When I think about my feeling of wanting to be trans I find it hard to link to a sexual element. I really feel that I didn't want to be me and changing gender in this way was a way of doing that, a way of starting again, a way of escaping my problems.
I am bisexual, when I was younger I was kind of ashamed of it. I think I repressed a lot of my homosexual tendencies. I did have a few times with men but they were always trying to be more dominant with me and I didn't like that at all. It put me off pursuing anything of that nature. After coming out as trans, not going through with it, well there isn't really much to be ashamed of, when speaking about this stuff publicly.
When I got involved with the woman I was only 19. I'm English so I actually had quite a lot of experience with sex already. For Americans reading, we tend to start a lot earlier than you guys. A lot of the things that I was introduced to by her I'm not even sure I fully enjoyed them. But to say I wasn't up for it at the time would also not be fair. I was and I did enjoy some of the experiences to some degree. I think much of the other stuff around it was, to put it simply, far further than I would have liked to have gone in any respect and certainly the leakage of it outside of what was the bedroom was far too far.
To also jump back to what I stated in the last chapter about being unable to connect with my manhood, I mean that I found the fact I found maleness and masculinity in myself and others attractive a source of shame due to the fact it reminded me of the person that hurt me. As I've grown older though and come to terms with this I no longer find these things shameful. I also need to say that while I had these thoughts I was hardly walking around thinking them all the time. I talk about external stuff because I have and always have had a lot of stuff on the outside happening. When I wanted to be trans when I was younger, before I knew what trans was it wasn't related to gender at all. It was a bit, but I didn't want to be female, I just didn't want to be male.
Then when I was 16 or so and I found out what trans was I wanted to be that for a time due to the fact it was another option. I can't state this enough but I'm not sure how related directly to sex any of it has ever been for me, sex isn’t a thing I think about a whole lot or ever have other than when I was a teenager. I think it is related to my abuse and a repression of the fact that I am a bit more gay than I would have liked to admit in the past. Along with when I was older a lack of options of what I could be or do as a man, a lack of control over my own life.
I'm not a person that feels an extreme pull to carry out sexual acts in the way a lot of people describe. I have a very high libido but it's well controlled. I almost feel like my preferences are formed a bit by the person I'm with in a sense and without the element of another I'm kind of a blank slate. This could be in part related to my childhood abuse, I don't know for sure. However, I've heard stories of others who have been abused saying it basically makes them a blank slate and hypersexual at the same time, but this is the honest truth;
To me I am bi and it's kind of as simple as that.
After I first got back to the UK I was still on a mission to transition. A few weeks in I went out with my sister and mother to buy clothes as I really didn't have any other than a few shirts and the suit I had worn back along with a couple of dresses. I picked all female clothing preparing for my soon-to-be new life as a girl. During this time I was in a kind of strange state of euphoria at the thought of all the things I would be moving towards as a girl and the new aspects of life that I would have to explore: clothing, makeup, heels, and gel nails, which is a skill I got fairly good at (the main excitement about these things for me was the aspect of learning new skills, new distractions).
I have to add a note here that while I was also learning about these things I was too working creating an issue of my magazine and doing meetings with business partners. I speak alot about the parts of internal thought in this chapter as that is what it is about. It is important to add I was still very much aware that trans or not I had to get stuff done. For me I love to learn new things I get obsessed by it be it a new coding language or about a subject I find interesting. Alot of the things around becoming trans are learning new things. The gaining of new skills is something I have a kind of addiction to. For me, learning gel nails or makeup wasn’t all that different to learning to use in-design or photoshop, it was just a new skill I had yet to master.
I had a box of makeup which I would practice with along with doing my nails and I was slowly getting better at it. I met with a few friends and told them I would soon be transitioning. I was very much on my way. Along with this I attempted to set up an appointment with the doctor to speak about getting more HRT, which thankfully never materialized.
A few weeks would pass and I would message my now-partner Lucy. In an exchange of Instagram voice chats I told her I was planning to transition. After a few back and forths she said hold on I need to call you. We spoke for a bit on the phone and made arrangements to meet the following week. This was when the first bits of doubt sprung up in my mind. Along with my plans to transition had actually come a fairly healthy lifestyle. I didn't really drink much nor smoke but as the feeling of wanting to be trans started to fade these habits came back. Towards the night Lucy came over everything changed. We spoke for a while about my plans and she mirrored what I was saying back to me.
“What will happen when you start HRT?”
“Well within a few months, I'll start to grow breasts, my fat will redistribute and I'll become infertile.”
She started repeating my points back to me and I started laughing. In those moments the feeling of certainty about transition left completely and I was again thrown into a mindset of not really knowing who or what I was. That night after this I would for the first time in a very long time feel what it meant to be a man again. Without going into grotesque detail, in my marriage I was always made to be in the submissive role. I'm not sure, as I was in it for so long, that I really wanted that. I felt a rush of what being a man was on mine and Lucy's first night together, a feeling I had lost, a feeling of dominance and aggression, one I had not felt since before I was married, one that used to give me a level of shame but now that feeling of shame was gone. It changed me a lot and from there onwards, while still not sure of exactly what I wanted to do next. The seeds of change had been planted and I felt the joy of being male, for the first time in a very long while and maybe the first time I had felt it without any shame ever.
If I had to sum up what really pulled me out of the wanting-to-transition mindset it was enjoying my masculinity and being free to do so in a way that had been repressed. Both in a sexual way but also in a day-to-day way of making choices, in my life traveling, going places, making my own decisions in life. That and laughing at myself about what I was thinking about doing, which on its own made it impossible to carry on with anything towards transitioning as it had become extremely funny to me now. The idea that young men are choosing to transition before even understanding what being a man is and having the freedom to experience the world and truly make your own decisions is, to me, insane.
Being a man is about being free to a degree, having the freedom to control your own path and choosing for yourself, something that was stripped from me entirely for a very long time. I was left with no outlet, nowhere to go, and those feelings I had, had in my childhood I feel may have also come about in times of very little control. You see both then and when I would think about transitioning later I was in a place where I couldn't change anything about my life or myself, but I could change this one thing, my gender.
Weeks would pass and the idea of transitioning slowly left from this point. While I was with Lucy I was OK. She did and does ground me, with the loss of that euphoria I had gained, the underlying mental health issues started to rise up.
I would spend entire days in bed. One little thing could set me off and I would fall into a PTSD fit that would last an entire day. I was useless. I drank to excess, anything to stop feeling. Even when sober I would end up going places and not really know how I got there. I would be for a very large portion of time completely dissociated. The feeling of dissociation got worse and worse until I was some days quite literally having conversations with myself in my own mind, sometimes audibly as in speaking out loud to myself. I think the stress of what was going on and the situation I had escaped from quite literally broke my mind in two. There were times I had incredible in-depth conversations with what at the time was a voice inside my head which I termed the female me. This wasn't in the schizophrenic way in which the voice is totally out of your control. Both voices were me and I could control them both but they did argue a lot. If I drank it would shut this constant dual internal monologue up. So I drank a lot. Some days it felt like I was one person, the next a different one. At the peak of this it started to border on what one would call schizophrenic, almost seeing the other me but never quite, more like a memory overlay. I think this is what is referred to as a complete mental breakdown.
Throughout all this the days with Lucy kept me sane and gave me some base for reality, I was fast losing my grip. During this time I saw a therapist and was diagnosed with PTSD and DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder).
I did for a good few months have two distinct people living inside my head. At its worst I gave one a name. After some time and when my sanity had reached a level of about 1% I made the decision that in order for this to end I had to stop naming it. Due to the fact that in reality I could control both thought processes I could stop the constant conversations.
So with that in mind or minds I worked towards a kind of unification of myself from these two forms of me down to just the one me. This whole process was slow and I don't know what would have happened if Lucy wasn't there but in time these two voices came back to being one. I still am left with the kind of remnants of this in that I can process with two internal monologues now and in some way I think I always have done. However, the idea of them fighting it out in my head was slowly gone. Thank God this was temporary. I don't know exactly what happened to me during this time and I don't want to over-sensationalize it. But this was the experience I had. I feel I narrowly escaped complete madness. It's hard to exactly recall as it was, as I said, complete and utter dissociation - like being in Alice in Wonderland.
Towards the summer this kind of dissociation slowly went away but the PTSD fits stayed and still do to this day. I am lucky in a sense that my fits don't often come out as external rage. They normally just take the form of mind storms that cripple me into a foetal ball. Another big part of my recovery was traveling to France where for the first time I would in person meet Robness from the last chapter. It's amazing that you can have a friend who you've never met in real life mean so much to you.
Traveling solo just after something like this and still mentally ill is probably not the best idea, but I've been traveling like this since I was 16. I'm used to it. If anything, moving around helped me not think about the internal hell that, while mostly passed, was still a small part of my day-to-day life. When I was moving around I was OK. Seeing new things, seeing new people, I became myself again. During this trip I met some amazing people. All of these small things added up to save my sanity bit by bit. If I stayed a little drunk my grip on reality was actually better. During this time when I was sober the madness would start so it was simple: never stop drinking. I hold my liquor quite well and have the gift or curse that no matter how drunk I get I don't slur my words, so it mostly goes unnoticed by those around me.
After my trip to Paris I returned to the UK. Later in the year myself and Lucy would travel to Italy together where I gave a talk on my magazine FOMA. This was all in 2023, long before I was in the media about my issue at all. Seeing the world, meeting Lucy, and meeting people out there, realizing there was and is a life outside of myself and the mental state I was in was what brought me back from the brink. I could be a man. Not only that, I could achieve something as one. I slowly remembered who I was and in time my brain, completely shattered, returned to a state of semi-normality.
I have had a lot of time to think since then and, if I had to sum it all up, I was given clear reasons to be male, opportunities to feel male, to see what future I could have. I think mental breakdown was inevitable as soon as I exited survival mode and stopped focusing on being trans. The reality of what happened to me for ten years was naturally going to cause a lot of issues.
For the rest of the year after returning from Italy I had to deal with the fallout from the marriage breaking apart. I was locked out of the house by the women we had shared in Waterloo by her changing the locks through the concierge. This resulted in my stuff being locked behind a door that I to this day can't access. Bills for this property are still in my name at time of writing this and I have had zero contact from the woman. I would also come to find out that someone I had considered a very good friend in Japan was now engaged to the woman only a few months after I left. In the last chapter I mentioned how I thought something was going on as to why she was so eager to get me to sign a contract. I think this was it. She had been planning a move to a new victim for some time.
To this date me and the woman are still married. She refused to work out anything regarding the unpaid bills or return much of my stuff from Tokyo or the UK. She hasn't contacted me and I have no way of settling it. All I know is we are still married and I still haven't got my stuff back. I think about how this is actually an example of men being treated very differently to women. If I was a 20-something girl and she was a man 20 years older as she is, people would be outraged that I received nothing, less than nothing really.
I even lost my own property. In the end though I am just happy I escaped with my life. Now it would be great to get this stuff sorted but I simply don't have the money for any kind of legal setup, and due to the nature of her being in Japan and more than likely already selling all of my stuff it is doubtful I would get anything anyway. Again, just happy to be alive.
After I had escaped Japan and met the love of my life and had decided to remain a man, combining the two parts of my mind into one and slowly healing.
I would become interested in the debate going on in the UK around the trans subject and I would create an issue of my magazine FOMA called “How to be a Man” which was where I interviewed the Transmaxxers I mentioned from chapter one who I felt had an interesting different point of view on what trans meant to them.
Alongside this I would attend and record a “Let Women Speak event” for a documentary I was planning on making on the subject. The work after FOMA was disjointed and I didn’t end up doing much, still having extreme PTSD fits and many dissociative episodes, well throughout the year of 2023.
After a while around late 2023/early 2024 I started to meet with people again and one of these people who I can never quite know who decided to leak my story to the press. At first this was terrifying and not something I wanted. I was still a wreck in a lot of ways, but published in the Mail was one of the first articles about my marriage breaking up. Later I would message the same journalist that was covering this article about my trans experience. I did this due to the fact I had figured they already knew and it was only a matter of time until they published it not on my terms. A few weeks later I would be asked to do a feature with the Mail which I did. This would set off the chain of events that would have me interviewed on the Gender the Wider Lens podcast, alongside other media that would have people in the fashion circles label me as not fit to attend any parties.
A kind of soft cancellation. Any hope I had of getting back into that world was gone before it even materialized. During the first few press pieces I got calls from a few people that had spoken with the woman. They would try to feign concern and act as if the press was using me, which to some degree they were. I had decided after receiving some messages of support from other desisters and parents suffering from the sudden transition of their child that I had to carry on. This is and was bigger than me. My story could help people and I have seen that first-hand. My goal now is to push it as far as I can to make sure as many people as possible know that there are always other options, for other reasons.
Between interviews and appearances, having PTSD fits when coming back to myself. What didn’t help is alongside all this I had the woman refusing to send my stuff back, taking ownership of my company, and locking me out of our shared flat in London. With the help of a doorman there who acted completely illegally in changing the door locks.
I will say though while I was still not very well at all mentally I was on the mend as they say and these interviews actually helped a lot with my mental state. I think I put it as I was doing EMDR therapy in public and talking helped, hearing other stories helped. I had worked on ways to manage my PTSD fits which do work quite well. Normally even at this point I could make them pass by holding onto ice or some such thing. So before you jump and say a mentally ill person was talking on these shows, well yes I was but also it really helped. By the time I was on Andrew Gold I had created management techniques for the processing of these episodes that made me feel quite strong.
I am still on the road to recovery but I've learnt my triggers and I avoid them or manage them appropriately now. PTSD is something I had before I met the woman. I just didn't know what it was then, linked to my childhood trauma. Afterwards and now it never goes away but it certainly gets better and more manageable. As for the dissociation, that seems to have been a product of the extreme stress and changes in life I was going through. I'm very happy to say I don't really experience it anymore.
I had started up a Twitter account in order to take full control of the narrative. So I was now pushed into this new online world and I guess my team by default was the TERFs or Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Or more broadly the GC (Gender Critical) team. The other team in this strange online discourse is TRAs or Trans Activists, but what do these two groups believe and what is the discourse around transgender people even about?
This concludes the part of this book that is about my story. I don't feel that a longer explanation is needed as I stated throughout this book. I want it to be about the wider issue, not just me. I’ve laid myself bare over the last two chapters and explored all facets I am comfortable with and a lot I am not. I hope you can take this for what it is and perhaps find some level of understanding from it. I am not the person I was then, during transition or even after. I am a new person today in the sense that after experiencing all that I have I have a very different outlook on life. I still have PTSD, I always will. I still don't want to be me sometimes although this is pretty rare these days.
With all that said let's start zooming out again and pick up the story from my entry into the online and culture war that is around gender. What are the beliefs of the people in this argument and why are they invested?