IAM

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

Perhaps the worst thing I suffered when I was young was that I felt so completely alone. I was born in the 1950s and nothing then was ever written or said about being trans. There were no words to describe me and nothing to help me understand who I was. The few representations of people like me that I came across in plays or films or books showed me I was grotesque and ridiculous. Profoundly sick and often downright evil. I felt so horribly ashamed of who I was that I really believed that if anyone found out about me I would die. For in those places and times when the world around us hates and fears us for being trans and we are made to feel horribly isolated and alone, it does something worse to us as well. We internalise the hatred and prejudice that surround us and part of us believes it is true.

The one thing that saved me was that something within me drove me to become a writer. Creativity saved my life. And even though I’m successful now, and living and working openly as a woman in ways I could never have hoped or imagined, creativity is still central to my life.

In 2008, James Morton and the Scottish Transgender Alliance helped me run a writers’ group for trans people, meeting every week to tell each other our stories and craft them into pieces of writing we could share with the world. The experience affected all of us very deeply. I’ll never forget the day I was sent a poem from one of the participants who told me she had been on the point of self-harm when she stopped herself and wrote the poem instead.

That made it so beautiful on so many levels. There is something so powerful about telling one’s own story, and hearing the stories of others who share our experience. Discovering the capacity to tell one’s own story means learning to value it. And valuing our stories helps us learn to value ourselves.