The Birthday of Love and Hate

Today is my birthday. I am in my 50s. Suffice to say that 60 is charging over the horizon rather faster than it was and 50 is starting to look like a blip on the edge of the radar screen.

It's been a lovely day. My children, who love me and whom I love dearly, have made a fuss of me and got me nice things. One decorated the house with banners and balloons and confetti. I walked out of a long and gruelling work conference call this morning to see her efforts. Friends have sent love and care and cards. I appreciate it all. As I write this, my fiancee and my youngest daughter are cooking me a birthday dinner, whilst I type away accompanied by a Sun sinking in the west and a rather nice South African Sauvignon Blanc. Life is good. I am blessed. I am loved.

And yet, I know I am not loved by all. The reverse. I am hated. I sit here, ensconced in warmth and human affection and today, just for one day, I have turned the hate off. I have avoided the places where it blazes away, reducing me to an abstraction, a concept, my entire existence to a toxic theory. I know of course that it will be back. And on Sunday, the papers, one in particular, may be doing their work again, reducing me, frightening me.

It's not because of anything I have done, or ever will do. It's because I am a transgender woman. Twelve years ago, I simply could no longer pretend, no longer manage the performance of behaving; living a life that wasn't mine. It had been building since I was a child, suppressed and suppressed again, fear (and not just for me) rising each time I tried to face the meaning of it within me and what it suggested for the life ahead. But eventually, the feelings - and the knowledge - would simply no longer negotiate and my defences collapsed entirely.

There followed a few years of elation, release, surgery, personal family trauma, abuse (something I had experienced for many years in a crumbling marriage - and it went on), looming penury, loss of home and friends and business and refinding replacements for all of these. It was an amazing few years. It was a grotesque few years.

I got through. I kept loving those I loved and they saw that. Over a decade later, I have rebuilt.  I was lucky. I had a profession and I was good at it. Some in my world turned away, wouldn't pick up the phone anymore. But others stood by me. I rebuilt.

To those people who love me, I am no abstraction, no concept. I am real. A loving Mum, a friend, a partner and soon to be wife. I matter to these people. Some have reached out in need to me, and I have been there. We have been through some trauma in the last decade, and certainly not just mine. Likewise, when I have been beaten down, they, loved ones and friends, have held me, kept my nose above the water.

But when I read newspapers, when my social media feed opens, I find that to some people I am not anything like this at all. To some people, I am shapeless, dangerous and terrifying. They have never met me yet they fear me. I seem to destroy their sense of themselves, their gender, who they are. It's them or me. My happiness, even my existence, seems to undermine theirs. I must be gone. Driven out.

They don't know me. They never will. They have never measured me by the content of my character, or by what I have contributed. Nor by the love I have been given, or have given, by the difference I have made in the lives of those about whom I care. Yet they judge and they condemn and wish me not to exist. They actively work towards that end. They write lies about me, yet regard me as the biggest lie, my existence as some sort of fiction - part of a vindictive plan to destroy them. To rape them. To kill them.

I am not going to do either of these things. I probably spend as much of my life as other women, maybe more than some, wondering if I am going to be attacked, or raped, or killed. My fear of all that happening has gone up, a lot, recently. I have read what the British government is contemplating for people like me. Read about how they would like to push me out of society by denying me access to the same spaces as other women because I am somehow a threat. I wonder what sort of world they have in mind for people like me.  What people will say or do to me? The people who urge the government on describe people like me as monsters. I think, do you mean me? My friends and family think, do they mean her?

But they do.  They do mean me. I don't seem to be able to make my point, that I just want to live my life, like any other woman. It feels like it has taken me quite a long time to get here, to find a sense of peace. I want to love who I love and let them love me. Make my way. Grow old with someone.

But, I guess, a return to all that hate and anguish is for tomorrow. This evening I am sitting in the sunset, with a glass of wine, being where I am and who I am.