Sunday 30 September 2018

Labels


For the last 5 months or so, I have been doing some long hard thinking about who I am, something that I probably should have confronted years ago, but somehow managed to bury deep until this year. A combination of currently feeling in the best, clearest head space I have ever been in and somehow still feeling like I am living a lie.

Its been 15 years since I accepted that I was a lesbian, it took me a few more years to be able to tell people, but the end of denial and questioning felt like the biggest breakthrough ever. Perhaps it was but looking back I feel like what I did was try on a different label & felt more comfortable and ran with it. I’ve spent the last 15 years trying to make it fit, and now I’m questioning if I have been just trying too hard to fit a slightly-less ill fitting set of social expectations.

I have always struggled with being in queer spaces, accepting that that comes from an element of expectation on my part, but since long before I was accepting of my own sexuality I sought out queer spaces and found them intimidating and not for me, which kept me questioning myself. Yet I kept persisting, as there wasn’t anywhere else I felt comfortable either.

I realise now that I am far from alone in my first experiences of lesbian venues, showing up with the expectation of finally being welcomed with open arms into The Community, only to have the door slammed in my face by the (I now realise) infamous door staff of the candy bar in Soho, for not looking lesbian enough or not being masculine/feminine enough or just being too fat. I’ll never know, but I still look back with anger to those days. How could anyone who has questioned their sexuality then reject another human who shows up looking for acceptance too. I never, ever want someone to feel like their identity is invalid on the grounds of social expectations, be those from inside or outside of the queer community.

I spent the next 5+ years getting very comfortable knowing that I was the odd one out in a straight bar. Feeling awkward in a space I knew wasn’t meant for me was less problematic to deal with than feeling awkward in a space that I felt should have been my comfort zone.

Being accepted by my straight friends as the lesbian in the room was fantastic, and no one needed me to go any further with explaining myself. Walking into a female queer space, I was met with a sense of expectation that you would then have to fit into another label – butch or femme, lipstick, chapstick or boi. I didn’t have a clue and felt exhausted with the idea of having to go through another round of soul searching to find a new closer, but probably still ill-fitting label.

So, I didn’t, I stuck to hanging out in straight spaces, with little fear of being confronted to have to say anything about my sexuality at all. Over time, I made more lesbian, gay, bi and questioning friends, making the straight spaces a little more queer which made me happy, to be accepted in a mixed crowd was a new comfort zone.

Needless to say, I remained firmly single through these years and was happy to stay there but as friends and family all married off & started having kids, I found myself spending more time alone. It was time to take an active role in looking for a partner, so turned to the internet. I met several people doing this, and one did turn into an 8-month relationship, but I know looking back I was playing a role – it wasn’t really me in that relationship, it was my idea of what a partner should do, how I thought I should act – all seen through a lens of straight relationships.

The end of that relationship was the first big crack in my mental health, looking back it was coming for a long time & if I hadn’t had my own expectations, having grown up a tomboy, of I needed to be strong and unemotional, I may have sought counselling much sooner & not circled down as far or as deep as I did.

Having come through the next 5-year period of anti-depressants and counselling, I have found my new family with The Women’s Equality Party these last two and a half years, so why am I now questioning myself and my identity again?

The Women’s Equality Party has had the most positive impact in my life. It has given me hope for politics, it has connected me with so may amazingly supportive women and created the sort of mixed space where I feel utterly unjudged by fellow members of the party. There are no expectations on my place within societal structures, there is a pure acceptance of being taken at face value, without judgement. I am being appreciated for the time, skills and ideas I bring to the table. I’ve worked all my life in a male dominated environment as a computer programmer and I have never felt seen in my working life the way I feel seen and appreciated and encouraged by my fellow volunteers within the party.

This year alone has seen me standing in the local council elections, taking to the stage to speak about my personal experience with mental health services and writing a motion that got passed by conference into our party’s official policy document. I look back on where I was 3 years ago, even one year ago & I barely recognise myself. I have done things I never thought I could and I am ready to step up and keep pushing at my former boundaries as I carry on this journey.

So, this all sounds positive, right? Why is it that I have been struggling these last 5 months? Being challenged on what I thought I was capable of has allowed me to push at some of oldest walls I had built up in my mind.

It started with an invite to the Diva Awards back in June, a glitzy celebration of LBT+ women and allies, which I was to attend with friends from the party. This filled me with fear, it could have been excitement, but I find it hard to tell the difference between genuine nervous excitement and actual anxiety – I have spent too many years in trepidation that I will slip back down the well of despair that I default to worry & fear in these scenarios.

My feelings were overwhelming and disproportionate to the event & I knew it. Lots of old default thinking of self-hatred bubbled to the surface, for letting myself get so worked up before it began that I couldn’t enjoy it.

Roll on a month to Pride, and I did the exact same to myself, feeling utterly sick at the idea of marching with my fellow party members through London. I felt more of a fraud than ever when confronted by the very space I have craved to fit into and hating it. Hannah Gadsby in Nanette has come the closest to connecting it for me, talking about the first time she saw “her people” on TV at Mardi Gras – “We like to dance, don’t we? … my people …”.

I turned 40 this year and treated myself to a no-holds-barred week in Edinburgh at the Fringe festival, where I prioritised seeing shows based on feminist themes, queer women stand up, anything challenging mental health and some sci-fi, coz a girl had to have some fun too!

My over ridding take home from all these shows was to challenge my view of myself, why do I still approach all these new experiences I am having with such fear – of failure and of success. I have such high and low expectations of myself, simultaneously and with no reasoning.

On returning home from Edinburgh, I found myself in the middle of an unexpecting whirlwind of internal politics at The Women’s Equality Party, as the disagreement on trans rights ripped through the heart of the party I thought already held trans rights absolutely at the core of its ethos.

This sent me into a tailspin, questioning first if I had been wrong on the party position. Earlier this year, I was on stage at Queer Question Time as The Women’s Equality Party representative and proudly repeated the party line from our policy document: “We recognise that the binary words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ do not reflect the gender experience of everyone in our country and support the right of all to define their sex and gender or to reject gendered divisions as they choose”. Had I got the ethos of the party so wrong? I was completely taken by surprise by the speed and strength of force behind the turn of events, from where I was standing.

This was an incredibly painful couple of weeks that sent me questioning the loudness of my voice on this issue as well as questioning why I had been working so hard for a party if it didn’t accept my trans siblings & if I HAD got the position wrong, could I forgive myself for having represented such views, even if unknowingly.

I spent a lot of time crying during the two weeks between the storm beginning and conference bringing it some sort of a head and I discovered the power of a hug. I was struggling emotionally, and I reached out and created a support network to help me get through. I was vulnerable & I found strength in a group. This is new for me, I have always seen myself as a strong independent woman and it has made me question the core truths that I thought I knew about myself.

I identified as a Tomboy from a young age, looking back I can’t be sure if I chose this label, or if it was given to me, but I see now that I buried the patriarchy within myself with that label.

I have spent my whole life trying to emulate and fight for the right to be seen as having masculine traits within this feminine body. This is why I have had my own journey to becoming fully trans inclusive, I initially found the idea of someone changing their body to match their gender at odds with my desire to change attitudes to my gender based on my body.

Once I started questioning this, thinking about what gender, sex and sexuality meant to me and what it might mean to others, I concluded that these go hand in hand to truly break down societal conventions. The current system re-enforces the very gender stereotypes I have been trying to break – only by demolishing them and allowing for the non-binary can I truly live freely.

I want everyone to be able to accept any human being as they present and to believe them when they tell you about themselves. No assumptions. No stereotypes. That’s the world I want to live in.

My visceral uncontrollably emotional outpouring during these weeks leading to conference has forced me to question further why this topic completely broke me. I have dug deep and considered the last 30 years of my life as a whole.

Since puberty I have been at odds with my body, I am completely disconnected from my physical appearance, I don’t have mirrors in my flat, I avoid photos. I feel awkward all the time. In my head, I present as androgynous, however, mother nature delivered me G cup boobs, making it impossible to feel in control of the first impressions and assumptions people make based on my appearance.

I am also aware that I have a lot of internalised stigma around being fat and being female and being queer, thanks to growing up in a hetero-normalised, fatphobic world. I have known from a young age that I had no desire to have children, however I still feel like I have failed at life for not having got married and had kids. That’s the end goal we were all given as girls, right?

Over the months where these questions have all raised themselves and caused me some painful, personal introspection, I can also see I made some significant steps forward. The discovery of the amazing Gender Free World (https://www.genderfreeworld.com/), who make shirts with extra room for boobs - allowing me to dress comfortably and present as I have wanted, in shirts that are fun & fit my body. I finally got my hair cut short again; the liberating moment of seeing myself emerge from underneath the curls was liberating and freeing. A hair cut really can change your life.

So, where do I go from here? I want to find a way to lose all the labels, all the baggage, I want to get to know myself without any of the social pressures or internalised biases that I have held onto for far too long. I want to start again, to find a place of self-acceptance and then possibly, I can finally find my own personal comfort zone within the world. Maybe my life really will begin at 40.

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