change, and forgive the desperate need I had to change myself. I was a ship that crossed a treacherous reef because that’s the way the wind blew. I had no choice. But they did, and still do.
As a life experience for me, it has been pure gold in terms of the enrichment. But it came from ore. And I understand that some cannot face smelting and would rather keep a rough rock on the shelf.