Try to Hit the Pool 4

Part 4 My lived experience

ACT 2: Introduction

Before I dive into my personal story, there are a few things that I want to cover. The story I am going to tell is 10 years in 5,000 words or so. It is hardly in extreme depth. I wrote it via automatic writing due to the fact that thinking about and recounting it in depth is really quite unpleasant, and often results in me having PTSD fits. I did however write an entire book which covers the more fun aspects of my life chapter by chapter, in a kind of gonzo romp style, but spending 50,000 words or so talking about how hard I had it isn't something I want to do. Maybe one day I will put that book out. However, a book like that is more something for an ending, and my story’s only really getting started, I'm only 30.

This covers what I feel are the most important parts of my story. I want to talk to you more about recovery and share positive thoughts as well as use my platform to try and help young men. With that in mind here are some footnotes about my near-transition, and questions the following will not answer, but I'm sure some people will want to know.

I was not hurt by the “Trans cult”. I didn't suffer years of medicalization due to my mental state, I am not a detransitioner. I am a desister in that I wanted to do something and then didn't do it, which is the literal definition of the word. I was abused as a child which led to a sense of dysphoria, and an inability to really connect with my maleness. I had the feeling of dysphoria many times. But now I don’t think it was ever that - I think it was more of a sense of not wanting to be me, combined in some way with a form of DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder).

I want to make it very clear that I think the stories of people who did suffer for years at the hands of “medical professionals” need to be told. My goal is to serve as a lightning rod in a sense, and help make the conversation around it easier by, in the words of Douglas Murray, stepping on as many (cultural) landmines as possible.

The actual time I wanted to transition took place over a few months, maybe six, but the feeling of wanting to grew stronger over a year or maybe a bit more. This was combined with abuse from an external force. None of this changes the fact I was predisposed to it due to the factors of my abuse as a child. The sense of dysphoria I have experienced throughout my life in moments that passed but were key to my final near-transition and the near-suicide that pushed me towards the idea in finality.

My story isn't one of someone who was pushing for years to transition, got it, then regretted it. It is of someone who had a predisposition to it and nearly jumped off the cliff very fast. I think this can be of value to people in that there are a growing number who come this close and do jump, and if people are suffering other issues as I was, this can result in being pushed towards transitioning.

If I was born slightly later, maybe five years or so, I have zero doubt that I would have ended up transitioning - pushed there by social media and the “acceptance” of trans by the mainstream. I had these thoughts strongly at 16, but didn’t speak on them, as people were not as clear cut on the idea and we didn't have the mixed up social framework we do now. People may take this as I regret not speaking out, when I nearly transitioned later, I certainly thought so. However, now I am incredibly happy with the man I am today and if I had spoken out then I would be writing this book from a perspective of pure regret.

So this book is for the people like me, who are born into this generation and who are transitioning rather than coming to terms with who they are.

I will also add that I wrote a short piece on my story on the site Medium but I left out a lot of details because I was going through legal issues with a divorce at the time. When I say I didn't choose to go public at that time I mean it. So while it contains some of the information, it shouldn't be taken as in depth, as I was while being completely honest and open also trying to avoid any chance of losing my stuff in a possible legal battle based on what I might write. As you will find out later I don’t know if that is so much of an issue anymore, so this is the full chain of events as best as I can recall them. While also using messages I sent to people to cross check the order.

Even with all of that due to the nature of how much was happening at the same time, it’s very hard to be sure of the exact order of things, but this is what I do know. Anywhere events are cloudy or perhaps slightly ordered wrong I have made a note, the key elements are in order.

With that out of the way, let's dive into my least favourite part of this book.

Chapter 4: My lived experience

I really don't want to write this chapter. Reliving this is something I don't want to do at all. But in order to complete this story and understand what has driven me to create this book and talk about this in public, it is necessary. Even now, I find myself skipping back through the later chapters, looking for other things to edit.

Here goes.

As a kid, I was abused sexually in a way that stole something from me—something that can never be returned. For this act done to me, I feel a kind of dull pain, one I feel right now as I write this. What was done to me was carried out by someone who was meant to be trusted—an older person who, in this scenario, was a caretaker. The person who did it is a nobody, an uninteresting person, no one of note. So if you are expecting, as many might, for this book to be an exposé of someone famous, well, it’s not.

This act made me hate my maleness. This is something that many trans people report—that they feel as if they are bad for their anatomy. To be clear, this wasn’t so much a hatred of maleness in concept as it was a hatred of my anatomy. One very early memory was me thinking about removing my male appendage in the bathtub just after the event. I didn’t want to be like the person that hurt me. And due to this, I would experience what people call dysphoria throughout my whole adult life.

In times of stress or when remembering this, I would have two symptoms. One was the feeling of not wanting to be me. Later, this would develop into: "I don’t want to be male; I want to be female." But only after learning about the concept of what "trans" is—before that, I simply didn’t want to be me. I remember at the age of 16 or 17 thinking that I should do this soon, or it might be too late—a feeling, coincidentally, that would return at the age of 28 when I once again felt this urge.

The other symptom was what I can only describe as a "mind storm," something that caused me to buckle into a foetal ball in extreme mental pain. This kind of pain was far greater than any physical one, so in these times, I would resort to burning myself with cigarettes to alleviate it—something I still bear the scars of on my hands.

I still get mind storms. Right now, my hands are beginning to shake as I begin to write what comes next.

I always had great difficulty connecting with women my own age. This might be, in part, due to my maturity or some undiagnosed issues with my mother, as a Freudian might assert. But with older women, it was different. My first real girlfriend was in her 30s when I was 16. She was, thankfully, a good person.

This cannot be said of the relationship I entered at the age of 19.

To give some backdrop, at this time in my life, I was dejected—cast out of my social group due to one bad night out where I drank far too much and acted like an ass. Still, this erased years of good times in their minds, and they felt the need to cut me off completely.

I moved into a place in East London with a few friends from the countryside—people I still consider some of my oldest friends, though they would most likely not want to speak to me now due to perceived transphobia.

For a time, while working at local bars, I was somewhat happy—poor but free. Then I met her, the person who would make the next ten years of my life a living hell.

I was young and incredibly stupid, but when I met her, I fell in love. We met through a mutual friend—a gay friend who I thought was just meeting up with me to teach me about social media. In reality, he thought we were going on dates. I have a habit of attracting very large African men. I don’t know what it is about me, but this seems to be the type of homosexual man who finds me appealing. This man was that type—Caribbean in origin, but the statement still stands.

He invited me to a party at his house, and that’s where I met my future wife.

At 19, confused and lacking any social camaraderie due to my own actions, I craved connection. That first night, she performed oral sex on me. To many, this would have been a red flag. But to me, it was human connection—something I so desperately needed.

Months passed in a haze of crazy sexual experiences—things I had never even considered before, most of them involving pain, an aspect of human sexuality I had not explored until that point.

One night, something happened that, in hindsight, should have been a massive red flag. I went out with my roommates, and on the way to our destination, she texted me, asking where I was and to send pictures.

"You meeting other girls?" she asked.

I wasn’t. I was standing outside Sainsbury’s at the time.

I tried to have fun that night, but her comment sucked the enjoyment from me. I spent the whole evening thinking about her instead of enjoying a night out with my friends at 19—an age where I should have been carefree.

Before long, I moved in with her.

At the start of the relationship, I remember multiple times stating, “You’re treating me like shit,” and she would stop for a while. I left in tears a few times and always came back after a phone call.

I bought her a dog because she had never had a partner do that before.

At the beginning, she would go out of her way to test boundaries—to see what she could say and do without me getting angry. It turned out I was willing to be treated like a doormat. I didn’t have a concept of my own value.

So naturally I married her.

Later, we moved into a house in Waterloo. The years would fly by—years of torment.

Early on, there was a night when she had taken a large amount of coke—the drug, not the drink—and became convinced she saw birds behind a coat hanger. I spent the entire evening walking between the bed and the coat hanger, showing her there were no birds.

Later, in the Waterloo flat, this became the norm—locking herself in the bathroom due to invisible intruders. I remind you, I was only in my early twenties at this point, with no real way to understand what I was going through.

She blamed Pro Plus, the caffeine pills you can buy at any UK supermarket. It was, of course, not that—but coke.

On one particularly bad night, she called the police. I had to spend time on the phone convincing them that no, it wasn’t an intruder—my wife was simply having a psychotic episode.

For five very long years, we lived together in that flat. Her episodes became an almost nightly occurrence. But when I brought it up the next morning, she would gaslight me, insisting she didn’t remember the events of the previous night.

Somehow, through all of this, I maintained both a bar job and a promotions job at some of London’s most exclusive clubs. I was looking after myself and, unknowingly, funding her habit. She would frequently go out to the Chiltern Firehouse—a place I now recognize as a hotspot for classless cokeheads. Seriously, anyone who thinks that place is cool is an irredeemable pig.

For some reason—probably because she was my wife—I decided to share with her the details of my abuse during one of the mind storms I mentioned earlier. This was a catastrophic mistake.

Far be it from me to share something intimate with my own wife.

She used this knowledge as a weapon, beating me over the head with it whenever she wanted to alienate me from the people I loved or make me feel dirty. She exploited it at every opportunity.

This resulted in more than a few mental breakdowns for me.

The breaking point came in 2019—another night, another freakout. At the same time, I was hosting an art show at a 2,600 sq. ft. venue in the Oxo Tower, Waterloo. Meanwhile, the woman was at home, taking coke and spiralling. I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped.

I broke a lot of plates, throwing them around the living room. In the chaos, I ended up destroying a £3,000 TV—one that had been bought by my company. The next morning, in a desperate attempt to fix things, I had a thought: “Let’s go to Japan for a couple of months to detox her.”

Why Japan? Because it’s next to impossible to get coke there. (Again, not the drink—that’s everywhere. Is that joke getting old yet?)

So, off to Japan we went. I booked two months in an Airbnb. Then, COVID hit. The world shut down, and the only logical thing was to stay put.

Over time, the woman told her parents she was in Japan—a fact she had hidden from them for a while. When they found out, they insisted we move into a house they just had lying around. As you do.

The issue wasn’t getting a free place to live—that was great. The issue was that, as someone who had just moved to this country, I was now responsible for the bills on a two-story, two-bedroom house in Kawasaki—far more than I could afford. But these people were absurdly rich; they had no concept of financial struggle. Of course, all the responsibility fell to me—someone who barely spoke the language.

Somehow, largely thanks to my work in crypto, I managed to pull it off. For a time.

But with coke out of reach, alcohol took its place.

I had multiple mental breakdowns and was eventually referred to a Japanese psychologist.

Mental healthcare in Japan goes a little like this:

“Oh, you are sad? That’s okay—as long as you can do your job.”

That’s not even an exaggeration. At one point, the psychiatrist literally told me:

“Do you cut yourself? It is okay if you do—as long as you can still work.”

As I write this, I’m still blown away. Pure insanity.

Before long, I was on 30mg of Valium a day and 15mg of Ambien. Side note: Ambien is great. Just the best.

Two years in, I was fat. And for me, that was bad—I’d never been able to gain weight before. The weight gain made me deeply depressed. Somehow, between constant trips to the local pharmacy for her stool-loosening pills (which she was also addicted to) and my own routine visits for more Valium, I got fat.

At the start of my time in Japan, the woman would go to her father’s house to work. Those days were some of the best days of my life.

Totally alone in Japan, but finally at peace.

I could walk around, explore, and enjoy the culture.

To break from the intensity of this chapter: I love Japan. It’s my favourite place in the world. The friends I made there, the artists I met, the small family-owned shops I visited—these are some of my fondest memories.

Those days of complete solitude were magical. I’d walk to a local place, eat something amazing, then return to an empty house. Truly blissful. The chaos of my everyday life was broken up by delicious convenience store egg sandwiches and a beer, enjoyed on a hill while looking at the majesty of Mount Fuji in the distance.

Truly breath-taking.

And in a way, those moments made the constant belittling and insults worth enduring.

I love Japan and its people. I don’t want this book to be used as a reflection of them—it’s not. The woman may have been Japanese in blood, but not in thought or action.

After some time, the woman stopped leaving the house altogether. The days of beautiful solitude were gone. All I knew was constant stress.

Around this time I had already attempted to kill myself. I spent the day of the attempt in the house. I had already written a suicide note, one I still have saved on my phone to this day. In it I expressed how I was dejected with life, feeling there was no real place to go from here. My end was, as I put it, because there was nothing left to do or be, just oblivion, ending it with a note about how the woman was not a very nice person and I couldn't go on with the way things were. After the completion of the note I looked around for places to hang myself from. I had considered other ways. If I was in the USA with access to guns I probably would have just done it, but that's messy. Jumping is messy. Hanging is, in a weird way, one of the more peaceful choices. I had considered traveling to the suicide forest in Japan. No, too contrived. Keep it simple, I thought. Do it in the house, get it over with.

So, belt in hand, I started looking for a place to hang it from. Stair banisters, no, they felt as if they would give way, then I would have to deal with the breakage. Cupboard hangers, same issue, too easy to break, simply could not support my weight. Finally I found it; our bathtub was rather large and had a kind of disabled railing on it. Perfect, well, kind of. It wasn't vertical, so, nude in the bathtub, I leaned forward, belt around my neck, and slowly I felt the airflow slow, then stop. A few moments in, the angle of the tube and my weight pushing down on my throat, a few moments, stop breathing, not many thoughts now, soon it will be over. But then, stop. No, this isn't the right way. There is no way. I pulled the belt off from my neck and gasped a breath of air.

Too much of an undignified way to be found nude in the bathtub. But then this thought of wanting to end myself would later change to one of transition, as the me that was couldn't exist anymore. I truly believe that the man that had ceased to exist in that moment. Even now the person I am today is not the same one. I feel that belt on my neck sometimes. Hell, I still own it, a little light blue number, designer. I mean, I could hardly hang myself with something cheap, now could I? From the moment I took that belt off I was someone new and this someone was on a mission to transition. On a positive thought, now I know that in any situation I am the most dangerous thing in a room with me.

Now I feel no real fear of anything, whereas before this I had been afraid of some conflict. I feel no more fear in this regard ever. I also need to add the standard preachy thing of never kill yourself. No matter what, it isn't the option you should take. I speak about this with a kind of dark humour, as to me it helps relive it without it being too painful. But it is, like I said, I still feel that belt on my neck sometimes, a kind of ghost of it. I can relive that despair I was in, kind of at will, and it's a pit of despair, feeling there is no real way out other than the exit. It's no small thing to say, no small thing to do, but hell, if you can't laugh at yourself…

The whole event made me also kind of a believer in the quantum immortality theory too. This is the idea that you can't actually die in the short term. If you try and kill yourself you can't experience that, so you just move into a reality where you are still alive. You're dead in the reality you came from, but you can't experience that, so you just move to one where the attempt failed. This means, in effect, you can't kill yourself, so there is no point in even trying. This, even this near ending of myself, I think, as well, is what makes me explore this whole issue with compassion. I know what it feels like to be at that point and I don't want ANYONE to feel like that, regardless of who they are.

I did try to speak to the woman about this event before I brought up any reference to the idea of transitioning.

Her response?

“How dare you do that? I would have had to find you like that.”

“You’re not paying the bills.”

“You’re not a real man.”

These were constant refrains.

I remind you, reader, that I was still in a country where I barely spoke the language. The fact that I had any money at all was a testament to the force of nature that I am.

At this point, I started exercising—two hours a day. One hour of running, one hour of general aerobics. I lost two stone in two months.

Then, one day, after being physically attacked—having my hair pulled, being slapped around—I lost it. I spent an entire day unmoving in bed.

She knowingly commented, “I’ve broken my husband.”

Then the questions started pouring in while I lay there in the foetal position:

“Are you gay?”

“Are you trans?”

For many people who have been hurt by men transitioning in their lives - trans widows - I feel sympathy for. I feel many of those stories echo the abuse I was under, not of the trans people, of the widows. And I know it can be hard to see this for many that have been hurt. So you might be asking how the woman felt about my transition.

She was supportive, even going so far as to do my makeup before I had even thought about such things, suggesting it herself at some point during this whole process. She asked me to sign a contract that stated I would basically have to pay her a percent of my earnings for the rest of my life, and in the later chapters you’ll see that it is clear she was already planning to marry someone else at this point, or perhaps before.

Below is that contract I spoke about.

This was after a night when she had spat out:
“Why don’t you go suck [insert my abuser’s name]’s dick?”

A direct reference to my childhood abuse.

She then locked herself in the bathroom with a knife, threatening to kill herself.

Of course, it was all deflection.

Going back to the night with the knife, was around the time I had managed to put together an art show. I was already deciding to transition.

If this chapter is hard to follow, good. So was my life.

But I will try and sum up the events that lead up to my near transition in a more coherent fashion in the below part.

I had been for a whole year prepping myself in some way to transition, growing my hair out, obsessively removing body hair. I started doing it with one of those laser machines, the handheld ones. I began obsessive exercising in a way that would grow the more female areas of my body to make a better shape to start as a base for HRT. I quit smoking, as I had read that it would impact the HRT in some way, no small task for someone with a 20-a-day habit.

In the summer of that year I would return to the UK for a short time to see my family. I made no mention of my plans or what I had been thinking about doing. This was long before, in terms of how many things happened, I would be prescribed HRT, but in reality I think it was only around 6 months.

For a few months close to the end of the chain of events I would start wearing a body-shaping corset and slowly organizing my wardrobe for the eventual event, still wearing jeans and shirts but in a more feminine way. I started painting my nails and going out in public with it. Some people asked and I would tell them that I was going to transition. Some of these events happened before I went to the gender clinic and some after. I'm sorry to say that the whole time was such a blur it's hard to place exact events at exact times.

I do know, however , that the following event happened soon after I returned to Japan. My suicide attempt, I felt shame at the want to transition at the time that I thought, along with the ongoing abuse that I had yet to understand for what it was, it was the only way out. In hindsight though, I believe that the abuse was more of a factor of what drove me there. The use of my childhood abuse as a weapon in arguments, sent me into PTSD fits before I even knew what they were, mind storms where I fell into foetal balls for hours at a time.

I think I mostly came out as trans in an exact way before I went to the gender clinic, but with the events being around survival and the ongoing abuse it is hard to say. Also, it only being a few months, it all happened extremely fast.

The main events of this happened over a few months with the night of the knife being pretty close to the end. I told friends I had all over the world that I was planning to transition via text and some on a call. They were supportive, albeit a bit confused. One responded, "What? You're the manliest guy I know." I came out to people in Japan too. The woman was very against me telling anyone and exerted more control over me by checking my phone when I did speak to people, trying to cut me off from any support network I may have had.

I mostly came out to the homosexual men I knew, as to me I thought they would be more understanding. One who is one of the people I've known for the longest, someone I went through a kind of coming-of-age saga with while modelling in Japan, was the first I came out to. I chose him because one night in Tokyo when I was 17 he told me he thought he was gay. It felt to me that in some way, as he had shared this with me, he should be the first person to know about my wish to become a girl. I was very selective with the people I told and business partners and people I thought that wouldn't be supportive I omitted it from. These people I only had to speak to via phone calls anyway, so they wouldn't see how I was presenting until I had started HRT. I only told my family about a week or so before I ended up escaping back to the UK, but that is a story for the next chapter.

A lot of my female dress actually took place online, via the use of AI filters, and I got a lot of attention around it. I would change my profile picture to that of me gender-swapped and be in character presenting in the digital world as female. As time went on I found myself wanting to look like the gender-swapped me more and more, and spend more time as her. This would lead me to using a lot of AI on myself to transform into a digital female, any excuse to throw on the digital drag. I have, in the online version of this, included a video below where I did this for a FOMA magazine advert. If you are reading this in a book then the below description should suffice.

From a technical perspective this video is impressive. Several custom codes to take each frame and gender-swap me, a voice changer, and a code to move the mouth in a way that changes no matter what it is made to say. If you look at FOMA ISSUE 6, the worst one by far, I actually created most of it while I was believing I was going to transition. It serves as a relic of that time.

I went out a few times in almost all female dress. There is a photo of me at a party in Japan where I was wearing my more feminine get-up, sitting on a friend that I had worked with on an art show. I obviously can't include it here in print, but if you go to the online version of this you can see it. I hardly recognize myself, still unmistakably male, but all traces of maleness in the sense of presentation seem gone. My body even seems to be in a different shape. It is a photo of someone right on the edge of a life-altering decision.

One day after the night at the club, I headed to Nagoya, to a gender clinic.

After a 10-minute consultation and a few questions—one of them being, “What was the colour of your school bag?”—I was diagnosed and given HRT.

For the low price of 30,000 yen.

Amazingly, this happened before any hormone tests were completed. I never even got those results, though I did pay for them.

Damn. Scammed again.

On the Shinkansen (bullet train) back, I started Googling:

Signs you are in an abusive relationship.

Go bag? Check.

I had been keeping a bag in a cupboard with my passport and a few cards, since she would regularly hide mine after kicking me out.

Physical violence? Check.

Gaslighting? Check.

That’s when I decided—I had to leave.

With eyeliner on and gel nails, I gave up my seat for an elderly Japanese woman.

She looked at me with a knowing expression. A look that said she understood my pain.

The next few days, I was opening an art show.

Did I mention I was curating an art show during all of this?

And trying to start a business?

Because I was.

Then, the morning after the show opened, I packed my PC—the very one I’m using to write this right now. The one she had threatened to throw out the window on so many drunken nights.

I loaded it into a bag, put on my now-lucky suit, and packed up my makeup and dresses.

My mother—God bless her—had sent me money to buy a ticket back to the UK the night before.

I left the house, dodging the three Pomeranians.

(Did I mention we had three? I guess not. But we did. All pedigrees. All paid for by me.)

I headed to the gallery, grabbed the few possessions I had stored there, then jumped into a taxi to Haneda Airport.

Side note: while most Japanese people are honest, airport taxi drivers will scam you. My last 10,000 yen went to one of them.

At the terminal, I went straight to JAL. They told me to book through an app. I was too out of it to do that.

I said, “Get me a ticket to the UK.”

After some time, they dusted off an old PC, processed my request, and handed me a ticket.

£2,500.

Exactly what my mother had sent me.

My phone was off—only turned on to call my sister, who was there for me the entire time.

I kept it off for fear that if the woman called, my weakness would break through, and I’d go back.

I had access to the airport lounge, but in true Japanese style, only from 10 p.m. onwards. I arrived at 9:56. Of course, I had to wait four minutes before they would let me in.

When I finally entered, I turned on my phone.

Messages flooded in—people asking where I was, people who had no right to know what was going on.

But one message stood out.

A hero to me. A brother—not by blood, but in spirit.

And without him, I’m not sure I would be here now.

Robness.

I had worked with him on my art magazine, FOMA. The woman had been frantically messaging people, trying to track me down, and he was one of them.

His response was simple:

"Who is this crazy woman?"

Having never interacted with her before, he saw through it immediately.

Who was this crazy woman?

Soon after, I boarded my flight.

And just like that, I was home.

My mother, my sister, and Robness saved my life that day.

But Robness would go on to do even more. He was there—in a meaningful way. Ready to joke, ready to take the piss.

A couple months later, he messaged me:

"Are you a woman now or what?"

Attached was a laughing Pepe the Frog gif—Pepe being a meme deeply ingrained in the crypto community.

But beneath the joke was something real.

He was there.

A true brother.

I owe him more than he could ever possibly know.

And I dedicate this chapter to him.

Thank you, Rob. You saved my life.

Returning to the UK

When I got back to the UK, I still fully planned to transition. But slowly, over time—and thanks to meeting a few very important people—the idea left me.

I had escaped a situation where I simply couldn’t exist as a man.

And with time, my mind, body, and soul returned to me.

Of course, it helped that, as the saying goes, I found "the love of a good woman."

My now-girlfriend and partner in life, Lucy, helped me see things clearly.

She helped me understand that what I was doing was madness. She laughed at the idea that I would grow breasts and become infertile, and that laughter—her sheer disbelief—helped me step outside of myself.

It made me see just how ridiculous the situation had been.

I really didn’t enjoy writing any of that.

But if there’s anything to be gained from it, it’s this:

The situation I was in—having my manhood challenged every single day, having no outlet, no solitude, no time to think—being constantly pushed, constantly asked, "Why aren’t you man enough?"

That was just a micro version of what a lot of men are experiencing in the wider world.

My environment was a microcosm.

No matter how much I achieved, it wasn’t good enough.

It was always rejected.

Always torn down.

Never enough.

The only logical thing left to do was to become someone else entirely—to leave my manhood behind.

One night, the woman was raging at me again, attacking my masculinity.

By that point, I had already chosen to transition.

And I responded:

“You’re right. I’m not a man. I don’t have to adhere to your heteronormative values anymore."

And you know what?

It was freeing.

That freedom I felt in that moment?

It’s probably the same freedom that many young men feel when they choose to transition.

In this chapter a lot has been left out and that’s an understatement. It is ten years of my life. Even the lead up to the year where I nearly crossed over as they say is missing details. It was Covid for example, I was running a company, I was hosting art shows, I was meeting with titans of Japanese IP ShoPro, who hold a lot of the Pokémon IP. This chapter could be a short book just on its own. I’m sure there are people who will want to pick apart my story looking for any discrepancies. I experienced that first hand when I started my publicly talking. Simply put, it was chaos. Keeping track of it is hard, even harder that I was removed from access to my old email by the woman. Maybe one day I will write more on it but I think for now this includes all the key details, I also don't really want to create a trauma porn book, I want this to be a hopeful story.

The next few chapters cover the events of my return and my experience of being thrown into the media, theories on trans and finally, how I think we can help young men dealing with these issues.