Transitioning in the End Times

Excerpts from a transition journal, presenting as poems

Apologies for the delay in posting; there’s no shortage of drafts queued up but I’m currently figuring out how the various journal entries written as poems might fit together with critical essays to comprise an appropriately trans-genre memoir that speaks to our moment without being as bleak as our moment. For now, a selection of the more poem-shaped opuscules that I like to think are optimistic without being dishonest. Enjoy!

Her        {Madrid, August 2022; Day 60 on E}

Patient Information Leaflet           {August 2022}

Dream Interpretation for Beginners    {November 2022}

This Means War       {Valentine’s Day, 2023}

Hanami                      {Pre-Gregorian New Year’s Day, 2023}

Re-Wilding                {July 2023}

Eirinicon                    {January 2024}

Portrait of a Woman at the Centre of a Stone Circle

{April Fool’s Day, 2024

Her  

It’s a blood-warm August evening in the city where I’m staying with my oldest friend –

And we’ve walked miles through the Prado, past the Garden of Earthly Delights, and the Renaissance and Romantic era and innumerable Crucifixions and Annunciations –

And lain in Retiro Park, near the boating lake with the stone lions, reading, and yesterday saw Guernica, and the history of LGBT activism in Spain –

And must have seen hundreds of elegant women in ankle-length Summer dresses, or shorts and singlets, or jeans and camisetas, and the word is “elegant”, for sure, because no-one’s in a hurry and the heat makes everyone glide through tunnels of shade –

And now we’re in this café opposite the vinyl-only record shop that also stocks Chomsky, Ducasse, and Shon Faye, drinking Tinto de Verrano beneath rainbow bunting and backlit bottled spirits casting a blue and magenta aura as we people-watch from a pavement table on the street sloping up to La Chueca, the hipster district or, some would say, gay –

And talk has turned to how violent it was at school, and friends who can’t forget, and friends who try to rewrite the past, and those who aren’t out (perhaps even to themselves), and I say Yes and, by the way, I’m sorry that I took so long to tell you, but my friend waves it away, we’re cool, and it’s around this moment I see her –

The girl I want to be, passing –

But not completely. Only for a few seconds, striding up the hill, and I can’t tell whether we make eye contact or if she’s just looking over my head at the name of the bar, or to see her reflection, or assessing the number of cis-het guys before striding on, but I can’t forget –

She wears her hair, raven black, in a Kiki de Montparnasse bob, curled a little at the tips, and blood red lips, slightly parted, eyes wide and ringed with black, like the lace of her top, long sleeved, black petals and leaves over a skinny boy’s body, slightly broad shoulders, although she could be anywhere in her 20s or 30s, and I think it again as clear as a subtitle laid over the scene: I want to be Her; that’s the woman I want to be –

Not anyone else in this entire city, no matter how elegant, and how much I’ve been purring with gender envy, not unpleasant though, thanks to the E, feeling the cling of my clothes and summoning memories of this dress or that but not until now wanting to be anyone but Her –

Not quite fearless, with her eyes wide and parted lips, who might just have been clocked by some cis-het guy (though his hair’s quite long) with a crooked smile –

But that doesn’t stop her as she strides onward in the bloodwarm evening, uphill (as it so often seems for Us), alone with her arms crossed over her chest (because sometimes you have to hug yourself when no-one else will), moving quickly but eagerly (so no-one has a chance to clock her before she’s gone), but nonetheless Out –

More beautiful than any woman I’ve seen, the only one I’ve wanted to be, glancing back at the one stranger who saw her, and read her as a sister, she only wants the best for, to keep on striding up that hill, in that moment of trans-feminine perfection, forever –

All the wasted years behind her.

{August 2022; Day 60 on E}

Patient Information Leaflet

There are certain details you won’t find in the Patient Information Leaflet.

Don’t be deceived by the discreet paper bag, stickered with your name, the cardboard sleeve and blister pack. This is not, in fact, medication for a disorder, but a substance naturally produced by the body to affirm who you are. The fact it is disguised as medicine is a means to trick you into believing yourself unwell, and a patient, instead of an actor at the start of her second act.

Which is why the most important side-effects are the ones not mentioned in the Leaflet: that you will recover, for the first time since childhood, the sensation of sleep pulling you down, through the sheets and mattress and bed, like sinking into the waters of a lake, or through the strata of the Earth, toward the warm centre of it all.

That you will awaken from the third or fourth night of deeper, longer sleep, to feel your anxiety a little less, the tension in your shoulders eased, the hyper-vigilance that kept your eyes darting from side to side, lessening.

That the intrusive thoughts will be quieter, or perhaps not there at all; the ones that made you wince – a whole body wince – when you recall a stupid thing said in childhood that no-one even heard.

That your eyes will seem brighter, and wider, and your face somehow younger, and you don’t want to use the f-word yet, but something’s different because – could it be? – you look happier?!

That you will come to realize that nothing is lost of You; each of the dials has simply been turned down a few notches so that none of the feelings overwhelms you, of the squalor of the world, the decay of your body, the weight of the years. When you allow them to, the feelings will come in floods but, after the choking sobs, actual release, and a feeling of being cleansed.

That all of these changes are so subtle, so smooth, they’re barely there, even subtler than those you glimpse when you used to study pictures for the difference, measurable in millimetres, between one face and another, asking: Why? What would it take to shift them? – these details that add up to a destiny so different from your own.  

Changes like the way that your smell will dwindle to nothing, not that it was ever bad, and sometimes you smell of soap, even at the end of the day, sometimes you smell a bit sweet, and sometimes you smell a bit like – yes, really.

That for the first time in your life, everything that was hoped for has happened, and more besides, and the only twist is that there is no twist. Before transition, you marvelled at the ingenuity of the universe in thwarting you at every turn with some unexpected way of falling short. And the twist this time is: there’s so much more.

Like the way you find it easier to clock others like you on the street, behind a counter, behind a bar, or working in a hardware store, and, when you do, these siblings will no longer give you envy or make you sad for those with pitted skin, or barrel chests, or thinning hair, but make you smile for them, and at them, as if to spur them on but also thank them for doing the same for you: 

I know what’s at stake whenever you walk out the door, because I’m finally out too, and we made it.

And yet you will also see the ribbon red slashes on a boy’s arms from wrist to elbow, fresh and determined, without hesitation, passing you in the corridor of the girls school where you work, and your chest will tighten, and when you find yourself alone in the office, your tears will be hot on your cheeks, and your chest will finally heave and you know that you’re crying for him but also crying for you, for the You you couldn’t be, then, and the only good here is: You’ve finally started to cry, but not from despair, because at last you know what to do.

And that there was so much else you thought was You, and never even tried to describe to another soul, not because of shame or fear but because it was the nature of the spider at the centre of the web to conceal itself even as its strands extend to everything.

That there were sliding gates, it seemed, impervious to light or sound, between the Conscious & Unconscious, between Thought & Expression, so that the speech you rehearsed for hours, weeks, or years, in your head, became not unsayable, in the heat of the moment, but unthinkable, as if it never were. That sometimes your tongue was not your own when you were speaking, or you never spoke at all. And now those gates are… gone? Or just open? Let’s hope that it lasts.

Which is why it bears repeating: you were never meant to be defined by dysphoria, by disorder, by autogynaephilia, by a fetish, by weakness, by deviancy, by degeneracy. There was never meant to be a Patient Information Leaflet because you were never ill, never sick, never sinful, never weak.

Certainly not the latter for never doing what seemed effortless for everyone else, and now you know what you needed, you can forgive yourself for feeling lost for so long, and for feeling alone, which you were, it’s true, but no-one can be blamed for being either, and yet you piloted this craft, that was never meant to be yours, for years, to reach these shores, this place you call home:

This body you’re finally making your own.

            {August 2022}

Dream Interpretation for Beginners

If your earliest memories are of being chased, always chased, through grey landscapes by faceless hordes of people, and trying to find the smallest possible place to hide, before waking…

…then the question isn’t so much who “They” represent, the cis hordes, but who “You” are, in dream logic, whom you never get to see, reflected: your inner girl, perhaps?

And if you should find a shop, more of a booth, in a bazaar, really, and furtively pay for the one item you snatch from the rail, or simply thieve it, and then scurry to find a place to try it on, only to find as you unfold it the material is simply that, a shapeless mass of fabric in which you can’t even find an armhole…

…then, surely, your Dream-Self is saying: This is a problem that can’t be solved in the Dreamwork, but in the Waking World; give me the material and I’ll make you your fancy but I’ve nothing to work with if You won’t wake up.

And if, years later, you should see your child grown up (but somehow macro-cephalic, a saucer-eyed, adult-size foetus), in a musty bedsit, and this same son has nowhere left to shoot up, not a single vein he can pop, even with a rubber-tube for a tourniquet, so he has to inject directly into his eyeball…

…you have to ask who filled you with fear that you’re the one to blame for traumatising your child with the shame of having a trans parent, when no-one else would ever dream of shouldering the blame of Your being trans – nor should they.

And if you see a man dragged through the doorway, out of black sheets of rain, into the stone-walled room where we sleep, his black hair stuck to his forehead with blood running over lids and lips, and watch him hacksawed, limb from limb, then you’ll know to bide your time because this is the man you’ll have to retrieve from the underground tanks where the unclaimed dead are kept so the fat and meat may be sloughed from the bones; You, the woman who’s lowered in a basket to wade into that waxy solution, and by touch alone, identify the man who’d been your brother, no-one knowing you’re siblings you’ve been so long under-cover; and when you tug on the chain, and the basket’s winched upward, you’ll see the bodies that, even as they rise, slough more flesh, yet retain their poses, like statues in a Roman villa, crumbled by the ages; and as you ascend the shaft, you’ll see foetuses, placentas, and organs, teratomic in deformity, caught on the pipework where they were thrown, yet you’ll beam like a saint for having made the descent, a part of your mind left far below, for such is the price of entering this place…

…which is where, you wonder why on waking, you should finally see yourself female, for the first time in dreams, of all possible places; though the whys and wherefores of your being the sister of one of the desaparecidos, a victim of the interminable drug-wars of cartels you’ll not fathom, for a while, not until you’re winning – your Self.

And if you should find yourself extracting someone’s teeth with your bare hands, while holding a gun to their head…

…you don’t really need a Dream Dictionary for this one (do you?), although the sheer remorseless ultra-violence of it might be explained by the fact you were so delirious with illness, you’d fallen asleep mid-afternoon, woken fully clothed, checked the time, donated a surprisingly large sum to support Stonewall’s campaign against hate-crimes in the Developing World in a fit of guilt, then fallen back to sleep.

And if you should be peeling off strips of newspaper and chewing them to a grey pulp in which you imagine Times New Roman letters embedded, as you swallow them…

…be sure not to ask a former-nurse “What causes Pica?”, in case she puts two-and-two together, having answered “Hormonal changes, especially in pregnancy”, the second “two” being: that her AMAB offspring (yes: you) somehow looks younger.

And if you should be urinating, with one arm against the tiled wall of the cubicle as you’ve seen men do, when your penis snaps off in your hand, and continues writhing as you hold it, but you’re trickling still, into the bowl, from a circular stump, so you place it on an electrical socket (curiously close to the cistern, you think), hoping to be able to take it to A&E for reattachment, don’t be surprised if when you pick it up, now still, it crumbles apart like deep fried cod, when you fork through the batter…

…which is a sign the anti-androgens are finally winning the battle against the last few drops of T in your system.

But if you find yourself in a lab full of dismembered torsos, some of them little more than a wedge of flesh barely large enough to contain a heart, but all fitted with prostheses so the heads (intact) might speak and breathe, or even crawl across the workbench, rolling stump over stump over stump like tardigrades, or operate (with tubes in their mouths) robotic arms equipped with laser scalpels to cauterize their flesh…

…perhaps the male portion of your psyche has some fight left in it, and will continue this Cronenbergian, Verhoeven-esque body horror… until the night of the day you’re correctly gendered twice (“Is this your… um, grown-up?” a librarian says to your child and then, later, from a stranger: “Listen to your mother…um, father; they’re the one with the money…”) in the same week the students get your salutation correct, namely: “Miss, I mean, Sir”, which is just as you wanted: to no longer be the one who’s confused, it’s someone else’s turn now… and the dream of that night is not one you’ll remember, there’s no need to dream now – you’re living it.                                                                    {November 2022}

This Means War

Like any war, this one began a long time ago, in deep history. We could go all the way back, but let’s start a century ago, when a new kind of person was created, who displaced us, overshadowed us, and, in some sense, became us: the surgically created human.

What gave us hope was pioneering work in surgery during the War. What enabled the burned to survive, the shattered to rebuild (or be rebuilt), was what would transform us into who we should always have been.

All of this went on through the middle of the century, when the icons of stage and screen would be surgical creations, marvels of Science, Triumphant, over the old enemy, Biological Destiny. (But all the while, a resistance was growing, a suspicion of those who are sculpted with scalpels.)

Few noticed when we were given a new name – in ’65 – that sought to break the link between transformation and desire. Even as Religion waned, in the aftermath of war, humans began to assert a deeper identity, a little like a soul, with a higher purpose than procreation. Our drive to transform, in short, was almost spiritual; not sexual, after all.

And yet the Resistance continued. We were called an “Empire” by those who feared our rise, as if one in 200 could ever overwhelm those they sought to go stealthily among. All mention of us was banned in schools, as if our name, alone, might be used to groom and recruit the young, as had been said of Commies and Queers.

Not that we would never be accepted, on their terms. If we submitted to tests and trials, ritual humiliation at the hands of doctors who, alone, could authorize our existence – re-shape us into submissive clones – then, yes, we might pass and become a new (sub-) class of human, instead of being erased.

At last, just shy of a century after the surgically created humans arrived, we were declared No Longer Disordered. Our discomfort might be psychopathologized (instead of theirs, with us) but our essence was no longer diseased, deformed in body and mind. We were, through a brief window in time, able to glimpse a paradise with enough space for us.

Along the way, all manner of Others had been accepted: women who loved women; men who loved men; immigrants; the disabled, the mentally ill. All might participate in the great vision of Capital, Triumphant. Social worth was no longer a matter of inherited wealth, only the Will to Work, the Will to Power. For a while, we were part of that vision.

Until a scapegoat was needed. A scapegoat whose very stealth was used against him or her, passing invisibly among us, until you spotted the signs. (The heavy jaw; the five o’clock shadow; the thick-knuckled hands.) What did they want, these intruders, these bodysnatchers, the one in 200 who couldn’t be content with any amount of capital…?!

We’d entered the Anthropocene: the age when the entire planet might be re-shaped by something like a surgeon’s scalpel: by drills and diggers and clouds of chemicals. The age in which the Neoliberal Order was crumbling, the wildfires closing in on the capital, the supply chains that brought us all we wanted from the ends of the Earth bringing disease, and our desire to see the world with a God’s eye view meant sickness travelled, too.

And we were perfect for their purpose; the perfect predator. Spies so dedicated to their cause, they changed their names, their faces, their bodies – and for what? To steal the privilege of others. There was no question, no hesitation: we had to be destroyed. The first solution was simple: cut off our supply chains; starve us of what we needed to become all we were meant to be; refuse us care or shelter.

Still, we found the means to transform, and so they claimed we operated outside the law; that we used the same supply chains as criminals to obtain controlled substances. We resisted; re-defined what it meant to transform; defined ourselves with new names; refused to be reduced to the surgically created humans we’d been equated with.

But their tactics transformed, too. They proposed a ban against the conversion of all whose identities were aberrant, drawing attention to “therapies” more akin to exorcism and torture, then exempted us from the ban. “Concerned families”, they saw, would do their work for them.

We started making plans to flee for nations where we were not yet pariahs. We knew our past: that our ancestors were the first “degenerates” targeted, a century before; a full decade before the Shoah. But where was our Kindertransport?

Too many of us were dying by our own hands, exhausted by persecution, exhausted by living in a world exhausted of hope – but the blood was never on their hands. That was their tactic – to starve us of hope, to starve us of meds, or even just tolerance on terms besides their own.

And then the killings began. No longer of solitary sex-workers, or adults assaulted in alleyways outside bars and clubs, by people who might claim a “panic defence”. Children began killing children, in parks, in daylight, in a war more “total” than the world wars they said were over and done with. No, this isn’t their Final Solution – there will always be another after this, and another, and another – but there can be no more denying:

This means war.

{Valentine’s Day Morning, 2023}

Hanami (Spring 2023 —> Spring 2003)

This week has been a week of cherry blossoms along our street. And yes, the sun through petals seems to catch them aflame, but when it’s overhead it’s the sky that’s a-fizz.

I’ll point them out to my daughter as we walk home from school, savouring the way I can say “Aren’t they pretty?” uncensored by fear of what we should and should not enjoy, we AMAB parents, because she’s small and doesn’t know…otherwise.

And this starts me thinking about hanami – the Japanese appreciation of Sakura – the cherry blossoms that stand for renewal and hope but also the transience of all things.

Because it was half-a-lifetime ago, I did a lap of the globe; took the trans-Sib to Beijing from Moscow, and then flew from Shanghai to Tokyo, arriving just as the cherry blossoms had almost blown.

Which the weather maps show, in Japan – a kind of “blossom-front” sweeping from southwest to northeast, where you can still see them, before Spring itself is swept into the ocean.

And it wasn’t until I reached the Nikko shrine – with its timbered temples, tiered like the branches of pines, and its stone gates, and wishing ponds – that I saw the mountain I felt I should climb –

As if climbing would yield some epiphany, or just solitary beauty – which it did – when, an hour higher up, I saw the last of the blossoms over the path between trees, and met one other person, and we had not one word in common, but his gestures meant “See! It’s still here! Sakura is here, at the peak!”

And now it’s half-a-lifetime later.

I chose today, of all days, to go back to the place where I spent so many years trying to write myself out of myself; this time, though, presenting as myself. En femme, enfin.

It’s peaceful, as ever, in the library. I spot the faces of “lifetime learners” who’ve been coming for 20 years; and the faces of some of the latest crop of students I’ve taught who may never come again, after their last exams.

Acting like a tourist in a place that’s home from home, I take a high-angle selfie in front of the three storey glass cube – the King’s Library – at the heart of the library; a selfie at the trans-flag zebra crossing, outside Gay’s the Word; a selfie in front of a Japanese maple.

(I remember the first time I saw a selfie-stick, a camera-phone, and learned the word katachi, all while posing on the Most Photographed Bridge in Harajuku. I saw my first “herbivorous male”, wearing a pinafore over salaryman attire. I caught a glimpse 20 years into the future.)

Bloomsbury lived up to its name, of course – there are blossoms all along the streets and squares – and it’s a pretty place to feel pretty, for the first time, in a dress; not floral, by the way, but the colours of our flag, hidden among the stripes of a detuned TV screen.

And what I learned in Nikko holds true: there’s no forcing epiphany. If you climb a mountain, the best you can guarantee is a view. You can circle the world but you can’t out-run you.

But today, as ever, the universe went out of its way to surprise me.

For the first time in 20 years, a fire alarm sent everyone out of the Reading Rooms, to stand and shiver, awkward on the plaza. 2,000 people with nothing to do but stroll their gaze over 2,000 other faces, take selfies, and politely ignore anyone they’ve seen 2,000 times before who chose today of all days to present as herself. Among them, at least one of my students (because now, 20 years on, I have students).

And in this moment, which is all moments, past and present, I am both seen and un-seen; presenting as myself yet mentally absent, 6,000 miles ago; 20 years away.

            {Old New Year’s Day, Pre-Gregorian calendar, 2023}

Re-Wilding

I’m deep in the woods, right now; the literal woods.

The fallen tree I’m reclining on, spine against a vertical branch, is thickly furred with almost lime-green moss; the lobes of the hundreds of oak leaves above me: chubby alien fingers waving in the breeze.

Looking along the trunk, what used to be down, the root-ball of the tree is a bonsai mountain – over-furred, too, with tiny caves in its ochre sides, to excite the imagination of a six-year old me, who would have peopled it with homunculi, and the curling, brown leaf-litter a few feet beneath the trunk has up-thrust brambles, just starting to sprout berries to ripen in time for Autumn. 

But it’s only a few weeks past mid-Summer now. In the present and immediate, I can hear the thwack of cricket balls on willow, far away, and dog-walkers in the near-distance. There are ferns, too, in the undergrowth that I never fail to think of as survivals from the time of dinosaurs that were too pretty to be destroyed with a meteorite, and too much like a cello’s head, a cathedral’s ceiling, a python’s ribcage, a mathematical principle. (“Pretty”, to me, is being a bit of everything, but also entirely yourself.)

Between the smaller trees are rope-bridges of spider-silk, yet to be woven into rainbows. Butterflies flutter by. A bird’s melody I can’t place – a twitter, not a trill or coo – and then there’s me.

Almost camouflaged with green Cons, green knee-length shorts, mini-dress with a pattern of verdigris cinquefoil flowers, and others in pink, on a background of black. Butterflies are among them, too, if you peer close. Even my sunglasses are mirrored-green.

The sun announces itself exactly as I write this, silver-blue-gold lances through the black lace of leaves. I note a rusted nail in the trunk, almost 20 feet along, which used to be up, and wonder ((What’s your story?)) before noting the way that the bulge at the base of each branch, where they’re snapped off, makes them look like the skulls of fauns, while other bulges are the pregnant bellies of women recumbent, further up/along the trunk.

Pause.

I just walked to the end-slash-top of the tree, 40 feet from the roots, and 10 feet above the ground, such is the steepness of the hillside. I think how much I would have loved this as a child – how the subtle risk of climbing makes you hyper-attentive to your surroundings, but also more present in your body, monitoring the strength of limbs and the sway of the wood underfoot, so that other concerns drop away – and then think how much my kids would love this too; feeling themselves in the crow’s nest of a pirate-ship, or the battlements of a castle.

But today is for me. I am the only one here. Almost camouflaged, blending into my surroundings, both safe and unsafe, cradled between two mossy branches, watching a spider, inches from my face, the size of a sugar-grain, building a web beneath an oak-leaf no larger than a finger-joint but offering all the shelter it needs.

This is the place so many trans stories seem to end, if only in fiction. How much crime drama opens with a body discovered in a shallow grave, beneath the leaves? Today, a dog-walker said “Morning!” as I threw the spit-sticky ball back to his spaniel, and “You’ve got a friend for life, there!” How often, though, is it the dogs that discover our bodies? It’s not just drama, though: if I were by a river, I’d picture a pre-Raphaelite “Ophelia” or “Lady of Shallot”; the most beautiful woman is a dead woman, the Romantics would have us believe, and trans women are only beautiful when they’re dead, according to trash-TV.

But not today. I’ve taken back the night before, if you can call scurrying furtively from shadow to shadow “taking back the night” and today, for a while, I’ve taken back the woods.                                                       {July 2023}

Eirinicon

There is a word I love – eirinicon – which means “a sign of peace, or covenant” sometimes as simple as a raised open palm but, in Genesis, the rainbow, drawn in the sky by God as a sign the Flood was over.

It’s a phenomenon that lends itself to origin stories, all over the world: the shimmering arc of seven colours that appears in the sky after rain, and defies all aesthetic laws by placing clashing colour against clashing colour, red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet, the way a child likes to dress herself, refusing to choose but using all the clothes in the closet, all the crayons in the box.

Funny how a symbol we learn about in Sunday School – at the end of the story in which the only survivors of the Deluge are the animals that went into the Ark in breeding pairs, two by two – should become a symbol of all of us L, G, B, T, and Q. It’s as if someone tried to reclaim the single biggest slur in the entire Bible and queer it for good. But it never felt entirely like mine.

By the time I was out as trans, and queer, a Woman who Loves Women, 30 years late, the Progress flag was here, and I too had arrived, in a world where cis-het colleagues sport it on lanyards and lapels to show solidarity with students and staff: the rainbow stripes with a chevron in trans flag colours: the Pink, White, and Blue that I prefer to wear on their own, to show: this is my flag – I’m no longer just presenting as an ally.

I’m writing this today because it was my third day presenting as myself, at school, among all of the students; not just out to staff, as I have been since April, or out as Non-Binary, no more suits and ties as of September, but that was still a halfway house. The first school-day of this year, I taught my lessons wearing the cowl-neck dress with stripes like a detuned TV screen… and then the purple and green checked needlecord shirt-dress… and today the tunic in the colours of our flag.

Because in the two years since I came out, I’ve come to see them everywhere I go: in the colours of dawn and the colours of dusk. I’ve painted them on my nails, and picked out dresses to match, and decked my shelves with Blahaj & Mew, and my kids like to spot them too, but the place I most like to see them is in the sky.

When the clouds turn coral or salmon pink (and then shocking pink or magenta as the Sun burns amber, melting to Earth), I never fail to smile at the sky, with a broad, beaming, idiot smile, because it’s as if Someone Up There Likes Us, and whatever we’re doing Down Here to deserve a Flood, it’s only bickering and squabbling in the Human World, often claiming all this cruelty is in His Name when the truth is S/He loves us.

Or why else would S/He fly the flag every dawn and dusk?

{January 2024}

Portrait of a Woman at the Centre of a Stone Circle

This is my thirtieth Easter or so in the village where the standing stones mark the start of one kind of time, and the taming of seasons, without ever dispelling all the other breeds of time that are marked by the wheeling of birds over the fields or the flooding of streams or the long shadows raking through the trees.

The sky above admits to no metaphors. The clouds are aflame at the edges, icebergs moored over the horizon but directly above is swimming pool blue: sterile and smooth, its colour the result of the diffraction of light by dust. The sun is too bright to look for images of eternity or fathom the depth of space.

Instead, it forces the eye down to the human level, where the world is a quilting of colours: the ruddy bricks of centenarian cottages, dry stone walls calligraphied with moss, calf-deep grass to fatten the clouds fallen to earth that are sheep, and tourists of every colour, in every colour, among the stones that might be grazing on the outer mantle, too, in their own inscrutable way.

And the colours, the warmth, the world all quilt me in a way they haven’t before now; the scene no longer projected on the circular walls of a bell jar that moves when I do, and exactly as I do, always out of reach, the world of substance and mass, always the other side of an expanse of air that masks my face clingingly, and gloves my hands, as if to operate, but on what?

Today, I seem to be cloaked in a paradox: my calf-length burgundy coat and cowl-neck jersey dress striped with blue-pink-white-red-yellow-black attract no attention, not even on a six-foot frame. For all the eyes I meet, no-one looks aghast, apologetic, or away in haste. I look like I belong here because I do, at last; after 30 years, I’m at home in my body and my parents’ home village, which was always theirs, not mine, although it might start to be.

This is the place where one kind of time started, and yet time always seemed to have stopped, or never to have started; the place I never expected to walk among the stones, with the wind buffeting ringlets of shoulder-length hair against my cheeks. This is the place I learned to step outside Time, and to live without Hope because Hope can blind you to what is in front of you. 

In a village where I knew no-one my age for 30 years, the risk of rejection always seemed huge, were I to transition, and yet the reward, it turns out, is larger than the sky: to inhabit this world and body completely, as I do now. The price might be losing a friend, a parent, a partner, but the reward is everything: a world and body in which you belong.

And now, halfway through the first cycle of seasons, fully out in the place I never really called home, I find myself on the edge of the circle, walking past The Lion’s Head, the Rabbit, the Mother and Child, the day that two different hands on one massive clock happen to align: Easter this year has fallen on Trans Day of Visibility and not, as some will claim, the other way around.

In the political sphere, this is clickbait and fodder for soundbites, as charlatans wrangle about “common-sense” and the primacy of “tradition” as if a certain stone were never conveniently rolled away from a tomb onto the Eostr that was already there, and here, where Time is said to have started (although it often felt like it stopped) it is both, and neither, as I am both and neither, visible and invisible, forever and never.

{April Fool’s Day, 2024}