I’m trans. This is the story of an extraordinary gift given me by my friend as Alzheimer’s took hold of him.

UPDATE JAN 12, 2025: Five days after I published this blog, my friend Jonathan, about whom I write, suddenly died. He was good man, and a loving and compassionate Dad with a powerful moral sense. My heart goes out to his family. He’ll be much missed. 

RIP buddy. You earned it.

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I am a trans woman. This means that I have taken a journey in life that’s unlike the one travelled by many. The weight of being expected to carry, share and explain the story of my past in ways that satisfy the curiosity or calm the anxiety of those around me is something of which I am always conscious. But when a good friend developed Alzheimer’s, I unexpectedly felt free of that weight because he could no longer remember the past. It was an extraordinary, strange, gift made all the more so by seeing what he was going through, by sensing what was in store for him and by him being unaware that he was giving it to me. 

Alzheimer's Disease has surely got a strong claim to be one of the most heartbreaking and distressing conditions anyone, or their loved ones, can face. Incurable, it's thought to be caused by the build-up of certain proteins in the brain, causing growing chaos in the connections between cells (though breakthroughs are beginning to happen, amongst them a new theory which suggests it might be a devastating auto-immune response). The condition causes a loss of memory, growing disorientation and confusion, mood changes, anxiety, inability to find words and later language, plus the destruction of reasoning powers. Personality can be dramatically affected, aggression and even violent behaviour emerging from those who were previously gentle and good natured, a particularly wrenching aspect for families. 

This is a story about one person who developed Alzheimer's and what happened when I visited him five years ago. He was hit by it relatively early, whilst still in his 50s - a bitterly cruel spin on a cruel illness - thus beginning the long path to specialist residential care where he now lives and a complex and traumatic journey for his wife and children. I'll call him Jonathan.

Jonathan is a lovely man. I haven't seen him since the time of the visit I’ll describe here, something that I regret, but life, his worsening condition, the location of his family abroad (and the somewhat forced circumstances of their return), Covid and other factors intervened. It would be a colossal understatement to say that they’ve had plenty on their plate – and frankly the last thing they’ve needed is to worry about accommodating visitors. 

Nevertheless, we go back over 35 years. My children grew up with those he had with his wife (I'll call her Kate) - three kids in each family, and similar ages. Though they lived abroad in Europe, we saw each fairly frequently - long, wine-soaked evenings of good food and conversation, sometimes in their perpetually-a-work-in-progress cottage in rural France, or in their beautiful city home. Jonathan worked in the legal profession, qualifying in the UK and then again abroad. Gentle and funny, with a disarming smile and a big laugh, he was always a charmer - good at putting you at your ease and considerate with guests to a fault. He was a talented photographer and an extraordinary guitarist; when the disease started to rob him of many things, he was able to hold on to his guitar playing when much else had disappeared into the fog. I remember him playing that guitar on summer's evenings, under the French sun, long before there was the slightest suggestion of what might be on the way, years hence. 

And then came my gender transition, sixteen years ago. The events of that period are not the subject of this piece. I'll simply say that when it happened, my family went through a traumatising crisis, much of which could have been avoided if some of those on whom I had previously depended had chosen to act differently. It resulted in many very painful things happening, as my marriage, and much else, unravelled explosively. Jonathan and Kate however stayed in my life, whilst others (in fact, almost all others) theatrically ran for the hills. At significant social cost and even though it brought them abuse and criticism, they did not abandon me, later also playing a critical role in helping me reconnect with my children. I will always owe them for that.

Jonathan and Kate both had senior roles in their respective professions. As Kate’s career brought a move to a new country and my family simultaneously disintegrated in England, we inevitably saw less of each other. They were always relentlessly, breathlessly, busy too - a seemingly constant stream of house guests arriving to take advantage of their hospitality, for a time in a jaw-droppingly beautiful setting on the fringes of the Alps to where they had moved after France. Meanwhile, quietly, the illness was reaching deeper into Jonathan's brain, year by year. 

At the end of 2019 I stayed with them, a few days either side of the New Year. On the other side of the world, people were just starting to report a dangerous new virus, but that news hadn't yet crossed into our consciousness. In many ways, Jonathan still seemed his old self; affable, courteous, and hospitable. In others it was clear that something was wrong. He’d had the diagnosis for a while by then and the family had been told what to expect. Kate told me that they were coping ok, but there were concerns about Jonathan wandering off and becoming lost, that his memory was becoming noticeably shredded - short-term and patchy. 

I came face to face with that feature of Jonathan's experience quite quickly. 

By this point, Jonathan had some meta-awareness still of what was going on inside his brain. He was, characteristically (and unnecessarily), apologetic about his failing memory. He'd beg your indulgence as he asked you to repeat something that he suspected you must have said earlier, perhaps a biographical detail of your life that his still operational logic circuits told him you likely shared, but that now he could not recall. He'd smile, slightly shamefaced, as he asked you to remind him. And of course you did, with as reassuring a tone as you could find, concerned only for him in his embarrassment. 

I sensed from the moment I arrived that Jonathan was hazy about who I was; this woman who’d arrived to say that she had known him for years. He smiled and heard me describe some of our shared past, nodding and clearly working on holding it in his mind, trying to make it sticky - perhaps snatches or episodes were coming back for a moment, it was hard to know. The next day a good deal of it had gone again, though he seemed to sense that I had probably told him about myself and our relationship and that he had forgotten. There was someone staying at their home, and he'd known them a long time, that much he could remember. Kate had told him. 

I very much saw the Jonathan I’d always seen him, nonetheless. The wry humour was there, and the charm. And the guitar playing. And we looked over some of the beautiful landscape photos he had recently taken, about which he was still able to talk with passion. Kate talked admiringly of some work Jonathan had been doing to support a local young asylum seeker. I wasn’t sure how much of this Jonathan could now recall, but it felt very much in keeping with who he was. 

It was a strange experience not being remembered. One to which Jonathan's family has subsequently had to become accustomed as the disease has deepened. As I began to process my own feelings about this, I realised that they included some that I had not expected at all; some that I don't think anyone else could have prompted in me. Feelings that only someone with Jonathan's condition, or memory loss, and that stage of it, could have brought up in me. Incredibly, something in me felt grateful for how he had been responded to me. I felt not just grateful but seen. This man was meeting me; seeing and responding to the person he saw; a woman, me, here, now, in the moment. No history, no backstory, nothing to explain or justify, just everything in the now. 

I guess I need to say more. 

If you are trans, much of your 'transition', the process through which you go to move from one assigned gender to living in another, may be spent predicting and managing the reactions of those around you. These reactions can vary from loving acceptance from a few, to puzzlement, to confusion, to fear, anger, condemnation or even a desire to do you violence. I have been on the end of all of these at some point plus others. At least as much attention is required to handle other people's responses to you as you might need to work on your own responses to the world as you finally meet it as a woman - especially if those others occupy an important role in your life (like your spouse, parents, children, work colleagues, boss, or doctor). You never know how others will be with you, when you share your 'news' (an anxiety that has deepened for many as the discourse in the UK has become so toxically prejudiced towards trans people in recent years). Even 16 years ago some whom I had assumed would be open and welcoming, after years of bonding over shared liberal and inclusive attitudes, never spoke to me again. Some, whom I had assumed would respond with hostility and bigotry, reacted with compassion. Challenging people’s ingrained and unexamined preconceptions around gender, whatever their public attitudes, I soon realised was a game of Russian roulette. I found it deeply draining trying to predict and manage this, though for years I put the effort in, desperate to be readmitted back into 'accepted', cisgender society, desperate to pass some kind of test of ‘worthiness’. I still feel that demand on me, even whilst the British political and media establishment and well-organised anti-trans activists in alliance with it work to make it harder for people like me to achieve.

Even now, years after my transition, people still occasionally reappear from my past and, with a heavy heart, I find myself being asked to go back to first base all over again.

Recently, I found myself at a reunion for those who worked at a company where I had spent almost a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s - my first job after leaving university. I had been well known, popular and successful there and was rapidly promoted, making many friends. Perhaps, in this socially-connected, LinkedIn age, I had naively expected word to have got around about what I’d been up to since then. I was wrong. Within two minutes of arriving, there I was, having to go through it all again with people who took me as a complete stranger. One melted in front of me in tongue-tied embarrassment and confusion. Another seemed to want the ground to open up. A third looked at me without a glimmer of interest. Someone else smiled and gave me a huge hug (the best response of all, yet, true to the theory, not someone I had known well). And so it went on. The evening brought up a lot of the old distress and self-consciousness, and after 45 minutes I was so spent that I transformed into a silent wallflower on the periphery of conversations in which someone I had known well was holding forth, and they didn't have the slightest idea who I was. A couple of times it involved proximity to people I had worked closely with, for years. Yet to speak up would have necessitated launching a conversation I was just too drained to have, not again, with all eyes turning to me and no idea what would happen next and everyone in the group later taking that moment home to partners or spouses to say, ‘You’ll never guess what happened at the party tonight..!’ All that in place of the experience for which I hoped (and which had lured me there); of simply saying hi and catching up with some old friends.

It's because cisgender people usually demand of you a story, an explanation, a reason. Once you’ve provided it, you wait for a response – an assessment - anything from awkward bafflement, embarrassment, or smirking hostility to, occasionally, warmth and welcome...though hardly ever actual understanding. That night I could see that those around me were having a tremendous time. For me it was disorientating and humiliating and after ninety minutes, I slipped away, saying goodbye to no-one. I don't know how I even lasted that long. 

I had of course been through this whole 'coming out' moment with Jonathan and Kate, years before. They'd probably been as blindsided as anyone, but neither of them really bogged me down with demands for explanation after the news broke (back then I had internalised the sense of one being needed - the feeling that I had done something so outrageous that I needed to justify it felt so powerful - that I wrote a round-robin letter to our many friends, most of whom then cut me off anyway). Jonathan and Kate however committed to not eliminating me from their lives. They acted in the way I had naïvely assumed other people would act when they heard the news, but almost universally didn't. 

Whatever the response to it, I have always experienced my story and the need to carry it as a burden. I remain in a permanent state of low-level heartbreak that I wasn't born as a cisgender woman, and I will feel this till I die. I cannot have the past that I might have had. A past that featured a lived girlhood, the excitement and hope of the teenage years with a changing body and emerging fertility, the later chance to become pregnant and give birth to a child. I had to grow up feeling as I did, supplied with a body that seemed designed for another life, at least as per the rules of the world in which I lived. And when the torrent of anti-trans hate flows in the British newspapers as it does every day now, I re-experience that hurt each time I meet it. 

Yet with Jonathan, on that visit as 2019 became 2020, that weight was entirely absent. Jonathan had always been caring in his handling of my story, but now, it seemed that he didn't actually have to be delicate or cautious around it, because he just couldn't remember it. Kate explained to him that I was an old friend and Jonathan looked attentive, trying to remember. Even without remembering, his acceptance of the news of our long-standing friendship seemed to be all he needed - all he could have as he was maybe growing accustomed to having his life re-explained to him. He was starting to exist in the short term, in a present tense life. And in that life, I had arrived, a female friend who - apparently - he'd had known decades. That was good enough for him because it had to be, and his welcome was as warm and genuine as ever. I could know that welcome and those feelings from him were fully authentic, because with Jonathan's failing memory, they literally could not be otherwise. For me, this was priceless, a tiny glimpse at a life that might have been. 

Jonathan's life since then seems to have become a series of ever-shrinking nows. For those of us who haven't been hit by the chaotic destructiveness of Alzheimer's, our nows contain thens - as we are mentally present in a memory of yesterday, or last week, or 5 years ago. Our nows also contain yet to comes, as in the present moment we speculate on what we'll later eat for dinner this evening, on a holiday we are planning, or a future retirement plan. Alzheimer's strips the thens and yet to comes away. It does this randomly at first, leaving partial, broken access, then more completely. It parses the now into smaller and smaller chunks of time; this week...today...this hour...this minute. And with the loss of the past and the future go the people in it. 

I suspected that I was mostly gone by the time I saw Jonathan back then. I hadn't seen the family for a while and perhaps that didn't help. I could sense his frustration at not finding anything much stored in memory about me, but he seemed to be able to accept it. For me it meant that no explanations from me could be needed by him, no concealed anxiety about my story could be present for him; the immediacy and the acceptance in the present was strangely reassuring. 

The disease alas took the course that it takes. Five years later Jonathan's life now is, I gather, very immediate indeed. I can only speculate what that must be like for him. We cannot know, another part of the isolation of the disease. I know a little of the shatteringly painful difficulties that his family has faced as his condition deteriorated and as his care needs have deepened. It's been a dreadful journey for all. 

I wish him love and peace, and I won't forget those few days of strange, unique, unexpected acceptance that he offered me. Briefly he gave me a gift, the chance of a life story different from the one I had, the chance to not explain the one I did, made all the more genuine and powerful in his unselfconscious inability to even know that he was giving me that gift at all. 

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