We're just back from a weekend away with good friends, friends that I've known for over 35 years and met when I was at college. They know that I dress and are fully accepting, and the lady of the house has even promised to make me a dress, when we can settle on a pattern. Anyway, on Sunday morning we were joined by another ex-college friend for the day. He and I met on the rugby fields of our youth and had many adventures together where we would "Bind on, drive over and make the ball avilable." So, we had a good brunch and then settled on something to do for the morning. He and I decided to have a walk along the beach and then possibly have a lunchtime pint in a pub in the village. So we set off and wandered along the sands, the beach is massively long and massively sandy, fringed by sand dunes. There's a massive castle perched high on the rocks behind the dunes. The tide was out and so the beach was also massively wide. It's a fantastic beach. So, there we were, two good friends of over 35 years wandering along a beach and remembering times past. Then it started to rain and so we cut across the sands and wandered up to the village. It was too early to go to the pub and as it was still lightly raining we decided to have a look around the ancient church. I say ancient, a church on the site goes back to Saxon times of about 600 CE. Unfortunately there was a service in progress in the church and so we wandered around the graveyard and then decided to move on to a local museuem. As we walked back along the wall in front of the church, we noticed that the vicar had come to the front door, to shake the hand of the faithful as they went on their way. The service had finished and so we would be able to wander around the ancient church after all. So we waited for the church to empty and continued our conversation.
It was at this point that he mentioned transgender people, particulrly children. This mentioning of transgender came completely out of the blue and formed no part of the previous conversation. In fact, I can't remember him every mentioning anything to do with transgender issues before. My friend works in education. I severely paraphrase here and want to stress that whilst his views were incorrect they were not bigotted, more that they were based on ignorance. There was no malice in what he was saying. Anyway, to paraphrase he was wondering how it could be right that one day John, let's call him John, aged 7, could be at school and the next day, she, that is Janet, the same person, could turn up at school weaing a skirt and use the girls toilets. He was sure that children of that age could not understand or questeion their gender identity (basically he had never had cause to question his own gender identity and so it was an area of life about which he had no comprehension), and that the frequent metions of transgender issues in the media and particular social media were to blame. So, I gently questioned his views and what he was saying, trying to make him question where his viewpoints were coming from and why he held these opinions.
I then felt that I was at a crossroads, I had a decision to make and the conversation could go one of two ways. I could ignore what he was saying and move on or not. I also had to bear in mind that I have been a good friend with this person for 35 years and would I want to risk that? But, I thought that there was an opportunity here, not to make the conversation about me, but to educate someone, to put them on the right path, to make them think and so, when they next have a conversation with someone about people who are transgender to discuss it from a more informed position, a position of knowledge. Even though I could not be sure, I took the plunge and jumped stright in.
I have a picture on my phone for times such as this, though this is the first time that I have used it, and so told him that I was going to show him a picture and that when I showed it to him I hoped that it wouldn't change anything between us. And so I showed him the picture. On the face of it, it just a picture of the lower half of a person wearing a skirt. He wasn't sure what he was looking at and so I told him that it was me, and that I am transgender. I also told him that I could trace my being transgender back to when I was four when I had a unstoppable need to wear one of my sister's dresses. I explained how my mother had allowed me to play in a dress and how, since then, I have always known that I have a large female part to my gender identity. I explained how this has arrived unbidden, fully formed and completely unprompted from any external source. It is, and has always be, a part of me and who I am. And you could see the scales drop from his eyes, you could see how he realised that what he was saying peviously was based on ignorance and conventional wisdom, but with no thought or consideration. But, previously he had had no reason to think any differently. No one had questioned his views and, as far as he was concerned, he had never known anyone who is tansgender. And so we talked and he learned, and then he said one of the nicest things which he could have said, which was that he likes it when someone completely and utterly changes his mind, that a person who clearly knows more than he does about something, explains to him not only that his views are wrong, but why they are wrong.
And we had our pint and we continued our chat and we continued to remember times past. And the only thing that has changed between us is that he now knows that I am transgender and I express that in the way that I do, and that I have done so for the 35 years that he has known me, including the 18 months when we lived in a shared house. But something much more important has changed and that is his views of transgender issues because now he can speak from a position of knowledge. He will now say that yes, it's right that if John needs to go to school as Janet and use the girls' toilets then that' ok and it's what should happen and that Janet should get all the help and support they need, because life when you're transgender can be very hard and he doesn't want to part of what makes life hard for Janet, because underneath, when your strip away the ignorance, he's one of the good guys.
