‘I’m me’
Today I looked at an old photo of myself in Ibiza with friends. It was a wonderful little holiday and deeply affirming. I got to spend time with incredible friends in a beautiful place. More than anything though, purely selfishly, I got to be accepted as who I know myself to be. Sure, this was a hen weekend and it tested the limits of my neurons secretly being damaged by a disease I did not know I had, and I struggled to keep up.
I tried my best.
We were out late at clubs dancing with strangers, back at first light. I was destroyed by hangovers in a way that felt like my soul had evacuated my body. I'd had hangovers before but this felt like my bones were staging a protest. MS fatigue before I knew it was MS fatigue. But I loved every moment.
Yet I looked at that photo today and tears streamed down my face. I realise I write a lot while crying and you may well think me emotional. In truth I rarely cry. But when I do, I write.
It took me some time to understand my feelings. Why in the world would seeing me that happy evoke such a reaction?
Well… I just don't feel like her right now.
Let me explain. When I first felt like I had arrived in my transition it was only about a decade ago. I was in schools regularly, doing the job of Educational Psychology. I was on the waiting list for surgery. I didn’t know I had MS. I was presenting at conferences at the start of my career, laughing with audiences, loving every moment.
It was at that time we went to Ibiza. It was one of the first times when I did something so… girly. We got made up, dressed up, went out late, fought off overenthusiastic men, found female kinship.
That was the first time I felt fully realised. When I look back on that photo, she’s smiling from every cell, and I envy her. Not that she didn’t know she had MS. Not even that she looks confident, I know she was anything but confident. She felt like her invitation was a kindness, that she didn’t truly belong, and my confidence has only since grown.
I envy her for the world she inhabits.
A decade ago the world was so different. People thought of trans women as women far more readily. Harassment of trans women was common but not as common as it is now. And we didn’t have a human rights watchdog seemingly wholly set on removing our rights, that invalidates us as women in such a fundamental way.
And then there is the hate online. I have been receiving A. Lot. Of. Hate. For some reason a group of people have made a mission of calling me a man, including one very influential person with hundreds of thousands of followers. I'm used to it. And I'm receiving far more love, more solidarity, than I'm receiving hate.
I want to be impenetrable. To own who I am to the point that their words cannot affect me. This is why I’ve been so open about my gender, because if I own who and what I am then I become invulnerable to its weaponisation. But this hate has pushed its way in, its insipid effect proliferating through my system like psychological sepsis.
It’s like I’ve stopped breathing. I only realise when someone offers a sliver of affirmation. A guy came to my door yesterday and we got talking, of course, and I know he was aiming to sell me something, but he referred to me, totally off the cuff, as a ‘gamer girl’. Suddenly oxygen. I breathed it in deep. The moment poured into me. To this guy it was a Wednesday afternoon and this woman just wasn’t going to buy anything at the door, a bad afternoon for him. To me I suddenly came to life again.
It keeps happening, the little moments of tender affirmation are like a breath of wind in a stifling room. I pursue them, seek them out, and fleetingly try to live inside them.
And that’s what I envy in this version of me just a few years ago. To her, she felt like she didn’t belong, like her invitation was a kindness, that she might be just a facsimile desperately trying to be and never quite realised. But the world affirmed her. It welcomed her, and she flourished under its gaze. Now I am realised, confident. I know I belong. But the world has begun to exclude me. In dark and quiet moments our Supreme Court, the Government, the EHRC, and countless commenters online whisper to me ‘You’re no woman’.
I realise now what a contest my emotional wellbeing has become. On one side we have the entropic corrosion of a world telling you that you're a man. On the other you have the life affirming experiences of being a woman in the world, of being seen, liked, as the person you are.
While I’m typing this post my computer pings that an email has arrived.
No word of a lie, an email literally just popped into my inbox from the Gender Recognition Panel. I’m literally sat here in tears as I write about that wholly indescribable feeling of being so fundamentally invalidated and an email with such profound implications for my validity is now sitting in my inbox.
I open it.
The panel have granted me a full Gender Recognition Certificate. In the midst of so much invalidation I am here, beaming, as I’m validated by the only body in the UK that can. They’ve come to recognise me as a woman so profoundly that they’re going to change my birth certificate.
Invalidation meet legal recognition. I know I shouldn’t need validation from anyone to know who I am. But that isn’t how my psychology works. My femininity, my womanhood, vaporously slips through my fingers whenever I grasp at it. And people telling me they see me for my authentic self… is everything. So I hold this little certificate close to my chest and inhale the moment. As though I can hold my breath forever. And as the quiet of night settles around me. I sigh back to the darkness…