Becoming Emma
Chapter 1: The inner awakening
I am 5 and I’m new at primary school. It’s morning breaktime. The boys go behind the school to the field to play football and be rowdy and boisterous but I don’t want to go there. I’m standing in the other playground at the front of the school watching the girls play hopscotch and singing games. I think to myself how much nicer life would be for me if I would have been born a girl. But I remember that I’m not. It feels as if a prison door has clanged shut in my mind. It’s somehow not fair. It’s not my fault, I did nothing to deserve this, but I know in that moment that I will be in this prison for the rest of my life. My body will be my jailer.
I am playing dress-up with my younger sister in the garden- we have a box of old clothes to play with in the shed. I choose a dress. A voice comes from the house: “take that off right now before someone sees you!”. How deep was the shame that I feel.
I am 14 and I’m at a school for boys. 800 boys and no girls, and this is a problem for the school play for the female parts. I am playing one of the female characters- I asked to and since I’m not tall and quite slightly-built, I fit well. It’s a few days before the first performance and I’ve got the costume to try on for the dress rehearsal. When I put on the skirt and tights of the outfit, I have a moment of awakening. Why does this feel so right?
From then on, in quiet moments, I flee into the peace and truth of putting on women’s clothes. I live for those moments. They feel right. In 1994, I get internet access at work and stay on after hours exploring this new world. I look for lists of resources that can help me. Back then it was lists that were curated by people- Yahoo and even Google were yet to come. I swap bootleg music cassettes with people and I look for information for transvestites, because that’s what I thought I was. I’m not bold or dysphoric enough to brave the public shame of being a transsexual. So I think that I’m just a transvestite, as it is called back then. I find Ray Blanchard's theory of autogynephilia. I believe it. I conclude that I am simply a pervert and should be ashamed of myself.
This medicalised pseudoscientific diagnosis of myself deepens my shame. I dress, usually after a little ritual of bathing and shaving, and feel dirty again afterwards. Sometimes I would take my things and throw them in the rubbish. Mostly they stayed in a locked toolbox, in a cardboard box, in the back corner of the cellar, behind another row of boxes. Hidden where no one would find them, the hiding place is very much a physical metaphor for my feelings of my identity- buried so deep under many layers of shame. Despite that, the urge to be a woman, the need to escape my life as a man which doesn’t quite fit me, won’t go away. After dressing and putting myself into hiding, each time I am depressed for weeks afterwards.
Chapter 2: Navigating the waves
I try to beat it out of myself. I become a little too obsessed with exercise and train ten times a week, running, cycling and swimming. I enjoy pushing myself into the hurt locker because I can feel something, even if it’s physical pain. That’s better than feeling nothing, or the emotional pain of facing my fears and my needs. I get to be quite good, as a nice side effect, and even qualify for a triathlon world championship, but the sadness doesn’t lift. My kids stage an intervention during a trip to Legoland where they give me an anti-anorexia stone because I’m down below 60kg, and my weight is worrying people.
I live through other people- in my family with my first wife and our twins, and later on my second wife and her children. I subjugate my needs to theirs because my needs are unspeakable. I have the perfect life, twice- a beautiful family, a lovely house, a great job- but happiness never seems to be within my reach. In therapy, I am asked to choose figurines that symbolise the identities inside me. I choose four. There is the white knight, who is always there to look after everyone else; a little child who doesn’t want the role he is asked to take on; a donkey who is never happy and honks self-criticism into my ear; and a little girl, dressed like a princess. She is crouched in a corner and doesn’t have a voice.
With this picture of the elements that make up my inner life, I realise that what I’ve been feeling all those years is gender dysphoria, although I didn’t have that phrase yet. But what should I do about it? Somewhere deep inside I now know that I need to transition. But around this time, my life is in turmoil- divorce, new relationship, bullying at work, my kids struggling in their lives- and again my needs are not at the top of the list.
Depression rolls in like a sea fog. I think a lot about how I would end my life, but I know that I cannot, which only makes my despair heavier; I don’t even own my own life. Prozac wraps me in cotton wool and deadlines float past, so my job falls apart. Citalopram is prescribed to help with my anxiety but makes it ten times worse. In desperation I convince an online company to prescribe me estrogen: the weight of depression seems to lift the next day.
So I’m trans, that’s clear. But what do I do with this knowledge. Can I transition? Can I keep it hidden, along with the buds on my chest? Can I keep on being outwardly the man/husband/son/brother I’m expected to be, while embracing my inner truth? Is that enough for me? For a few years it is, and the need to cross-dress ebbs away, but is gradually replaced by the need to stop hiding. I realise that I am hurting myself by hiding and no one sees that pain. No one asked me to hide, and no one sees the cost to me of something that they never asked for.
Chapter 3: Taking the first steps
I pluck up the courage to go to the local transgender network and explain to a stranger how I feel. It’s not easy to prise myself open and confess. I am recommended a psychiatrist. I’m sure that I’m really hard to work with because the part of me whose job it has been to protect me is still trying to do that. That voice is finding reasons for not transitioning, telling me about the shame, the likely loss of family, friends, job. It talks to me about the embarrassment of coming out and being the centre of attention in every room I go into. It’s telling me that it’s safer to live in pain than it is to embrace happiness.
My psychiatrist gives me some good advice: to go to a transgender support group and talk to people who have similar experience to me. She tells me that even were I to regret transitioning, that I can always go back. I go to the sessions with her en femme and gradually get bolder. We try hypnosis too and talk a lot, and slowly I start to stop fighting myself.
I do make one of the two mistakes that we often make. Some trans women change their appearance before they have done the inner work and struggle afterwards. Others do the work quietly on their own before they change their outward appearance, and surprise their family and friends when they pop out, fully formed. That’s what I did, even if a look at my social media would have left you in no doubt.
My wife chooses my name for me, and I try to bring her with me on my journey, but it’s too far, too fast for her, and while she’s catching up I’m still racing ahead. And the habit of secrecy and of hiding myself is so deeply engrained that I was not as open as I could or should have been. She is worried about the way the world will see me and her, and is not as encouraging as I would have liked her to be. It’s often very difficult for both of us, which makes it even less easy for each of us to be open.
We do go to the council offices together and have a little ceremony to change my name to the one she’s chosen and my gender to the one that I’ve chosen. Where I live, the process is self-declaration: you fill in a form, pay a small fee and the change is made. I feel joy, my wife feels a loss that I don’t feel. At least that one that I don’t feel anymore.
It is a big change to our partners when we come out isn’t it? At the stroke of a pen, they go from normal to gay. And not even the cuddly sort of gay, but one who is driven to it by a terrible transgender person. A trans widow. That was not easy for my wife and it still isn’t. I feel like a better version of myself, but the world doesn’t always see it that way.
I find support in a couple of friends, both cis and trans, and from my sister. I take baby steps and then ever bolder ones. I travel as Emma when I go on business trips, and find that at least in Germany, no one gives me a second look, and even if they do, nothing bad happens. With encouragement from a few people who I have trusted with my secret, and with a positive reaction from the wider world when I go out into it, a new me seems possible.
At this point, there is a realisation that something has tipped: I feel an acute discomfort when going back to being a man after my forays as a woman, and also I realise that being me is in touching distance. Also, after several years of estrogen, the feminine is shining through and boy mode is definitely starting to fail.
I am been really worried about how to tell my kids. This anxiety paralyses me for years. Will they cut me out of their lives? How can I ever go to their weddings when I’m so embarrassing? In the end, the problem solves itself. I have booked rooms for us for a weekend away, and the app has used my new name for the reservation. One of my boys gets to the hotel first, and I get a call asking me who Emma is. That evening, over pizza, I tell them, and promise that I’ll still be their dad. I was wrong to worry, they accept me fully and our relationships are stronger than ever.
The change accelerates. I start to work out how to look as passable as possible after time and testosterone have marked me. I get lessons in makeup, which are a gift from my wife. I grow my hair a little and I try to work out what style of clothes I need in different situations build my wardrobe from cross-dresser’s clothes to outfits for everyday situations. I start going to see Jenny the electrologist to get rid of the beard that no longer need to hide behind. I start to unleash the feminine in me instead of covering it up. Drag not drab.
Chapter 4: Finding my true self
At work, which is a big and happy part of my life, I set myself the goal of transitioning by the end of the year, and I’m terrified, but I know inside that being me, the whole me, is no longer a choice. Surprisingly for a company of 10,000 people with a 100 year history, I seem to be the first to change gender. There is no official process, and so me and the lady who does Inclusion write a policy for transition at work. She’s supportive and I feel valid. As the year passes, and the day gets closer, my doubts do mount. Am I doing the right thing? How will my team feel having a trans person as their boss? What will it feel like sitting in a Teams meeting as Emma? Will I lose my
job?
I’ve set the end of November as the day. I tell HR, which is what it says to do in the policy that I wrote. They are excited and the machine swings into action. We make a plan to change my data in the system, get me a new email address, tell everybody. I feel dread that I am losing control over my identity, becoming public property. My alarm bells are ringing. Half a century of habit is hard to break. At the end of October, my boss calls to tell me that I am going to receive an award. It will be at a global townhall meeting in three weeks. More than 2000 people will be there. I know instantly that this is the moment, that I want to be Emma when I’m given it. I tell my boss that there is something I need to tell him… and he smiles and says that he knows, he’s seen from my social media. We laugh.
I call a meeting with my team. They’re worried that I’ll be announcing job losses or a restructuring and several of them call me. I reassure than that it’s nothing bad. In the meeting, I tell them that I’m going to make my outside better fit the inside. Most of them are thrilled for me, a couple are more sceptical. I email the 200 or so people that I work with most closely, and I get back dozens of messages of support that fill my eyes with tears. The next day, the CEO introduces me as Emma to 2000 people and congratulates me on the work that I have done. My picture is on the screens of thousands of people and that’s it. I’m Emma.
The picture that people see on their screen is a great picture; partly because I went to a proper portrait photographer, but really because it’s a great picture; you can see the happiness in my eyes and face. The noise In my head is finally quiet.
It’s been a journey of more than five decades since that little child had the realisation that he should have been a girl. The euphoria of feeling free for the first time in my life is wonderful and I still feel it every day.
Chapter 5: Words for the next generation
So what does freedom feel like for Emma? It’s finally not hiding who I am and how I feel. I check the mirror now when I leave the house, and I see a happy, beautiful (if old) person looking back, rather than checking whether I look boy enough. I interact with people in colour, with emotions, with warmth and feeling. It’s so different moving through the world as a woman, compared to having to be a man, and it’s wonderful. It’s not been easy, and sometimes it’s still hard, but I would not go back.
I am trusted more than ever before. My openness, authenticity and the trust that I show others with my identity is returned to me even more strongly. I think that before, people sensed that there was something that I was hiding, but now my honesty is now there for the world to see. People like that, and respond with kindness.
I have had a great team of people to help me on this journey; family, friends, doctors, colleagues, and people who have expertly tried to guide me. Jenny has been a big part of helping me to get the confidence to be me, not just in helping me get rid of the beard that I used to hide behind, but also with her love and encouragement.
Thank you, all of you.