My own boy’s own story

This story culls heavily from one of my more popular Twitter threads, which I wrote after some time engaged in the recent gender debates, when I started to make contact with detransitioned lesbians and recognised lots of the things they were saying to me.

My unqualified but careful reading of DSM-V suggests to me that I’d have met enough criteria for a diagnosis of both early-onset or late-onset gender dysphoria, had the medical world of my childhood and youth been what it is today. The prospect horrifies me and terrifies me. As my way of standing in solidarity with those lesbians I was speaking to at the time, I wrote this and had it as my pinned tweet for a year or so.

Some friends were surprised I shared such personal details in public; some strangers thought it was bold and brave to say these things from my position of public prominence and vulnerability to media intrusion (I didn’t lock my account back in those days). I was bemused by both those reactions: it was, admittedly, only much later that I discussed in public the detail of the mental health and psychiatric supervision I experienced around puberty — in part because it was only partly related to what I write here but also because that is much more private. This stuff, however. I couldn’t be any less ashamed of or embarrassed by this. It seemed to touch a nerve with many people, and in turn I was myself touched by the many sweet, lovely messages I received — mostly from women who had been tomboys — after publishing it.

I’ve added a few more details, which seemed unsuitable for a Twitter thread but fit well here and make the whole even more honest. Anyway, here it is:

For three years, from the ages of 10–12, our separated-by-language German neighbour, who looked after my siblings and I three times a week, while my mother worked, and was our regular evening babysitter, too, thought I was a girl. This is me, aged 11:

After three years, my mother had learned enough German to recognise the feminine pronouns she was using, and the references to me looking like ‘such a pretty girl’. So Mum went overboard in reassuring me that our neighbour was just a silly old woman. Until I said, ‘I don’t mind’. I really didn’t. I’d been learning German at school, more quickly than my mum. I had picked up on what we’d now call misgendering by our neighbour much sooner than my mum had, and I’d just let it ride. For nearly three years.

My memory of it all is a bit hazy but, apparently, I told my mum that I just thought it was all a bit odd, because I was obviously a boy. Despite my posters of David Cassiday, despite all my girl friends with whom I’d spend every lunch break skipping or chanting playground rhymes or doing those hand-eye co-ordination games with balls and slapped hands, despite my constantly repetitive tastes for high wedge heeled shoes, red leather, white pumps and diamonte butt-spangled butterfly trousers (all of which my Mum told me were not really for boys, although it was only the white pumps on which she never relented), despite my consistent play acting as Lt.Uhura in our sibling fantasy games (I’d put a bottle stop in my ear and make my younger sister Captain Kirk and my younger brother always the villain of our adventures: I didn’t really like him much until he turned 25). Despite all this femininity, I was — in my mind — always a boy.

Now I’ll roll back a bit. Aged 4, in 1968, my parents took me to the doctor for what we’d now call gender non-conformity. Apparently, although I hardly remember those years, I had played ‘as a girl’, most often calling myself Winifred, and I liked wearing dresses. There are some old photos of me playing with my sister and her dolls but I don’t remember that at all, and there are no photos of me playing dress up (which means there are not many photos of me from the ages three to nine). I do recall Winifred vividly: she was a middle aged woman, always falling into holes or tripping over things. She spoke in a high pitched twitter and was meticulously snobbish: tied to social niceties.

Her pratfalls — which made my elder brother hoot — always followed telling someone off for using the wrong spoon, or cutting the nose off a piece of cheese, or — my brother’s favourite — letting farts slip or swearing. In my later years, I was reminded of her by Hyacinth Bouquet, since she was of that grotesque, caricatured sort and, for me, that’s what Winfred always was: a character. But I played and played and played as her, over days and months and probably years. I wasn’t Winifred, but hobbling around in my mum’s shoes with one of those sixties long skirts on, I was her, too - and she was a place of safety.

I’ve since been told that the doctor they went to told my parents to let it all play out, and that it was quite normal for children to explore like this. “It’s probably just a phase,” they said.

A few years later, my Dad got a promotion and we moved to England so, to soften the blow, I was allowed to subscribe to one weekly magazine. A magazine of my own choice! My brother chose Roy of the Rovers or something like that and I opted for ‘Jackie’. I recall an anxious discussion in the newsagent at Carterton, but I stood firm, and I was allowed my choice. So that dates it around 1972, when I was eight. And I read the problem pages and photo love stories eagerly, for years after.

And then I told Hugh, the prettiest boy in my class, that I wanted him to be my girlfriend. Aged 9 by that time. And then, for a few months, not much later, by which time we had moved to live in Berlin, I found my mother’s wardrobe fascinating. Bras, which I just couldn’t work out, especially so. And then, and then, and then … there was a later moment, involving a purple satin ball gown and a very pretty first boyfriend. More moments, as a young man, when I was into amateur dramatics, when I learned to flounce, and camp it up, and wear pink shirt-dresses, and eyeliner and ear-rings. And then there was that very private personal moment, when I first knew, for sure, that I was gay. Post coital. Later than you’d expect.

Years later, when I was around 28, after I’d at last come out to my very unsurprised parents, my mother asked me if I thought she had done anything wrong in raising me. No, I said, it’s not your fault, and if you are responsible then, ‘thank you’ because I love the way I am. But just to keep her on her toes I added that dressing me in leather hot pants when we lived those years in Germany might not have helped, nor making me dress up in those Scottish ‘skirts’ for any and all special occasions, including my first day at primary school, in Inverness.

I now love wearing my kilt on special occasions, and I’ve got the full set of traditional Scottish outfits, including the one I wore proudly for my civil partnership ceremony but I’ve completely outgrown the lederhosen my mum once provided and I never really acquired a taste for the leather scene: those handlebar moustaches were not a look I ever favoured for myself.

As I got older. I became more masculine.

I must have been 28 when I first went to live in Moscow and I recall doing camp twirls around the Bolshoi ballet in my suit and brolly, in the hope of attracting a ballet dancer and making contact with the underground gay scene. I succeeded, enjoying a spectacular affair with Sasha and helping set up the initial AIDS awareness programme — little more than a desk with some posters and fliers — by the cloakroom in Moscow’s first gay club, where Sasha took me for our first date, whilst hosting groups of worried activists in my flat and supplying as many condoms as I could afford to cram into my suitcase for the next thirty or so trips.

I quickly learned the dangers of being camp and open in unfamiliar environments and by the time I moved from Uzbekistan back home to Scotland, a decade later, in the early years of the new millennium, I was besuited, straight laced and free of adornments.

But I was still ordering stereotypically feminine chick flicks and romantic comedies as my movies of personal choice, and tending to lean towards female authors in the novels I read (with a particular fondness for Margaret Attwood, Pat Barker and, more recently, Barbara Kingsolver). And I still play out as Lt.Uhura from time to time because she’s an inspirational ace, and I still have an imagination.

Anyway, after I came out to my parents, and long before I got a bit more butch, we discussed all these gender non-conforming events and many more such childhood memories. Some of them I recalled, like being thought of as a girl and not caring much, others I’d completely forgotten until I was reminded, like playing with dolls.

So with me use whatever pronoun you like. No skin here. There never has been. I just don’t care what you think. But don’t call me cis, please, because I don’t have a gender identity. I have a sense of self. It includes being male, because I have a male body. That’s my sex. Gender is not something I bring to the table, it’s what I call all the shit they threw at me to try and stop a male like me from being male like me.

I’m certainly not aligned to masculinity and — frankly speaking — it’s ignorantly discourteous for anyone to suggest so. Respect goes both ways and o-one has the right to take my rejection of gender away from me. I worked for it, my whole life. At first I just did it for me, because I had no other choice, I had to be true to myself and I knew no better but now, when I could just shut up, when there’s a hostile — albeit for me far less scary — environment again, I’m doing it for you, too.