Being the social worker and councellor I am, I love case histories – sort of eat them for breakfast. And one of the blessings with the internet are all the autobiographies out there. Many are very touching and deeply moving making feel so very humble to listen in. And during the small hours of the Barcelona GATE pre-conference we sat around and talked of our lives and memories growing in a multitude of cultural settings. Still I think we all recognized our selves in our sister and brothers stories, regardless of you came of age in Asia, Africa or the Americas and Europe.
Still on the internet and in counselling sessions I come across the stereotypical text book stories on being a girl trapped in a boys body that makes me think and wonder why would one fabricate histories like this, as I do belive they’re often fabrications, but for wht purpose? Is it that we do form hierachies within the trans and gender variant community? That being born a trans kid is like the cream of the crop and realizing you are gender variant and want to “transition from male to female” past 50, say would be at the bottom of the food chain? It is so sad, as it deprives those trans men and women of their sense of worth and dignity. No matter when you realize your difference or act on it you are just a human being that deserves respect and love.
Being one of those trans kind, still I acted on my my feelings of difference well into my middle age, for a number of reasons – many of them too self-destructive to be told here, which I hope will be fine with you. But I have no problem identifying with people who came out late. Still one task for us is to make peace with our inner demons and horrors of the past and count the blessings of being gender variant and part of a world wide tribe of people who have been around for ever.
BTW way, when the anger and rage of a stolen childhood and youth bubbles up, I either start to write something personal or political or put on some music, the best cure for this is playing bands like Ramones, Pistols, Sham 60, Cock Sparrer to name a few as loud as hell while writing. The music sort of absorbes my despair, hatered and anger and strangely the whole process turns into some sort of creative process. And yes,the personal is indeed poltitical!
The Cock Sparrer song “Take thm all, take’em alla – put them up against the wall and shoot them, short and tall watch them fall, come on boys take them all” sum up much of my feeling. And I do get into that mood, destructive yet constructive and empowering when I reflect of my childhood and adolescence. When I grew up, assigned male at birth, with a different gender expresson and completely oblivious of the reason why I was being told to behave normally, harassed, riduculed, beaten, sent to the psych ward and what have you, I still had no concept of that gender was something that came in a binary. That you were either the one or the other, a boy or a girl never dawned upon me until I was say eight – ten years old.
Well hard to belive as it might be, I was quite convinced that there must a number of genders and expressions of gender out there somewhere. I was convinced that there must be other kids like me – who were assigned boys at birth and that lived like girls. I was a reasonably smart kid, learned to read at four and read all sort of strange books before I went to elementary school and on top of that started my first stamp collection (yes I was a nerd allready at that tender age). I certainly did know what boys were and that they grew up to become men and girls would eventually become women. But how could I explain that there were so few kids like me, I must belong to a rare and unusual kind of gender och why was it that people seemed to hate my very existance. I didn’t matter what I did and how I behaved I wouldn’t be accepted as anything but human trash..
Apart from all the abuse and hatred I encounterd things grew from bad to worse when my little brother was born. I was six years old and soo thrilled, I would have a brother and I was there at all times to help my mum change diapers, wash him and giving him the pacifier when he dropped it and staeted to cry and just caressed him affectionately. My mum didn’t think that much of my behaviour, kids come in different packages don’t they, seemed to be her attitude.
My father was working abroad and would be away for weeks and months. My misfortune was that my father, eager to make a mark for him in the society, joined the Freemasons, and all important people in my town belonged to them. So one evening my dad asked one of the other Freemasons about the way I acted and it turned out this guy was a psychiatrist and to make things worse in charge of the child psychiatic ward. To make things even worse he was a dyed in the wool Freudian.
The reaction my father got was one of horror. You must stop this at all costs if you valeue the life of you new born. You devious son is trying to lure you into belive he shows love for is baby brother, but as soon as you turn your back, he’ll kill the baby instantly.
My father bought the whole thing and before I knew it I was put away with a dozen other maladjusted kids, mostly kids who were intectually challenged. They were BTW the first kids that tereated me as one of them and we became very good friends. I finally got out after a number of sessions of having my behaviour analyzed. The price was that I was put on a strong anti-psychotic drug called Thorazine (Hibernal) which would eventually transform me into a normal kid. The only thing it did was nearly to kill me as I went outside in our garden to enjoy the sun.
Slowly it dawned on me that there were no other genders and that the binary was stricktly enforced and that I would grow up to be a boy, and yong man and eventually a grown man. This seemed completely incomprehensible. The only thing I could think of was to escape this somehow. Sitting one summer afternoon in my grandparents outhouse looking through the magazine put ther in lieu of lo paper, there was this article on a Brittish marine officer and dentist, that changed from a man, in his navy uniform, to a woman that looked like most women did back then in the late 50-ies.
Well, I dared not keep the article but remember it by heart and the thought never leaved me, well if I could not find other beings like myself, being a woman was definitely a lot better that growing up to be a man. So while thinking of various ways of getting rid of what would make me grow into a man I had all sorts of fantasies. I used to make small figures of clay, complete with male genitals and then I would remove their penises and testicles and thought I got the solution of the problem.
Still my main problem remained unsolved. I tried to shove my genitals back into my body, but no chance they were there what ever I did. I became more and more depressed and gradually turned into an autistic adolescent kid whithout any hope of having a life.
To make matters worse, we moved to a big city and a new set of kids to torment me. I did go to school but never formed any friendships with the other kids in my boys only grammar school. The on my way to school, I stopped at a tobacconist who I knew also sold stamps just to see if he had any new and interesting stamps. In the window was a paperback book, Mario Costas book “From Man into Woman – the Extraordinary Life of Coccinelle”, I mustered all the courage I had and pointed and said that one. All my savings and money to buy stamps for was gone, but I had the book.
I spent the whle night reading about a young kid that grew up like me and who hade the guts to go her own way and become a woman and a beautiful woman to that. In spite of making me exited and pointing a way out, I went into an even deeper depression. Coccinelle was good looking and had the fortune to find a doctor to prescribe hormones and finally have her GRS at Dr. Bourou in Casablanca.
After leaving my blissful state of looking for other kids of my kind, I began to hate myself, my body, my penis and all that made me into a horrible, unlovable freak. There were now chance in hell a freak like me could turn into a young woman. Shortly after our daily newspaper hade an article that Dr. Jan Walinder was working with men who wanted to become women. I was so exited but the realized if I told my parents I needed to be a girl, I’d be sent back to the psych ward, and maybe they would never let me out again. So I began to be obsessed by getting rid of the poison in my body.
One dark night, all were at sleep in our apartement, I went an brought out a dozen ice cubes and salt. In physiscs class we have learnd that salt and ice would produce a low, low temprature and that you would be numb and not feel a thing. So I numbed my scrotum and proceded to open it up with a razor blade. I felt like nothing, but all of a sudden blood began to pour out of the incission. At first I thought it was ok, but after some minutes I began to suffer from the blood loss a d slowely drifted in to a semicouncious state.
My feelings were divided, one part of me said well no more pain no more hopelessnes, the other said maybe my mum would be sorry if I’m gone and as she was a very good mother I did get a bad consience. After an eternity I managed to slow the bleeding and stuggled to stay awake, knowing that if I fell a sleep I would never wake up again.
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