This is a love letter, a complicated one. It touches grief, confusion and shame but most of all joy and though it is written to some people I care deeply about I hope it may be of use to others as well. The letter arises from my transition but I’d like to clarify what that is. Like many other trans people now, I do not see myself as transitioning from one gender to another. I am transitioning from confusion to clarity, from night into day, from a social strait-jacket sized too small to free genuine self expression. My transition extends into my past, reformulating it as I understand it better. It is a break with the past. I feel as if I have been walking in the dark in what I thought was the path only to find when the sun comes up that the path is to my left, smooth and clear and I have been stumbling through brush and mire in the ditch. So why grief, confusion and shame? What melacholic notes sound a low harmony in this moment? Do you mourn the night when the sun rises for the first time in your life? These are the questions this letter addresses.

To M — Discomfort

The one concept that binds most sense into my past is discomfort. I was just plainly, simply uncomfortable. Generalised discomfort is a difficult symptom to resolve, difficult to find the causes beneath and — when years dull it — difficult to realise there is even a problem to resolve.

I was never comfortable as a gay man because I just wasn’t comfortable as a man. In the thick of it I put it down to a dislike for gay culture, for pop culture and I can see that I exaggerated that dislike — feeling safe with something that explained my discomfort.

‘I am a y type of person’ ‘this is just the way I am, I like a and not b’.

These are attempts to sum up the wildness within, to give it coherence, stability, structure — but they can just as easily be attempts to hide what we don’t really want to understand. All of these statements are conversation stoppers. They close down questioning. They’re not concerned with digging deeper, don’t care to ask why.

My subconscious forged artificial awkwardness that, unfortunately, impinged on the lives of people I loved.

I’ve learned to not let narratives lie still. Awkwardness ought be examined; discomfort, dissected. If those stories we tell about ourselves turn into pride or stubbornness we’re throwing ourselves deeper into confusion, dispelling the day of revelation. They keep the story from ending and letting a new one begin.

Now when I find awkwardness or distaste for something I won’t let it sit unexamined. If it makes you itch, scratch it: explore it, uncover it, think about it, dream about it, write about it. Maybe you won’t find the truest answer any time soon but don’t just let it sit there.

To T — Be careful what you say

You and S helped me be honest to the world that I was attracted to masculine people. Do you remember when the three of us dressed up in women’s clothes for an event? For the two of you it was a lark and for me a liberation. I remember you said you didn’t understand it but you were happy for me. We were twentyone, or something. Gender wasn’t something we were thinking about so much except in terms of who we were attracted to.

We watched Billy Elliot together. Billy just wanted to dance but his friend, Michael, found freedom in girl’s clothes and it was Michael that stole my heart every time I watched that film, though I never told you nor anyone else. Now I see I wanted to be her. One of the few occasions we went to Soho together we were having a drink in a bar and a trans girl at a table over caught me eye. She was gorgeous; I was breathless. I didn’t understand then that I wanted to be her, to be as free as her. Well I am now and, though we didn’t have the tools to help me break open my cacoon all those years ago, your love and acceptance did give me the strength when the moment came and I want to say thank you.

You never know who you’re talking to — you never know who’s listening. There might be a trans person whose truest self you haven’t yet seen so always speak with as much acceptance and love on your tongue as T did to me.

To all my surprised friends — Just celebrate

These stories we tell ourselves become layers that we wrap around our onion souls. The deepest wildest innerness is remarkably fluid, capable of accumulating a library of ticks and passions, likes or dislikes, characteristics that most people may see as our fixed personality but the soul is anything but fixed. As a child I was raised to believe in my self, to be confident that I could set out to do anything I wanted to do. Only much later did I began to understand that pursuing some of those values stopped me from seeing and hearing other people. I began unbuilding so much of what I had been taught. I am convinced that it was this work of unmaking that liberated me, helped me to hear my quiet gender, helped uncover the pain and discomfort I had been masking. These layers that we build up can obtain a remarkable thickness, an apparent solidity. I think it’s perfectly reasonable that many of my friends were surprised I came out as a woman. They saw something completely different, a person who managed to function as a gay male for over a decade of adult life. But I was never happy being a gay male the way I am overwhelmingly happy being myself now. For those who are having a hard time understanding my transition you just have to hear me: I am at peace.

When someone comes out as trans you need no explanations, no justifications from their past life to make sense of it. It doesn’t matter how much their previous life seemed to make sense to you — all you need do in that moment is celebrate.

To A

In the last article in this series I wrote about determination. I was determined to be the cis-male I never could be not knowing I had everything to gain by giving up. Since writing that I realised that an itchy under-neathy sense of discomfort, of self-failure may well have spurred that very determination.

I think my underlying discomfort made me obstinate, determined to see things through. I clung to things, wanting to finish them because I never felt like I arrived at anything at all. Everything was striving and no rest, no peace. I can only say these things with hindsight now that I finally know what the joy of being feels like, now that I am finally comfortable with my place in the world. I’m sorry for the discomfort my determination inflicted on you. Uff, see how discomfort is cyclical, just like violence. Cis normative expectations do no one any good.

Finding myself, being trans, is a gift to me — it’s an opportunity to make great leaps in my growing up, to find more patience, acceptance, listening, understanding. To let these softer values rub the edges off determination. In these ways and many more, trans is a gift.

To E

Here’s another way.

There’s no excuses for bad behaviour, ever. The solid skin I wore trying to be a real gay man had some good things going for it and some bad things too. The models for pursuing relations and sexual or affective connections that I had weren’t the healthiest. The gay world has a lot to improve on that score but pushing critiques of my behaviour off onto its cultural influences doesn’t do me or you any good. I didn’t always treat you the way I would want to treat people now and I am ashamed. The good that comes of it for me is that I lived vividly those lessons and can understand better the importance of the behaviours that I value and want society to adopt. I owe you, and others, apologies. But apologies are only the first step. If an apology is used as a way to lubricate awkwardness without undergoing self reflection and change it is worse than no apology at all.

For those reading this without knowing what kind of behaviours I’m referring to it’s nothing monumental — not the worst behaviours you could envision, not at all… it’s all the little things that don’t seem to add up to much but do add to something important inside of us. A kiss that should not have been offered in its context, the chase of a momentary objective that stopped me from really listening and seeing and feeling the feels of the other person. Disregard, selfishness. All the little things we do that show we aren’t really thinking about the other person, that show how much our desires come first. These little things are the seeds of bigger social evils but that is an essay for another day. Breaking with the past is an opportunity to address past wrongs and, as we grow into new people, work to ensure we don’t carry those old patterns with us.

To X — On Grief

When something has brought me so much sense, fulfilment, euphoria — it’s odd to hear someone say they feel sadness to hear the news.

If I allow time to mellow defensiveness I do understand the need to mourn. Your idea of who I am has died. There are things I am mourning too. I am not a member of a community that I had taken as natural to me; I am not, in actual fact a gay man. Who I am seen as in the street is different now and will never be the same. I have lost some things. Of course, in terms of my inner life, what I lost is a pocketful of pennies compared to the treasure hoard found but nonetheless, its easy to get attached to a penny or two when it’s all you had for so long.

Perhaps the problem is that we lack a word, a cultural idea that allows us to mourn when we are rejoicing. In every passing over from one thing to another there is some kind of loss even if the new thing is infinitely truer, more beautiful, more fulfilling. We need a concept that combines joyfulness and mourning. The Irish wake is one of the best European funeral traditions I know.

I was never a man but pretty much all of you thought I was and that image of me needs a funeral, no, a wake. A fucking celebration! Trust me, what comes after is so much better and the friendships we’ll forge now will be so much truer. Parents and family members often have the hardest time letting go of those past images. If you find yourself in a similar situation I recommend organising a wake with your family and friends. It will be cathartic and joyful and teary and emotional and exciting and afterwards everyone you love will get a chance to get to know you a second time.

All good wakes need a toast or two and here’s mine: so perhaps we do mourn the night when the sun first rises and so what. It was the night walk that carried us into day. All those people I met and love — I met them in the night time of my soul’s confusion and they continue to be good memories and they continue to be people I love. So let us celebrate the past and let us celebrate the future and let us continue always transitioning, growing, learning, stretching, listening and breaking with the past. I love you all.

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