The wrong trousers

David Thomas’s transgender diary

I’ve spent my life as the very epitome of privilege: white, male, straight and privately educated. Now I’m seeing life from a new perspective. And I’m getting a crash course on what it’s like to be part of a controversial, even hated minority.

Rewind to 11am, Christmas Day: I’m on the phone, howling like a deer in a poacher’s trap, ‘I’m not a bad person, am I?’

‘No, of course you’re not,’ my sister Harriet replies, firmly.

But I don’t believe her, so I pack up the food that I’ve spent days preparing and that everyone’s expecting to eat at my flat. I take it down to my dad’s house, where Harriet and my two nieces are staying, hand it over and say, ‘Sorry, but I just can’t face anyone today.’

Then Harriet, meaning well, calls me by my female name and the absurdity, the sheer implausibility of it hits me like a live electric cable and I race away. In the rear-view mirror I can see my poor father, standing helplessly in his front garden, wanting to wish me ‘Merry Christmas’, but I can’t bear to hear it.

So what was the problem? Partly these were just the regular blues of a divorced dad alone at Christmas. But most dads aren’t in the process of changing sex, and suddenly that process seemed to be crashing off the rails.

People had said kind things about my remodelled face, but it still looked swollen, stubbled, grotesque to me.

My impetuous confidence that I could start ‘living in role’ as a woman had collapsed faster than a failed soufflé. But maybe that entire plan was nothing but a pathetic fantasy. In the week before Christmas, I’d been reading about Maya Forstater, a woman fired for posting tweets that insisted no one born a man could ever become a woman. When an employment tribunal judge upheld her employer’s decision, Forstater was declared a martyr for free speech. Even JK Rowling came out in her support, tweeting, ‘Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like… But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?’ Actually, it was a judge who did that. Still, I get why people presume that the division between the sexes is black and white, even if I, and the latest scientific research, might suggest that there are actually shades of grey in-between.

But this isn’t just an intellectual debate for me, nor another hand grenade in the toxic gender war being fought by extremists on either side. This is totally, deeply, terrifyingly personal.

I have staked everything I have and years of my life in the hope that gender transition will enable me to live a life that is true. To be told that I will never be accepted and must forever bear my male birth like a mark of Cain upon my soul – and for this to be regarded as a truth that decent people should defend – feels to me like a hateful rejection.

It’s as if transpeople don’t even truly exist. We’re just self-delusions.

That’s why a story that was barely a blip on most people’s radar was enough to tip me into a swamp of shame and self-loathing. Because it’s constant, this drip-feed of transphobic comment, and it’s absolutely horrible to be on the receiving end of it.

‘The tyranny of the trans minority has got to be stopped,’ I read, and wonder how a tiny fraction of the population, suffering sky-high rates of poverty, harassment and suicide, can tyrannise anyone. And yet, apparently, we do. One day transpeople ‘have a stranglehold on much of our culture and legislation’. The next we ‘threaten the whole of society’, and ‘women’s rights are being eliminated’.

These fearful visions of wicked conspiracies are absurd. Just imagine the offence that would be caused if those same statements were made with the words ‘black’, ‘gay’ or ‘Muslim’ instead of trans. Well, that’s how hurtful they are to people like me. And why would we even want to threaten the rights of the sex we’re trying to join?

The real truth about us is that we inhabit a world of extreme vulnerability, fear and fundamental uncertainty. Even as our very identity is being challenged, there’s a nagging, self-betraying voice in our heads asking: ‘What if they are right?’

That’s when I look in the mirror and think, ‘Who am I kidding? I’ll never be anything but a freak.’ And the next thing I know, I’m calling up Harriet and howling down the phone.

Even as our very identity is being challenged, there’s a nagging, self-betraying voice in our heads asking: ‘What if they are right?’