stone at birth and was rigid. If anyone, especially their child, strayed from that (presumed safe) rigidity, then all hell would break loose.
They told me that if anyone called me a pansy again, I should come home and tell them so that they could sort it out. All of my family could fight apart from me. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to be beaten up for calling me a name that I liked and wanted to use myself. In my dreams I called myself ‘Pansy’. Should I tell them so that they could beat me up?
By the time I returned to school in the autumn, Pansy had all but disappeared, retreating deep inside of me. I disappeared with her into a pit of unhappiness that would last for many years and at times become so devastating that it resulted in self-harm and addiction.
By the time I returned to school, I’d returned to silence. I never put my hand up in class again and when Miss Honey read a story on the round, threadbare carpet, I put my hand into her bag and stole a packet of sweets. Hard-boiled toffee sweets. I stole them one by one until she saw me. I wanted to be seen.
She told me off, called me ‘Simon’ and sent me to see the headmaster, who said that he’d never seen me outside his office before and that it was out of character for me to be in trouble. I should think long and hard about what I’d done and never do it again. ‘Where was the smiling child who’d left at the end of the summer term?’ he asked with resignation.
Confused and filled with sadness and anger, I decided there and then that if I couldn’t be happy, I’d steal sweets and then steal more sweets until there were no more sweets to steal. And I did. From that day on, the day I was called ‘Simon’ again on the carpet, I behaved terribly at school.
I never thought back to that summer term in 1972 again. A term when the sun was forever shining. A term when I was so excited to go into school that I ran so fast one day that I tripped over and hit my head on the main school door. I had to have ten stitches, that’s how excited I was to be me and to be free.
That’s how excited I’d been to be Pansy.
How Did I Go About Writing This Book?
For a year I attended a series of weekend family residentials with the charity Mermaids and I also attended a series of Saturday youth clubs with Gendered Intelligence.
Mermaids is a charity set up to support trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming children, young people and their families to achieve a happier life, often in the face of great adversity. They campaign for the recognition of gender dysphoria in young people and call for improvements in professional services.
Gendered Intelligence’s mission is to increase understandings of gender diversity and to support young trans people through a wide range of youth work provisions and activities.
The two sets of interviews were very different in structure and time. The Mermaids interviews were spread across a weekend and feature not only the young people but also some parents and carers. The Gendered Intelligence interviews fitted into their quite amazing youth club parameters and feature only the young people (no parents or carers).
With complete kindness, generosity and a faith in my ability to write their truth(s), both groups allowed me into their fabulous worlds to sit and listen and ask questions. I spoke with young trans children (the youngest being five), older trans teens and some young people in their early twenties. It felt important to have some follow-on into higher education and perhaps aspirations beyond. I listened as they told me about their happy times and the times that weren’t so happy. I listened and then cried afterwards, alone. The Mermaids team must have thought that I was a little anti-social because after each day of interviews I would eat a little, walk a little and then go to bed.
The process made me both happy and sad. It was cathartic. It made me think about my own childhood and how cruelly, perhaps unwittingly, I’d been treated by a world not ready to listen.
I apologise to the Mermaids team if I seemed a little quiet, but in those interviews I captured a world in which trans and nonbinary young people and their parents are, by hook or by crook, making their lives work and allowing slivers of happiness to grow. I’ve never seen such nurturing from anyone. One parent described her role as being like that of a meerkat, on constant alert, watching out for aggression or danger, and at the same time finding the time and strength to create a safe space for their children to play and to grow up in.
In the Mermaids interviews I really wanted to focus on what was happening at school and in the education of the children. In my own very small way, I felt a little like a teacher-meerkat and I wanted to see and highlight the good and also the damage done to children’s education when we listen or don’t listen to them, when we support or don’t support them. Education is just a way to dream about the future and explore the present. To dream is to aspire. To dream or aspire you have to be present in the ‘now’.
I hope in the process of writing, I’ve captured some of this.
For the Mermaids interviews I used the same room each day. I stayed put and used the same question format to start the interviews. I always worked backwards towards the word ‘trans’ with the younger interviewees. Sometimes we rested at superpowers and that was more than enough. Sometimes they told their truth with a maturity and sensitivity that would silence much of Twitter. With the older ones we sometimes started with the word ‘trans’ and worked outwards to where they needed the interview to go.
There was nothing prescriptive about the interviews. They started within the same space and with a similar format but went towards their own truths.
If the parents or carers were up for chatting, then I interviewed them afterwards. They were always present when the under-sixteens were being interviewed and could stay if the over-sixteens felt comfortable. It was often the first time the parents or carers had heard the young person’s innermost thoughts. The interviews were joyful but also full of tears.
Make no mistake: these meerkat parents and carers are superheroes. Rather than mistrust them, we should only seek to offer them support.
I am in awe of them all.
The Gendered Intelligence interviews were structured differently to the Mermaids interviews. For my first visit to their Saturday youth club I simply observed their methodology and working structure(s). I had time to understand and appreciate how they work as an organisation and how I might come along to a session and, without impacting on the space, collect some interviews. For the book to be rounded it felt imperative to collect interviews from both organisations, Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence.
Therefore, getting it right and fitting into the Gendered Intelligence model and being able to utilise the far shorter time frame was paramount in getting the right kind of interviews – interviews that reflected their ethos as well as the grander themes.
Since I had far less time to conduct the Gendered Intelligence interviews, these interviews are much shorter than the Mermaid ones. I enjoyed the challenge of working differently. The week I attended to carry out the interviews, there was a theme of ‘self-care’. It made sense to loosely pitch the interviews around this theme and to focus on why this group mattered to them as young trans and nonbinary folk.
I thought long and hard about whether the interviews should run as a single block rather than separating them out by organisation, but the structures were so vastly different that it felt only right to reflect that in the actual physicality of the book. One set had time and space – I had a room and the time to speak with parents and carers. The other set of interviews was principally about collecting the voices of the young people, with
