In the Eye of the Culture War Storm

The backlash to left-wing lunacy is just as much in full swing as is the left-wing lunacy itself. I am in the centre of it and at times both loathe and love in equal measure those on both sides of this bloody mess. The lunacy in part, this week, caused by two things:

1) British schools in Brighton have been directed to teach students that boys have periods too

2) Miss Spain Competes as the First Transgender Woman in the oddly named Miss Universe contest

Other such stories resurface on social media, for instance:

3) Transwoman handball player Hannah Mouncey banned in one league but eligible to play in another seemed to gain popular attention again

So it goes. And the conservatives, God love them, are considerably riled up and are not that partial to emotional arguments. There are plenty of these to make. I make no comment on whether any of this gender-bending business is wise. I sometimes wonder- will we get to the end of 20 years of this and think “oh bollocks, we fucked up gender”. But what used to be known as the medical condition called transsexualism, now termed gender dysphoria, is very real and pretty grim to live through.

So I thought through it. I thought- okay, I really intensely dislike the nonsense being propagated by my left-wing friends. It would be much much easier for me to sign the dotted line in favour of their ideology- but I can’t. I’m like the DUP- I want to be fully part of the United Kingdom, no border with the Republic, and not in the customs union. That’s a shopping list of demands which when put together seems intractable. My more liberal friends tell me to be more honest. They are right. I should do that. I haven’t been honest enough with them. I am nobodies puppet, so here is my shopping list of demands:

1) I want to live my life as myself. To be a masculine woman is a compromise. To be a feminine woman is a heart-breaking unbearable burden of which I am not capable. There are many many burdens I can shoulder in order to live in a world which makes more sense. This is not one of them. I’m officially done oppressing myself. This will please my liberal cohorts.

2) I can not buy into this absurd unscientific nonsensical ideology you’ve constructed in order to, as you see it, support me in my decision to live as my authentic self. This will displease my liberal cohorts.

My identity was so fragmented pre-transition. I had a heart-breaking conversation with a friend once it went like this:

“You don’t really know who you are, do you?”

Me- “No”

That was a lie. I knew precisely who I was but did not have the means to express this. I do not often talk about this but pre-transition I attempted suicide on two separate occasions.

Once when I was 11, the other when I was 19.

When I was 11 it became clear to me that the stupid bloody awful mistake that had been made at my birth was not going to rectify itself. Pre-puberty I always thought once I hit that stage when people turn into teenagers that nature would correct itself. I would grow a penis, my chest would stay as is. Everything would be right. This did not happen.

I should clarify there are multivariate reasons for suicide. Here are those other reasons in this instance:

• my percieved sexual orientation and its conflict with my faith
• Pope John Paul II calling us “intrinsically disordered”
• Reading Romans 1 over and over and over again until I had memorised it
• The fact that I had prayed for the past 6 months prior for God to take away my attraction to women and it never abated.

I suppose those are really all related.

So I wrote a note, ran a bath, attempted to drown myself, realised what I was doing, stopped myself, dried myself and wept. Physically sobbed. Then I disposed with the note, woke up next morning and declared that “God is dead”. I spent the next 6 years wading in and out of atheism, paganism, buddhism and even for a brief period LaVeyan Satanism. I did not regain my faith until I was 17. That is for a separate blog post.

When I was 19 this is what happened, and this time gender dysphoria is entirely to blame.

I could not picture my future. I kept looking around, as I have done on an almost daily basis since I was about 16, at masculine women (could I be her? Is that not an incredibly isolating and difficult path?), feminine women (of all sorts, but strong feminine women in particular- how is that even possible? How is she managing that? Could I do that?) and glancing briefly at men (again of all sorts) and thinking “I want to be you when I grow up” and feeling deeply ashamed of that, and trying to squash it with all my might. So when I tried to picture my future as a woman it was a black nothingness, so I began to assume I had no future- I couldn’t picture it presumably because it didn’t exist.

This time, whilst at boarding school, I attempted suicide in a very feminine manner (though again with water, I am not sure why) by taking a pair of hair straighteners, turning them on, grabbing them and shoving my hand into a sink full of water.

It did not kill me. It just gave me a quite painful shock which lasted for a few days. Immediately afterwards I went to my housemaster who instructed me to go the nurses (I didn’t) and to call my mother and tell her (I did- hardest thing I have ever had to do).

Two weeks later the depression sunk back in and I burst into tears mid-history lesson and afterwards came out for the first time to anyone ever, to my history teacher. And that’s when I made the decision that this thing I was doing where I was trying to contort myself into an identity that was so ill-fitting it was likely to be the death of me- I’m done with that. I want out. So I made the decision then and there to transition.

The physical transition took a long time to come to fruition and I have now been on hormones since August 2018- or 4 months. I lived “in role” for whatever that means (it is a rather nebulous phrase if you ask me) for about 4 and a half years. The Catholic Church, Edmund Burke and I like to do things at a snails pace to be absolutely one hundred percent certain that it is the right thing to do. We are the holy trinity of taking time and giving things their due respect.

Society is not that way. It wants to rush on ahead- sod any mistakes it makes and push forward for PROGRESS. If in the meantime we destroy the viability of women-only rape centres by allowing self-identification of gender with no system of checks and balances then so be it. Well whilst being myself is one red line I have, here is my other red line:

On behalf of women everywhere, fuck that- sincerely a trans person.

This move to self-identification seems to think so highly of human nature that it imagines that a system with no checks and balances will not find itself open to the worst predators and abusers. It will. If our so-called “Conservative” government introduces the self-identification of gender it will officially cease to be a conservative government. The same, it has to be said, would happen under Corbyn whose policy-platform is to introduce self-ID. I can think of nothing worse to happen to trans people- it will make our desires to authentically be ourselves seem like dangerous lunacy- if that isn’t already the case anyway.

Now where I am- the strongest, fittest, and most at peace with myself I have ever been- I am willing to say “This is me. I can’t be anyone else. This is my red line. My red line is I want to be me. Is that really so much to ask? Seriously?” But I am also willing to say to the trans-activists and the progressives out there “for the love of God will you please stop your nonsense? You may well reign in a neo-victorian era and that will be dreadful for all of us”.