A Boy Named Sue

Why is it that, if you announce you're changing your sex, so many people automatically presume you will want to change your name to the opposite-gender equivalent of your birth name? For example, if your birth name is 'Sue', that you would automatically want to be 'Stu' instead because it's close enough to what you're already called?

I know some people do do this. Some people don't have any major dysphoria about their birth name and they seem to associate with it in some way, even if it is the wrong gender. So it would be simpler to just change to a correct-gender equivalent of their birth name, or to leave it alone if their name is androgynous enough.

But my name doesn't have a male version (although there are similar-sounding male names, similar to the 'Sue'/'Stu' example above) and more importantly, I've never felt that my name is actually a part of me. It's always been a convenient label that other people have used when they want to get my attention but it's never felt like it belongs to me - seriously, they might as well call me 'hey you' for the amount my name means to me. It's a name that belongs to other people so they have something to call me.

If I'm changing my life to honour my true identity, why would I want to retain some part of the erroneous identity my parents conferred upon me when I was born?

The fact is: I don't want anything to do with that horrible name. It's unmistakably female and it can't be lengthened or shortened to anything masculine, so I'm happy to just kick it to the kerb. But that leaves me with a bigger problem: which, of the thousands of male names available, should I select for myself?

I think I've come up with a very easy answer.

You see, when my mother was pregnant with me (back in the early 1970s) there was no way of determining the sex or gender of your unborn child. There was some folklore in my family that there had been no female children born for four generations and indeed, my father was one of four brothers, so nobody was surprised when my mother's first-born child had been a son.

So when my mother miscarried her second pregnancy a couple of years later, she presumed that that had been a daughter and that there was something wrong with my father's line which would mean she couldn't have any daughters with him. So when her third pregnancy (with me) was a healthy one, she resigned herself to the thought that she must be expecting another son… and my parents picked out a boy's name for him. They decided to name him in honour of his two grandfathers.

How right they actually were about expecting a son - only they wouldn't realise this until many years later.

Unfortunately for me, their second son was born female-bodied and so that original grandfathery name had to be abandoned. Instead they named me after my paternal grandmother (who had desperately wanted a daughter but instead produced four sons). I've always hated that old-fashioned, female name they gave me. But my grandfathers' names are perfectly acceptable even today, almost 100 years after they were named.

So when I decided to transition, the thought occurred to me that I could simply go back to the name my parents had originally intended to give me had I been born male-bodied. It seemed to fit; almost like it would help to heal part of what went wrong when I was assigned the wrong gender at birth.

So that's what I've decided to do. And I'm eternally grateful that my grandfathers weren't named 'Horace' or 'Cuthbert' or something. ;-)

Verbal Tasers

I'm looking forward to the day when people start automatically using the correct pronouns, titles and name for me rather than guessing and getting it wrong.

I've been kinda lucky recently. Living in the UK, which is generally a live-and-let-live society, I don't tend to get addressed with pronouns very often in public. I try my damndest to present as male but I don't pass well (due to my shrimpiness and my cute girly face, damnit) so people that I meet in everyday life can tell that there's something going on, even if they can't tell exactly what it is. So they just tend to serve me without addressing me directly with pronouns or as 'Madam', which is the perfect thing to do under the circumstances.

But that's not always the case. People do sometimes insist on using gender-specific titles and pronouns and every single time they do it 'zings' me like I've been shocked with a mini-taser.

• The other day I was in Boots (a British pharmacy chain) buying make-up for my very feminine elder daughter. I've been out of that particular market for so long that entire brands have been born & died since I last bought make-up for myself. So I asked one of the staff members to help me find the things on my daughter's list. She was brilliant and walked me round the shop like she was a personal shopper, but she then said "Your daughter is very lucky to have such a loving mother". Zing!
  Huh. Mother. Well, in all fairness I did fall pregnant with my babies, I gave birth to them naturally, I breastfed each of them for two years so I am definitely their parent, but do I feel like a 'mother'? No. 'Mother' is a word applied to women who have had (and/or are raising) children, and since I've never felt like a woman I don't feel that the term really fits. I'm not their 'father' either because they already have one of those, so I prefer the more neutral 'parent'.  
• Today at lunchtime I got 'madamed' by a chugger collecting on behalf of the British Red Cross. Zing! I corrected him and he apologised & wished me a good day, so that kinda defused the pain right there.
• This morning one of my colleagues greeted me by saying 'Hello Miss (Name)!'. Zing! She also tends to call me 'lovely lady'. Zing! She means well and it's just a term of endearment between colleagues who are fond of each other, but being addressed with feminine titles stings every single time.
• My kids still call me 'Mum' (which I have no plans to change) and refer to me as 'she'. Their 'she's are perfectly ok at the moment as I'm pre-everything and the habit is ingrained, but I do hope the 'she's will shrivel up naturally in time. Along with my ovaries, har har.  

Hanging with the Chinese tourists

OK, so I understand completely that it's difficult for many people to understand what it's like to be transgender. For most people, our physical sex (i.e. our set of genitals) matches our gender (the way our brains perceive ourselves to be) so it wouldn't occur to many people that some of us have a different experience. So as a public service (you're welcome!) I thought I might try to give you an analogy that could help you along.

Imagine, if you would, that you're a person of Oriental extraction living in a Western country. Say, your grandparents came over from China but your parents were both born in the USA and so were you. Your grandparents wanted their kids to be 'real Americans' (whatever that means) and so they didn't teach them any Mandarin and they encouraged them to immerse themselves in American culture. Likewise you have been raised without any real reference to your Chinese heritage since your parents didn't learn anything about it themselves. You're American through & through and although you're proud of your Chinese heritage, it is in reality rather alien to you.

With me so far? Good.

Now, imagine that you then decide to go on a foreign holiday/vacation to a country where English isn't spoken but that by sheer coincidence is also frequented by Chinese tourists.You go to visit some tourist attraction (say, a museum) because you hear there's a good guided tour and you'd really like to see the exhibits. It's a former Communist country, and of course China is still broadly Communist so the cultural relevance of this place would probably be very different to a Chinese person than it would be to an American. And more importantly, the tour would be presented very differently to a Chinese audience (so as to not cause offence by criticising Communism) than it would to an American audience (who might enjoy seeing how Communism has failed).

So you turn up a little late (the American tour group has already gone ahead), and as soon as you get there the museum officials usher you into the Chinese tour group rather than the American one. You try to protest but nobody speaks English so they can't understand that you're really an American; they see your Chinese features and perceive you as being one of the Chinese tourists. The door is locked behind you and the tour starts.

So there you are, stuck in a place that is not culturally relevant to you. The language spoken is unintelligible to your ears; you can't read any of the material; and you have no way of making people understand that you're really in the wrong group and that you're uncomfortable at being treated as something you're not. Because just look at you; you are Chinese, right? Get a grip! Get used to it! Learn to deal with it! Start acting like it already!

So people will react with shock and discomfort if you try to get them to understand that you're not what they perceive you to be. They might even feel threatened, because this particular tour group is a 'safe place' for people who are Chinese, and you're an outsider. A foreigner. One of them masquerading as one of us.

Humans love to take short-cuts in classifying people. It's part of our tribal instinct and in ancient times it helped us identify friend from foe. So people make summary judgements about you based on what you look like, so that they can pigeon-hole you into a slot that is familiar and comfortable to them. At best, this helped us keep our families safe during ancient times. At worst, it has led to Apartheid and the Holocaust.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you really are an American of Chinese ancestry who needs to be treated like the person you know you are inside (American) rather than what you look like on the outside (Chinese). And it can be uncomfortable and even dangerous when people treat you as the wrong type of person.

This is what it feels like to be transgender.

People see you as being one gender because of your physical appearance and they expect (and need, for their own comfort) you to behave like a typical person of that gender is expected to behave. However, you really are something else, and other people can react with shock, discomfort or even aggression when you challenge their suppositions.

People also tend to believe that their own perceptions are more valid than someone else's assertions, which leads them to think that they must be right about you and you must be wrong. This is especially damaging to transgender children, as we're often told that we're 'wrong'; 'weird' or 'deluded' for thinking we're not what other people perceive us to be. This leads to feelings of isolation as we start to believe what other people are telling us - especially since it's very rare for anyone to meet another transgender person whilst growing up. So it's not unusual for a transgender to child to think we're the the only person in the world who feels this way so we start to internalise what other people are saying about us being 'weird' or 'wrong'.

But I have to ask: who is the expert on 'me'? Is it you, the person who gets to meet & interact with me occasionally, or me who is forced to live in this skin every second of my life?

My lived experience of myself is far more valid than anyone else's fleeting perception. So no, I'm not Chinese. Nor am I American.

The Emperor's No Clothes

For many years - sporadically from age 5 but solidly from age 7 onwards - my mother didn't buy me any new clothes at all, apart from my school uniforms. I know I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, but I think I've just figured out the reason why she neglected me in that way.

Mum used to buy my brothers new clothes on a fairly regular basis considering the tight constraints of her budget. My elder brother was even treated to t-shirts with his favourite bands on them as a teenager (these were very expensive as they had to be imported from overseas) and my younger brother owned everything that had anything to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But she was loathe to buy anything for me.

I've just realised that she probably didn't like to buy me clothes because she didn't like my taste in clothing: specifically, my preference for wearing male clothing.

I've recently been looking through some old family photos from the 1970s and one thing struck me: every single photo of me before the age of 5 has me in a pretty, frilly dress, looking like a stereotypical pretty little girl. When my parents had sole control over what I would wear, my mother would choose to dress me solely in pretty girly things. So she made sure she chose hairstyles & clothing that showed off her 'pretty little girl'.

But after the age of 5, the photos tell a very different story: I'm wearing t-shirts & shorts or my favourite corduroy trousers (hey, it was the '70s!) in every one. That's because I'd started to notice gender differences and I insisted on being treated like a boy. And there are far fewer photos of me after the age of 5 than before.

Many of the clothes I'm wearing in those later shots were my elder brother's old things that he'd outgrown. This is because my mother would refuse to buy me boys' (or androgynous) clothes and would pressurise me to choose dresses when we'd go out clothes shopping. I'd invariably kick up a stink & refuse the dresses, so the end result was that I would wind up getting nothing at all. For years.

This went on for my entire childhood, from age 5 until I started working and could afford to purchase my own clothes at age 17. I have wondered over the years why my mother would buy clothes for my brothers but not for me (did she love them more?): but now I think the answer is simply that she wasn't comfortable that her pretty little girl wanted to look like a boy so she couldn't bring herself to buy me anything. She wanted me to be her pretty little daughter, dammit - not the masculine tomboy I insisted on being.

She did have one way of trying to force me to wear dresses: if I was invited to a friend's birthday party, my mother would insist that the only way I would be allowed to attend would be if I wore a dress. This would lead to a lot of frustrated crying and begging on my part because I really wanted to go the the party but I really didn't want to wear a dress. She wouldn't budge, so if the party was important enough I would eventually give in & wear the damn dress. She would curl my hair and try to 'prettify' me as much as she could - but if you were to see the photos from that period you'd see a pissed-off kid looking very uncomfortable. I guess she wanted her daughter back any way she could, and she thought that if only I could see how pretty I am, I would start acting like a girl. She was very wrong about that, though.

I remember having nothing but my brother's old rags to wear for years and around age 15 I was invited to perform in a school play, and my mother's pride would not allow her to let me perform on-stage in my brother's tatty old clothes. So she gave me R20 to spend on clothing and sent me into town on my own to pick out some clothes. I came back with a pair of trousers, a t-shirt and a pair of boots. All in white, for some random reason. No, actually the reason wasn't that random - it was because I hadn't been allowed to buy clothes for the past 10 years so I didn't really know what to get. I was hugely uncomfortable and anxious on that trip; almost as uncomfortable as I had been a couple of years previously when she took me out to buy my first bra (what a heartbreaking experience that was!). That was the one & only time she gave me money to buy clothes; after that I couldn't buy anything until I started working part-time at 17 and could pay for my own things.

So, yeah. My stubborn mother was so uncomfortable with me wearing even androgynous clothing that she preferred to buy me nothing whatsoever to wear. :-(

Coming out at the gym

So on Friday I bit the bullet and decided to come out to the managers of both gyms I attend, as well as my Personal Trainer. I haven't been going to the gym since my last post on the subject as I've been struggling with the dysphoria that was triggered by that post I'd read… but I decided that I need support if I'm to regain my comfort in the gym.

The first gym started out very well. The manager is a lesbian and she was very supportive, friendly and sympathetic. She agreed to look into options to make me feel more comfortable in the gym, particularly in the changing areas an on the treadmills - all of which are in front of mirrors. So that went well.

My personal trainer? Not quite so good, actually. I've been working with  him for a couple of years now so he knows me quite well, but he kept saying things like "I never would've guessed" and "But you really do look like a woman!" (yeah, thanks for that - how do you think I feel about having that little fact pointed out to me, arsehole?). He then told me quite proudly that he'd once met a 'tranny' who 'even though he was really a guy, looked quite attractive' and he seemed to think this story showed just how enlightened and tolerant he is if even he had fancied that 'tranny'. Ugh.

Well, he gets ONE opportunity to talk trash like that whilst adjusting to the surprise of meeting his first transgender client. But I expect (nay, demand) that all my future dealings with him must be far more respectful and must not include words like 'tranny'.

So I had mixed feelings about that particular 'outing'. The good work done by the manager was kind-of negated by my personal trainer. Unfortunately the only other personal trainer in the place is a woman and I've seen how she operates - it's all about femininity with her and I'd be even more uncomfortable working with her under those circumstances.

My second 'outing' session was at my other gym, which is closer to where I live. I phoned the manager and organised an evening appointment with him… and when I arrived I was delighted to see that he turned out to be the campest gay guy you could hope to meet. Well, this is promising, I thought - there's a good chance that he'll be sympathetic to LGBT issues. And sure enough he was.

I had a lovely long chat with him in which he promised me all the support the club could offer. I'm very uncomfortable with using their ladies' changing rooms (and I don't pass well enough to use the men's yet) so he's offered me the use of the single-stall disabled changing room. It's not ideal, but it's the best that we can come up with within the confines of this club and its facilities.

He also got his senior management involved as they're always on the floor when he's away so I have three people making sure my gym experience is as comfortable as it can be. However, the (gay) manager did also say: "But you look very female". URGH!!! Twice in one day. :'-(

Goddamn it. I can't wait to start on hormones.

Surgery

The other night Eldest Daughter and I were having a chat and she mentioned that she wants to eventually have cosmetic surgery on her nose. I somewhat understand where she's coming from… when she was little her nose looked a lot like mine (small & button-like) but as she goes through her teenage years it seems that the bridge is becoming quite pronounced, giving her a bit of a hook nose.

She gets this from her father's mother, who has a rather generous hooter herself. Daughter's nose is nowhere near as pronounced as her grandmother's but she is very image-conscious, so she compares her nose unfavourably to everyone around her and she clearly has some dysphoria about it. Nothing to do with gender; just general dysphoria with the way it fits on her face.

Boy, can I relate about dysphoria.

So she said that if she could have plastic surgery some day, she'd like to get her nose done. I tried to reassure her that it doesn't look bad, but I'd understand if she'd feel happier with having it done. She then asked me what plastic surgery I'd have done if I could.

A meaningful glance downwards and a salacious wink was all the answer she needed.

Private Person vs. Public Property

A thought occurred to me this morning while I was driving in to work. I know I can be dense at times, but I've just spotted a major difference between men & women in our society. And it's one of the problems I've always had with being female-bodied because people treat me incorrectly.

I've spotted that men in our society are treated as private persons. By this I mean that the public has no say in how they live their lives or the decisions they make. If a man wants to get an education in a respectable field, that's his right. If he wants to work an 80-hour week, he's a dependable husband providing for his family. If he goes grey, that's just his age. If he wants to dress to his comfort, he's just a bloke wearing what he wants; why would anyone ever even think of passing an opinion? He's treated as an adult who is sufficiently competent to make his own decisions. Granted, he can be judged or criticised if he makes decisions that are considered harmful, but most of his life choices are supported by society by default.

On the other hand women are treated as public property. The public thinks it has a right to an opinion on what a woman chooses to do with her life. If she wants an education, well that's fine but she'd better not get too big for her boots by studying any traditionally male field such as engineering. If she wants to work an 80-hour week, why is the selfish bitch neglecting her husband and kids? If she goes grey, she's a washed-out old hag. If she dresses to her comfort, she's a slut who deserves to be attacked in the street for wearing revealing clothes; or if she prefers less revealing clothes, she's 'frigid' or 'a lesbian'. She is treated as someone who is not only incompetent to make her own decisions, but she is heavily pressured to conform to society's expectations of what a 'wife and mother' should be. And if she doesn't, she fails as a woman.

That realisation hit me like a ton of bricks this morning. Society in general, spurred on by the media, thinks it is entitled to comment on every aspect of a woman's life but they wouldn't dare say some of these things about men. I had a look at the sidebar of articles on the Daily Mail's site (the most heavily visited news site in the world) for some examples of this. Here are three actual headlines from today's Daily Mail, along with my take of what's wrong with them, and a suggestion of what a similar headline could look like if the story applied to a man:

Actual Headline: Something to tell us, or just a REALLY good bikini? Frankie Sandford's curvier cleavage sparks boob job speculation.
What's wrong with it: the media (and public) thinks it has a right to comment on a woman's choices regarding her body.
Imagine this: Something to tell us, or just REALLY tight trousers? Justin Bieber's larger bulge sparks penile enhancement speculation.

Actual Headline: There's a rat in the kitchen (and it's not Alex Reid!) Hysterical Chantelle Houghton fails to keep her composure as she discovers vermin in her old house.
What's wrong with it: the headline implies that a typical stupid hysterical woman gets ridiculously emotional in public.
Imagine this: There's a rat in the kitchen (and it's not Chantelle Houghton!) Hysterical Alex Reid fails to keep his composure as he discovers vermin in his old house.

Actual Headline: Even J-Lo needs a bit of help! Ms Lopez keeps her famous curves in check as she sports Spanx under her skintight catsuit.
What's wrong with it: A 43-year-old mother apparently fails as a woman because she needs a little support to keep her figure up to the required standard.
Imagine this: Even Frasier needs a bit of help! Kelsey Grammer keeps his famous belly in check as he sports Spanx under his skintight shirt.

I'm willing to bet your reaction to the imagined headline involving a man is not quite as positive (or as neutral) as your reaction to the actual headline involving a woman. I'm willing to bet that most people would think that the women in the actual headlines are 'fair game' for such public scrutiny; and the men in my imagined headlines are having their privacy invaded.

Right?

I'm not sure why our society operates in this way, but clearly it does. This also goes some way towards explaining why so many women feel they need to 'dress sexily', including wearing loads of make-up: it's because they know they're under intense scrutiny everywhere they go and they'll be damned if they let some other woman look better than them.

Why do we think it's ok to invade the privacy of women, but unacceptable to do the same to men?

I am a private person, and I always have been. I refuse to allow others to judge me, particularly on my body parts or appearance. That's one of the many, many reasons why I dropped out of the 'female' game, and I feel a whole lot more comfortable now that I'm not under the same pressure.

Turning the oil tanker

Graham Norton, the Irish TV presenter & comedian, noted in his Telegraph advice column a few weeks ago that "Turning a life around is like trying to turn an oil tanker, it will take time and involve thousands of small manoeuvres". He was answering a letter from someone who was stuck in a rut and wanted to find more enjoyment in their life. But the words struck a chord with me; they were exactly what I needed to hear at the time.

I suppose I'm privileged in a way to have access to the NHS, which is frustratingly slow and sub-standard at dealing with most things (you can go a couple of years without treatment, and even then it is often of the 'budget' variety) but it does get things done eventually if you're persistent enough. I have a lot of sympathy for people in other parts of the world where gender reassignment is an impossible dream due to a lack of finances.

I recently participated in a local NHS survey about services for LGBT people, in which I asked them to consider the fact that many patients with Gender Dysphoria suffer terribly for a long time - sometimes many years or decades - before getting to a crisis point at which they realise they can no longer persist in living as their birth gender. This is a very common and it is certainly what happened with me. I've known that 'something' was wrong since I was 5 years old, but it wasn't until I was 19 that I first heard of someone having had a sex change and figured out exactly what was wrong with me. Then I tried to avoid/ignore my deep-seated problems with my body for twenty-one years before I arrived at a crisis point where I realised I couldn't possibly continue any longer being treated as a female by society.

The problem is: I went to my doctor because I'd hit a crisis point. The last thing someone in crisis needs to hear is that they'll have to wait months before they can actually do anything to make themselves feel better. I hit the wall in June but I still haven't even heard from the Gender Clinic that will eventually be treating me. That's not good enough. Many transgender people consider or attempt (or commit) suicide when we hit that crisis point so we need to be seen much more urgently, and I don't think the medical profession fully appreciates the huge mental and emotional anguish that accompanies living in the wrong body, and what it can drive an otherwise sane person to do to themselves.

So I have a period of several months before I can get any treatment, and in that time I'm trying to keep myself sane by making whatever small changes I can to help me feel a bit better:

• I'm spending a lot of time in the gym doing cardio (to reduce my female fat distribution) and weights (to improve my overall musculature).
• I've cut my hair short, in a surfer-dude style. It's hard to find a short style that won't lead to me being misidentified as a lesbian, which is something that would make me extremely uncomfortable.
• I came out to my immediate family, who have responded in various ways. My elder brother is supportive, and my husband & kids are trying to get used to the idea. I have a long road ahead of me... but I only have one life and I don't want to go to my grave having spent my entire life trying to be something I'm not.
• I've selected a male name that I use in public places. Apart from Starbucks, who write that name on my take-out cup - and I'm not yet ready to be 'outed' at work! 
• I've spent quite a bit of money on men's clothing, which I wear exclusively. Shoes are a problem as my feet are a size 4/5, but that's what the boys' department is for. ;-)
• I bought an excellent binder from Amazon, which was delivered in very discreet packaging. I wear this every day.
• I've always spoken with a lowered voice since I was about 12, but lately I've been deliberately lowering it and speaking more slowly, particularly when in public.
• Since my hips widened (age 8) I have deliberately walked with my feet slightly further apart than is natural, to alleviate the hip-swaying gait that comes from my (unfortunately) gynaecoid hips. I've been concentrating on doing this a lot more now, and have changed other aspects of my gait by giving myself permission to walk with my hands in my belt loops and by pushing my chest out - something I've not done since The Girls started developing when I was 7. My shoulders are permanently slumped forwards due to many years of trying to conceal my chest.

Each of these little changes is a step in turning that oil tanker. I'm hopeful that having made these changes to my life will help me convince the Gender Clinic that I'm very serious about what I intend to do, and that it might spur them on. I can only hope they agree.

Last night I watched a documentary about FtMs in the UK, and whilst I found their stories inspiring I was a bit disheartened by the long time periods for which they had to wait. It was quite an old documentary (I think it was from 1999) but still, seeing those poor guys waiting months between appointments, and having to pretty much beg medical professionals for permission to let them be who they are, was a bit of a downer to say the least. Cis people don't need someone else's permission to get on with their lives; why should we? Oh, and one of the people assessing a patient to determine whether he would be 'allowed' gender reasssignment was a vicar. A VICAR? I don't want any damn vicars involved in my case. I'm a staunch atheist and the Church of England has no relevance to my life or my decisions. I sincerely hope they don't still require a vicar on the panel.

So I'm still waiting to see the Gender Clinic in London. My local shrink told me there was about a 3-month waiting list, but the Clinic's website says their wait is more like 6 months - so it's unlikely I'll be seen before February next year. And that will probably just be for an initial consultation, followed by another consultation some time later (months, maybe?), before I can actually do something about the gender dysphoria that has plagued me for almost 40 years now. The wait is agonising.

On the one hand, I've been waiting so damn long I shouldn't be concerned about waiting a bit longer. I know that. But on the other hand, I've been trying (and failing) to cope for so long, including about 20 years of trying unsuccessfully to be a 'woman', that I'm at crisis point and I need to move forward NOW, not at somebody else's leisure.

Dammit!

Binding

I've been using a binder for the past month, and it's been absolutely fantastic.

I had been worried about binding because I have a rotator cuff injury in my left shoulder which makes getting dressed quite difficult and painful, let alone putting on something as constricting as a binder… but I just got to the stage where I had to bite the bullet. I have had severe dysphoria ever since I started to hit puberty (34 years ago!) and have tried to cope by simply not looking down. I had resigned myself to the fact that I couldn't do anything about my equipment and so since the age of about 10, I have felt a bit like Rapunzel: trapped in the highest room (my head) of an inaccessible tower (my body) that stands between me & my freedom. How's that for an analogy? (If only Rapunzel wasn't a girl it would be perfect).

So I did some research and found a decent-looking gynaecomastia vest on Amazon - the Underworks 997, which incorporates both chest and abdominal compression - and placed my order. It arrived a couple of days later in a very discreet package - the small, brown package that Amazon usually uses if you order a music CD - and I gave it a whirl.

Well, it's brilliant.

It's not as hard to put on as I feared it might be, and it's not uncomfortably tight either. I put it on by stepping into it (like a skirt) and pulling it up to waist level, then I put my arms in the armholes (starting with the injured one). Once I've repositioned The Girls by pushing them downwards and towards my armpits it leaves me looking almost completely flat-chested, to the extent that people are treating me differently in public. Unfortunately for me I'm rather short and quite 'pretty' and I'm a 34D so I don't pass very well, but this vest is definitely causing confusion amongst people I deal with. They seem uncertain as to my gender and they tend to address me generically rather than by gender. Which is about as good as I can hope for at the moment, so it's great to have a tiny bit of freedom from femaleness.

I try to give myself a break from wearing it over the weekend for two reasons: 1) I'm at home so I can just lay around in comfortable clothes without worrying about how I'm presenting; and 2) my hubby & kids still a bit uncomfortable about my GID so at present I try to leave my binding for when I'm out in public.

So this weekend I went without my binder for two days. Saturday was fine - I stayed indoors and just wore a very baggy shirt - but on Sunday I wanted to go to the supermarket but the binder was in the wash, so I simply popped on the sports bra I was using before I bought the binder, thinking that that would be good enough to get me round Sainsbury's.

It wasn't. Not at all.

I've become accustomed to looking down at a relatively flat chest and masculine profile, so when I looked down and saw those two enormous mounds on my chest (yet again) I felt badly dysphoric in a way I haven't done for the past month. Those familiar but unwelcome lumps made me look 'female' again and I hated every minute I was out of the house. I also got 'madamed' everywhere I went; clearly people aren't confused about my gender if I'm not binding.

So. Clearly I can't make do without binding in public. And clearly I'll feel a lot better once I get top surgery - I just wish it wouldn't take so damn long to get there. But it was an interesting (and enlightening) experiment to see whether I could cope with going binderless in public after binding for only a month. And the answer is: I can't.

Why I couldn't transition in South Africa

I've mentioned previously that I figured out that I'm transgender back when I was age 19, around 1990. I'd felt very uncomfortable in my own skin since puberty started around the age of 7 but I've known since I was about 5 that I feel male inside.

The difference that made me start to feel uncomfortable around age 7 was down to other kids' socialisation with me. I had this wonderful year or two around that age, between when I was able to start influencing my appearance and when the hormones hit. You see, when I was little my mother was hugely enamoured of the idea that she'd given birth to a pretty blonde daughter, so she always dressed me in pretty dresses and kept my hair long.

I didn't really know anything about anything at first but as soon as I became aware of my appearance, of gender norms, and of the differences between the way my brother was dressed and the way I was dressed, I vociferously demanded that I be allowed to cut my hair short (she wouldn't let me cut it too short though) and that I be allowed to wear t-shirts and shorts instead of dresses. My mother kind-of allowed this, but she had a lifelong pride in her achievement of giving birth to a pretty blonde girl and she assumed I would simply fit into that role. Until I told her otherwise and became a 'tomboy'.

For that bittersweet brief period I was able to pass as a boy - provided my brother didn't out me - but from 7 onwards I started to go through puberty and my body started to become obviously female, which meant that boys simply didn't want to hang out with me any more. Boys who used to quite happily play with me suddenly started to shun me because it was becoming obvious that I was physically a girl, which meant that I was left with very few friends as I don't socialise easily with most girls.

When puberty started to make major changes to my body I was devastated. Puberty is supposed to be an awkward time, but for most people it is the time when you start changing from a girl to a woman or a boy to a man, and whilst the changes might be somewhat daunting they don't feel 'wrong' to most people. However, many trans* people are desperately unhappy during puberty, anxiously crying out inside that we DON'T want to arrive at the destination our hormones are taking us as it doesn't fit at all with who we are. That was certainly my experience and it's not at all uncommon if you're trans*.

However, I had the added complication of living in South Africa. For those of you who haven't lived there, white South African culture is very paternalistic. Or at least, it was when I was going through my teens in the 1980s and 1990s. Adding to that, many white South African men have Dutch ancestry, and the Dutch are the tallest race on Earth… which means that South African men tend to be pretty tall on average. I'm 1.55m, or 5"1', which means I'm very short by female standards let alone male standards.

South African men are cruel to their shorter brethren. They cannot take seriously anyone of either gender below a certain height (in my experience, about 5"4) and they mercilessly bully short men. I was shocked by my discovery during a business management course I completed when I was 19, in which our lecturer asked all of us to write down 5 characteristics of a good leader. Most of the men (predominantly white and in their 40s) in the class wrote "he must be tall"… which means that in their eyes, a leader must be both male and tall. I presented as neither, and I knew that this meant I would never be taken seriously in South Africa due to my lack of height.

Then a couple of years later I worked for a company in Johannesburg where one of my colleagues was a man of 5"2'. He had been mercilessly bullied his entire life about his height, to the extent that he bought himself a monster truck so that he could at least feel adequate on his daily commute. Bear in mind, he was slightly taller than I am... and he'd suffered daily mockery due to being short. He was actually a nice guy, but he had no significant other in his life because nobody wanted to date a short man.

So I knew I couldn't possibly transition in South Africa under those circumstances. In fact, my height has been one of the main reasons why I have held off for so long. However, when I finally reached crisis point several months ago and decided I just couldn't carry on living as a female any longer, I really looked around me for the first time in a long time and I noticed that many of the men around me (here in the UK) are actually quite short. Some are even shorter than I am; I spotted one just today who was under 5". In fact, it's not at all unusual here in the UK to see men who are around my height.

So I'm letting go of my fear that my height will hold me back from transitioning. And as long as I don't move to South Africa, Holland or even Kenya, I should be just fine. :-)

George

In High School, I insisted on being called 'George'. Much to the ridicule of my classmates.

I've always absolutely hated my birthname. It's old-fashioned and inescapably feminine, and so are all of the options for shortening it. And my middle name is no help either. So I've never been comfortable with people referring to me by name; it jars me every time I hear it. Even my husband calls me 'love' or 'darling' or similar, never my name. I can just about cope with my kids calling me 'Mum', but I'm uncomfortable with being called a 'mother' because that's a distinctly female title with all sorts of social connotations and it just doesn't sit right with me. I prefer 'parent'. How PC am I? ;-)

So throughout my childhood, any time I'd introduce myself to a new boy in the neighbourhood, I'd tell them I was a boy and I'd give them a boy's name to call me by. Usually it'd be the name of a current TV or movie character, because when I was on my own I would fantasise that I was that character so that I could imagine interacting with my friends as a man. I did this to a very small extent in primary school, but when puberty hit and I started High School I used to do it much more frequently. Why? Because I have a very feminine body, and as soon as that manifested itself people started dealing with me as if I were female, which has been a nightmare for me for around three decades now. If my everyday interactions with other people left me in such discomfort, the only way I could have a break from the way other people made me feel was to escape into a fantasy world in which I was male. And powerful. And handsome. And popular. And later, virile. ;-)

So when I was in High School I used to tell my classmates that I preferred being called 'George', and that I wanted them to use male pronouns with me. A couple of them did do so, bless their hearts, but most of my classmates just ignored me as a weirdo. Of course, that was back in the mid-1980s when very few people had even heard of trans* people, so I don't think many of them had a clue what was going on with me. And I sure as hell didn't know what was going on with me either. I just knew that I hated being treated like a girl and I felt more comfortable being treated like a boy. Who knew there was a word or a diagnosis for that?

My mother's daughter

According to family lore, my father's family had not had any girls born into it for five generations. My father was one of four sons, and when he and one of his brothers each produced a son within a year of each other it was simply assumed that the trend would continue for yet another generation.

My mother fell pregnant again when my brother was about a year and a half old, but she miscarried at 12 weeks. She assumed that the foetus must have been female, and that there's some genetic fault in my father's family that prevents them from having daughters. She'd always wanted a son followed by a daughter but she resigned herself to the fact that her husband could only give her sons.

She fell pregnant again a few months later - with me this time - and she assumed that since her pregnancy was going well, she would be expecting another son. Little did she know how right she actually was! They decided to name me after my grandfathers… so it came as something of of a shock when I was born apparently female. So they decided to name me after one of my grandmothers instead - the one who had four sons but no daughters - and my mother was absolutely over the moon to have a daughter, and a pretty one with blonde hair and blue eyes, no less.

I've been going through some old photo negatives from the 1970s and I can see that my mother delighted in dressing me in pretty dresses when I was little. I had shoulder-length wavy blonde hair which my mother would pin back with pretty hairclips. And I remember my mother would brag about having a pretty blonde daughter (she was brunette; my father had black hair). So from the way she would dress me when I was little, and the way she would brag about me, I can tell she was very enamoured of the idea of having a pretty little girl. Not because of my value as a person, of course, but because of the increased status she perceived herself as having due to successfully producing such a gorgeous little specimen.

(No I don't mean to sound big-headed there; I'm not at all - it's just that she seemed to see me as a physical manifestation of HER prowess as a woman because SHE'D made a beautiful child. So she took all the credit; it was nothing to do with me at all, or with my father for that matter).

Anyway, as soon as I could form my own opinion on my appearance, I pushed to have my hair cut short and I started naturally gravitating towards wearing shorts & t-shirts rather than dresses. She wouldn't let me cut my hair until I was 8, but by that time I was vehemently against wearing dresses or looking 'girly'. My best friend was a boy and I'd try to convince other kids in the neighbourhood that I was a boy.

Even though I'd managed to get my hair cut relatively short and could get away with wearing what I wanted most of the time, my mother would insist on 'beautifying' me if I was invited to a party. She told me that it was simply not allowed for me to attend a party in anything other than a dress, and that I could choose to wear the dress and go to the party, or not wear the dress and stay at home. So I'd wear the damn dress, and my mother would curl my hair with her curlers, and I'd be all 'beautified' up for the damn party. I have photos of me standing in our front garden before leaving for a party, looking rather miserable and defeated because I'd just had another blazing row with my mother over being forced to wear a dress yet again.

My parents figured that I was a tomboy because I liked to dress in boys' clothes and I tended to play with boys. They didn't realise that I would tell those boys that I actually was a boy, and that I'd give them a boy's name to call me by. I had some great times with the boys in the neighbourhood when I would be free to be myself. At least, until I'd generally get outed by my brother who had a terrible knack for saying "you do realise that she's my sister" when they'd come calling for me. ;-)

(Quick interjection here: I've long suspected that childhood can be easier for FtMs than for MtFs. I suspect it would be much more difficult for a boy to play with girls and dress in girls' clothing than it was for me to do the opposite.) Moving on...

As I headed towards my teens and the trauma of puberty, I became increasingly uncomfortable with my body and the direction in which it was moving. I would hide my figure behind oversized t-shirts and I would walk with my shoulders slumped forwards to try to minimise the size of my chest. I became a Goth, wearing black all the time because the colour went with my mood. Then at 14 I said to my mother that I wanted to dye my hair black to go with my Goth image... and she said "No, you have such pretty blonde hair, it would be a shame to ruin it by dyeing it black".

Uh, ruin it?

I know from experience that you can easily dye blond hair black and then dye it back again. OK, the dyeing it back again part takes several hours, but even so, even permanent hair colours are not actually permanent; you will eventually grow them out.

So my mother didn't want me to dye my hair black, because she was enamoured of the idea of her pretty blonde daughter, and she wasn't comfortable with me changing my appearance because it would no longer fit with the way she wanted me to look.

Is it any wonder then that I never came out to her about being transgender, even though I knew four years before she died exactly what I was? Imagine how she would've responded if I told her what I intend to do to her pretty blonde daughter?

Primary school experiences

WARNING: I had a difficult childhood and this entry mentions (not graphically) being molested by my school Principal.

My first primary school was pretty good when it came to socialising children and I generally enjoyed my time there. We had extensive fields to play in and students of both genders and all ages were free to mingle on the fields or around the school buildings. The only restriction that bothered me was that we were not allowed indoors at all during our breaks, so we had to eat our food outside even during bad weather. The best we could do for shelter was to stand in the (open-sided) corridors outside our classrooms. We would freeze in winter but at least we weren't getting rained on.

Oh, did you not realise that South African schools don't serve meals? Well, they don't. You are expected to take in a packed lunch, or you can buy something to eat from the tuck shop, which would generally be a shed that was converted to a shop selling sweets and crisps (or chips, as we called them in South Africa). I remember frequently queueing up for practically my entire lunchbreak to try to get something from the tuck shop, only to be turned away empty-handed when the bell would ring. But then again, our school day ended at 1:30pm so it was generally expected that our breaks were really for a quick snack and a toilet break as we would get lunch at home after school.

My best friend at that age was a boy named Lawrence who lived a few blocks away from me. He & I had met spontaneously in our neighbourhood before starting school and we hit it off immediately; and when we both started school we attended the same school (the only English-language primary in the area) but were in separate classes. The only problem was: our primary school ruined our friendship.

Before we joined primary school Lawrence & I were great friends. We would spend practically every day round each other's houses, playing with his toy soldiers or riding our bikes in the street. We would go for adventures in the enormous open veld between our houses. We would build 'castles' out of the palettes his father stored in their garden as part of his job. He would come round my place to play Top Trumps or Scalextric with my brother & I. He would join in our games of 'Six Million Dollar Man', where Lawrence, my brother and I would play-fight in slow motion in our front garden (you had to watch Six Million Dollar Man to understand the relevance of that). ;-)

We would also play hide & seek with my brother… and it was during just such a session, when I'd decided to hide in the storage compartment above my wardrobe with Lawrence, that I fell head-first out of the compartment and fractured my skull on the wooden floor of my bedroom. I spent almost four months in hospital recovering from a head injury. So you see, kids… hiding in the closet can be bad for your health. ;-)

Lawrence was awesome and he was my best buddy at the time, but bizarrely (to me, anyway) my parents used to refer to him as my 'boyfriend'. Naturally, they did this because they saw me as a girl and it was very unusual for girls to play with boys back in the 1970s. But I was rather puzzled as to why they called him my 'boyfriend'. They certainly didn't call my brother's best friend his 'boyfriend'. Couldn't they see that Lawrence was my buddy?

Anyway, we started primary school and would hang out sometimes during our lunch breaks, but most of our socialisation continued to happen after school. But some of the boys in Lawrence's class noticed us hanging out together and they started asking Lawrence "why are you playing with that girl?". So Lawrence started to feel social pressure from the boys in his class, and he started shying away from me. Our friendship came to an end during our second year of primary school because the other boys were making fun of him for hanging out with a 'girl'. Sigh.

A couple of years later I left that particular primary school because my family was moving to a different town. I was sad to see the end of my friendships in my home town but I was looking forward to meeting new people in my new town. I was enrolled at the main English-language primary school and started Standard 3 (age 10).

What I didn't expect was that this new school was heavily segregated (no, not just on racial lines: that was to be expected in every school in South Africa back in the 1980s) in terms of age and gender, and these rules were very strictly enforced. Plus, the headmaster at the time was a pervert who loved fondling vulnerable little girls, as I found to my dismay.

My new school had two large play fields separated by a series of netball and tennis courts in the centre. The field to the left was for the younger children (Grade 1 to Standard 2, ages 6-9) and the field to the right was for the older children (Standards 3 to 5, ages 10-13). This meant that the younger children had to keep themselves to their side of the school and the older kids had to stay on our side, so we were never allowed to interact with each other at all. Then each play field was sub-divided by gender: on the older kids' field, the girls were on the left and the boys were on the right. There was an imaginary 2-metre border down the centre which was patrolled by prefects, and anyone who even approached this border, let alone attempted a conversation with someone of the opposite gender, would earn themselves a much-dreaded visit to the Principal's office.

Our line-ups were gender-segregated; our classrooms were gender-segregated; even the main hall was gender-segregated. So I had absolutely no option to get to know any of the boys in my new school and so I struggled to make any friends. I managed to befriend one or two of the more socially awkward girls but I would generally spend my lunch breaks sat by myself under a tree at the far end of the girls' field. So for my first three years in a new town I couldn't make the sort of friends I was naturally drawn to, which meant that I became somewhat socially withdrawn. That damn school had no clue how harmful their segregation policy could be; or maybe they did and they wanted to force kids to become good little drones and conform to gender norms? Who knows. Either way, it certainly harmed my childhood because most of the people in primary school then went on to maintain their friendships in high school and I was denied that opportunity because I was forced to be with the girls.

And as for that perverted Principal… I was struggling with my home & school life at the time. The new town we'd moved to was my abusive stepfather's home town, and he really started piling on the abuse once we were in his territory and the rest of us were removed from our support group. So I would struggle to finish homework and would sometimes forget to bring in assignments. One such occasion led to my English teacher brutally humiliating me in front of my entire class, for which she has since apologised, but it did mean that this previously happy, bright, straight-A student started to get into trouble with my teachers. You could only get away with so much before your teacher would send you to the Principal for a bit of corporal punishment. In those days teachers were still allowed to hit boys, but they weren't allowed to hit girls; however, the Principal was still allowed to hit girls. So if I 'misbehaved' by not doing my homework (again) due to my stepfather terrorising my family for an entire weekend (again), I would get sent to the Principal's office for punishment.

He would call me into his office and make me close the door, and then he'd get all 'sympathetic', smiling kindly and asking me why I hadn't done my homework again. I'd start crying and tell him that my stepfather was 'fighting' again (I was pretty ashamed of my home life and I found it difficult to explain exactly what was going on behind closed doors). The Principal would then smile at me (aha! a vulnerable child!), pat his knee and tell me to sit on his lap, and he'd stick his hand on my backside and move it in 'soothing circles'. Then he'd do those same 'soothing circles' on my chest, which had developed noticeably by that age. He'd then get to the point where he 'had' to punish me, and he'd lift my skirt to hit my backside with his bare hand, after which he'd give me a hug. The sneaky bastard never did anything obvious enough to leave any evidence for the cops to find… but he was definitely getting his jollies whilst doing what he was doing. And if any of us ever complained, he'd be able to innocently say that he was merely comforting us as he hadn't touched us intimately. It would be his word against ours, so we would wind up getting punished even more. Bastard.

But do you know what? That school's gender-segregation policy left me with more lasting damage than being molested by the Principal did.

Gym difficulties

I've kinda been avoiding the gym over the past few weeks, which is hugely counterproductive for me as I'm trying to improve my shape. But I'm just not comfortable at all with their changing rooms and I'm struggling to go back because I want to avoid the discomfort I feel in the ladies' changing room.

I've been avoiding the gym due to a bad attack of dysphoria that I suffered the other week. It was inadvertently triggered when I read a post on a transgender support forum about someone who was dreading the thought of 'dressing out' (whatever that means) at their school/college gym. I've never heard that phrase before and The Googles didn't shed any light on the subject, but I figured it must mean either a) changing your clothes in front of other people, or b) wearing outdoorsy clothes that tend to be rather revealing of the figure.

This made me think back to my own school experiences, and how different things are for me today. Which led me to realise the root cause of the dysphoria I'm currently experiencing in the gym: I've been there before and it started in Primary School (ages 6-13).

Fortunately for me, my schooling took place in South Africa where people are somewhat more prudish than they are here in the UK. Our school gym changing rooms were gender-segregated into separate rooms as they are in most countries, but we had separate, curtained changing cubicles for each student. So you never needed to remove your clothing in front of anyone else, and there were no mirrors in the cubicles… which meant that I didn't feel any more uncomfortable about getting changed at the school gym than I did getting changed at home. The only problem I had was with what I was forced to wear, or more appropriately, how figure-hugging it all was, especially once puberty had had its wicked way with me.

At that time, I was so uncomfortable with my body (especially the hips and breasts) that I used to wear shorts or jeans with oversized t-shirts to try to hide the worst of it. And in case you're wondering why I bothered with shorts at all since they would show off my (admittedly shapely) legs, please bear in mind that I was living in Africa where the daytime temperature could go up to around 40°C (104°F, if you prefer old money) so shorts were a necessary evil. Well, it's not like I could wear a skirt, is it? ;-)

But our school sports kit was tight-fitting and it accentuated the shape of my hips & chest, so I was particularly uncomfortable if I had to run around. Especially since certain anatomical features tend to bounce when you run, if you catch my drift. But the most difficult gym-type experience happened during my last year of primary school, age 12/13.

Our primary school was horrendously gender-segregated and it had a major negative effect on my socialisation which I'll go into elsewhere, but we had a municipal swimming pool a couple of blocks away from our school and during our last year we had to go for swimming lessons every fortnight during the summer months. Due to their very strict enforcement of gender roles, they were also strict about swimming costumes. Boys had to wear boxer-short-style swimming trunks (no Speedos); and girls had to wear one-piece swimming costumes.

Now I should point out that I adore swimming, and would've loved to learn how to do it better during these lessons… but I was so uncomfortable with my body that I would only swim in a bikini with a t-shirt over it. That would give me the illusion of wearing a Speedo on the bottom with a shirt on top; the bikini top was merely due to the necessity of not having nipples showing through a wet t-shirt. To the outside observer, there was nothing objectively wrong with my figure, it was just that I hated the fact that it was a female figure. It didn't matter that I was slim, shapely and pretty… these were not characteristics that I wanted assigned to myself. Well, apart from slim, maybe. ;-)

I told my teacher that I was very uncomfortable with wearing a one-piece swimming costume and asked whether I could at least wear a t-shirt over it. She refused and insisted that I wear the one-piece. I had no choice but to comply, but I felt horrendously exposed so I rushed from the changing room into the pool (I felt a bit better when I was mostly hidden in the water) and at the end of the lesson I would run back to the changing room so I could get my uniform back on as quickly as possible.

It was the first time in my entire life that I absolutely hated swimming.

Then a couple of weeks later, one of my classmates went up to the teacher and told her that she was on her period. The teacher said that she'd have to sit out the lesson because she wouldn't be allowed to swim if she had her period.

I was stunned. Could it really be that simple?

So from then on, I had a 'period' every two weeks, every time we went to the pool. I knew my teacher would eventually figure out that my 'period' was coming far too frequently, so I planned ahead by leaving my swimming costume at home anyway. So when she eventually did call me out on it, I could say that I'd left my costume at home because I was on my period! Genius. There was nothing she could do, and I successfully dodged swimming classes for the remainder of the year.

I was very sad that I was missing out on the swimming lessons, but at least I didn't have to feel so desperately awful every time I went to the pool. And I did go to that pool independent of the school, going for weekend swims with my friends… and when I did so, I did so on my terms.

Fast-forward to today, when I'm now living in the UK. I have two gym memberships: a corporate membership near work and my own personal membership at a gym near home. This is because I live an hour's drive away from work so it doesn't make sense to drive for an hour just to use the gym on a weekend.

British gym changing rooms are much more open-plan than the South African ones I was used to. British people seem to be quite happy to walk around completely naked in front of strangers, which was quite a culture shock for me! So if I go into the ladies' changing room (by necessity, since I don't pass well) I'm confronted by naked women walking around. Which disgusts me. I don't like the female body at all - probably mainly due to my own dysphoria - and I'm not sexually attracted to women, so seeing them naked grosses me out. And it also stresses me out, because it reminds me that the reason why I'm in this particular room is because I happen to share their physiology and I detest that physiology on myself. To add to my discomfort, women are very chatty and they tend to chat loudly and incessantly about subjects that I find absolutely inane: "Oh, I've just bought this new dress from that shop and it was ever so cheap…. you should try going there sometime, their prices are really good and the dresses would really suit you… we're going to visit so-and-so this weekend and she said that she's bought this new mascara that's ever so good…. " AARRGGGHHH!!! I wish they'd either just shut up, or at least discuss something interesting or amusing. But no, it seems women (or some women, anyway) actually do find such topics interesting and they love yammering loudly about them in front of everyone else. Which is fine I suppose; they have every right to do so. But it makes me feel very uncomfortable and it reinforces the fact that I simply don't belong in there with them. Women like that make life for people like me a nightmare. Why does everything in life have to be so damn gender-segregated?!?

I came up with a partial solution for our work gym: they have two sets of changing rooms and the downstairs one is less frequently travelled so I use that one and hope that no women will walk in while I'm there. But the other gym near home has only one changing room for each gender along with a separate disabled changing room (which the staff use as their personal storage room) so I find it difficult to get changed there.

One of the biggest triggers I've had for my dysphoria over the past few years has been the gym. Being forced by necessity to share a changing room with women is very uncomfortable for me. It'd be much easier if we just had single-stall changing rooms (like some of the gender-neutral toilets that are thankfully becoming popular) but that's impractical to set up, so I suppose I just have to feel this way until I get further in my transition.

By the way, I do try to drown out most of the women's natter by using my iPod in the changing rooms, but there comes a point (usually after a shower) where I can't use it because my ears are wet… so I just have to roll my eyes skyward and put up with their inane ramblings while I rush through getting the hell out of there.

Living in Suffrage

By marriage, the personal identity of the woman is lost. Her person is completely sunk in that of her husband, and he acquires an absolute mastery over her person and effects. Hence her complete disability to contract legal obligations; and except in the event of separation by divorce, or other causes, a married woman in the United Kingdom cannot engage in trade.

- Leone Levi, International Commercial Law, 1863

Back in High School we eventually got round to studying 20th Century history. I say eventually, because South African history lessons seemed to consist of one topic which we studied every damn year: the Great Trek, which involved the long journey by ox wagon of Dutch settlers from the Cape to the Transvaal and beyond. How exciting! Oh, and when they'd run out of Great Trek things to talk about, they would teach us about the Anglo-Boer War (known simply as the Boer War here in the UK). Which, according to our Afrikaner teachers, the Boers won. The British have a slightly different opinion on that matter, but I digress.

But finally, in Standard 7 (age 14), we were taught some history that seemed relevant; events that had happened within living memory. World War II was recent enough that my grandparents had lived through it. But we had a brief foray into the Suffrage Movement which occurred around World War I, and in doing so our history teacher painted a picture of life for women before Suffrage.

And what an awful existence it must have been. At least, for people like me.

Our history teacher explained that in most societies, and certainly in ours, women had practically no rights before Suffrage. Whilst women in most Western societies gained the right to vote around World War I, the emancipation of women was actually a slow process spanning most of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and in my opinion there is still a long way to go before women are truly considered equal to men.

With very few exceptions, a 19th-Century woman could not choose to have a career as a professional. Heck, up to 1870, women in the UK had no right to own property; even if they inherited property from their father, it would automatically belong to her husband. Up until relatively recently women had no individual rights: they were not entitled to the same education as men; they could not work in most professions; they could not vote; they couldn't even instigate a divorce.

A woman's place was squarely in the home and she was expected to cook, clean and raise the children. There were no other prospects for most women. Women were considered intellectually inferior to men and this was used as an excuse for treating them so shabbily. And if someone was unfortunate enough to be born female, that was the fate that awaited you, whether you wanted it or not.

When I learned these unpalatable facts I hadn't yet figured out that I'm transgender - that would take about another five years - but I knew I was desperately uncomfortable with the idea of being female. I listened to these lessons on pre-World-War-I society and I thought about what life must have been like for those women back then. What a nightmare, I thought. Imagine being unable to choose your own destiny. Imagine being forced into marriage and childbearing (with the enormous risks associated with that before the 20th Century) because that's the only way you can survive. Well, that or prostitution. How else could you have a roof over your head or food in your stomach?

And I thought: with my discomfort at being female-bodied, how would I have coped back then? Could I have found a way to be happy or satisfied with my life under such circumstances?

The answer was: I would've fucking killed myself. There was no way in hell I could possibly live such a life. I wouldn't be able to cope at all with being forced to be subservient and obedient to some guy who would have complete control over my person, my finances and my future. The thought of being a housewife is an absolute nightmare to me.

Luckily I was born in the 1970s, so the very idea of such a society seemed ridiculously archaic to me. That having been said, my parents were rather old-fashioned in their expectations for their kids. My father made it perfectly clear that he expected my brother to go to university and then go on to a professional career; but he made it equally clear that he wouldn't bother sending me to university because he expected me to just marry and pop out kids whilst being supported by a husband who'd have a professional career. Uh, Dad... what fucking century were you born in again? And do you actually know me?

Anyway, my brother dropped out of university but became a successful computer programmer instead, thanks to my mother paying for a programming course when he passed out of the Army. And as for me? I've done some university studies in my spare time, and have become a respected IT Manager at a multi-million-pound company. All without the help of my parents, but particularly without the help of my father.

Oh, and I wound up getting married and popping out a couple of babies anyway, whilst being the chief breadwinner for our household. But not because I had to. I'm so grateful that I wasn't born 100 years earlier when my prospects would've been so very different.

One-up-womanship

Women can be very odd creatures.

I noticed whilst growing up that there are many injustices committed against women in various parts of the world. Amongst them are the social customs in the parts of the world where women are treated as second-class citizens (or worse, not citizens at all). Y'know, the places where women can't drive, can't own property, can't hold down a career… can't even leave the house without a male relative as a chaperone.

Those are extremes, but things haven't always been that great here in the West either. I'm old enough to remember the 1970s: a decade in which few women worked (and those who did tended to go for supportive roles like a secretary or a nurse; they were never the boss or doctor); few women drove; and the word 'man' was synonymous with 'human' or 'people' and everyone was perfectly OK with this. The (male) boss could expect to pat his pretty little secretary on her pert little behind and that was just A-OK with everybody. So we aren't entitled to be smug, but we've come along way since the 1970s. Unlike some cultures.

To me, the subjugation of women is a grave injustice against humanity. I find it hard to fathom how half of a country's population can be treated with such contempt. Why don't these women, having seen how women in the West have demanded equal rights, join forces to demand their rights? The reason, I discovered to my surprise, is that the largest group of people promoting the subjugation of women in these cultures is… the women themselves.

The 'sisterhood' gets VERY offended if some other woman gets all uppity and decides she wants to be free from male control and to have equal rights. The 'sisters' want other women to be in the same situation they're in; no other woman may dare to want a better deal than they have!

I had to ask myself: why? Why do these women apparently hate each other so much? Well, I have a theory.

Having been forced my entire life to conform to female gender norms (which I simply can't do), I've practically been a 'secret agent', watching female behaviour from the inside whilst in disguise as one of them. I've noticed first-hand how women interact with one another. They seem to have two oddly conflicting drives that are at odds with each other:

1. Women seem to have a sense of 'sisterhood'; of a shared, collective female experience; of all being in this together. They behave as if every other woman should automatically form part of this collective and conform to the rules of this sisterhood, which in my opinion also includes an element of victimhood - some of which is deserved. Even here in the West, women do have a history of being downtrodden and mistreated by society and I remember how different society was just a few decades ago, before the wider acceptance of feminism in the 1980s. Feminists are, in my opinion, at the extreme edge of this brand of sisterhood… and are most likely to be dismissive of FtMs because some of them see us as abandoning or betraying the collective. So if the women of a society collectively believe that they're downtrodden and discriminated against, they seem to believe that other women in the same society must be equally downtrodden to validate their own sense of victimhood. Hence the situation outlined above.
   
2. However, women are fiercely, brutally competitive with each other. You can see this in all aspects of their lives, but I'll use a simple example of the women's restroom. Here, women constantly check each other out, to validate their own opinions of themselves and their place in society. They're judging other women around them by comparing their own characteristics to the characteristics these other women present. They'll judge another woman's haircut, her figure, the behaviour of her children, the quality of her clothing, the application of her make-up etc. etc. to attempt to validate their belief that they are in some way superior to those women. It seems like they're saying "I'm a better woman than her because my thighs aren't as flabby as hers." Or "I'm a better mother because my children are better behaved than hers." They do this sort of thing constantly, and feeling everyone's eyes on you (whilst guessing the sort of things that must be going through their heads) can be very uncomfortable for those of us who do not identify as women and do not wish to play their games. I'd imagine this also presents difficulties for MtFs who desperately want to join the 'sisterhood' but find it difficult to feel included if they don't pass well and they haven't grown up learning the rules of this game that women play amongst themselves.  

So… women are hugely contradictory. They are a collective group that believes they are downtrodden by 'society' / 'men' / 'whatever', but they're the first to stomp all over other women in order to keep them equally downtrodden, so they can perpetuate their own victimhood. I call it 'one-up-womanship'.

I've always believed that Feminism should be about the equality of women to men. In that regard, I would consider myself a Feminist. What I am not is someone who believes that men need to pay for centuries of keeping women down. Especially since the women themselves have done their fair share of keeping each other down.

WTF, women?!?!?!

Why I never came out to my mother

My mother, with whom I had a rather difficult relationship, died of breast cancer in the mid-1990s, aged 48. The cancer started when she was 39 so she lasted quite well considering… and this is the reason why I have had the extremely uncomfortable 'pleasure' of having early mammograms. I'm on the early screening programme, at least until I have top surgery. ;-)

I was around 17 when she was first diagnosed and her diagnosis threw our world upside down. At the time her husband had abandoned her, my elder brother was in the Army and my younger brother was about 4 years old, so I had to pick up a lot of the slack when she was in hospital having her mastectomy. I would drop my little brother off at nursery school in the morning, go to college, pick my brother up afterwards, and then walk us both down to the hospital to visit Mum before walking back home and cooking our evening meal. Then I'd have to see to my brother's ablutions before putting him to bed and starting over again the next day. All this whilst worrying myself sick about my poor mother, and trying to work myself through college. It was a tough grind.

My mother had suffered quite badly at the hands of her various husbands and they seemed to get progressively worse as she went through her life. The first husband, who she married in her teens, was not really suitable as carried on behaving like a single man even after they married. So she got sick & tired of him and whilst she was still married to him she met her second husband - my father - who was a colleague of her first husband. She separated from her first husband and shacked up with my Dad, and it was during this period that she gave birth to my elder brother - the son of my father - whilst still married to another man. A bit of a scandal for the 1960s, I'm sure you'll agree.

She then divorced her first husband and married my father, and after they had me they both decided to move from the UK to South Africa for a better quality of life. And it was indeed a far superior quality of life. We had a lovely home in an up-and-coming area, and my mother went back to work to save up for luxuries such as overseas holidays. Ah, those were the days! Days when you didn't need two incomes just to keep your heads above water!

Unfortunately my father was rather bored with their relationship so he had an affair with the office slut bike. My mother found out instantly (my father is pretty crap at subterfuge) and she kicked him out. After a painful divorce in which she tried to be 'the better man', she was left financially and emotionally devastated. She desperately searched around for a replacement husband to add that all-important second income which led to the worst decision of her life: she hooked up with a charming Scotsman who turned out to be a wifebeater and abuser who made our lives hell for seven years.

But he particularly liked making my life a living hell. I suffered relentless emotional abuse from him, and occasionally physical abuse too. He belittled and insulted me at every turn, telling me I was worthless, and the problem with that is that you eventually start to believe it. I'm convinced he did this because he could see that my brother and I are light-years ahead of him and his children in terms of intelligence and aptitude. He felt inadequate in our presence and so he did everything in his power to beat us down. My brother grew into a strapping young man who could give as good as he got, but my bloody hormones were determined that I would be a short girl who was powerless to fight back.

Unfortunately my mother was desperate for the income he would occasionally bring in (when he was sober enough to hold down a job for a few weeks), so she used to tell me to not argue back when my stepfather would verbally or physically abuse me. "Keep the peace", she'd say. "Don't wind him up".

What an awful lesson to teach your child. Don't speak out against your abuser. Keep quiet and take it because that's all you're good for. And worse than that: to try to "keep the peace" with her so-called husband, she would join in with him in attacking me. Her attacks were always verbal, but she would reinforce the negative messages he was giving me. Every. damn. day. For seven long (and important) years.

I've never understood why she allowed him to continue abusing all of us. Granted, I'm sure she was scared of him. After all, he was a mean drunk with a violent temper and a gun, so she had good cause to fear him. So why did she stay? Why did she sit back and allow her children (and herself) to be abused by this man for so many years? Why the hell did she actively collude with him in the emotional abuse of her children?

The stress of being verbally and physically abused by him for so long took its toll on me, and at the age of 14 I was hospitalised due to a nervous breakdown. I'd started to get panic attacks, thinking my heart was failing, and Mum eventually took me to a doctor after several weeks of suffering. The doctor admitted me to the local hospital where they ran all sorts of checks on my heart just to make sure, but my heart was physically fine. They figured (but didn't tell me) that I was having panic attacks, and I was put on valium for a couple of months. This worked a treat and I was able to get over the panic attacks, and it was not long after that that my stepfather eventually buggered off.

So from that front, our home life became somewhat better. We were living in a rubbish two-bedroom flat (all four of us) in which I shared a small bedroom with both of my brothers, and my elder brother was then conscripted into the Army so that left myself and my youngest brother with my mother. She was still hurt and bitter from what she'd experienced at the hands (and fists in the case of one of them) of her husbands and she was so used to habitually denigrating and verbally abusing me that she just carried on doing it.

I enrolled in college and started doing very well, thank you, when she was suddenly diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer started in her right breast and was Stage III (which means it had spread from her breast to the surrounding lymph nodes) so she had a mastectomy and lymphectomy on the right side, followed by radiation therapy. That had her in remission for a while, but two years later the cancer had spread to her left breast. So she had a total mastectomy of the left breast too, leaving her flat-chested with two ugly scars on her chest where her breasts used to be.

It was around this time that I read an article about Caroline Cossey, a famous male-to-female transsexual who actually appeared in a James Bond movie (you go, girl!), and figured out that I too am trans. The night I read that article (in People magazine, thanks guys!) I sobbed relentlessly on my bed as I suddenly put together exactly how I'd been feeling my whole life, and how it married up with what Ms. Cossey had felt (although from the opposite direction). I finally understood that I'm transgender and that I would probably benefit from a sex change, but I had very recently been badly abused and had zero self-esteem. And on top of that, I was dealing with the trauma of my mother's breast cancer. So I needed time to figure out what I was going to do with myself.

So one night my mother & I were chatting in her bedroom and she burst into tears. She told me that she was very uncomfortable with the appearance of her chest post-mastectomy. She said she felt like less of a woman without her breasts, and she couldn't stand looking down and seeing herself naked in the bath with those horrible scars where her breasts used to be.

Wow. What an alien concept!

I could empathise with her to a certain extent. I could see that she was upset and I could appreciate that she saw her breasts as symbolic of her womanhood. But I asked myself a very pertinent question: would I feel the same way?

The short answer is: hell, no.

Granted, I'd be very upset and frightened by the cancer. Of course I would. But when I asked myself how I would feel if I were to look down at my chest and see no breasts there, the only answer that came back was "bring it on!". Not only would I be perfectly fine with losing my breasts, I would actually be much happier to be flat-chested because I've hated having breasts ever since they first sprouted and I have never felt comfortable looking at myself in the bath since puberty because of their presence (and the presence and/or absence of other gender characteristics).

I was quite surprised by my answer. Surely if I'm a girl like everyone has been insisting I am, I should want to feel womanly? Surely I should be proud of my pert little B-cups? Turns out I didn't, and I wasn't.

I then probed deeper: would I feel less of a 'woman' if my breasts were removed? The answer to that was even more startling: what do you mean 'less of a woman'? I do NOT feel like a 'woman' and I never have done!

So I commiserated with my mother about her feelings of inadequacy as a breastless woman. I put myself in her shoes and tried to be sympathetic. But I didn't tell her how I really felt and how I had felt for many years. How could I say to a woman that was devastated at having lost her breasts to a life-threatening condition that I would be hugely relieved to get rid of my own?

So in essence, I figured out that I'm a transguy four years before my mother died, but I never said a word to her. Firstly because she used to verbally abuse me (when I aced a Business Management course at age 19, instead of congratulating me she called me a 'jumped-up little fart') so why the hell would I want to give her the equivalent of an ICBM of ammo to use against me? And secondly because I just didn't have the heart to tell a woman whose womanhood had been devastated that I didn't actually want my own.

Incidentally, my mother did go on to have reconstructive surgery, so she did eventually feel a bit better about her body. But the cancer won in the end, unfortunately.

Coming out to my kids

Tonight, Hubby & I agreed that I should come clean with my kids and let them know what's been going on. It was one of the most difficult & painful things I've ever had to do, particularly due to their reaction.

They're not stupid. My daughters are 14 and 12, and they've known for some time that something was going on between Hubby & I. I've also been dressing in male clothing for several months now & have had my hair cut in a short, boyish style for a while, but I did these things to feel more comfortable within my own skin... and to help ease my daughters into the idea that I'm uncomfortable with doing 'female' things.

So we sat the kids down tonight and I started off by saying that Hubby & I have been having some problems within our marriage, which started about 15 years ago when I was expecting our eldest daughter. I gave them a couple of the more innocuous examples, one of which they already know about, but I told them from my perspective instead of from Hubby's usual perspective.

I said that we'd been trying to work on these problems for many years, but it has become graphically evident that they won't be resolved. I didn't pin the blame on Hubby anywhere near as much as he deserved, but the kids still presumed I was persecuting him. For example, I said we'd agreed before we got married that we'd have three kids and the first two would be born before I turned 30; we did have the first two before 30 but he was so traumatised by the circumstances surrounding our eldest's birth that he changed his mind about having the third one. (What I didn't reveal was that he had been dead set against having the second one and that he made it perfectly clear we were having her under his duress. It took him ages to warm to her as a baby, but luckily she was too young at the time to notice. She didn't need to know about that. Consequently, she thinks the sun shines out of the arse of the parent that didn't want her, and that the parent that wanted her from the start is a queen bitch. Awesome.).

I'd also said that we'd planned to stay in our current house for about 5 years before moving up the property ladder, but we're still in the same house we bought just after we got married. I used these as two examples of the sorts of problems that we've been unable to fix despite our (actually, my) best efforts. What I didn't tell the kids was that we haven't fixed them because Hubby changed the parameters of our agreement and didn't keep his word about the kids - he also refused to attend counselling to help him deal with his negative reaction to our kids; and that the housing situation is because he has never bothered to improve his qualifications so that he can make an equal financial contribution to our family.

So I said we've been going round & round in circles for years and we're not getting anywhere, so we need to consider whether there's any point in staying together. I then told them that there's another serious issue behind the scenes that may play a big role in that decision.

I eased them in gradually by explaining what I felt like as a young child, including the way I used to dress and the toys & games I used to play with, and how I became hugely uncomfortable with my body when puberty hit and my family & friends started piling pressure on me to conform with 'female' behaviour and presentation. I told them how betrayed I felt when my body changed, and I told & showed them some of the tricks I used to use to try to disguise my very obvious female features.

I explained how I'd felt miserable within my own skin pretty much from age 7, and how I spent my teenage years feeling depressed and confused until I read an article about a transsexual when I was 19. I realised immediately that this was what was wrong with me and I resolved to do something about it, but it was a daunting thing to think about at that age, especially with my mother suffering from cancer at the time.

I told them how I moved to the UK after Mum died and then I met their father within a few months of arriving, and at that stage I decided to just try and make the best of being female. Hubby seemed to like my features (even though I hate them, I do in fact have a good set of breasts and an attractive female body shape if you like that sort of thing) so I tried to ignore my dysphoria so that I could see myself from the perspective of someone who loved me & found me attractive.

I tried so damn hard.

And at first, it was OK. Hubby was loving and supportive so I could just about ignore most of my dysphoria so that I could enjoy being in love with him. But that was a very short-lived period, because he started to become distant when I was expecting our first child (about a year and a half after we met) and all of a sudden I started to lose the closeness we'd built up. Over the next 15 years he isolated himself more & more, and by 2006 he started pulling away completely because he had trouble dealing with me losing my job. I've always been the main breadwinner in our family and he's enjoyed a cushy existence while I've paid most of the bills; as soon as the responsibility fell on him he just couldn't take it.

What I didn't reveal to the kids is that our marriage was pretty much dead in the water by 2009 and I was seriously contemplating leaving him. He'd become not just distant, but emotionally abusive and quite nasty towards me - and the weird thing is, I have no idea why. I think it may be because I got very stressed in 2006 while I was going from freelance job to freelance job trying to keep our heads above water, and he didn't know how to cope with the stress I was experiencing. I think he just wanted me to be easy-going all the time, which I just couldn't do when I had insecurity and stress in my life.

But as I said, he'd started behaving almost like he didn't want to be part of our family, and certainly part of our marriage, between 2006-2009 so I was seriously contemplating my options when he happened to fall desperately ill in 2010. He suffered brain damage as a result of a serious migraine, and I dropped everything to take care of him and see to his every need. I more than went the extra mile to help him recover and to be honest, his illness was the only reason why we've stayed together as I do love him & I couldn't just leave him to struggle on his own.

He has made quite an improvement, but he's still unable and unwilling to improve on any of the serious aspects of our marriage that require work, so I'm tired of going over the same ground again & again, just to get more promises from him that he then immediately breaks.

So now the kids know that I have been suffering from gender dysphoria all my life. I explained that it's usually caused by one of two causes: genetic faults or hormonal imbalances during gestation. I said that the second one is what happened with me, and that I have been formally diagnosed by a consultant psychiatrist so it's a definite medical issue that I have. I told them that I have been referred to the gender clinic in London, where the next step is counselling to help me decide the correct path forward.

The kids were hurt & furious. I don't know how I expected them to take this, but I didn't expect the vehemence that they both spewed at me.

Both of my kids said that they wanted nothing more to do with me, that they wouldn't be there for me, and that if I decide to go through a sex change they would never want to see me again. Ouch.

My youngest asked whether I would start dating women or whether I would become a gay man. I asked her to think about what (not who) I married: a man. I asked her what that means about my sexual preferences. And she came to the correct conclusion herself, which I confirmed. And I corrected her by saying that it's not about 'becoming' a gay man, it's about honouring what I've always been all along by getting my exterior to match my interior.

I know they're raw and that this is a lot of information to take in. I hope they'll come round in time. I certainly know that my eldest daughter will sweeten up pretty quickly as soon as she wants some money from me, so hope springs eternal.

My youngest hit me with that old chestnut that I was born a 'woman' so that's just what I am and I just need to learn to deal with it. I told her that I've been trying to 'just deal with it' my entire life and it's gotten to a point where I can't deal with it any more, but it really hurt to have someone so close to me exhibit that perspective on the situation. Besides, nobody is ever born a woman. I don't know about you, but I was born a girl. At least, physically anyway.

Diagnosis

I'd heard through the grapevine that getting help for gender dysphoria is a painfully drawn-out process, particularly here in the UK with the bloody NHS. Once I'd come to the conclusion that I couldn't cope with it any more and that I needed to do something about it, I did some research on Teh Interwebz and saw that, in my area at least, you could expect to wait 18 weeks to 6 months in order to start the process. According to what I read, it goes a little like this:

1. Go to your GP, telling them you feel you were born in the wrong body. If you're lucky, they might refer you on; otherwise, wait for a second or third opinion before you're referred to the next stage, which is
2. Your community mental health team. Before anyone can do anything about this condition, you need to speak to a local psychiatrist who will poke around in your head to ensure there are no underlying mental health issues which could be misattributed as gender dysphoria. If you satisfy this local psychiatrist, you then get referred on to 
3. One of the gender health clinics in the UK, of which I believe there are only 3, 2 of which are in England. They'll then start counselling you over a long period to help you deal with your dysphoria, analyse its cause, and determine the best course of treatment, which may include
4. Real-life experience (living in your preferred gender role for one or two years, depending on the counsellor)
5. Hormones
6. Name change
7. Surgery of some sort
8. Full SRS surgery, if it comes to that.

The time period between each stage is, according to our local health authority, that infamous 18 weeks to 6 months.

So I saw my GP in June and broke down in tears in her office, explaining how I'd always known for as long as I can remember (since the age of 5) that I'm not female, and how desperately uncomfortable it's always made me feel. I explained how recent events have meant that I'm no longer able to tolerate living this way, and the thought of eventually becoming a 'little old lady' (within the next 20 years, holy shit!) fills me with such abject despair that it's making me feel suicidal. And I'm not being melodramatic there: I would quite literally rather top myself than find myself stuck in an old people's home wearing a horrible flowery dress, having the nurses call me 'dear'. The very thought fills me with dread and desperation.

Luckily my GP already has a couple of transgender patients that she'd referred on to the next stage, so she knew exactly what to do. She wrote to the local mental health team on my behalf to start the ball rolling. And I went home pleased (and frightened) that I'd actually finally pulled my finger out to do something about my lifelong difficulties, and sat back to wait... you guessed it... 18 weeks to 6 months for my appointment with a local psychiatrist.

So imagine my surprise when an appointment came through for early August for me to see a member of the local mental health team to get the ball rolling! So soon!

So I went along to the appointment, which was a week before we were due to go on holiday. (To Cornwall. In a fucking caravan. Again.) The lady I spoke to - one of the Community Mental Health Nurses - basically does 'mental triage' to determine whether the patient is indeed a suitable candidate for gender counselling, or whether there are any other underlying mental health issues that need to be investigated. 

In a very gruelling hour, I told her how I've always felt very uncomfortable in my own skin for as long as I can remember, and how it always jars me when anyone uses female pronouns with me, calls me a woman/lady, or even uses my given name. It shakes me every single time, and it always has. I'd thought this would improve with age, but this is my 41st year and I haven't grown out of it yet, so I guess it's not a phase I'm going through.

I told her how I used to run around topless & barefoot as a kid (usually wearing nothing but my underwear and a pair of shorts), and how I was so happy at age 6 when my best friend's mother made me a bikini in my favourite colour (blue!) because it meant I could whip off the top as soon as my parents were distracted and swim in what effectively looked like a Speedo.

I told her how I was utterly devastated when my mother spotted (because I was running around topless, natch) that I'd started developing 'beestings' at age 7 and she told me I'd have to wear a top all the time for the rest of my life. I felt so terribly betrayed by my own body. I'd been playing along with all the other boys up to that point, but now I had to wear a shirt and be this weird 'girl' thing that everyone kept insisting I was supposed to be. And now that everyone could see I was a 'girl', the boys simply didn't want to play with me any more.  :'-(

I told her how by the age of 9 I had a fairly decent set of proto-boobs growing and my hips had started to spread. I started feeling desperately miserable and felt such intense despair every time I saw myself in the mirror and saw how my disgusting breasts & hips were distorting the shape of my clothes and making it very, very obvious to anyone who looked at me that I was 'female'.

I told her how by the time I was 12 my periods had started - another betrayal - and my sense of futility and despair of my own body was reaching critical mass. I stood up and demonstrated how I used to walk down the street at that age, clutching the bottom of the front of my T-Shirt and pulling down hard on it to flatten my chest as much as possible. I said that I noticed this only earned me even more attention from men driving past me as they were wondering what the hell I was doing, so I then came up with a slightly better coping strategy of wearing clothes that were 2 or 3 sizes too big for me so that I could hunch my shoulders forward & hide my hated features in a big, baggy top.

I told her how the rest of my teenage years were spent in miserable resignation that this was just the way my body was, and as long as I didn't actually have to look at myself in the mirror I could just about get through the day.

Then I told her how, at age 19, I was leafing through the latest issue of People magazine looking for yet another ridiculous story to give me a laugh ("Elvis is the father of one of my identical twins but not the other one!") when I stumbled upon a story of a Bond girl who had been born a boy.

Caroline Cossey was 'outed' by the media in the UK when she had a small walk-on role in For Your Eyes Only, and someone who knew told someone else that she used to be a man and a huge scandal erupted. The story was syndicated and People picked it up... leading to me reading it that one fateful night.

Caroline said how she'd always felt uncomfortable in her (male) body and had always felt more like a girl, but it wasn't until she was a young adult that she heard about transsexualism and decided to have a sex change. She then went on to talk about some of the injustices that affected trans people in those days, such as being unable to marry and being forced to attend prison (if arrested) with people of your birth gender. She fought hard for trans rights, and is an absolute hero... but until that fateful night when I read her story, I'd never heard of trans people and I had no idea that anything could be done about it. I remember reading this article, and by the time I was halfway through I was literally shaking. I realised that this woman was going through exactly what I was going through (although from the opposite direction) and that her experiences so clearly mirrored mine that I finally understood exactly what had been wrong with me my entire life. I knew then & there that I'm transgendered and that I would benefit from doing something about it.

However, there was a problem.

I was living in South Africa at the time, and South African society is very macho and patriarchal... and they do tend to bully mercilessly any men below a certain height. Many white South Africans have Dutch ancestry, which means that they're generally very tall, so there are a lot of tall men to pick on the smaller ones. I had a male colleague who was 5'2 - two whole inches taller than me - and he suffered so much incessant bullying in his everyday life due to his height that he bought himself a monster truck so that he would at least feel tall on the roads.

So I knew it probably wouldn't be a good idea to transition in South Africa. And anyway, my mother was suffering with cancer at the time so my life was very stressful; I resolved to just put my epiphany on the back burner until I could deal with it later.

And then later came. My mother eventually died of cancer four years after I realised I'm trans (I never told her). I struggled to deal with my grief, but I eventually worked through the worst of it & figured out what I needed to do next. I decided to adopt my then-11-year-old brother, pack my bags, and move back to England to start afresh.

I'd only been living in England for less than 3 months when I met Hubby for the first time. And he was such a nice guy, and I fell so hopelessly in love with him, that I decided to marry him, settle down & have some kids. I'd always wanted these things despite my gender dysphoria, and I found myself in a position to try them out & see how things went.

Things went OK at first but I never got rid of that constant sense that I'm in the wrong body. Actually, scratch that: it's not actually my body that's wrong, it's society's insistence that I have to be a certain gender with strict constraints on my interests and behaviour that is wrong. I could probably live this way for the rest of my life (provided I don't need to look in mirrors and I can bath really quickly) as long as society wouldn't try to insist on me using female toilets, female hospital wards, female changing rooms at the gym (including being forced to see naked or topless women in the changing rooms - yuk!),  and as long as society would stop presuming that I want everything to be pink and frilly and that I want to watch chick flicks & read chick lit. Ugh! Why can't society just back the fuck off and allow people to behave how they want to behave and be interested in what they are interested in, provided nobody is getting hurt?!

So the Community Mental Health Nurse listened respectfully and sensitively to my story, asked me some probing questions to check the validity of my statements, and then said that she'd be more than happy to refer me to the psychiatrist for a formal diagnosis. She then wished me luck on my journey.

That was less than a month ago. So imagine my further surprise when I very quickly received a follow-up appointment with the psychiatrist, which was held this Tuesday?

He went over the nurse's report from our meeting, and he asked me several in-depth questions to ensure I was really a genuine case... and then he said he'd be very happy to refer me to one of the gender clinics for proper treatment. He reckons the wait for this will be something in the region of 3 months, so there's a possibility that I might take the first little baby steps towards transitioning before the end of this year.

Oh, and he did indeed confirm the diagnosis. I have now been formally diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, by a consultant psychiatrist. This whole thing is getting more real by the day.

And as for that People magazine article about Caroline Cossey? I still have it. It made such an impression on me that I ripped it out of the magazine and put it in a safe place, eventually bringing it over to England with me. I've held on to it for 22 years. And if/when I transition, I'm going to have it framed.