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Today is the 30th Anniversary of the first time I presented as myself in public when my best friend and I attended the WayOut in Knightsbridge. The atmosphere was nice but it wasn’t really me. I wore a black lace shift dress and lace-up knee boots.
It took me a couple of years before I ventured out again. Starting with Whitby Goth Weekend and then London’s alternative scene: Gossips in Dean Street, Planet Earth’s Big Night Out, The Electric Ballroom, The Devonshire Arms, The Fox in Wardour Street, The Purple Turtle...
Uncle N’s gigs at The Borderline, Sacrosanct at the Astoria and many many weekends at the Slimelight. I lived, loved, laughed, and danced myself senseless to the finest melange of goth-rock-industrial the 90s had to offer until my gorgeous Andy captured my heart.
We’ve been married 22 amazing years: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. She really is my everything.
As a teenager in the 80s struggling with gender dysphoria every image in the media was either glamorously unattainable or a tale of lonely brokenness. People like me weren’t believed to live normal lives, have families, earn professional success, or be happy.
We were The Other whom everyone else could laugh at and feel superior to. The social scene in London revolved around the WayOut, the Phoenix Centre, dressing services like Transformation, and on the margins of the gay scene. It catered to a very narrow interest.
By the mid-90s furtive publications like WoTV had been joined by the house magazines of social clubs like Rose’s TV Repartee and the short-lived but glamorous Taffeta. The world was changing and trans women were treated as a curiosity. We were humans with lives and feelings.
When I actively joined the goth scene in 1993 you might see a couple of openly trans girls at the biggest festivals if you were very lucky. By the end of the decade every club night had at least half-a-dozen, not including the non-scene girls looking for a safe place to dress up.
I used to trek up to Rock City in Nottingham with friends for their all-nighters. They were fun nights with great bands but a trans girl had to be willing to stand up for herself. That was true of other Midlands rock clubs like the B Note and Edwards.
I always felt a lot of the anti-trans sentiment I saw in the 90s was a belief we were trying to dodge the male obligation to be strong as it used to evaporate if I stood my ground politely and unaggressively. Head held high young lady and great the world with a smile.
The forbearance with which I traipse my way to places that are sometimes very trans intolerance, and the generally very positive memories I have of those places, has its origins in dealing with drunk, leery bikers in early-90s rock dives. Who says a misspent youth isn’t useful?
It took me until 2004 to decide to transition, something I’d been actively dreaming of since my teens but had a curiosity about since I was much younger. There was stuff going on in life which meant I couldn’t sustain a male persona and deal with what needed to be dealt with.
It wasn’t a light decision and being scientifically inclined I effectively ran an A/B test. I left my stable & much loved career in embedded systems and by the end of the year had a new career and much less stress. The burden of gender dysphoria really is difficult to overstate.
I’m glad my road to transition was long and slow. It gave me ample opportunity to figure out what exactly I needed to tame my gender dysphoria and mostly feel comfortable in my own skin. I’ve also been very fortunate that transition hasn’t broken any of my personal relationships.
That’s not true for many transgender people who even now when society at large is tolerant of our open involvement find that some of those closest to them cannot come to terms with them being honest about their inner sense of self.
In the 30 years since I took my first faltering steps out of the closet the world has changed in so many ways. It’s now possible to live a perfectly unremarkable life as a transwoman without feeling obliged to disguise the fact and without being forced to the margins of society.
However we now find ourselves at the centre of an increasingly rancorous debate between two equally strident ideologies. On the one hand is a political ideology which sees gender identities as social construct and which asserts the primacy of sexual identity.
On the other hand is a political ideology which sees all identities as existing on a continuum between masculine and feminine, male and female. Each asserts identity as political andhas more in common than not.
Each asserts the personal as political, each considers one set of identities to be oppressive of other identities, and each is determined that the world should agree with it uncritically. Each claims victimhood and paints the other as the oppressor.
It breaks my heart to see young transgender people buying into the narrative that we are a uniquely victimised group and that our every living moment is an invitation to violence from our fellow humans. It’s just not true in the western world.
The ideologues who push this narrative do not have the interests of people with gender dysphoria at heart. They are revolutionaries who see us as useful idiots in their battle to smash society and replace it with a totalitarian utopia that would soon find an excuse to excise us.
But I’m equally horrified at the way conservative groups ignore the way the anti-trans ideologues are likewise using them to further a very similar agenda. If gender didn’t exist gender dysphoria couldn’t either but it is a well-documented phenomenon so gender must exist.
