James

"'You’re not going to start presenting as a different gender under my roof',
that just meant that the relationship broke down and I ended up becoming homeless."

Gender as a Kid
As a kid, I didn’t see gender as a massive big issue because kids were kids and whether you’re a boy or a girl. Pre puberty the only difference was whether you stood up or sat to pee and how much it hurts if you’re kicked there. 

As puberty hit, my body was no longer androgynous, it became much clearer to society and my peers and it made a massive difference to how they interacted with me. The more my body started to look female, the more distressing it got, more alienating it got. It didn’t really have a word to explain what I was going through back then, it was in the 90s. 

The 90s
Back then, section 28 was in place, so teachers weren’t allowed to talk about LGBT issues in Scottish schools. They couldn’t hand you a leaflet, they had to wait till you end up at the psychiatric services, so they could give you a leaflet and that’s where I learnt the word transgender. 90s, it was so invisible and there wasn’t that online community. As a young person, without an internet access, you end up feeling like you’re freaky and weird. You’d think there’s nobody else who’d know what you feel. It’s not going to be something that you can explain to other people. So you just feel like there’s no point trying to tell someone, because you’re just going to sound crazy and they’re going to be horrified and not have a frame of reference. 

When I was a teenager, I was really distressed about puberty and I couldn’t really imagine a future. So, I got very depressed. I did not have the words or the confidence to try and explain how I felt about my gender. So I was just saying I don’t feel like I fit in with the girls but I was being too vague so they didn’t really get what I was meaning. They put me on antidepressants but because it was situational, it didn’t stop me from being in that situation. I was still distressed about my body and how people perceived me. Just increasing the serotonin in your brain isn’t enough to change that situation.

Relationship with mom
By the time I came out as Trans, my relationship was bad with my mum and that made it even worse. She did see it as some kind of ‘You’re already depressed. You’re already unstable, and this is a symptom of how unstable you’re.’  so she didn’t take it seriously as an identity. She saw it as a symptom. “You’re not going to start presenting as a different gender under my roof”, that just meant that the relationship broke down and I ended up becoming homeless. 

My early stage of transition, was a mixture of having friends from the LGBT community group and friends from the homeless scene in Edinburgh. Those actually overlapped quite considerably. The way people are seeing homeless scene as being rough, and yes, there are people who don’t have much education, but actually people have gone through so much and all their friends are going through so much that as long as you’re treating someone with decency, they treat you with decency too. In terms of family, it was very difficult. It took around three years or so to have my mum come around. Now, she’s more supportive. Once she saw I was much more confident, comfortable and able to live an ordinary life as James, than I was before, then she was changed for the better. I think my mum was just convinced that I was making myself ostracised from society and destroy my life by transitioning. Once she saw that wasn’t actually the case, she was much more supportive. 

When I started testosterone, it really suited me. The more masculine in physical appearance I became, the more comfortable I felt. The more seen I felt and the less awkward the social interactions became. People saw me the way I instinctively thought of myself and everything just became smoother. Less stressful, less depressing. By early 20s, I was living simply as a man.