Girl, Interrupted

by Kate Sanders, Liverpool

Birth: 1956

Realisation: 1967

Acceptance: 2008

I started dressing – cross-dressing – when I was eleven. That's pretty common and how was usual too: dress-up games with my sister and a nightie that sent electricity to every part of my body. Of course I was told it was bad and I should never do it again but I couldn't, not then, not ever. What followed was seven years of torment and delight. Shame, fear and guilt caused the torment, a stolen pair of knickers, her (my) first training bra the delight. I should have known it wouldn't last.

Back then (the 1960s and 70s) it was almost impossible for someone living in a small town to find out anything about being transgender and how to either escape or live the condition. You couldn't just walk into the town library and ask. You couldn't discuss it with parents or teachers or friends, the friends you wouldn't have any more if you did. The only information that ever came to me was through the newspapers, either lurid stories of freaks and perverts being exposed, arrested, losing their wives and careers or sympathetic accounts of successful, middle-aged men - think April Ashley or Jan Morris - who'd decided to be women - and who, with the help of a sympathetic series of Harley Street doctors, had achieved that ambition.

All such infrequent 'exposes' taught me was the huge risk of being transgender and the terrible loss it might involve or that living a gendered life was impossible unless you were rich, lived in London and had all sorts of friends who knew other people who knew the doctors who could help. And I was none of those things.

I was destined for university and saw in it a form of freedom, escape. But you cannot escape desires unfulfilled, and that freedom was just a bigger cage. At university you are rarely alone. You share dorms and communal areas, there are cleaners and janitors, lectures to attend, seminars to take part in. And what I did, what I needed to do, could only be done alone. But how?

No-one who has never been me – or us – can understand the sordid behaviours it compels and the torments the trans condition causes. I used to deliberately walk past the laundrettes late at night, waiting for when they were empty, hoping a pair of knickers had been left behind or – glory – a bra. Your identity, your true identity, gets pared down to a stolen scrap of cloth. Hidden and cherished perhaps, but also a secret mark of shame. A ticking time bomb that if discovered will destroy everything. It is life and truth to you but also a source of shame. I felt that shame for oh so many years.

Being unable to be me, not even knowing who or what I was, I let myself be directed, acted upon. I became a follower, filling my hours and days with other people's interests and pleasures. Sometimes it was learning. A lot of times it was drink and drugs, aimless night-time walks. But only as an interlude, a waking dream before my true passion re-asserted itself. University was an asylum, a waiting place. In my case it was an asylum for the criminally insane. Because of the times, that's what I was. Cross-dressing was illegal and anyone who did it was sick, and needed help. I needed help but it took me another thirty years to find it.

I realised later that I had never chosen my girlfriends, they chose me. I realised that I was attracted to particular girls and women because they had something I did not, that I wanted to be them. Yet imagining I was them, longing to be them and to inhabit their lives was, of course, a violation, an invasion. This was something deep in my unconscious, of course. Something felt not thought about until later. Instead I held aloof, never made the first move, kept my distance: controlled, silent, passive. I didn't develop emotionally or, rather, I did not gain emotional maturity. I could not commit. So while women seemed to like me and to like being with me they eventually realised that something was not quite right. That I was not quite right.

To hide that difference, that condition, I built strong walls of control, of self-discipline and regularly cut myself adrift from people I had become too close to and groups that were beginning to wonder who I was. I did not cry, did not get angry either. But I also didn't laugh. To laugh out loud is to let go, to let the mind's response to a joke, a funny situation run free. But that was something I could not allow. Because as my awareness of people who were trans grew through the distorting lens of the media (I didn't meet anyone who I knew to be trans until the 2000s) I realised how vulnerable we were. Vulnerable to exploitation or descent into the secret, sordid and destructive world of the gay man. This was the 1980s and 90s after all, the time of anti-gay hysteria, AIDS and Section 28. I could not allow either of those things to happen. So I hid behind the walls I had built and played the part I had chosen to play. They say gender is a performative act and so it is; I proved it was.

Another thing that I did was to pare away at things: emotions, experiences, relationships. I decided early that I would not get married and never be a parent. Too much intimacy was involved, you had to give too much of yourself and I had - by now - nothing to give. Perhaps, too, I realised the terrible damage that coming out to wives and children would do to them and me. That is one of our greatest fears. That we will hurt the people we love and that they will begin to hate and to hurt us.

For forty years I hid my true nature. I lived with depression. I watched life from inside a shell. I existed but did not live. I saw but only as an observer sees. I lived a halfway kind of life, truncated, controlled, vitiated. Until, of course, the thing I was began to overpower the unreal me I had created. Powerful emotions, the need to be me, grew and grew, welling up like embers smouldering into life and becoming, at last, a raging fire that could not be denied. And so I became me.

I came out to my partner in 2008 at the age of 52. She was, and has been, massively supportive and, I assume, forgiving. Forgiving of the person I was, struggling with my true nature, the things I may have put her through, the sleepless nights, wondering. But having come out, I had to find ways to express my identity, to explore who i was.

Most helpful of all was Manchester Concord, a weekly transfemme meetup above various bars on Manchester's Canal Street. It provided a welcome, a place to change and an introduction to a wide range of - mostly older - transwomen and crossdressers. It was a chance to talk, to hear their stories, gain insights into their and my life but above all to be accepted. I had, I think, thought that such places might exist but had no way of finding out where and when and why.

In contrast, in Liverpool where I lived there seemed to be no such place. I remember googling 'Transvestite Liverpool' and only getting listings for trans escorts. It was incredibly frustrating and damaging, the fear that I was alone, would always be alone, in the dark, the shadows. Eventually someone said a group met in Jigsaw over in Birkenhead. I didn't know what that was but I did find out when and where. So I went, taking a bag full of clothes and makeup to change, knocked on the door and waited. And waited. It was a drab, nondescript, entirely unmarked terraced house and as silent (and as I discovered later) entirely abandoned. I remember waiting outside and then thinking perhaps I had got the time wrong so I went and sat in Hamilton Square, then went back and knocked and knocked again. I think i did that for six weeks (it was supposed to meet fortnightly) before someone said it had closed and the group had moved to the Terence Higgins Trust offices.

There I found a group of people who were friendly and welcoming but strange. People who rarely if ever dressed and talked about sex, fetishes and motor bikes as often as about hormones and foundation. Eventually, after two years or so, the group petered out and I was left - alone - to carry on. I recall the many occasions where I would go, get dressed and sit for an hour or so, quite alone in a silent, empty building, occasions brought to life only by the return of the THT outreach workers. I remembered how I had felt knocking at Jigsaw's door, the fear but above all the disappointment when no-one answered, the crushing disappointment. And I determined that that should never happen to anyone else, that someone should also be available to welcome, befriend and counsel if possible. And so I have continued, from that day to this, working to make local support groups as visible and accessible as possible.

And so I go on, without joy or completion, without hope of being or becoming. I go to Sparkle each year and love being me from dawn to dawn, day after day. But I walk Manchester's streets alone, silently stare at pictures in the gallery, sitting in a pub with my back against the wall, watching and thinking.

For stolen minutes and hours in childhood and my teens I had been a girl. But when you're an adult and come to realise the consequences of being trans, the rejection, humiliation, the ruin of reputation and possibilities, the insane criminality of what you are doing overshadows everything. I came to know I was not and could never grow up to be a woman. I was, instead, a girl, interrupted.

I am out now. The times are kinder after all. And though I pretend to smile, to nod, to laugh, the corpse of that little girl is with me. I look at a photograph of me when I was young and the girl seeps through. She appears for just a little while. But she is dead and ghosts cannot hurt you, they say.