Transgender Life

I don’t want this site to be solely about being transgender. From my experiences so far, it’s not even something I could write about every week – being in the closet is far more intense and frustrating and writeable. However, there are moments when things happen, unique to trans people. I’d like to share those moments with you, and let you into the mystery.

Saturday Night Party at Valentina's

Valentinapartyonacid
Saturday Night Party at Valentina's How is it possible to get lost on the way to Valentina's, of which I've been to twice before? Pulling behind me a suitcase filled with gifts and alcohol, I took a long route up my favourite street, then realized it wouldn't take me to the party. A swirling blizzard soon enveloped me, and I found myself at a motor...
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Please, I don't want to dance

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After the cinema yesterday evening, I entered a gay bar with some friends. I never go to gay bars – or any bars, except in cinemas. I get anxious in crowded rooms of strangers, where alcohol is flowing and the music is slightly deafening. Like Alicia Vikander's cyborg in Ex Machina, I feel vulnerable in my artificiality. In the gay bar we were okay...
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Identity Politics

GinaWarhol
Identity Politics Sunday morning, I dropped £1 into the empty cardboard cup of a homeless person while the snow fell around us. It's the first time I've done such a thing in a while. It didn't make me feel good, it felt like a drop in the ocean. Earlier this week, the staff of my university went on strike. At one point, a picketing staff membe...
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Anamorphosis

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Anamorphosis On Thursday I went to a public speaking contest where I watched my flatmate get first prize. I was late, turning up in the dinner break, with everyone milling around me, chatting excitedly about talks I hadn't witnessed. I drifted wordlessly, in a gentle trauma where I couldn't articulate anything. I found a friend I hadn't talked to i...
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A Shop I Used To Know

LTS
A Shop I Used To Know When you're six foot tall and trans-female, entering a women's clothes shop isn't like entering a cinema or a newsagent's. In M&S, the women seem so small – maybe it's the age of the average customer there? – that you can't help but stand out by comparison, even though it's got easier than it used to, from an emotional poi...
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At the Dentist's

Joker
At the Dentist's The dentist's chair is a place of tension for me. In childhood I never cared about my teeth and saw dentists as my nemesis. Then one day in early adolescence I fell as I was getting off my school bus and smashed a front tooth. It got fixed but I'm permanently insecure about breaking it once more. Then last summer, after nearly...
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In tribute to Laura Jane Grace

Laura-Jane-Grace
In tribute to Laura Jane Grace Back then, circa 2008, it's Tom Gabel singing to an acoustic set with their band. The song, called The Ocean, twists and turns melodically, the voice is straining passionately. The song is fucking good already, If I could have chosen where God would hide his heaven I'd wish for it to be the salt and swell of the ocean...
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2018 All Shiny and New

Dallas-Cheerleader
2018 All Shiny and New 12.01.18 I wake up in darkness: too cold and too dark. It's 2018, Edinburgh-style, in a freezing bedroom. Thoughts of studies and part-time work come to me. In my part-time job I am writing a manual, with a page of FAQs relating to work. There's a question I kept to myself for obvious reasons, but it re-appears in the morning...
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Final Message of 2017

Christmas-tree-forest
Final Message of 2017 22.12.17 I wrote this post yesterday, but it had a strange effect on me afterwards: I wrote about my excitement buying things for my family, about spending money on stuff. Christmas can have a strange effect on people, on me at least. Briefly I got swept up in the glittering waves, imagining how it's going to be, tha...
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Christmas Party

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Christmas Party 16.12.17 Isn't mulled wine the best? I am still glowing with the aftertaste, from last night's Christmas party. I wore my new, shiny black pleated skirt – which you can see in the top photo if you really peer and use your imagination. Well done Gina. Must model New Favourite Skirt with better strategy next time. Anyway, some introdu...
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On Orange Is The New Black

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On Orange Is The New Black 11.12.17 It was only a matter of time before I wrote about this show. Orange Is The New Black is the Netflix drama with one central location, where no one can escape, not the prison guards or their captors. There are several strong characters, all suffering from bad decisions that have cost them in life, from drug addicts...
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What's On?

BeFunky-Collage-Pleated
What's On? 08.12.17 Note: I wrote this for a What's On? post, but I'd like to add it here as a companion piece to the Christmas Party posting. I so seldom write about clothes, especially the ones I like, and writing this about beautiful skirts made me happy . . . This is a difficult What's On? to do, because I've been invited to two housewarming pa...
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On AIDS, Twitter and a Bad Week at Work

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On AIDS, Twitter, and a Bad Week at Work 03.12.17 I went to an event on AIDS on Friday afternoon. I know so little about AIDS, mainly fragments from my childhood in the 1980s, of adverts with gravestones, then later a televised concert commemorating the death of Freddie Mercury. In the late 1990s I read a book by journalist/broadcaster Andrew Neil,...
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A Difficult Week for Trans Rights

Gender-Kristeva
A Difficult Week for Trans Rights 26.11.17 Since I joined Twitter a month or so ago, I've become aware of the vitriol about trans and non-binary rights. Effectively you can boil the debate down to one side battling for its own existence, while the other side attempts to strangle this possibility at birth. It is a seismic debate. It is effectively d...
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Trans Remembrance 2017

BeFunky-Collage-Trans-Remembrance
Trans Remembrance 19.11.17 We gathered, commemorated, and also celebrated our identities. I wish I had promoted the event more successfully, and yes, more professionally, but that's a thing for another time. Elaine Gallagher, our guest speaker, spoke movingly about unemployment, about being single, and the awkward, probing questions that she's aske...
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Is Tintin Transgender?

BeFunky-Collage
Is Tintin Transgender? Last week I wrote about other dimensions. This week I'd like to take the plunge into alternative animated worlds: what if we could see beyond the published cartoon frames of my favourite character from childhood, Tintin? There was always something about Tintin's androgyny, his anodyne spirit about making the world a bett...
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Out Of This World: A Tribute To Brit Marling

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Out Of This World: A Tribute To Brit Marling 29.10.17 There are moments, they appear before you on screen or in a book or in a song, and they capture what you yearn for. This might be the case for anyone, and is certainly so for those who repress something. But then, doesn't everyone have something they can't have? Isn't that how the psyc...
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Trans vs TERFs

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Trans vs TERFs 22.10.17 It's the red rag to a bull, from a transgender perspective: radical feminists, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and what we're meant to think of each other. I read this week an article in The Big Issue (October 16-22) about violence at a protest from some weeks ago, between trans and anti-trans activists ...
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Reflections on Sense8

Sense-8.1
Reflections on Sense8 15.10.17 The Wachowskis have made art with messages before. The Matrix asked questions of reality, while bringing cyberpunk style into Western fashion – Neo, Trinity and Morpheus became our vulnerable superheroes for the computer age. Who hasn't thought about which pill they'd take, the red one or the blue one? For that matter...
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What happened to the thing I loved?

The-Catch
What happened to the thing I loved? 24.09.17 American football, like nothing else, rose before me in the 1980s while I was still working out how to be a boy. In Wales we had semi-professional rugby and a football team that never quite qualified for anything. The Darwinian in me stared from across the pond and sighed in awe at the San Francisco 49er...
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