The Transgina Monologue

I suppose it doesn’t hit you at first, you know those early years when nothing conscionable is happening in one’s existence. There are few words anyway and nearly all of them relate to external factors, such as, mama, dada, hugs, food: me, - - me, me, me!

Is ‘me’ an ‘external factor’ I wonder, when you have not yet learned to express the word ?

I don’t know, but I suppose it was probably my very first ‘pronoun conundrum’ even though I did not know it then. No, truth to tell, those first two or three years don’t count for much.

Oh I know educationalists will tell you that you learn ninety percent of all you’ll ever learn before the age to two but it’s only functionality learning. Operating ones limbs and senses then reacting to others. It’s not until cognition arrives, which for most of us is around four to seven, that we start to relate to the people around us, usually our parents and siblings.

Even then it’s difficult to gather one’s thoughts into a coherent sentience and then articulate them effectively.

By effectively, I mean somehow avoiding confrontation and censure.

And there starts the trauma that will follow us throughout our growing, because we encounter the confrontations, and censures then ofttimes, the final castigations.

So when does ‘sex’ rear its head. Is it in the shared bathtub with one’s infant siblings when one first notices a difference; or is it when you wonder if something isn’t right –‘down there’- compared to your differently gendered sibling. Or is it when the clothes feel wrong, or the toys seem wrong and one enviously covets the toys of your oppositely sexed sibling.

Here the first inklings of idle curiosity next lead you into stranger paths that constantly present pitfalls and frights. Inevitably, these expeditions slowly turn you into a super-cautious deceiver, a secret holder, a secret keeper; - a liar even?

With each passing juvenile year the dangers seem to multiply as one’s world expands and the contradictions within you become steadily more complex, more burdensome.

Ah those were the deadly years, the years when you wanted to share the secret, share the burden but long ago the mould had already been cast and in those critical years you had not the courage nor the wherewithal to step outside your parentally imposed mould.

If that mould were ever to be broken then I knew it would mean breaking myself and always, always I wondered if I’d ever have the strength to do it. Firstly to break the mould and then somehow to escape from it, to step outside it.

But step outside to where? That would be the next burning question. There were so many unknowns back then.

Then next came the adolescent years, the early teens; the first feint tremors of sexuality. I well remember my first shy, secretive, uncertain looks, whether the object of your interest was boy or girl it mattered not. Though in my case those secretive envious glances were ‘girl bound.’

I discovered I liked girls whilst simultaneously envying their lifestyles and community; their clothes and the freedom to express themselves through their cloths. The conflict with boys mediocre clothes and unitary styles for me seemed impossible to reconcile.

Somehow you felt the inner turmoil, driven by your secret conflict, could never resolve itself. Those early infancy rules had been set in stone and always to be obeyed. Until; until the conflicts within you started to tear your confidence apart You felt forced to step cautiously around the snares and traps as you spiralled slowly but surely outside the circles of family, friendships and finally society.

In those years your middle teens, the only reliable companions you had were fear and loneliness; oh; and ignorance of course. For where could you ask? Who could you ask? What could you ask?

Often, this was the first time that the thoughts of escape turned to thoughts of suicide.

And of course, the search for that escape invariably exposed you to the flip side of the coin; the dangers that unwarranted interest brought. Those dangers that girls had been constantly warned about ( and protected from,) were soon to spring upon you as you learned with traumatic speed, that what you first thought might be a friendly approach, was almost invariably a predatory one.

Yes those desperate years from fifteen to seventeen were your most tumultuous times as one trod the rocky road, unbalanced, unfriended, undefended and unguided.

If a young person managed to run this first serious gauntlet (and as many as twenty percent failed), the survivors did not emerge into some liberated upland of oxygenated freedom but more often an underworld of toxic secrets, fear and bullying. Denied work or opportunity in nearly all the professions because gender was considered sex was considered perversion and therefore pornographic.

What use was it trying to use education as a route of escape when education only opened the gate to yet more sophisticated censure and persecution as transgenderism was invariably associated with immorality.

Ironically, it was education that finally, after many years of societal and judicial abuse, started to offer the very first tiny glimmerings of hope. But it was a drip feed where the tap was totally controlled by firstly the medical profession and secondly the legal profession. Two agencies who must be considered the most hide-bound, self-serving, and self-serving forces of humanity.

Time and again we found ourselves and our rights set back by some prejudiced, blinkered interpretation offered up as wisdom or insight by some elevated authority that had neither experience nor understanding.

How many blind alleys, legal distractions, and frivolous conundrums were used to pervert the course of understanding or obstruct the path to a solution? God knows is was endless and for decades, one would read or hear of some isolated report or incident in the media what served to demonstrate that we still had a long way to go.

And of course, the media serves as little more than a double edged sword as now we find ourselves getting tied up in such elemental factors as ‘pronouns’, essential bodily functions, gender approved spaces and so on.

‘Will there ever be an end to it?’ I ask myself.