Person is Not a Rude Word

Today marks the third time that I’ve rummaged through my old diaries’ box, looking at the current day’s date in several diaries of yesteryear, only to feel too despondent about the diaries’ texts – the content and context of my life at the varied then years – and put all the diaries back into the box, and that back to its shelf space.

What can that say of my then unrealised transgender life – of which I’m searching for clues in those yesteryear diary entries?  Ironically, the more the disturbed and distressed years, the better the proof to the Gender Identity Clinics’ psychiatric consultants of a person genuinely struggling with gender dysphoria…

For the transperson living that life, those were just yet more sad days that are hard to look back on.  For me, they were days with no mention of transsexualism nor of intersex gender; no tolerance of bisexuality and no utterance of asexuality; no relief of medication for chronic anxiety and depression; an absence of diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder Level II; nil awareness of Fibromyalgia Syndrome; complete lack of knowledge about Asperger Syndrome…

Today I rummaged for longer than I had on the last two occasions in October and November.  Eventually the sixth diary I picked out of the box was for 1988.  On this day, 9th December, twenty five years back, I was caught up in yet another emotionally-charged, but asexual, relationship-of-sorts with a gay man. This day in that year, I was feeling some rays of hope that this new friendship would ‘go somewhere’.  It didn’t.  But the clue for my trans nature is there: a male side to me that was attractive to other gay men.  It wasn’t just that I felt back then that I was a gay man when I was dancing.  Some ‘part’ of me was a gay male sharing a flat with a gay best-buddie and falling for a handsome gay bloke I’d met on a Body Positive HIV awareness training…

As for the not-so-gay days, all I can do is embrace the grey’d-out (but a bit pink) shadow self…