Content Warning: Historical suicidal ideation.
So for years and years I did an update at the turn of the year. I can’t remember how long I did it for. I mean this site has been around in some flavour or other since 1997 – not here, exactly, I didn’t get this domain until 2002, apparently. But first on geocities – or possibly tripod – or maybe angelfire; then on a server running on a subdomain on an ISDN line, then on an ADSL line, and then eventually I sprung for actual factual real hosting.
Back in those days it was zesthost, who’ve gone the way of the dinosaur. So has the hosting provider that I switched to when they got bought, and now on a third provider, here the site sits. Not exactly unchanging, but a weird little outpost from the web of the thousands. My personal blog and random shit I put up here. Beholden to no-one and lurking here. No one to control the content but me. No sales pitch, about three visitors a decade (that’s a lie, but it’s not many) and yet I continue to post.
I’m going to be honest – back in 2000 before I transitioned I didn’t imagine that I would be alive in 2025. I could barely see to the next week. Often I couldn’t see to the next day. Sometimes the next hour was pretty fucking impossible. I had passive suicidal ideation pretty much every fucking day. I remember really, really clearly standing in the biochemistry tower and realising that the windows could fairly easily be made to open far enough someone could jump.
That I could jump.
And every day I’d line up outside labs or lectures and think about just ending the pain.
I remember walking across the canal bridges and locks as a kid – remembering my dad’s admonishments to be careful because of the currents around locks and that if you fell in it would be easy to drown. And constantly wanting to just be sucked into that darkness and let the suffering go.
It’s really distant from me now. It’s something that I can remember, and I can feel, but it belongs to a different version of me. To a girl so traumatised by her body, by her experiences, that any future seemed unattainable. To a girl who a quarter of a century ago decided fuck it, I’m going to take estrogen — not because I was sure I was trans. Because I wasn’t. I barely accepted myself. I barely accepted transness – because patriarchy, because misogyny, because racism, because Section 28.
Despite the blunt fact that I was so fucking trans it was visible from space.
I took it because I could see no other option where I might survive.
I’m so tediously stereotypical for the trans story that I basically fit every soap opera stereotype. Quote unquote cross dressed as a kid, other parents were always telling my mum I was so well behaved that I was more like one of the girls — and how did she get her ‘son’ to behave so well, I was ‘mistaken’ for a girl fairly frequently, etc, etc, et-fucking-c.
And yet I would desperately try and convince myself that I could be ‘happy’ without being trans. With maybe just being me at home, and being alone forever because I was some special weirdo. And of course since I couldn’t – since I was so fucking dysphoric I couldn’t deal with that I basically just lived hour to hour waiting for death to come. And then I got linked to the trans community. And I came to accept who I was. Not well. Not without a shit ton of self-loathing. Not without some serious internalised misogyny and patriarchal bullshit. Stuff that’s taken years to work through. Stuff that’s messy and unpleasant.
But I remember starting estrogen. I remember popping the pills from the pack of Ovran and how quickly – how insanely quickly it felt better. How utterly ridiculous it was that a tiny sugar coated tablet of shit-for-you synthetic estrogen could make my brain actually work. And it wasn’t like it was y’know, magic. I still had – and still have – trauma to work through. Being a trans-lesbian (mostly*) in a cis/het society is inherently traumatic. Those little round pills – the ones that were high risk for clots, and which in the end screwed my liver (well along with the alcohol), well… they were life saving.
It never fails to stun me how I went from a suicidally depressed male-ish-presenting thing, to someone who looks at the world and wants — hopes — to live a long fucking life. Who has joy and happiness and laughter and love and is such a fucking cliche about her wife. Who built a fucking house, more or less, and a career, and y’know plays bass in a band and sings and writes books and does all this shit. And thanks, pretty much in its entirety, to some little tiny pills prescribed by a doctor who was almost struck off because he actually treated trans people like fucking adults.
Which brings us to 2025. And more, I suppose, for the subject of the post: 2024.
2024 has been such a weird dichotomy of a year for me. Because in my personal life it’s been amazing. My work life’s been split in two between great and shite, and politically…well.
But 2024 has seen me making more friends than I’ve made in – well, decades. I’ve got closer to my existing friends here – and let them in more. And I’ve made queer friends, too. People I can not mask with. People I can just share all of my messy, untidy internal self with. And that’s been utterly amazing. I can’t really express how it’s felt to make friends again. I kinda thought I was broken on that front. Such a weird outlier of a human that making friends was…yeah. Let’s just say I hadn’t made friends.
No, let’s not. Let’s be honest. I thought that my weird confluence of interests and queerness and brownness and personality made it really hard to make friends. That I was a strange little human and the fact that I’d found someone who loved me was astonishing for someone so…otherwise apparently unlikable.
Anyhow, I’m not going to say this is all Alyson’s fault, but in 2022? when I started reading Welcome to Dorley Hall I didn’t realise the impact it would have on me. It made me look at myself a shit ton more than I had. It poked me to look at my transition and conclude that I’d let shit slide. It made me open my little gollum head up and take out the pieces of paper that my ex had dropped in there an look at them critically and toss them mostly into a fire. Because fuck that noise. But spiraling off from that one thing – one – I got to see an utterly awesome human get one billionth of the recognition she deserves (because she’s a phenomenal writer and deserves all the awards and plaudits and acclaim) and, two, I made a bunch of friends.
Partly I think because mentally I was in a better place. I like myself much more now. Oh, I got FFS in 2024 so I’m happier with how I look and I have a scalpel to stab the brainworms with which is nice, but also I grew my hair out and changed the way I dress, and exercised a shit ton, and improved my diet, but most importantly I improved what’s going on inside my head. I joined a discord server for Alysons’ books, and then for Zoe Storm’s books (she’s also awesome), and between them I ended up both making a nice little group of friends at least some of whom I hope to get to see this coming year, and also a place I practiced not being quite so self-deprecating. Because that’s one of the server rules.
I practiced accepting compliments.
I practiced…talking to people.
And yes, yes, I can do a good impression of talking to people. I do it for work all the time. But actually opening up and just chatting with folks? That’s led to some new and unexpected friendships that’ve made a big difference. Enormous, actually, because without them I wouldn’t have been screened for ADHD – and wouldn’t be being a billion times nicer to myself.
Because I was being a bitch to me – and now I am…not.
It’s so funny because it’s as blatant as the trans thing. Like I told people after I was screened and they mostly were like: “Well, yes.” and “Oh, you didn’t know?”
And no, I didn’t, because a fish doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, I guess. That’s just the way my brain works and I assumed it was how everyone’s brain worked. And knowing it? Understanding that aspect of myself? Knowing I’m not broken and useless? That’s been… really startlingly impactful in ways I didn’t expect at all.
And obviously, last but really the most, like, I cannot mention 2024 without mentioning how utterly awesome Kathryn has been. I cannot imagine how hard it’s been, the hot mess I’ve been at points with the political situation, and with the trauma my friends have gone through, and with how bleak I’ve felt about the future at times. And she has always been there to hold me up. But also she’s always been there providing joy and love. And yes, I am fully aware that I’m still revoltingly in love and sickeningly adoring of my wife. But she’s phenomenal and I genuinely don’t know how I’d’ve done 2024 without her.
Oh, and bonus points – in 2024 I wrote most of a second book (I mean, it’s book-length, but has some significant issues and I will be tackling that in 2025. I also started on a third book; I mean, why not?). Kathryn’s been very sweetly editing her way through Lies Unmake Us. I hope to get that to ‘published’ by whatever means that happens in 2025. I’d really like it to be published by an actual company, I’d like to find an agent and have it y’know, hawked to appropriate small presses (the word ‘commercial’ doesn’t really apply to my writing). But failing that, when she’s done (she’s about 1/3rd the way through) I can put it on Amazon and itch as a self-pub.
So like I say, 2024 has been personally good.
Politically and socially it’s been horrific. I don’t need to re-litigate the awful fucking shit said about and attempted to be done to trans people in the last year. The stuff that makes me think back to all the bleakness at the beginning of this entry. I talk about that more, now, because inflicting that harm on kids when we have ample fucking evidence that giving trans kids just the one appropriate puberty using blockers and the right hormones for who they actually are is the least damaging option. And it sickens me that cis society is so anti-trans that the concept that one cis child might be marginally uncomfortable is worth risking the lives of every trans child.
It sickens me that fascists are in a position where in some places they get to make the rules.
And 2025 is going to be more of that, and more fighting and more bleakness as the environment is ripped to shreds by people who don’t give a shit.
And I find it hard to be optimistic about all that. I’m not without hope, because that’s just not the kind of human I am. I am periodically pretty fucking bleak and dispirited. But I’m also the sort of human that fights. I fought fucking hard to be here. I overcame barriers that the fucking tories put in my way, that homophobes, transphobes and racists threw up in front of me. I’ve done it before and I will fucking do it again.
But honestly, what I’d like for 2025 is just to quietly enjoy our nice house for a bit. I’d like to play games with my friends, visit with some of my other friends, travel a bit, and drink some really nice tea.
And y’know what – like my mum said when she talked about her experience of the extreme racism when she got to the UK? The best way to show them how wrong they are is to live a good life.
And y’know what? I’ve got good friends, a nice house, I’ve spent a quarter of a century – more than half my life – getting to be me, and I’ve had nearly two decades with the most wonderful woman in the world. That’s doing pretty fucking well.
* Theoretically I have come to accept that I could like boys. Like they’re sometimes kinda attractive and I think I’ve got over the whole penis thing – although it’s still bloody ugly. But since I’m very happily married, and the vast majority of the men I’ve ever met have the problem of really not having dealt with their own internalised misogyny and patriarchal values then eh. Probably wouldn’t, even were I single. But y’know, know thyself.
