Being trans was considered an illness. We were seen as ill, as broken, as needing a sex change. If we got into the right line and stayed on our best behaviour, then someone would eventually come along to help repair our broken bodies. It was seen as an act of charity: of helping a sick individual to be patched up; of helping them to make the most of a broken life.
Those days are gone. Sorry (not sorry), but they are gone.
The ripples we have created, the ripples that younger gender bosses and explorers are creating, demand that we be treated with respect and decency. The ripples are changing the environment for younger and younger people to express their gender authentically within; it’s becoming a little easier for them. Thankfully. So, the numbers of younger people coming out are rising; it makes sense, doesn’t it?
It is a safer space now, one defined in great part by greater understanding and respect.
It seems simple.
These young trans and nonbinary people are managing to ignore the enforced dominant script of gender over which we have no control and are writing their own scripts from scratch to fit their lives. They are resolute in wanting to be the best that they can be and they want to be happy.
And they want to be happy now!
Just happy.
They want their present, their now, to be positive and happy rather than having to close their eyes and dream about a future in which they might get to run away and become themselves. As I did. Dreaming for years about being the me that no one could see.
These children and young people are the true superheroes of our age (not the ones populating the Marvel universe).
I feel sad that I can’t truly identify with them because my journey to my trans authenticity was full of trouble, strife, struggle and fight. They are defined by being in the moment as themselves whereas I lost almost half of my life.
Through the process of speaking with many young trans folk in the course of writing this book, I have had to own the subtle feelings of sadness I have, but also the feelings of slight envy. I’ll never know what it is like to live most of my life authentically, I lost so much time, so many potential experiences and memories that I will never know. Years of missing photographs.
But, overriding this sense of sadness and envy is a sense of joy that these young people can be the best that they can be at an age before the real mental harm and anguish can grow and embed. These young people owning and bossing gender, despite the attacks and mistrust, are what being alive should be about. They are building joyful lives. They are life. They understand life. They will be the ones saving the planet.
I’m not claiming for a second that they have idyllic, perfect lives. We only have to look at the ill-formed prejudice in the media to know that cannot be true. But when these children have loving and supportive families and encouraging and committed teachers and safe and inclusive schools then, yes, for many of these children there is little struggle, only joy. I know I’ve heard them talk their truths and I’ve seen their smiles. Great big real smiles.
I cannot comprehend my identity without the absence of struggle as my identity was shaped by struggle and pain. My body is literally shaped from a hormonal and medicalised battle for my space and wellbeing. But I do know how it feels to ‘just be myself’ because at the age of eight I had a few glorious weeks in which I was able to be me, just me.
And I was ridiculously happy. In those few weeks I was overcome with the joy of being alive. If I close my eyes now, almost fifty years later, I can still remember that feeling. That joy. I smiled and laughed, and I ran into my school eager to put my hand up in class to answer questions. I was confident, I was engaged in my life. Before that time, I’d never put my hand up in class because I couldn’t stomach the world noticing me. In those few short weeks I decided that I wanted to be a writer. It took me over thirty-five years to get to write again, to see that it could happen.
I was born in 1964, and the first time I ever emerged as myself was in the school playground, aged eight, in 1972. I had the briefest moment of being me and then the world told me that being me was a huge problem and one I should deal with by not being me and by pretending to be someone else.
My dad liked cowboy films, so I tried to be a cowboy.
The Most Wondrous, Spectacular and Smiley Pansy!
Pansy came into being in a sunny school playground in 1972 – the summer term, to be precise. I don’t remember the exact day or time, but I know it was during a playtime which narrows down the time of her birth should we need to do an astrology birth chart. Pansy emerged, laughing and defiant, into a crowded playground full of laughter and noise. The playground was surrounded by grass, and on one side sat the school building. By the end of the summer term the grass had turned straw-yellow and was replaced by brown swirling dust. It was a warm summer.
Our school was a late-1950s building, with all the classrooms leading off from a small central hall in which we sang cheerful songs, learned the Lord’s Prayer and jumped over low beams, pretending to be either deer or dancers. It was the age of Top of the Pops and Pan’s People. We all wanted to be a dancer in Pan’s People; at least I did, and boy did I learn the moves (not that there were many moves, just lots of finger on the cheek pouting).
Pansy emerged whilst we were playing Kiss Chase in the playground, possibly after finishing a small bottle of warm milk from the wooden trolley that the milk monitors pulled around to each class just before morning break, rain or shine. Rain was better because the milk was at least slightly cool; in the summer it had often curdled, and you’d only find out after whooshing it down through a paper straw. Before the afternoon break, we’d have a cup of warm orange squash and a biscuit, often a Custard Cream or a Jammy Dodger.
The moment that Pansy first emerged I was running away from the boys in my class (although I’m not sure that they were chasing me). They were chasing the other girls and trying to plant weird bird-like peck-kisses on their cheeks. We were very young, so Kiss Chase often ended up in Trip-Up or Tag. The boys laughed at me running away from them (in their eyes pointlessly) and called out to me, ‘You’re not a girl, you’re not a boy, you’re just a pansy, a stupid little pansy.’
Over, and over again, they hurled what they imagined was a great insult at me, designed to make me come to my silly ‘pansy senses’.
Instead, I stood rigid-still as it dawned on me that I was Pansy. Not a pansy, but Pansy. In that one insult everything in my unhappy and confusing life became clear.
(Thank god for the boys!)
I turned to the boys, who were now beginning to form a bullying, fight circle around me, and said, ‘I am Pansy, and I like it when you call me by my real name.’
I spun around 360 degrees and kept on repeating, ‘I like it when you call me Pansy.’ Like a seven-inch disco track, I spun until I felt sick. I was so happy that I’d made myself want to throw up joyful vomit.
The boys roared with laughter at me spinning around but then as they dispersed and ran away, they shouted back, ‘She’s Pansy, Pansy, Pansy, not a boy, not a girl, but a stupid Pansy.’ They said other stuff, not-so-nice stuff, but I only heard ‘she’ and ‘Pansy’, and I thought, ‘I’m taking it, it fits.’ It was the first name, label or insult to ever make me feel warm inside, a little like now when someone calls me ‘trans’ or ‘queer’ and I think, ‘Perfecto – too right I am.’
Importantly, it was also the first time I’d ever been called ‘she’, a pronoun which back then lifted me up, rather than ‘he’, which pulled me down.
As a young kid I never understood why ‘he’ didn’t work, or why my old name (which was Simon, in case anyone cares) didn’t work. When people said ‘he’ or ‘Simon’, I could see the words leave their mouths, travel towards me, hover in the air in front of my eyes and then fall to the floor. I spent my childhood trying to pick my name up off the floor and stick it on my forehead. The name I was given at