TransActual
It’s a difficult time to be a trans person in the UK. Over the last couple of years we’ve faced a relentless torrent of negativity in traditional media, social media and in the political arena ranging from misinformation to downright hostility. It is wearing to have one’s identity constantly denied, to be ‘othered’, mocked and portrayed as a threat to others. That’s why having allies is so important.
The connotations of describing a transgender person as a “trap” is significant, especially nowadays because there is more overlap with the real world and the internet than in the past
It’s not easy for me to speak publicly about my autism, in large part because I’ve been taught all my life that ‘good’ autistic people are those who are not visibly autistic.
I sit here with so much more knowledge about my culture and my religion. Hinduism has a wide and varied history and mythology full of queer figures. This is a religion of genderflipping deities and queer heroes. It is a religion which recognises that people aren’t always male or female; there is a ‘tritiya prakriti’, a third nature. Which then begs the question, where did all that pressure to conform to normative society come from? What caused my self-hatred and denial and hurt for all those years? Why did I have this idea that I couldn’t be Hindu and queer?
I don’t want to become another statistic because someone thinks that they have the right to treat me however they see fit – whether that’s because I’m transgender or because I’m a woman.
They will never understand the sense of grief I have for the body I should have been born with, the childhood I should have had, the adolescence I should have had. That life in my mid-20s that I’m doing over again in my mid-30s. That first operation that I needed because my body changed in puberty in ways it shouldn’t have.