Back to my Future

I need to change my passport and driving license. It really is time to divest myself or the last remnants of my former maleness. Getting my name changed on these documents is relatively simple, but getting the attached gender to say female is a different matter. Up to a few years ago it was well nigh impossible to get the state to recognise your new improved gender identity. Now, however we have the Gender Identity Act. This piece of legislation ensures legal and statutory recognition of a new gender and some protection from discrimination. An integral part of this is to change your birth certificate and this is important for changing both your passport and driving license. I think this right is real tangible progress and for many other new women like myself, so important in reconciling their past. For me however it just isn’t that simple. My mangled brain just doesn’t do simple.

The thing is, for me its never been just matter of being born into the wrong body (mind you I would have preferred a less lumpy one). I was born a male, grew up a boy and eventually become a man ( sorts). Although, it has to be said that for the majority of this time I felt uncountable and confused in that role. It is also true, that I did spend many of these years with the faint dream that I could one day I would live as a girl and then a woman. Changing who I am now and who I will be, is only right and natural, but the nagging rational pragmatist nested in my psyche finds it hard to change who I was. To in effect change my history. To present a birth certificate stating I was a born a male would feel disingenuous. I’m not proud of much in my life. The only achievements that spring to mind are getting 100% in my Cycling Proficiency Test, scoring a 180 in the Stallington Hospital interdepartmental darts tournament and just once landed a handspring of the pommel horse in high school PE! Anyway, what I’m alluding to is that I am sort of proud of my transition. For someone who spent 35 years taking the easy path of least resistance, I would never have believed I had the drive, patience and occasional bravado to follow this road less travelled.

All this musing leaves me with fundamental contradictions. I want desperately to be accepted fully and deeply as a woman, but I still want to hold on to the reality of my past. Being different is both upsetting and rewarding. In darker moments I just think, Why me? On better days I rejoice, Yes I am me! Much of the mundane minutiae of life becomes such a trial, when you’ve transitioned. On the other hand, what an absolute gift it is, to be able to live and experience both sides of the gender divide. If life is a stage, how fabulous it is to be able to play both Hamlet and Ophelia, Romeo and Juliet, or Terry and June. So whether I do seek to rewrite the history of one February day in 1968, is still to be decided, but at least I have that choice, that predecessors here and compatriots elsewhere were and are denied.

All this thinking's left me weary so in the words of Samuel Peepys, or was it Zebedee “Its time for bed”