I’m on holiday, on vacation as my adopted country calls it, mostly a trip to visit home. A trip to see my mother who I deeply miss and who, because of our annoying similarities, drives me nuts. We normally head down to her home to see her, but for a variety of reasons we decided, instead, to head to my ancestral home.
Alright not ancestral. Maybe spiritual.
Obviously not ancestral, because I’m kinda Welsh, but spiritual – because we came here almost every year when I was a kid. First whining, then eventually falling in love with the place. The Lake District in the UK is wound into my bones. Twisted into my DNA. I never felt a particular attachment to the town I grew up in, but every time we came here it felt like we’d returned home.
We’d walk the mountains, drive over the passes, and stay in sparsely decorated static caravans; often the cheapest one with just a radio, no TV. And my dad’s attitude that there was not the wrong weather, just the wrong clothes, meant that I saw this place cold and wet, hot an sunny and at all points in between.
Which is to say I love this place.
Before we came here we went to Finland. A brief stop taking advantage of the fact that it’s not hugely expensive to add a stop. By sheer coincidence it turns out that it was pride weekend. We knew that it was before we came, and when we arrived Helsinki was decked out in Pride finery. Flags everywhere, happy queer people around. Maybe it’s always like that, maybe it’s not. The folks of Finland are, apparently, not super chatty nor it seems, loud. But they were friendly and welcoming.
And the first thing I noticed when we got there; well, maybe not the first thing, but a thing I noticed very quickly was that after a few years of floating, formless anxiety that washes over me at any point. That saps joy. That wears away at me like water washing over a stone. That? It just went.
I could just be me.
It’s not like ‘me’ is super exiting. I’m just another vaguely queer girl wandering through the world and loving my wife. I don’t generally run down the street accosting people and sharing my transness with them.
I actually woodworked being the cis-lesbian or indeed in some points and places in time just assumed to be cis-straight girl, more or less, from some point in the early 2000s until about 2015. I was out online, in ways that were much less pervasive than they are now. Back then, when twitter wasn’t a nazi hellhole, and people didn’t background search everyone looking for a job, and also, back then when most people didn’t give a shit if you were trans – christ, most people didn’t even really have the faintest clue what it meant, that was easier to do.
I had a separate online existence where the few trans people I knew shared stuff, but mostly I talked about classic cars, house renovation, whatever weird project I’d picked up…
…and I had my cis-woman life where I had friends who didn’t really know I was trans. I would occasionally go out with work colleagues or whatever.
I always found that hard because as anyone who knows me knows I’m an obnoxiously open book. That, and it took me a long time to overcome the transphobia society instills. I still find little pockets of it hiding there. And thing is, if you’re close with me, at some point I’ll probably make some joke about it. I’ll tell the story where it only makes sense if you know I was presenting as male at the time (albeit, it turns out, not well). I’ll crack some inappropriate and childish joke about how much I dislike dick.
So I found it hard to have close friends. I was always watching myself. Wary of questions that might suddenly expose the transness and then invoke the “having to explain the transness” and also the different way a lot of cis people suddenly relate to you when they find out. The look of searching – trying to find clues. The reappraisal process ending up with placing you in a different and special category (UK supreme court, anyone?)
So in a way it was a relief when I came out again more thoroughly. More completely. It’s not like everyone knows, there are folks who do and folks who don’t depending on how well they know me. And cis-het folks in particular mostly have no idea, so even though I sport trans pride colours on my ID badge, on my water bottle, sometimes on my clothes…
…people still often don’t know until I tell them.
Which these days I’m more inclined to share, because I think it’s important that people know they know someone trans. Because I want people to have a face to put transness to. Because I want them to know, as they vote to strip trans people of their healthcare and ship trans people off to fucking camps, that’s who. I don’t want them to see trans people as some distant fucking unknown. We’ve always been here. We’ve just often hidden because of the bullshit of transphobia.
And the relief I felt in Finland was almost palpable.
And it fucking hurts being in the UK. The UK is a disaster right now for so many reasons. For the shredding of the social safety net. For the destruction of the lives of those with disabilities reliant on services that Labour should be saving and investing in, and is instead cutting. For the abject horror that is Starmer’s failure to do anything of substance (mostly because he’s not really a person, he’s a cardboard cut out of a human covered in work-shopped talking points and focused grouped policies to attempt to attract the not-quite-as-nazi-nazi’s to vote while ignoring everyone who might actually vote labour).
As soon as I stepped foot in Britain I felt that leaden weight reinserting. The corset constricting. The fucking theft of breath that comes with the knowledge that the government would rather kill kids than let people grow up trans. That I can be accosted in a toilet for the terrible crime of needing a pee, and that the head of the UK’s human rights organisation thinks that’s really fine and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the position that maybe it’s kinda sketch to photograph women in toilets.
And I realised how much it costs me to be in this place. Or to be in the US. To have that anchor dragging around after me. To spend so much energy trying to support community, to fall-apart and be repaired by my wife, my friends. To return the favour of dragging me from the bed in which I curl, crying because I just want to live my fucking life, and I don’t want other kids to go through the pain and torture that I went through.
And I don’t really know what to do with that.
I just know that I hate it.
