Dear May,

I’m sorry to hear the baddies have got a hold of you. This may or may not help, if it doesn’t at least it’s a reminder you are not on your own, and things can get better. Hard liquor and pills are not the answer. When the problem returns, and it always does, it’s exactly the same but with a hangover too! Buying a new frock or having your hair done or even a manicure too is a much better short term fix.

My preferred option is shopping for undies or better still shoes, but that too is just a short term fix. The longer term solution can only come from within yourself. You may not be able to envisage that at the moment, but you asked for a truthful opinion. You actually stated in your letter, ‘however brutal’, but saying it can only come from within yourself is not a simple ‘pull your self together, woman’ which is not at all helpful, and no friend would ever say that. I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s actually far more brutal than that.

Anyway, as you requested, I’ll tell you a bit about how I’m dealing with my issues at the moment, but to do that you have to have a context, a history to set it against. I know you already know a lot of this, but I’ll repeat it because I can’t remember what I’ve already told you and what I’ve not. As far back as I can remember I walked the edge of suicide. The abuse, the bullying, the pain, the confusion and the despair almost but never quite overwhelmed me. Running away from the beatings and sleeping with the horses or the dogs kept me warm and alive, but deep down there was always that burning sense of shame, the empty sense of inadequacy, and of course being a child the confused sense of unfairness, the question ‘why me?’

Why had I been punished with a penis? What had I ever done to deserve that? Of course at that age and in those days it never occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one this had ever happened to. Home was hell, school was a nightmare. The boys hurt me and were encouraged to do so ‘to make a man of me’ and the girls were told to stay away from me because I was unnatural, disgusting, and a pervert. I knew nothing would make a man of me because men were made from boys, which precluded me.

As a result I spent a lot of time on my own with nothing to do but think. Actually I spent most of my time just feeling sorry for myself though in I my own defence I would have done anything I could that would have made the situation better. If my childhood was awful, puberty just about destroyed me and my teens became worse.

Being clever isn’t always as good as it’s made out to be, trust me, and to have a memory with almost total recall of every detail of every miserable, painful, hurtful and humiliating experience you’ve ever suffered is definitely a serious calibre visitation from the Earl of Hell himself. However, for good or for bad I survived, and cutting a long story short, after I shook the dirt off my feet from that hellhole my loving family referred to as home and left the area far behind me, I studied.

I studied damned hard and obtained high flying degrees in let’s just say STEM and leave it at that. I went on to earn serious money, more than enough to pay for all the medical procedures that I had naïvely believed would end my torment. Did they? No. All they did was enable me to undress in front of someone and still pass, but since the situation never arose, I was regarded as pretty and I’d always passed that wasn’t much of a change was it? I did feel better about myself, but I was still me whatever that was, still couldn’t relate to people, and despite promotion after promotion, each bringing in more money than before, I was still having breakdowns at frequent but irregular intervals, which made little difference to the callous bastards around me at work.

The generally accepted belief by the super bosses was, “Of course with a mind that brilliant you have to expect instability. We can afford her idiosyncrasies with what we’re making out of her work. And don’t forget having been a bloke is bound to cause conflicts. Just make sure everybody does whatever makes her happy so she’s working as much as possible.” So I was a valuable resource with idiosyncrasies, but no more than that.

Self esteem nil, worthlessness at the high end of the spectrum and thoroughly unhappy, and that appears to be where you are at the moment too. I was so miserable and puzzled. The misery I accepted, the puzzlement no. I was supposed to be clever, so I told myself to think my way out of it. I regarded myself as a project. Now any project requires data to create a base line, so in an effort to acquire data I started keeping a journal. Sometimes I’d write large amounts, often just a sentence or even a phrase. Sometime several times a day every day for weeks, sometimes months would go by without writing anything at all.

Then I started to read back what I’d written over the last couple of years, and, for a reason that escapes me now, I started to write fiction, which childishly enabled me to get my own back on the bad guys. I could do anything I wanted to as many of them as I felt necessary. As I said childish, but cathartic. I started to have good days as well as bad. In the beginning not usually all day but enough to make me start to feel a bit better. I started to do mean things to the bigots by the thousand, sometimes wiping out whole populations. Hell damned fire punkah wallah, that felt good!

A minor turning point came when I was chatted up by a bloke at work. He was a total sleaze ball who told me he wasn't into fucking men but since I'd had the operation he'd make an exception in my case! Generous, in fact almost as generous as my knee to his groin which floored him, literally. Apparently he'd expected me to be grateful. He was moved to another site, my employer obviously valued me more than him. Unpleasant? Yes, but it made me think of the mathematicians’ belief, ‘there’s only one impossible number in the universe – one! If a thing happens at all it happens innumerable times,’ so I thought there must be others too who’d like to…? I wasn’t quite sure what they’d like to do to me or was it with me, and I was even less sure how I felt about that, or more to the point what I wanted, but I became more receptive to what went on around me, and I started to have a social life. It helped, not much, but it did help.

I was still depressed, on the edge of suicide and believed I was worthless. I probably only survived in those days because I used to get lost in my work for days or even weeks at a time. Oh I’d been under the shrinks and on pills for years and maybe I’d have been worse without them, but they’d never seemed to do me any good. I was aware at that point of the trans community and that there were internet sites where such issues were discussed and I’d started to visit a few.

To start with I thought they were helpful, but as time went on most of them started to make me angry, and I mean angry not depressed. I suspect angry because there were people out there who were having a hard time, and I knew exactly what they were feeling. What was worse was there were a lot of professionals who should have been helping by supporting those with problems, but who were gaining medical reputations and wealth at their expense, but didn’t really give a damn.

My anger made me, for the first time, question my own self assessments, and to question them in depth. To make an assessment one has to have a yardstick or a scale against which to measure, and it seemed to me that the yardsticks were all being provided by people who weren’t trans, didn’t understand and had no right to an opinion, and that wasn’t even starting to include the bigots, bible bashers, fundamentalists of other flavours and the other assorted cretinous inadequates who simply needed someone to put down to make them feel better about themselves. I came to believe they had no right to make me feel negative about myself! And that, Girl, was progress.

In addition the sheer volume of self opinionated claptrap generated by the ‘scientific community’, both on and off line, was incredible, and it seemed to me that an awful lot of it was generated purely to justify a preëxisting stance, in other words it was anything but science, and that I was qualified to hold an opinion on.

Given the lack of valid or even meaningful yardsticks, I decided to try to start creating my own, and to start with I used myself as my rôle model as a five out of ten for all the various parameters I was looking at. I picked me and put me in the middle because I had no body else and for no other reason other than it was the middle. I now accept, in part, the yardsticks of others with a right to their own, and that’s where I am now, assessing my self and what I consider to be valid assessment tools.

Does it work? I don’t have the certainty of the idiots, but I am beginning to see myself differently. I no longer accept anyone else’s value judgements concerning me. I know I should have refused to do so years ago, after all they’ve never accepted mine concerning them. I believe I’m improving because I now have more days that are entirely good, and that means I’m less tired. I fight back more effectively these days, often with my qwerty pen.

But, and it is a big but, however you assess your life you must never forget, you have a right to be you, to have your opinions respected and most of all to be safe. No one deserves to be hurt, humiliated, discriminated against or victimised just because they are who they are. I believe that you are placing entirely too much weight on the opinions of others who have no right or qualifications, and I mean qualified by virtue of experience not some poxy piece of paper, to make any kind of a judgement of you at all. You are liked as a human being, not because or in spite of being trans. The people who like you can't possibly all be idiots!

I’d never trusted scientific ‘perceived wisdom’ and had always gone to the source when possible or withheld judgement and I came to regard those so incapable of deciding for themselves what was decent behaviour and what was not that they had to take the word of what I consider is simply a document designed for controlling the have nots by the haves as only worthy of contempt. They are choosing to be sheep, but their shepherds are all wolves, and that goes for all flavours of religion.

You are being far too hard on yourself. I know you used to give a lot of your time to homeless kids via that church program. When you were outed and kicked out of the program for being yourself that did NOT, and I repeat NOT, devalue what you had done for those kids. Neither the church nor their program deserved you. The kids didn’t care that you were trans, what mattered to them was that you cared about them. I was pleased to hear that you are helping them via another more tolerant agency. Good for you! And it is good for you too. Accept it for what it is. You need those kids as much as they need you, and there is nothing wrong with that. Enjoy it.

I know you don’t suffer from the delusions of any religion, so you’re at least in with a chance of making your own valid decisions regarding your worth. You just need to take off the blinkers and rose tinted (so dark a red they are almost opaque) glasses that the yardsticks of others try to impose on you. They are a strait jacket and you deserve a better and more glamorous coat than that.

To end on a lighter or perhaps more amusing note, I wrote some fiction a few years ago in which I coined the phrase ‘the feijn’. Here is the explanation of the term from the piece.

Feijn, (originated in the phrase ‘the feral brain dead’) a pejorative term for the underclass who had not worked for generations and who lived off the black economy and the taxes of those who worked, pronounced fay+n, (IPA - f eI n). The spelling feijn is Dutch, it is not known how this came about. For feijn you can read bigot, but in the dystopian story the feijn ended up as feijf, feijn beef, and the children referred to salt feijf as fam, feijn ham.

As to whether my technique works. Yes. I should say it works, certainly it works for me. It’s slow, but it’s done wonders for my sense of humour. I don’t know if this will help you, but don’t let the bastards grind you down. Some days are better than others for every one, cis or trans. We must keep in touch more frequently, so ring me and we’ll talk, or better yet come and stay for a few days, a week, a month if you like. Bring some shopping clothes and we’ll undergo a bit of retail therapy too. That definitely works for a while. I need some new dancing shoes. I’ll introduce you to Clifford who I met at my new place of employment. I've been seeing him for a couple of months now (Yeah!), and I'll lean on his friend William to partner you when we go out. Dinner and dancing with two nice understanding boys. That should help.
Lots of love,
Jilly