Symbolic Forest

Very eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that a few days ago I added a new category to the list of post categories over in the menus. It’s quite a rare event, to be honest: most of the categories have been there for many years, and new additions really don’t happen very often. Before this week, the last one I think was Being Crafty, which arrived several months ago.

The new category is This Is Not A Memoir, and in a sense that title could apply to every single thing I post here. The real point of the new category, is for posts describing my experiences of being me: a queer, transgender woman living in Britain. But it’s not a memoir. It’s not a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and I definitely hope not an end for a very long time. It’s for, rather, moments in my life, moments of joy and sadness, moments coloured by my own life experience.

For a long time, “memoir” has been the default form in which British trans women express themselves. It all probably started with Jan Morris, who wrote and published Conundrum in the mid-1970s shortly after having her GRS operation in North Africa. Since then there have been so many other “trans memoirs” that it is almost required for any writers who want to discuss trans rights, trans issues: you have to start by talking about your own experience, almost to prove your right to talk about the topic.* This mode was specifically called out by Shon Faye in her book The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice, which I suggest you go and read if you want to find out more about the treatment of trans people in general in this country.

This is not my mode either. This is a blog, after all, and I am not going to embark on any sort of book-length project in its pages.** For many years, I didn’t even mention that I was trans in any of my posts. My experiences as a trans person, though, were deeply but silently embedded in it, right back to one of the very first posts, about the court ruling Goodwin vs the UK, 22 years ago, which—although we didn’t realise it at the time—set up the entire legal framework for trans lives in Europe today. Put simply, the basic principle of the Goodwin ruling is that when trans people transition, they must be able to entirely expunge their former name from the record. It’s why my university was willing to send me a new degree certificate with the right name on, why there is a special secret process for DBS-checking a trans person, and partly why trans people have their NHS number changed on transition—something not even many people who work in the NHS are aware of.

I’ve already mentioned that, when I sat down to write about the death of The Mother in the same way I covered the death of my father, I simply couldn’t write about it in the same way without explaining first that I am trans. I transitioned “properly and for keeps” in between the two, and so many aspects of the experience were tied up with being a trans person that I felt I needed to “come out” to you all first. And that—inevitably, I suppose—has unlocked the floodgates, has left me comfortable writing about other aspects of being trans, other aspects of my transition, things about my life that I’d like to tell you, and things that I’d like to set down in my own canonical form before the memory fades any further. It will be helpful to you, possibly, if they are all filed in one place, even if that place itself is a haphazard mishmash in a random order

Hopefully, this is a useful explanation, not that I really needed to give you one. I’ve been thinking more about navigation, too, because the navigation of the site is tied very much to the blogging styles of twenty years ago, with every post being categorised, every post having keyword tags. I’m working through a few ideas for helping readers follow threads, follow individual projects, without needing to manually insert links between them. I’m not sure where that idea is going to go. This new category, though, is a start.

* I’m not going to name the well-known trans journalist who has been known to give her partners a signed copy of her own memoir as a present.

** Until I do get around to writing Caitlin Teaches You How To Code

Keyword noise: blogging, trans, transgender.

This year, I’ve tried to hold myself to posting at least one post per month on this site. I’ve mostly, but not quite, managed it. Nevertheless, there have still been so few that at present, with ten posts on the home page, if you scroll down to the bottom you’ve gone back almost a year. The bottom post on the home page right now is this one from last August, about my summer holiday to Hastings.

Exactly a year later, the week before the August bank holiday weekend, I’ve just been to Hastings again.

The Children are quite fond of repetition. It’s a form of comfort, I suppose. Their first choice for a summer holiday this year was: can we go back to the same place again please? I can understand it: as I said before, I went to Hastings on holiday myself pretty much every year between the ages of 3 and 13. But also: it’s a nice-sized place. It’s a small town, but it’s still got plenty of things to do, it’s got things they can enjoy doing over and over again, and it’s within reach of cities like Brighton or London if you do want a day out somewhere bigger. This year, we had a day out to Brighton, we had a day out to Pevensey Castle, but aside from that we just hung out in the town, going in the sea or poking in all the little shops. I was quite pleased I managed, once we’d arrived, to have a no-driving-at-all holiday.

Naturally, as we were staying within walking distance of the seafront, as soon as we had unloaded the car we wandered down and discovered it was the Bottle Alley Art Market. The Child Who Likes Animals was able to buy his first pieces of original art, an exciting moment, at least for his mums. It set the seal, though, on the idea that this was a good place to come because it is “our sort of place”, the sort of town where you do just come across random art but that is also welcoming and friendly to all visitors, not “artistic” in a snobbish or exclusive way.

I’m still getting used to using my “new” camera, that I’ve had for over a year now: because of that, my holiday photos are all a bit patchy. It doesn’t have a viewfinder, just a rear panel; so taking photos in bright daylight, it can be very hard to be confident I am actually framing my shot properly, never mind getting the exposure or the focus right. It does, however, slip nicely into my big handbag, so I’m wary of buying a larger model. The main thing may well just be practising more. In the meantime, some of the photos, at least, have come out tolerably well enough to post online.

The children are quite fond of repetition, so we may well end up going back to Hastings again next year. They were both frightened and intrigued, though, by one aspect of family history I revealed to them. After touring the exhibition about Sussex and Kent smugglers in Hastings’ caves, high in the cliffs above the beach, they were somewhat scared to hear that their own Georgian ancestors were wreckers and smugglers—not from Sussex, but from Cornwall. I can see us having to go to Cornwall for a holiday now, just so they can see where their distant relatives came from.

Keyword noise: holidays, Sussex, Hastings, St Leonards, Brighton, The Children, railway, miniature railway, Bottle Alley, Volks Electric Railway.

Since the Great Pandemic, our lives have changed so much. Being forced to leave the office, we realised that to a great extent we didn’t need to be in offices. Our jobs didn’t even need to be near home, at all, except when we still needed to visit the office for meetings or when we had something to say face-to-face. That’s why I found myself, at 5am on a very dark morning after lockdown had ended, getting in the car to drive from Lincolnshire down to The South. A straightforward four-hour journey, at the most. Within five minutes of setting off, though, it had started to snow. Gently at first, but getting thicker. Within ten minutes, I reached a hill where the car’s wheels just spun to a halt on the fresh, wet snow beneath them. I paused, let my heart stop racing, and gently tried to turn the car round. This office trip had to be made. It was the last day in March, but the date was purely coincidence.

This is not a memoir, at least, not a coherent one. It is a series of little vignettes, memories, a palimpsest of moments which have made me the woman I am today. This is not even the most significant one. It is something, though, that is officially supposed to be considered significant.

Being transgender is not, itself, a medical issue. It’s just who you are, something you have to live with, like poor eyesight. Getting things to help you live with it, though, can be a medical issue. If you have poor eyesight, you can change your lifestyle by changing all your books to large print and increasing the font size on your devices; or you can turn to more medical solutions, have the defects in your eyes objectively measured, get yourself glasses or surgery. If you’re trans, nobody can stop you changing your wardrobe or changing your name, but you need to turn to medicine to start making significant changes to your body to mould it into the right sort of shape. In some countries, a friendly GP will prescribe you hormones as long as they are sure you understand the consequences. In the UK, you can only get a hormone prescription after you’ve had a psychological diagnosis of “gender incongruence”, and in order to get that diagnosis, you have to go through various stages, all of them essentially compulsory. It used to be called the “Real Life Test”, the idea being you have to demonstrate, conclusively, that you are trans in order for doctors to help you, because they have no better diagnostic tool available.

One of the key steps, in all this, is making sure that all the people around you know who you really are. That includes coming out and being your true self in the workplace. Understandably, for many people, that’s one of the most stressful parts. After all, you don’t necessarily get on well with the place where you work, and you often can’t exactly control who you work with.

So, to fit in with the plan, to step along the programme, this is what I had to do.

What I am about to say is not true in detail, only in the broad general sense, but coming out becomes easier the more you do it. The first time feels like it is impossible. The more people you tell, each time becomes slightly easier. Even so, it was still difficult, by the time I reached the point of telling work, to ping the head of HR and tell her I needed a chat. It was a fairly small organisation, everyone knew each other, but nevertheless. The important thing, I knew beforehand, was the phrasing. No “I think I am…”, no “I would like”. No. I used firm, bold, positive statements. “I am transgender. I am transitioning. I’d like us to agree on how we tell the rest of the business this. What do you suggest?”

And, as I had expected, she was entirely lovely about it.

We agreed our plan of action. We would tell my manager. He would tell the rest of senior management. As for the rest…at our quarterly all-hands face-to-face meeting, I would tell people in person. So that’s why I had to make it to the office that day, despite the unexpected snow. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t even look like I was going back. The announcement had to be made.

By this time all my old masculine clothes were already out of the wardrobe, and androgyny was in. I’d been painting my nails for a few months. I wondered how obvious it was; I wondered how many of them might have guessed. Probably none. As it happened, just one person had, or said they had, because they’d spotted my nail polish. They hadn’t spotted all the other hints I’d slowly dropped.

In the end, it was all something of an anticlimax, and everyone else was also absolutely lovely—which is entirely as it should be. We had various meetings set up, with various groups of people, all set up for the purpose of being able to say “oh yes, there’s something else [deadname] wanted to tell you.” Most people were barely bothered, aside from a few kind women who made a point of immediately striking up conversation with me about femme things, doing their best to make me feel included. And from then—that was that. Within a few days, my deadname had ben wiped from the systems.

Why am I writing this? In part, because it seemed like such a big step beforehand, and seems like such a tiny thing in hindsight. In part, also, because the rest of the world seems to place such a large emphasis on it being a major step in your transition journey. For me, though, it seems awfully irrelevant in hindsight. An event that was more important to everyone around me than to me myself. There are many more stages in my transition that mattered much, much more. Maybe that’s why I’m starting with this. Starting with the unimportant first.

Keyword noise: trans, transgender, transition, work.