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Detransition

  • Posted on September 12, 2013 at 11:29 pm

Oh no! Surely not!

I knew that would catch your attention …

The thing is, as I write every week, it’s usually as a result of gathered comments in the week. This time there just happens to have been a cluster of blogs, articles and comments about how many transsexual people either regret final transition (clinical attention and remediation), or who pull back and detransition (ie, go back to a previous presentation.

Statistically, post-surgical regret (with the choice, not the cosmetic satisfaction) seems to be about one in a hundred. Not bad compared with some other procedures. Some have commented this week on people they know, and indeed I batted comments back and forth over two years ago with someone, who had regretted long after. The regret may not be so much ‘Oh my God! What have I done?!’, as ‘Have I just landed myself in a place where nobody wants me?’ Few of us will ever honestly look in the mirror and see no trace of what testosterone (or oestrogen) has done to our adult bodies. Will we ever be ‘good enough’?

My interpretation is that many of these regretting people felt steamrollered into corrective surgery at the time – which is an interesting comparison with the frustration many of us feel at the slowness of gender clinics. For some of us, time and age are not on our side, as grey hair cannot be lasered away, and receding hairlines become irretrievable (or for the young, puberty threatens avoidable changes). The conflicting pressures of the gender dysphoric can be immense. How easy is it to make the best life decision? What if someone loves you enough to make you at ease with your body and a mixed presentation, that they actually appreciate or like?

However, I can also see how what a difficult job the psychiatrists face, distinguishing between various cries for help expressed as gender dysphoria. I can also see how a number of presenting trans* people feel they know how to play the system, give the right answers, dress correctly and persuade their clinicians of the depth of their feelings. This may be a quite genuine dread of not being believed, but it is still a form of game-playing.

Ultimate pressure

Long ago I wrote about the impossible situation many of us are placed in, between deep love of family, partner, children – and being unable to continue living as if we are something we really know deeply we are not. One way leads to incredible grief, the other to suicidal feelings. Some of us run from suicide, find huge fulfilment in our true gender expression, but find such grief and loneliness that we cannot live alone and separated from our loves.

What does this mean about those whom we love and who love us, if the only way that love can be shared is by being false? It has been expressed as a form of bullying in this week’s conversations: ‘I can and will love you if you continue pretending to be a man/woman for my sake.’

And yet the cis person is also saying that it would be inauthentic to pretend that they can have sexual feelings for a same-sex partner. And what of the realisation that a marriage has always been (unknowingly) same-gendered? Was there an attraction always hidden in there for that same-genderedness, showing in different ways? And how do you feel about that?

Why does intimate love always have to be lost, once the person is truly known? If I had promised not to undergo clinical reparation, I may well still be happily married. Was that just conditional love? Or was it blackmail? And if I had promised, what would the value of that love have been? My body, as far as love was concerned, was more important than me. By ‘me’ I mean really me. If I was authentic, it would show the love not to be authentic; if I was inauthentic, the love would still appear to be authentic. Or maybe this was just ordinary authentic body-love, presentation-love, true-within-its kind love, and I should have known.

Understanding what authenticity is

Maybe our concept of what authenticity itself is, is incomplete. If society truly embraced women with penises, men with breasts, and it was socially normal for people to love people more than bodies, and included all forms of inter-genderedness as equally valid and lovable, things would be different.

I asked a friend why they were only interested in sexual or romantic love with men, when half the time, women complain about their menfolk. The answer is usually the same: ’I’m just wired that way.’ Maybe we are all hard-wired as homo/ hetero/ bi/ pan/ male/ female/ androgenous etc. Maybe. I just think that my gender is a lot more wired than my sexuality. I also feel that a lot of comfort-with-sexuality is as much conditioned as innate.

So what do we do with all this? We must allow people to experience transition and choose if it is the all-round best route. We must accept that for some it is life-or-death, but that for others a love for, and appreciation of, gender ambiguity, fluidity or duality, is all that is needed. We must see that it is as much society that makes gender expression an impossible choice for some, as the fact of being born transsexual. Transsexuality is not the problem: social disapproval is.

No, I’m not even considering reversal, despite the ongoing grief of loss and of loneliness. Do I wish society had given me and my family a natural flexibility over sexuality and gender? Of course I do. I feel that I was only wanted for my body for over 30 years, and I wish I had known that. If someone had said to me ‘I love you for that strong feminine side and I’d love to see more of it’, I’m sure that love would have lasted.

Why transition? Why detransition? It’s complicated …

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Dancing free

  • Posted on August 31, 2013 at 11:00 pm

This week’s main blog was a bit philosophical, and stemmed from a conversation I’ve been having about gender essentialism and the determining factors in gender identity.

But that isn’t where my life is at, and it has been a really varied week.

It began in fear of feeling suicidal again. Just that deep gnawing, unrelenting fear that I have arrived in a place where I can never find another who will love me. That there never can be an intimacy again because everyone out there only feels safe with (or at least strongly prefers) a partner of determinate gender with a determinate history. And I shall and can never be that.

It is the most awful feeling of being an utter outcast in the world of love and intimacy. And yet love and intimacy is like air to me. I am suffocating right now, simply for want of love. It is framed in an awareness of friends who know just what to do. They go the places they used to (before the last relationship), they go on dating sites, the other parties know what to expect, and they start sifting. Kiss enough frogs and they will find their prince/ss. There are rules, they follow them roughly, they will succeed.

I have no such place, no such expectations, no such rules. I am not just suffocating, I feel utterly lost.

Even my garbled squeaks for help on Facebook were largely ignored, except a very dear friend actually called me to see I was alright. It didn’t take much, but it meant everything to me.

Come midweek, and I had an interesting and understanding chat with someone over the difficulty I have, in being asked or instructed to dress (mostly) male for a particular reason. In the above context, it might be understandable that I find this psychologically a very risky thing to attempt. But it also transpired that my transsexuality is not immediately apparent to everyone concerned, and despite my willingness to speak of it, the slight feeling of flattery added a hint of a silk purse in this sow’s ear.

I cannot say that this time is an easy one. The anxieties over buying a flat and selling a house without being there, and the last weeks of being married slipping fast away, don’t sit well with feeling the outcast from human intimacy. Believe me, being torn out of the love of someone you’ve spent your life with simply for being what you are, is the most gut-wrenching event you can go through. This blog is no longer a means of communication between us either. Now it is just me and you, continuing the exchanges of ‘life beyond diagnosis’. There is no play, no pretend, no fighting-to-keep, no misunderstanding, no fear of ‘what if I am?’. And no more believing that I could ever live a dual-gendered life, even for the best reasons on the world. This is the certainty of being born with gender incongruence, and the consequences. It matters, it really matters, that I am not a man after all. And yet, despite the fact that I live and move in this world, everywhere, without any question of not being a woman, albeit a different sort, when it comes to finding romance and love, maybe I am not a woman enough. Is everyone just looking for genitals?!

It is a raw time in some ways. And so I was glad to finish the week and head off for a Friday night of dance. Five Rhythms, or similar events in the summer break, means two hours solid of barefoot, expressive dance, with interactions with random other dancers as partners for maybe ten or fifteen minutes before dancing solo again. There is no speaking, only very free dance. I was determined to dance out my anxieties, fears, resentments, and the horrors of being unlovable. It’s that yawning awfulness that maybe some while ago I had the last loving sexual encounter of my life.

And I think if I really did know that, if that was a certain outcome of becoming my very best – as this – I seriously would want to end right here.

But we won’t go there, because it’s a horrible and scary thought, and what I really wanted to say was that someone, out of the blue, touched my spirit after the dance. I had a few beautiful encounters during the dancing, but it was sitting in the circle afterwards when this person, next to me, shared their own sudden realisation that being different was OK. F**king OK!! With a determination to let go of a lifetime’s angst at the behest of others, and be that ‘being of light’ that we all can manifest. That touched me, because I had gone that night to drive out the bad, rather than simply to let it go and move into a place of dynamic living.

We went on to have a long chat about the similarities in our life experiences, and suffice it to say, if she had said she’d been sent by an angel, I would have believed her. It wasn’t sympathy, it was possibilities, out of understanding each other, that life as we each need it, is possible; that it can be claimed if only we let go and trust.

What a week, after returning to my roots last week (A stitch in time) and facing living alone again. I put it down also to hormonal cycles, though it may be coincidence! It reminds me that I still walk close to the edge sometimes, and that I must simply trust that higher powers that may have kept me safe in every other way, can help me find real loving again sometime ahead.

So thank you to three people this week who have helped pull me back from the brink. If any of you are reading this, you make a difference to me just by being a bit more than just accepting. I am strong, but even strong people sometimes fall over edges. It’s the gravity, you know.

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What shit is

  • Posted on August 10, 2013 at 10:40 am

‘Shit’ used to be a deprecated word in English. But it’s a very old word, a purposeful word, and an honest word. It’s the stuff that’s left over when all the goodness has been extracted for the purpose of sustaining healthy life. It’s the stuff that isn’t good for you. It’s the gunk that was always bad, or useless, and it was the indigestible fibrous bulk that was necessary to get the bad stuff out efficiently.

And the thing about shit (unless it’s a medical thing, and you analyse it as information) is that we handle our own OK, but seriously dislike everyone else’s. It’s a healthy attitude really, but it’s partly a cultural thing too. We don’t talk about it, even though we encounter it every day from birth to death. We don’t talk about it like we do about food, even though it’s just the opposite end of the same argument.

I’ve taken in a lot of good stuff all my life. I’ve been lucky to have had a stable childhood, a good education, an adequate social circle, for a while a small degree of affluence (in UK, not global terms – I accept my position there is very different), a few wonderful (romantic) girlfriends, a successful and long marriage, two grown-up children, and a series of jobs that I could at least really make my own. I have skills and talents I indulge in expressing, and now … And now?

From some things, all I have left is the shit.

My soon-to-be ex hears all my sadness and grief as anger and recrimination. I hear all her coping mechanism as defensive, cold and distanced. There is no exchange of love any more. There is no meaningful relationship. This is refined shit, with all the goodness taken out. My daughter hasn’t spoken or communicated with me for over two years, and I frankly expect no change any more.

And I have no intimacy and no sex, and I can’t remember the last time or when. That’s pure shit too.

I’m worth more than this. And yet I have to ask, what am I feasting on now?

A new diet

Last week I blogged anger about Pride becoming carnival rather than protest. But as I walked up the main road to the event, surrounded by hundreds of lovely people, most of whom had been through a similar crisis of acceptability and identity as I have (and realised I was the only trans* person in sight) I saw openness, vulnerability, strength, romance, love and happiness. We joined thousands already in the park, the music was loud, the atmosphere was amazing, and I felt completely safe, completely accepted. Why should I not be happy too? In the Literature Tent, some of the anger, the protest and the meaning of Pride was voiced. Enough for me not to do the same. My angry poem stayed in the folder, my envisaged introduction unspoken. There was a consistent, articulate trans* voice in the event, and that was enough, so I added my own with a different poem.

I’d never even brushed close to Pride before, and here I was seriously enjoying myself and meeting new and lovely and welcoming people I could never have met before. If my flat purchase in Hove succeeds, it will feel very much like coming home. ‘My people’ are different people now, and it feels good. In fact, where was I, and where were they, all my life?

Today, once more, my legs are aching, but my feet less sore, from dancing barefoot all evening. This week, not Five Rhythms, but ecstatic dance. What? Who? Me? Yes me, dancing with 30 others, doing my thing, synching with people I’ve never otherwise met, flying around the floor at times like a bird set free. This is the person who was the massage client described only a few years ago as ‘very different’, not for being trans* in hiding or denial or not understanding, but for being so conventional! My previous life-diet signified one thing: either I was severely constipated, or I was shitting pure goodness without digesting it, and not growing as I should. And now I am learning where the best food is, chewing it, appreciating it, accepting the shit.

The whole point of this, is that these last two years have been a really bad time for me, to go through such heartbreak, so many destroyed ideas of what love and life are all about, feeling that I have only ever been loved as an object of significance, not as person of value. I haven’t lost everything at all. A lot, yes. Things that most people would only imagine losing through infidelity, serious misdemeanour, or death. But everything was a result only of my integrity and their choice. I have told the story to death, and the book’s binding is tearing loose, the lettering no longer gold.

With all the goodness extracted from the previous three decades and more, I have been left with the shit. And the significance of this, is that everything in the shit was inside my life before. Some of it just useful roughage, but the truths of being loved for significance rather than self were there all along. Contingent love looked different when its dependency was safe. And now all the crap is out. That means no longer in. It should instead feel like relief.

I love. I love other people. I have a few deep friendships, and a new ability and freedom to truly encounter and share with the people I meet. I know what it means that women are sisters. I know what it means for me to express my emotions and intuition openly and freely, and to find the same in others. I know that in some ways I have entered a whole new world of personhood, inhabited by people I could never truly have known before, who share my love and exploration of life and meaning, who eschew ordinariness as impoverishing. I will probably never live in a suburban semi with garden again, though somewhere I can have a cat or dog would be welcome

I have real questions about my previous concept of marriage and the merging of people into singular coupleness. I like the word ‘partner’ because it sounds more equal and less role-dependent. It seems to leave people intact and able to do their own thing and find their own way. I would love to find romance, and real commitment, but without the suspiciousness that marriage can bring. Maybe it’s my age! And I really long for kisses and intimacy … My diet may have changed, but I still need a complete diet.

It takes a while to understand shit, to accept that it is waste, and is meant to be waste, that it can contaminate and needs to be disposed of and washed away properly. But there will always be some, and it is better out than in. It is the product of imperfect goodness, and no reason not to feast. The shit is over. Long live shit.

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I am seeing something very different in love

  • Posted on July 2, 2013 at 8:55 pm

It’s different because it’s from a different place.

It’s a different place, because this is where I am from when I am not just being here.

Everything has a beginning. Everything has an end. In between all is change.

But that doesn’t mean anything is destroyed, or loses its identity.

I wonder. I wonder what our souls would say to each other today, if they could speak without our voices and ears. I wonder how confused our souls are, how bemused, when all they have, to join with others, is voices and ears.

I have no belief in a god. I feel no need. I did once, and my belief in a god who was loving, if corrective, made me hate myself. I believed I was a good person, liked by almost everyone I came into contact with. I also believed that something in me was wicked, sinful and wrong. I believed that if anyone else knew this about me, I would become unloved, untouchable, even hated.

I have a very different philosophy of life now. I am connected through love and life with all other living things. I belong in a wider, larger place than just this body-life, and it will be to there that I shall be reabsorbed again when this journey ends. I belong and I am safe; and so long as I know my place here and have acceptance, I am happy to stay and be involved. At my deepest, darkest point last year, I came to believe that I was unloved, untouchable, even hated. That meant there was no longer any reason to stay here, and I was very prepared to take a shortcut home.

I wonder what our souls would say to each other today?

I tried desperately for ages, in some kind of belief in thought transference, telepathy, rerouting my heart through spirit friends or guardians, hoping angels may be messengers–to say that love is love and souls are souls and connection is the meaning in life. I failed. I still believe deeply that I am part of something greater, something whole. And yet I feel that love has completely failed me. I have become untouchable.

It seems a long time ago, but I used to live in the belief that I was a man. I did as best as I could to do and be what that meant. I was acceptable empathic: people told me that in my 20s. I had a strong feminine side. People saw that. I was different, but I was one of the ‘nice men’. I was the man who understood the wives who had husbands who didn’t understand them. I was a lover because I believed in love. I was not god’s gift, I have no god. I was nothing special in terms of the big exotic Lover. But I knew how to give, and keep giving, when it came to making another feel special, valuable, wanted, loved. I don’t say outstanding, I don’t say perfect. I just say that inside of me there has always been an ability to connect, be devoted and committed, and express love. Not just desire, not lust, not wanting to possess, just to give and to share, beyond romance, but not excluding it. It doesn’t set me apart, but it does mean I still believe I have a lot to give and to share with another, with a lover, with a partner..

Today I laughed and laughed. Lying face down on tender breasts, having my back massaged, my therapist said how unusual I had always been. No, not for my gender, but because I was so conventional! I did ‘man’ well. I did as I was told, too much as expected, perhaps. I hid the self-hate even better. I was afraid I would not be loved. I was afraid I would become untouchable. And here I was laughing at the absurdity of it all. And realising that the only caring touch I now receive is this, at the hands of my massage therapist.

I understand completely that on the outside I have changed almost beyond recognition. In some ways I hope I have; I too see photographs of myself looking very like a man. I look at those images of myself, with the hatred locked and secret inside, and recall how my family, and my wife, loved me. At a human level they were loving the man; the father, husband, lover. But were they loving me? I can’t answer that anymore, because they don’t now.

I wonder what our souls would say today if they could speak without our voices and ears.

So I really do appreciate that the bits that were loved were in many ways the pretended bits. But the parts of me that loved in return were soul bits. I am not saying anything superior about myself, I just know that for me it was different. These parts of me, were those that lay inside all the time. Inside that ‘man’ was me, self-hated, not understood, but making me the different kind of man. There are men who are like I learned to be, who are not like me at all, who are kind, gentle, loving and don’t watch football with passion, or feel that women are there just for them. I know. But I was different, and if I was liked or loved for those nicer, understanding aspects, it was because I was never really a man at all. I just learned to behave more like one.

If your soul knew mine, it would understand that a woman had in fact loved a woman.

Spiritually, I feel I know myself and my place better than in the days when what I am, was a sinful secret. Those were the days when my eyes were blinkered by beliefs, or rather by dogma or doctrine about how we all ‘should’ be. And those beliefs, even when the religion faded away, stuck fast. Now, I need no religion and no god to love, to be kind, to work for better equality, fairness and to understand the acid of greed. I never was unlovable, untouchable and wicked for being a woman with a male habitation. But I was loved and touchable for hiding it and for hating myself enough to keep it secret.

But I also know that through the experience of wrestling with gender, I can no longer see as most people do. I can no longer wear the spectacles of the gender binary. I can see every day how the majority of men presume priority and superiority, and aren’t even aware of it. I can see male stupidity and emotional immaturity a mile off. I can see women taken in by sexual attraction above personal trustworthiness and real caring. I can see protective bitching. I can see how people judge each other for playing the roles they were taught. I can no longer see why two people who love each other should not find some physical expression of that love, whatever their gender or sexuality. I simply cannot see as most people do any more. I am not alone; this is no special gift as such, but I can never wear the same blinkers again.

I wonder, if our souls could speak to each other, what they would say about love, about bodies, about touching, and whether they would agree with our minds about what can and cannot feel, or be, good.

I can see better than ever that, for all the wonderful feelings of romance and being in love, truly loving another person is actually something quite different. I believe we are more than these bodies, and our feelings about loveableness and touchableness are badly skewed. If another’s body ‘isn’t right’ we turn away from touch. Disfigurement? Disability? Ageing? Impotence? Mental health? There are lots of reasons for disowning previously-loved people who no longer match our reasons for originally loving them. We reject their touch like infection. We fear being tainted by association. We fear losing the opportunity for something better, more like the original.

Don’t we all do it? Don’t we do it when dementia strikes? Don’t we do it when someone is struggling with life? Don’t we do it when we walk on by, past the homeless person we can’t possibly help, who doesn’t want to be helped, just wants to eat? Don’t we do it when someone is attacked, verbally or physically, in case being involved hurts us, in case we have to share in another’s hurts? And don’t we do it with the transsexual partner who finally finds their authenticity? Does expression of love need the same attraction as in the mating game? Can nothing new be learned? Is this really a different kind of love?

I wonder what our souls would say, if one said, ‘oh my goodness; I have the wrong body for this soul’. Would the other say, ‘oh yuk. I can’t commune with you any more, I thought you were a man soul.’

Somehow, because of where I believe I fit in the broader span of existence, I think real love comes from somewhere else than the recognition of bodies. I know as well as anyone that sexual attraction happens through eyes, and pheromones. But frankly unattractive people do love each other, people do endure together through disfigurement, illness, impotence and age. People of all kinds find ways to touch and to express love to each other, and overcome disappointments, changes and challenges.

I don’t know whether it is my spiritual appreciations, or through the struggles and changes I had (and still have), to go through in being transsexual in a world of preconceptions, but I just don’t see the barriers that bodies make between people who want to share love.

***

And this is what I wish I could communicate. I cannot, because to say it would invite the reply that I just don’t accept the impact of my diagnosis.

So here I am. It’s too late, and I know I see differently. My soul does not meet with you, and cannot simply say ‘I love you’ any more. I am not loved enough to be touched; it gives you the wrong kinds of feelings to touch me now. It has become unlovely and wrong. I wonder if we shall meet as souls in some other place, touch once more, and agree finally what love is? I do hope so.

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Authenticity and the empty bed

  • Posted on June 21, 2013 at 11:29 pm

Sometimes I just ache for loving contact and touch. I knew it every day for over thirty years, and gave the same freely and with real affection and love. This has been a real cliff edge, and as much as I accept that my marriage is over, I am haunted.

This week my black dog has been prowling, asking for walkies, claws clicking on the floor, and looking at me with doleful eyes. My black dog arrived the first night I descended into the awful realisation that I had shed my pretence of being male where I was loved and desired, into a place where I was sufficiently female to be unlovable but insufficiently female to be desired. That place, where I might never know love and intimacy ever again was my greatest nightmare. It was then my black dog chased me to the brink and I seriously considered that all meaningful life had come to an end.

Dramatic, isn’t it? Of course not. It isn’t any different from a million other lonely women who either don’t want a man or can’t find anyone attracted, or can’t communicate their feelings lest it break a friendship. So I don’t count myself exceptional, and among fellow transsexual women, this is de rigeur.

‘Count your blessings!’, I am told. I even tell myself. And yes, my life is richer now than ever in many ways. But I don’t need to be told this, as I have explained in previous blogs, and tell over and over, the explosion of reality for me that transcends everything else, is my sense of authenticity.

Yes. I am real. I feel whole and normal and complete (well, almost – give me another year!)

And ready. Ready to love and be loved and feel wonderful, and share life and wholeness with another. Wow! It’s amazing! But I am standing alone on an empty stage and the play is elsewhere, the lights are out, and I am not in it. I have a feeling that if only I can find the right stage I may just be mistaken for an extra, so long as my lines are convincing. But I have the feeling that my script just isn’t the right one any more.

You see, this is my script and I don’t want someone else’s.

Probably the worst underlying thing about being born transsexual is that only another transsexual really gets it. I am reminded by the way accepting friends act and speak, that their acceptance is simply that – and they still don’t fully get it. It’s in the handshake you get when the woman next to you gets an air-kiss. It’s the explanation of how you never had to grow up with the vulnerability of being a girl. It’s the male banter as if you aren’t present as a woman, that you will ‘understand’ because you ‘used to be a man’. It’s the comment: ‘I shall always think of you how you used to be’.

My history will haunt me for ever. I am neither ashamed nor embarrassed by it, but it just isn’t normal is it? I was reminded robustly by a friend that I don’t exactly present as your average lesbian. Real lesbians grew up as women facing male presumptions and female vulnerabilities and judgements. I, on the other hand, was fully socialised as a man and took all the privileges – so don’t expect any sympathy there (mate). You can never be a real lesbian with that kind of background. It seems even wearing a skirt and being feminine is in itself surrender to male dominance and betrayal of some lesbian fundamental. And yet I really don’t (at least as yet) feel that I could let the average man into my personal space. I think it’s partly because I’ve seen male attitudes, the male psyche (which I don’t feel I ever truly shared), and behaviours from the inside, being expected to do the same, and experiencing men in the absence of women.

‘Why don’t you find another trans person? They will understand you much better!’ As if being trans defines your personality, your philosophy, your tastes and abilities, and makes you all of a kind. Ginger hair? Go join the gingers! Does that sound any more or less reasonable? It’s as if people feel safer if I don’t get too close. My authenticity is, in this way, questioned or denied. Real people, this way; less real people: over there please.

So despite my complete sense of authenticity, the world is full of well-meaning people who insist on labels that simply are inadequate. *Sigh*. It seems we’re back with the ‘what’ being more important than the ‘who’. Nothing pronounces this more than dating sites. Blokes browse my profile (no money exchanged yet so there are no exchanges) despite ‘F seeking F’ – and women either explain their lesbian past or ‘only seek friendship, nothing more’.

I’m a person! I’m screaming inside. Where can I find another person for whom our pasts and our unlearned selves are far less important than who we are now? I only want to love and be loved!

OK, you’ve had enough of the apparent angst. So have I. But what is so wrong with yearning for love? Having the capacity to love, care and commit, and finding that your labels don’t qualify you for being wanted and trusted is truly awful.

Because authenticity seems to count for less.
Because what you are makes people defensive, lest you change them by being too close.
Because in the end I had to choose between authenticity and the love of my life.

And that, dear readers, is the case of authenticity and the empty bed.

It all leaves me wondering if I would have really got to grips with and faced authenticity (and how many people do) were it not for this. Most of us have an idea by the time we are adult, of how life goes. We adjust expectations to reality all the time, but we lose bits of ourselves all along the way. Life is like that, this is how it is, never a bed of roses, you have to compromise, count your blessings, please others, keep your head down, it isn’t the end of the world, there are many people worse off than you.

And yet this real-I-sation for me, this truly knowing with awe and wonder, that I am meant to be like this, is a wholly different awareness than I have ever had. And it isn’t just about my gender, it’s about my sense of self. And it means that I will never allow my authenticity to be compromised ever again. Is that why I don’t know the script any more?

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