by Tej Turner
It was when we had sex education classes when I was twelve that I really began to become conscious that something was terribly wrong. I had to sit at the back of the classroom for an hour every week and be told about how hair would grow from my face; and maybe even my chest; my voice would break and drone; and that thing between my legs, which had always felt alien to me, would grow. It made we want to scream. One day I even ran out of the room, crying. Everyone laughed.
In one of the later lessons our teacher delved into the topic of sexuality and half-heartedly recited to us from a book about how some-people-are-different-but-it-is-okay. Other kids giggled and whispered to each other as boys-who-like-boys and girls-who-like-girls were explained, and I waited with creeping anticipation for an explanation for me, for what I was. It never came; the bell rang and the lesson ended.
That week a turbulent storm played out in my mind and I hardly slept. I had by then begun to realise, on some subconscious level, that I found boys physically attractive but I still had not met one who was nice enough to me for me to like them. I didn’t feel like I was gay. Me as a boy, with another boy, somehow felt wrong.
I went to the following lesson a week later with apprehension, hoping that an explanation would come, but the teacher went straight to the topic of contraception, and I was left adrift.
I guess in one way I am lucky because in this day and age people like me have access to the world of the internet. I predictably began with online encyclopaedias and from there I went on to scientific and medical journals. I even found a forum called Trans-Connect, where other people who felt the same as me held open discussions and talked to each other. The string of emotions I felt for finally finding clarification for what was wrong weaved me through a terrifying but liberating journey, an entwining of ominous terror and illumination. It was frightening, but I no longer felt like I was alone. I even signed up with a user account for that forum, though I couldn’t bring myself to make any posts because it was all still too raw.
And with it all came the revelation that there were solutions: hormonal treatment could save me from a repulsive biology that was soon to riddle my body.
But this solution was fraught with obstacles. I was still three years, two months, and five days away from being able to go through such treatment without the consent of my parent or guardian.
And that person is my Grandmother.
My Grandmother is a stubborn and traditional woman. I could still remember the last battle I’d had with her a year before. It was after I watched a stomach-turning and enlightening documentary about the meat industry.
“What’s the matter?” she asked later that evening, as she carved through the skin of the battery farmed chicken resting on the table. I narrowed my eyes as she drove a greasy carving knife back and forth through its flesh. Throughout our childhoods, a romantic idea of chickens and pigs roaming around farmyards is planted into our minds through misleading books, songs, and cartoons. I had just realised that adults lie too. The idyllic homestead pastures had mostly been replaced by faded, industrial buildings where millions of birds are held in cages, so tightly packed together that their beaks and claws are mutilated to stop them harming each other. This was the modern, enlightened world of the 21st century.
“I just want vegetables. Please,” I said as I spooned myself some of the carrots and greens she had warmed from the tin. My hand wavered over the gravy jug for a moment, but then I remembered her habit of pouring the left over grease from the baking tray into it.
She stared at me, perplexed, as I helped myself to some boiled potatoes and then tucked into a very plain dinner.
“You think too much. Thinking too much will make people think you are funny.”
“It is just wrong. It is wrong, and it needs to be changed.”
I don’t think any less of her. My Grandmother raised me as if I was her own child. She is full of love and cares for me, but she is simple and from a different time. Back in her day the world was at war. It was a time where the main moral concern was what humans were doing to each other, not to other species and the world. Food was rationed, scarce, and something to be thankful for, not to worry about.
But I am from a different time and I do worry.
For a few weeks we were at war, and every day she put a new carcass upon the table and tried to tempt me to eat it. At first I thought she was just doing it to make a point but, after a while, I realised that this was the way it had always been. We had been eating meat every day, and it was something I had taken for granted.
Peace was only reached when both sides had drawn up treaties and concessions were made. We eventually went to the supermarket together and bought vegetarian sausages, gravy, free-range eggs, and responsibly-farmed milk. She later examined the receipt and complained that they were too expensive, so I got myself a paper round to chip in towards the costs.
But despite the fact that I won that round, I knew it was going to be much trickier this time. How could I convince a woman like my Grandmother that I needed to be taken to the doctors and given hormones which would put me through the opposite puberty to what her god intended? That her little grandson Charlie just wanted to grow her hair and fantasised about wearing skirts?
I hate myself for it, but this is how.
“Gran,” I said, finally breaking the silence a week later. We had hardly uttered a word to each other since she sent me to my room that day.
I placed a stack of papers on the table in front of her. It was a collection of my research. Explanations by experts and academics for what was wrong with me. I had been carefully choosing which ones to show her for days.
“What is this, Charlie?” she said, leafing through some of the pages with increasingly widening eyes. She looked up at me. Tears were already sopping down my cheeks, and my lower lip was trembling.
“Remember when I had to come live with you…” I whispered. “Because… because I found Mum…”
Swinging from the ceiling. That is how I found Mum, that day, when I came home from school. There has always been an unspoken agreement between us that we don’t use the ‘S’ word. It makes it too real.
Her face went white. I hated myself for that. I hated myself even more for what I said next.
“And you said—” Tears again. I tried to stop them but it was useless. “You said that… if… if only you could go back. That if she told you… and you knew… you would have done anything to stop her from… from—”
“What do you want from me?” she whispered.
“Do you care the same for me?”
“Of course I do!”
“Please Gran. Just read it. It’s not something I made up in my head. There are others. And there are things that can be done to help. Please help me. I need help.”
I went straight to my room, lay on my bed, and cried for most of the night. I was sure that I would not get any sleep but I must have because at some point I opened my eyes and it was light again. I got ready for school and crept downstairs silently, dreading what I would be up against if I encountered my Grandmother on my way out of the house.
She was waiting for me in the living room.
“You’re not going to school today,” she said. She was still sitting there, staring at the table – it was like she had not even gone to bed.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
I didn’t go to school for two whole weeks.
The first day I was taken to my doctor. She was fairly understanding but said I could not be diagnosed until I had seen a specialist.
The second day I was taken shopping for clothes. My Grandmother was acting like an automaton, she had not looked me in the eyes once since this whole thing began and she only spoke to me when it was necessary. It made me feel terrible that my emotional blackmail was forcing her to do something she hated. It was like I was holding her hostage but it was really my own head that I had pointed the gun at. She waited outside while I tried on the clothes. I could tell she was embarrassed – I was
as well. I received some very peculiar looks when I came out of the changing rooms with a new wardrobe of clothes draped over my shoulder and the whole shop watched us when my Grandmother came back inside to pay.
On the third day we changed my name by Deed Poll. I know that Charlie is technically gender neutral, and that was the exact reason why it had to be changed. I had already decided weeks ago that I wanted to be called Tilly – it means “mighty in battle”, and I knew I had much strife ahead of me.
On the fourth day my grandmother rang up my school and finally confessed to them what my ‘sickness’ was. It took a fifth day, a weekend ceasefire, and then another week of heated debates, requests for detailed reports from my doctor, interventions from the school board, and my assignment for bi-monthly meetings with the school counsellor before suitable terms for my reintroduction were agreed upon.
The following Monday I was back in school, but I was absent from class often throughout the next few months. I went back to see my doctor twice because I was horrified to find out that the waiting list for the specialist was four months. She was, once again, very understanding, but told me that, as being transgendered is still officially classed as a ‘mental illness’, she could not officially diagnose me until she got a report from a mental health professional, and suggested I pay a bit of money to see a general psychiatrist privately. Even then, it took weeks of harassment until I got my appointment, and, all the while, my body was, still, slowly changing. When I did eventually manage to see a psychiatrist I was forced to answer some very personal questions, but that part was surprisingly easy, and I left the room two hours later feeling lighter. Gran, who was waiting outside, looked like she had just attended a funeral.
Shortly after that I went back to my GP, who confirmed that the psychiatrist had diagnosed me with gender dysphoria and told me what I already knew: that, with my grandmother’s consent, I could be prescribed ‘puberty blockers’ to stop my body from changing. And if, when I am sixteen, my ‘symptoms’ still persist, and the doctors, psychologists and specialists still agree on my condition, then I could start going through hormone replacement therapy to put my body through female puberty. I was more versed in the legalities, bureaucracies, dangers, possible side-effects, and statistics than any of them. I also knew what she left out: that when I am eighteen I will be legally viable for sexual reassignment surgery.
My Grandmother signed her consent like it was a death warrant – which is not far from the truth. I wanted to comfort her but I couldn’t. She still could not look me in the eyes.
But none of this was anything compared to what I went through at school.
I am a weak person. When confronted my instinct is to curl up into a ball, but I have no shell or spines so I am the easiest of prey. I try to hide and keep my head low, but there is something about me that draws predators.
These things have always made me the perfect target in the schoolyard, so you can imagine the effect of throwing me back into the habitat of wolves and sheep with a new name, new skirt, new blouse, and heeled shoes. It was not armour, it was flashing lights and a siren. I was effluvious with the scent of blood.
I think the faculty must have had a stern talk with my classmates about the situation before I was first reintroduced though because, for a while, it was like I was diseased. People stared at me all the time but no one said anything. Even the ones who had been hounding me before the change left me alone.
For a while.
It wore off. I began to hear people muttering to each other as I walked down the hallway, and this gradually progressed to more blatant and public displays. Physical attacks were limited to odd occasions when I was caught in an enclosed space and there were no teachers around but verbal abuse was a score-based sport and the mentality of the playground meant that almost everyone had to take a nip once in a while or risk being pulled from the pack. With most of them it was half-hearted and done only under the coaxing of others. Some notably took pleasure in it though.
Ladyboy. Fag. Chick-with-a-dick. Nancy. Freak. Tilly-with-a-willy. Pervert. Boy George. Tranny. No tits. The list goes on and on. Screamed at me down the corridors and always followed by laughter. Muttered in the classroom or whispered into my ear, as I was shoved into the lockers, had my books thrown across the hallway, or was punched in the arms, shoulders, stomach, thigh, chest, or back. Never the face.
The first officially institutionalised attack against me was over my use of the female toilets. I had known from the beginning that it was going to be a possible issue so I had always tried to be quiet and discreet and became a master at holding my bladder so I could only use them at the quietest of times. I was frequently late for lessons because I would often catch my chance while the others were engaged in the post-bell rush.
But no matter how careful I was there would occasionally be other girls there. Some of them would glare at me as I walked in, or even yell abuse at me from outside the cubicle.
But none of them turned it into an official problem until Clarissa, a girl from my own tutor group, encountered me one afternoon. She tried to bar my way but I ran past her, then she and her friends kicked at the door while I was trying to relieve myself.
When I turned up at class a few minutes later, she and her two friends were not there and a sinking feeling crept into my guts. Something was about to go terribly wrong.
Twenty minutes later I was summoned to the headmaster’s office
Three weeks after that the GNs were installed. “Gender Neutral Toilets” are the latest hype in the world of political correctness, and you should have seen the light in the headmaster’s eyes when he presented to me and my Grandmother his resolution. He even bragged that they were to be the second school in the whole county to have them. He actually thought that it made the school a progressive forerunner in equality.
It was barbarism in its purest form.
The thing that the teachers did not understand is that most girls of Clarissa’s age and temperament lack integrity and conviction. The occasional objections they make about the world around them are fleeting, fickle, and usually more about giving them a brief moment of distinction in a society that constantly pushes kids down and makes them feel ineffectual. The handful of headstrong teenagers who actually have the energy and persistence to bring about change tend to concern themselves with much more global and venerable issues than who is daring to use a (partitioned) cubicle, which just so happens to be next to another (partitioned) cubicle they (may) want to use in the restroom. If the faculty had just paid her little heed she would have soon grown tired and found a new distraction.
My use of the female toilets was a situation that occasionally caused tension, true, but it was one I could live with, whereas the corridor outside the GNs became a feeding ground. It wasn’t long until wimpy younger boys were dragged there by bullies, kicking and screaming; and outed homosexuals in the upper years were pressured into taking the detour. Militant feminists fuelled the fire by using them just to make a point, thinking they were helping the situation but, in fact, escalating it. Life became prosperous and easy for predators because cattle in various shapes and sizes were being reared up and penned behind a fence. Clarissa and her friends were the most frequent prowlers, and took upon themselves the duty of sitting on the bench opposite it daily so they could taunt the passers-by as they ate their lunch.
It got to the point where every day I woke up with a sense of dread at the thought of going to school and, after a few months, I was even beginning to contemplate suicide. It was just a stroke of fortune that at that point two things happened which gave me the strength to carry on.
The first thing was that I found something that belonged to my mother, and it changed my life forever.
I was scouring the attic, one day, while my grandmother was at church. I guess I was just bored, more than anything. I was a bit curious about my grandmother because she never really told me much about her life before I came to live with her. I had long given up on finding out an
ything about my mother because the mere mention of her brought my grandmother to tears, and she hadn’t left many things to remember her by, as she had sold anything of value by the time she died.
I found some of her toys, which surprised me, but then I realised that it shouldn’t have; my mother was a child too, once, and she grew up in this house, just like me. It was a strange thought. Apart from that, most of it was out-dated junk I guessed was my grandfather’s.
I was just going through a suitcase filled with magazines when I found a little box at the bottom which caught my eye and made me gasp because it had my former name on it, in my mother’s handwriting,
Charlie.
My heart jumped, and I just stared at it for a while. Eventually, my surprise was overcome by curiosity and I opened it.
Inside it were a pack of cards and a note.
Dearest Charlie,
If you are meant to find this, you will. I will let fate decide if this path is meant for you.
I am so sorry,
Mother
The cards were faded with age, and each one had its own beautiful watercolour design depicting a scene. It took me a while to realise what they were – tarot cards. This arcane legacy contradicted everything I thought I knew about the pitiful drunk I used to find passed out on the living room floor when I came home from school. I should have guessed she was probably a very different woman before my Dad did… well… what he did to her. My father was nothing more than another bully, and my mother let him break her. I was determined to not let the same thing happen to me.
Throughout the following week, I spent most of my spare moments rifling through them, examining each and every card in detail. They made me consider a whole new side to my mother and feel a connection to her I had never felt before.