Only the face was the same, and it was beautiful. The eyes were like a fawn’s, and the smoothly glowing skin had clearly never felt a razor. Yet that face had been mocked by schoolboys who beat up the delicate classmate they could not understand, and convulsed with electric shocks by psychiatrists until the eyeballs bled.
She had felt she was female from the moment she started to think. Kneeling beside her bed at night, she had prayed to wake up as a girl. The prayer went unheard, and there was no one else to ask. The family were ashamed of her, so she became ashamed of herself, trying to fit into the rough world of men. It was hard. Twice in the Merchant Navy she took too many pills, but still not enough; once she was fished from the mucky Mersey.
Yet now she was hiding in a different way; hiding that she had ever been a man. To her this was not a lie, since she never had been. To Britons at that time, it was a scandal. In less than a year a supposed friend sold her story for £5 to the, and her modelling career was finished. She was now a celebrity freak, a persona as strange as that place between genders where she had lived before.
She did not have it until 2005, and the passing of the Gender Recognition Act. At that point, her birth certificate at last confirmed who she felt she was. In the meantime she became an impeccably elegant agony aunt and public spokeswoman for thousands of despairing people. She did not proselytise for trans life, or for the operation; she knew too many people for whom surgery had been a terrible mistake.
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Source: The Guardian - 🏆 84. / 53 Read more »