Every day I live with the trauma of something that happened continually to me when I was a child. It has been nineteen years since the last time it happened. What happened to me contributed to me feeling suicidal, mental health problems, self harm and has also led to a lot of sexual problems. I’d say it’s probably the worst thing that has ever happened to me – and that is saying something. What did happen to me, you might be asking? Whatever it was, it must have been something horrific. Well that depends on how you look at it. To me it was but I doubt very much that society would agree as it has happened to almost every schoolchild in the land and is perfectly legal. So what did happen to me?

After PE at school I was forced to change and shower in front of teachers and other children. Nothing unusual there, one might think. “Everyone else has to go through the same thing” is a very common response. I remember saying something about how it made me feel to my parents when I was thirteen (I had left school by this time as I was taken out of school when I was ten and homeschooled for two years before attending a further education college). My mother told me I was a drama queen and then my parents said they had to do it and then proceeded to name the people we know who had to do it. I think a common view is that because it’s something that happens to everyone it isn’t that bad. But to me that just makes it worse – because it is considered normal and something the vast majority of schoolchildren still have to do to this day, when someone takes issue with this sort of treatment people just don’t see it as a big deal and they think they should just get over it. Another common response is that there are many people in the world who have had it worse than me.

One of these groups of people who have had it worse than me are people who have been raped or sexually abused. The trouble is that I feel that that’s what happened to me. I would like to apologise if this statement and paragraph upsets anyone, particularly if someone has been subjected to rape or abuse themselves. I’m not trying to play down or invalidate the feelings of victims of rape or sexual abuse. Indeed I think it is a horrific thing to happen to someone and nobody should be subjected to such a violation. Yet I often find myself thinking that I would have been better off had something like that happened to me than being forced to strip and shower in front of others. The reason being that rape is recognised as a crime. It is true that a lot of rape victims are not believed and as a result many rapists are not convicted and that is a serious problem. But when rape victims are believed, what happened to them is classed as a crime and even more importantly they are given the right support by society. Which is all I want. I’m not interested in getting vengeance on the teachers who forced me to strip in front of others anymore but there was a time when I did. I felt so angry about the fact I felt violated I wanted revenge on my teachers. When I was thirteen I made a false allegation of sexual abuse against my teachers to my parents. I actually used words like rape. They knew that it was a false allegation because they knew my feelings on this and they endorsed the regime of forced communal showers at the time. But I don’t see it as a false allegation because I feel that in a way I was sexually abused. Not in the usual way but in a way that isn’t seen as sexual abuse. But to me being forced to let others see my naked body felt like a sexual violation. As a result, despite still being a virgin at the age of twenty-nine, I’ve never known what it feels like to be a virgin. I know people often say society sexualises nudity and whether or not it does is another debate. But I had issues with my body from about the age of two so I don’t believe my issues had anything to do with society. A common view is that a child is not sexually developed therefore they don’t mind or it doesn’t matter if their bodies are exposed to others as they are not sexually aware. But I still knew at the time that something didn’t feel right and later began to see it as a sexual violation as I found out about sex. I guess I realised all this in the same way a victim of paedophilia would realise that they had been sexually abused.

The trauma of it was made worse by the fact that I’m transsexual. I don’t think a child has to be transsexual to be affected from what I was affected by but the reason I think being transsexual made it worse for me is that I had to expose a male body, including male genitals even though I had a female gender identity. But I find that even a lot of people who are open-minded and accepting of my transsexuality don’t seem to get why I would have an issue exposing my male body despite having a female gender identity. I find I get little understanding from both conservatives and liberals.

Conservaties see it as good for discipline and that it teaches children to obey authority even in situations where they feel uncomfortable. I have even read in some forums that some people think that boys behave better when they are made to wear less as they feel more vulnerable. They think it is character forming and turns boys into men. Whereas liberals wonder why one should hide their body. Whilst I can see the point of the liberals’ argument I think that it should be the individual’s choice as I feel if it isn’t then it is not liberal. I’d say one of the things I find hardest to convince people is that I believe that my wish to keep my body private is something inherent in me. A lot of people think that children not wanting others to see their bodies is not inherent but something they develop because of societies’ attitudes to nudity and I don’t dispute that this might be the case for some children. But I feel that my body issues are inherent because I had them from as young as two, well before society’s attitudes shaped me. Nobody ever told me I should cover up, only the opposite so I know that it wasn’t society’s attitudes that made me inhibited about my body but that was a natural inhibition. The fact that so many people dispute this makes me feel the way I feel on this is unnatural. People seem to think it’s innocent but this felt anything but innocent for me and I feel like I had my innocence stolen by having had this happen to me.

I have tried campaigning for more privacy in school changing rooms for the last seven years but with little success, though I have found a few more people who are in agreement with me on the issue with the help of the social network. Six years ago I told a friend’s father how I was writing to various organisations on the issue. He said he thought younger children shouldn’t have more privacy but that maybe older children should. Then he said that he wouldn’t have thought it would have bothered me. I said it does. To which he replied in an unsympathetic and flippant manner that when my friend came to look for me in the changing room I was dancing round naked showing off everything I’ve got as he put it. I denied this though it was true. But I didn’t do this because I was uninhibited – people could see me naked anyway and I guess I was just trying to take ownership of my own body because I felt like I was public property and that people could do whatever they liked with me. Another example of the attitudes like that displayed by my friend’s father is when I told my grandfather how it made me feel. He merely stated that children don’t mind doing it, not taking what I said about how I felt into account. He said that while some may be reluctant to strip the first couple of times, they soon get used to it. He then said that no-one else would have been focusing on me as they would have been concentrating on what they were doing and that the only way anyone would have taken any notice of me would be if I’d had two sets of private parts – he actually said something else but when I say he said “two sets of private parts” I’m actually toning down the language he used.

Even if other people were not taking any notice of me, it still bothered me because they could still see me naked and they could still see my male body. A lot of the problem also is that people seem to think you’re strange or even that there’s something wrong with a person if they feel this uncomfortable about letting others see them naked and I knew that if I refused to strip myself the teachers would have used force anyway. I previously experienced this a couple of times in infant school where pupils had to strip to their underwear for the duration of a PE session (a school for children aged 4 to 7 in the UK), once when a teacher physically removed the top half of my clothing by force and another time when another teacher started coming towards me as if she was going to do the same so I removed my top before she had a chance to do so. So I guess I felt that had I refused to strip the teachers would have used force and I would have had the added humiliation of everyone knowing my fears and them ridiculing me for them. But looking back I wish I had refused to undress in the presence of others because I feel that had I done so, even if they had used force and stripped me themselves I could at least have said I’d done all I could to stop them. Though I also feared personal attack by them as the teachers used to regularly hit me, kick me, pull my hair and were just generally violent which meant I never felt safe when they were around.

And at the time I thought I deserved everything I got because people used to say I did and that I was a bad child. I think what I really feared was going against authority. I had no respect for what they did and never understood why they did it but at the same time I was very afraid of what they would do to me if I refused to do as they said even if it was to defend myself. Basically, whatever the rights and wrongs are I felt at the time that even if they did expect me to expose my private parts to everyone in the room it didn’t matter because the point was they were giving the orders and if that’s what they told me to do that’s what I had to do. But I think whatever they did to me for refusing would have been worth it because of the psychological scars I have from having submitted to this. I feel like I was a coward for letting them do this to me.

But despite my feelings on how wrong I feel it was that I was forced to strip by my teachers, I do feel a lot of guilt for feeling this way and for making the allegations about my teachers that I did to my parents. I went through a lot of self-loathing and still don’t really like myself because whatever the ethics the teachers were only following procedure. It is still perfectly legal for a teacher to pressurise a child to undress in the situation I was in even if I do think it is unethical. I feel particularly guilty because had I thought I would be believed or I thought there would be no comeback on me I would have gone ahead with the allegation. Had I done this they could have got into serious trouble. Even when one takes into account that corporal punishment is now illegal in British schools it wasn’t in private schools at that time so whatever they did they weren’t breaking the law. The guilt I feel is compounded by the fact that given the same set of circumstances I would have probably made the same allegations I did at the time. Even then though, I actually wanted to tell the truth – that I felt violated by being forced to strip – but I knew that would not be taken seriously, which is what made me make the allegations of sexual abuse I did, including accusing them of things they hadn’t actually done. But I wanted to tell the truth because even if the allegations I actually made were believed, the teachers would have been punished for the wrong thing and the issue that I really did object to would never have been addressed.

I also feel a lot of shame about the way I feel because there is a stigma about feeling uncomfortable about being seen naked. I find whenever I’ve spoken on my fears people have often spoken to me as if there’s something wrong with me. Many people seem to think it is irrational to have an issue with being seen naked or that it means you are weak, especially in boys due to people thinking they should aspire to be macho, though I do think the stigma exists for girls as well. So I do sometimes feel I am irrational for feeling this way and that my feelings on the issue are abnormal and unnatural. I think children are expected just to fit in and obey orders even if it means stripping to their bareskin, exposing their most private parts to others and feeling violated as a result. They are supposed to ignore the fact they feel violated because they are first and foremost supposed to do as they are told without question. I often worry about what people will think of me for feeling the way I do and I particularly worry about how a future partner might think of me and whether or not he will understand.

My experiences of being forced to strip in front of others has severely entrenched the issues to do with my body that I already had. I feel the need to cover up from my neck down with the exception of my hands. This doesn’t bother me personally because even in the summer I can wear thin clothing so I don’t get too hot. But where it does impact on my life is that I am too scared to fly to India to see my relatives and also to pay my respects to some relatives who have died since I was last there fourteen years ago because there are now body scanners at airports. In the UK passengers are not allowed to opt out so if a passenger refuses to be scanned they are not allowed to fly. These scanners can see naked images of a person, including their genitals, which would mean they would be able to tell that I’m transgendered, though even if I wasn’t I would still see it as a violation. I do campaign against the issue and I have been admin of a facebook group that campaigns against the body scanners for two years and have also campaigned on my own facebook profile. A lot of people have been angered by my campaigning and some have posted abusive and transphobic language and accused me of putting air passengers’ safety at risk. The nudity issue aside, I do actually think there are more effective yet less invasive ways of ensuring airport security which is another debate but I do feel like I’m letting my family down because I don’t feel I can pass through an airport as long as they can force passengers through body scanners. I feel like submitting to be scanned so that someone can see a naked image of me would be like submitting to the teachers at school forcing me to strip all over again. I regret letting them do that to me more than I’ve regretted anything so I really don’t want to do the same thing again as I worry it will traumatise me in the same way what happened to me at school did and also that I will regret it in the same way. Since I was last in India some of my relatives have died. Had I felt I could fly I would have gone to see them before they died. The fact I didn’t feel I could is something I will have to live with for the rest of my life and I will probably always feel guilty about this. When body scanners became compulsory for selected passengers in 2010, all the old memories of being forced to strip at school came flooding back as I feel that I’m in exactly the same position as I was at school in that people have the right to see me naked, unless I don’t fly. I feel like I am reliving what happened to me at school because although I can avoid being forcibly stripped like I was at school, my sexual integrity comes at the price of me being ripped apart from my relatives and my not being able to pay my last respects to my deceased relatives. I am a very family minded person and we are a close-knit family so I see this separation as a very high price to pay. But I don’t even feel I’m making a choice, I just don’t feel submitting myself to something so similar to that which destroyed a big part of my life is even an option. I actually feel that I can’t go down that road again even if it means that my family is torn apart. But all I really want is to see my relatives I haven’t seen for fourteen years and to say goodbye to my loved ones who have died without the fear of being sexually violated. But I feel sometimes because society doesn’t understand or respect my need to keep my body private and never has, that that is too much to ask for.

I’m on a waiting list to be seen at a gender identity clinic that offers psychiatric services. I am hoping to discuss my body issues and how being forced to expose my male body to others has affected me and look at how to come to terms with it all. I’m hoping to learn to like myself more and learn to forgive myself for making the allegations against my teachers that I did. Rationally I do feel I did the best thing I could in a difficult situation but I still feel very guilty about it and that I’m just someone who goes round making allegations, which is not the sort of reputation I want.

I also plan to continue with my campaigning on the issue to get more privacy in school changing rooms and to raise awareness of the issue and the effects it can have on some people. I am of the belief that there should be laws against forcing children to strip in schools even if there are no private changing facilities available. Ideally I believe that changing rooms should be refitted so that children can change in private cubicles with a shower in the cubicle. Until or unless a school refits its changing rooms, pupils should be able to change in the toilets and PE lessons should be moved to the last lesson of the day, or at least later in the day so that pupils can go home and shower. But at the end of the day is the child’s body and no-one should have the right to violate it in this way except for when essential, (i.e. caregivers maintaining personal hygiene, medical examinations) and even then it should be done with sensitivity and consideration of the child’s feelings. Stripping in front of others to get changed for PE is not essential as there are alternatives. And for those like myself who have already been ­­subject to this regime, I think more people in the teaching profession should admit that it was wrong that people were and still are put through this r­­egime. There should also be more awareness of the issue to eradicate the stigma sufferers feel about seeking help with coming to terms with their experiences so that nobody has to suffer in silence.