I commented to a friend yesterday that I had once had a dream that I would run away to New Zealand to live as a woman.
This was when I was around seventeen and in the sixth form at school. I still had lots of confusion about who or what I was but had been secretly cross dressing and wishing I was a girl for five or six years by then.
I then saw a documentary on television called A Change of Sex, which followed the journey of a “transsexual” man who was undergoing a “sex change” to become a woman. These were new terms to me. I had heard of transvestism and there was an old transvestite in our part of town that everyone referred to as a “tranny” and my mum had explained when I was younger was a “very sad person with mental problems”. So my limited knowledge of gender non-conformity was that a man in a dress was sad, mental and an object of ridicule. I also had no idea that he had any options beyond wearing a dress and being a transvestite. Of course I liked to wear women’s clothing myself, but I didn’t want to be an object of ridicule or pity, so I knew that I had to hide my secret from everyone.
Then I saw this programme on tv and there were these new words “transsexual” and this new (to me) concept of having a “sex change”.
This was like a revelation to me. I suddenly discovered what I was. This person was talking about how he (I didn’t understand pronouns at the time so thought of him as a man in the pre-sex change part of the series) had always known he was a woman and that he was “trapped in a man’s body” (1980s version of gender dysphoria!) and longed to become a woman. This was me! Or partly me. I wished I was a girl and had for years, it was part of me. I maybe didn’t relate to the idea of feeling trapped in a man’s body quite so much.
Not only was I learning about what I was, it turned out that what he wanted, to become a woman, was actually possible! Until then, I had thought the only way I could ever be a girl was if a genie granted me three wishes, i.e. not possible in reality. But it was! This person was getting a “sex change”. They were taking tablets (which I now understand to be feminising hormones) and were growing breasts and wearing a bra like a woman. Then they had surgery to remove the male parts and become a woman. It was actually possible to change sex!
I had a new dream. I had been wishing that I was a girl. Now I knew that it was possible to get a sex change and become one for real.
Except that I couldn’t do anything about it.
The person on tv had been disowned and ostracised by all their friends and family and was totally alone. I feared this would happen to me. My school culture was terribly homophobic and I had been bullied for being “gay” (despite not being gay!) and feared that anyone ever finding out my secret would mean more of that, and being mocked in the street by anyone and everyone like the old transvestite. Whatever I was, I had to hide it because it was shameful and disgusting and “gay” and “mental” and I would be rejected by everyone.
Hence the silly fantasy that I could emigrate and do it. At home I would be ostracised but I thought that if I went to a new place and lived as a woman from the beginning as soon as I arrived, anyone I met would only ever know me as a woman and I wouldn’t be someone who changed, I would just be the girl because that was all anyone would know.
And I could live there entirely as a female and only ever wear women’s clothing and no one back home would ever know. By going so far away, it was unlikely anyone would ever visit. We had never even had a foreign holiday and I had never met anyone who had travelled to Australia or New Zealand. All we knew about Australia was the tv series Neighbours and I don’t think anyone really knew anything about New Zealand except the All Blacks and that it was as far away from the UK as it was possible to go. There was only phones and letters in those days, no video calls, and I could pretend to still be “ normal” on the phone or in writing. So nobody from home would find out that I had a sex change.
In retrospect I can see some flaws in this plan.
I seem to have thought that all I needed to pass as a girl was to wear skirts and dresses and use a girl’s name and that everyone would simply accept that I was one. A sex change (my terminology at that time) takes years, but I seemed to imagine instant results achieving full female passing as soon as I arrived and got off the plane wearing a dress.
So clearly this was an unrealistic fantasy.
I don’t know what I expected to do there either. That I would just do university and then get a job? Maybe I would do everything that I would do in the UK, but as a girl so it would be better.
Which was probably the only thing that I was thinking about, that I could get to be a girl.
The destination wasn’t the goal, it was merely somewhere that was very far away so I could be me and live as I wished to without anyone finding out.
Of course there is another logical flaw in this fantasy, aside from the unrealistic expectation of passing as female on arrival, which is being alone. If my reason for going somewhere where no one would know about me being a transsexual (the term I had just learned) was because I feared rejection and ostracism and by implication, being left all alone with no support, then it makes no sense to “solve” this by going away from everyone to be deliberately alone.
But I don’t think that it was being alone without anyone that I either feared or wanted, it was more the fear of judgment or condemnation, of bullying or maybe of disappointing my family by being some kind of freak. That is the real thing that was holding me back, and let’s be honest, still is.
Even though I know that putting aside my own feelings to make life easier for others is wasting my life and I will never ever get anything I dream of unless I can overcome that.
Still now I fantasise about running away to the other side of the world and leaving everyone behind to go and live as a woman and how I want to live. Although now as then, it’s not the country I live in that stops me living my life. It’s me.
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