Freya-Onions-report

‘The thought came to me: what if you’re trans? And then it stuck.(…)
It was easier when I thought I was dying. Sometimes this feels bigger than death, you know.‘

–Bellies, Nicola Dinan

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Even though it was by now 6:30pm, it was still 37 degrees on the balcony. I sat in a wicker chair in front of a low table sipping a rapidly warming Aperol Spritz. Sweat on my lip.

Also sitting around the table were my mother- who occasionally glanced at the ruins of the Acropolis peaking over another apartment building- my brother Jack, and his girlfriend Effie. We’d only started drinking around a half hour ago. We all sat glancing around. I wanted to show them something. 

I pulled my phone out to show them a picture I had come across a few days earlier and had posted on my Snapchat story. It was a photograph taken during the early October of 2019, at the start of my second year of university. When I had come across it a few days prior, I had been undeniably excited- though it was only a few years old, I had completely forgotten about its existence. 

It showed me and a few friends at a bop (which is just the word used at Cambridge for regular college-run parties). On the far right hand side was me, dressed as a girl, in a black bob wig, foundation, mascara, red lipstick and orangey long-sleeve top. It had been taken by the photographer they hired to document the bop: the first time I ever saw it it had been posted on Facebook for the whole college to see. Now I had come across it again.

This was the Autumn of 2019, almost two years before I definitively started coming out as trans to my friends, but only a month after I had first seriously acknowledged the terrifying thought that I myself could be trans. Owing to this snapshot’s proximity to that realisation and the terror and despair it brought, I was in crisis mode. At the time I was going out with a cis girl called Katie- whom I still adore- and was not-so-convincingly disguising my desire to dress up as a girl at bop as ‘look I’m dressing up as my girlfriend’- that’s a normal thing to do, right? 

I had only started going out with Katie the July beforehand, and had immediately entered a kind of crisis because this was the first time I had ever had to consider myself to be a man. Where before I saw myself as this neutral, drifting entity with a mind filled with fantasies, adorations of various versions of cis and trans womanhood, now was I was ‘the boyfriend’. And that was the most uncomfortable thought in the world. Where before, I was at least neutral, now I was the boy. Now my skin began to crawl more than it ever had before. 

My mum and brother didn’t have much of a reaction to the image, even when I stressed, ‘and that was back from October 2019!’ We got back to drinking.

I’m interested as to why I was so keen that they saw that picture, why I posted it on my snapchat story for my thirty or so friends on there- many of whom I know from secondary school- to see. In reality, it was by no means a joyful snapshot of an early night of my personal story of trans liberation. In fact, it had been a brutally difficult and confusing time in which I felt deeply uncomfortable. I didn’t love the way I looked, but I did really want to dress up like that. 

It wasn’t a simplistically happy picture. But I think the reason I wanted them to see, both my family and my snapchat friends, was to try to communicate a kind of continuity about my life. Much of what can be difficult about coming out as trans to friends and family is that it can sorta seem like it has come out of nowhere, prompting responses like: what? you weren’t like this before. I know you one way and you seemed happy enough then and I want you to stay like that for my own personal comfort.

Frequently these ideas form kind of an implicit subtext underlying many responses from cis people upon hearing that their loved one is trans. Like that audio that’s been all over trans TikTok this past week: I liked you better when you hated yourself. 

In showing that photograph, I was saying, look, while I might have kept it secret, while I might have put all my energy into downplaying it, hiding it, keeping it behind closed doors, justifying it away even to myself, there it was, the whole time. Look: I was trans that whole time. 

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On that same holiday in Greece where I had rediscovered the bop picture I read what has quickly become one of my favourite novels- probably up there with To The Lighthouse– Bellies by Nicola Dinan, published that very month in July 2023. 

My experience of reading this novel had been intense: never before have I read a book that seemed to speak so closely to my own experiences as a trans person, both on a very trivial level- the book’s trans protagonist, Ming, is introduced while living as a cis man wearing drag at a Cambridge bop, realises that she’s trans during the course of her degree, tries to run away from it, before moving to Camberwell in south London, where she transitions and even gets the number 12 bus for christssake… 

But, beyond these bizarre similarities, which certainly made me love the book even more, on a more significant level it was the highly specific way that Ming realised that she was trans that really hit me on a deep, personal level. You see, Ming realised that she was trans in almost the exact way that I did- and this was the first time I’d ever heard any trans person’s story even remotely similar- let alone almost the same. 

So, while spoiling as little of the novel as possible, I’m now going to attempt to summarise the way Ming describes her realisation of her transness to her boyfriend Tom just over 100 pages into the novel. 

Throughout the early portions of the novel, which are mostly narrated from Tom’s perspective, it has been revealed that Ming, his then boyfriend, suffers from OCD, causing him to present hypochondriac symptoms, believing that he’s going to die from various ailments, particularly heart conditions. Pretransition Ming spends a lot of time obsessing over his heart rate, and is often overcome with fear of dying a slow death from a terminal illness. 

The ninth chapter, titled ‘Ash’, is narrated by Tom, who goes to a corporate work party before coming home to his then boyfriend Ming. For much of the novel thus far Tom has known Ming has a secret, but doesn’t know what it is. Then Ming says this:

‘I don’t think I want to be a boy,’ he said. ‘I mean that I think I can’t be a man.’ 

An anxious dread radiated from my stomach. It climbed my bones up to my jaw. It sat in the bays of my teeth. 

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘I think I’ve realised that now. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Since before we went to see my dad and Cindy in Kuala Lumpur. Much more since we graduated. I know you thought my OCD had got better. Or at least that’s what I said. I know you’ve been asking questions. It has got better. That wasn’t a lie, but in a lot of ways it just turned inwards,’ he said, growing more lucid as the words piled on. It was alarming. He moved his body back and sat against the headboard. ‘The thought came to me: what if you’re trans? And then it stuck. It came in and out, but then I was obsessed with my heart and ALS and it all took a back seat. It was so scary, you know, because it’s a big thing, and it means losing so much.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve thought about nothing else since, to be honest. Like, I’ve been analysing memories and imagining myself this way or that way and seeing how I feel. It takes me to different answers. When the answers tell me I’m trans, I panic and I do it again until I can convince myself I’m not. But it sticks, Tom. And I think it’s real. It’s different to the heart and ALS stuff. It was easier when I thought I was dying. Sometimes this feels bigger than death, you know.’

I remember when I first read this all the hairs on my arms and legs stood upright. I felt seen in a way that I never had before: like the minutest logic of my innermost thoughts had been given a voice.

It captured all the confusion, the going back and forth, the agonising. The desperate attempts to explain it all away. The way it can feel ‘bigger than death’.

Like Ming, during my adolescence and early adulthood I too had suffered from obsessive hypochondriac-like symptoms that had brought me to long periods of despair believing that I was going to die from various illnesses. Unlike Ming, who seems to experience a far more intense and all encompassing form of OCD than I ever have (I don’t think I have OCD but had very similar experiences growing up), these periods of health obsession were almost entirely confined to the summer holidays between school years when I had nothing else to distract myself with. Rarely, if ever, did my thoughts extend long outside of late July and August. 

The first time it happened was in the summer of 2015: I convinced myself I had diabetes on a fight back from Chicago. Then I started listening to my heart and getting chest pains as a result. Then I believed I was going to die because of my heart. I went to the doctors, had ECGs, they couldn’t find anything wrong. I lived two months of horror, my whole young life ending over and over again. Then I went to school in september and forgot about it and the symptoms disappeared. 

In the summer of 2016, my friends and I broke into an abandoned mental hospital in Wolverhampton, clambering over ‘Warning- Keep Out- Asbestos’ signs on the way in. Over the following days I researched mesothelioma and asbestosis, and sank into another pit of despair like the previous summer, keeping it a secret.

(I realise now that the secretness of these conditions, the fact that I couldn’t tell my parents but that if I did I would have to go through a series of medical interventions to address or investigate them was central to the feeling of isolation and hopelessness I felt). 

The summer of 2017… I can’t actually remember this one- maybe I got off scot free- who knows!

In the summer of 2018 I cut my leg badly and thought I was going to die from sepsis for several days, though this fear was far more short lived. After all, my whole life was going to begin, and I was full of joy and excitement. At the end of that summer I went to university, and immediately felt liberated. 

All my life I had wanted to leave my hometown, my family, and live the way I wanted to away from their prying eyes. Now, in my first year of university, I had the freedom to do so many things I had always wanted to. My first year was amazing- liberatory- I felt very vividly as if I was a plant growing on a windowsill, moving toward a kind of revelation that would change my life forever. From March 2019, I became closer with Katie: we bonded over our shared mystical ideas about life, the stars, religion, drugs, Carl Jung. 

When third term ended I travelled home in sunlight with my mother, playing the greatest hits of my year: Neutral Milk Hotel, Belle and Sebastian, Car Seat Headrest, feeling the most free I had ever felt. Then, during that July, Katie and I’s relationship became more serious, and I started to enter another period of confusion and despair, though this time it wasn’t medical. 

While I was on a family holiday in Croatia in July 2019, the first thought came: what if I’m gay? While the possibility had been discussed between myself and Katie in those early months I had never really considered this particularly seriously before, at least not since after puberty. Since the age of about 14 I had experienced little to no attraction to men at all. There were no guys I was crazy about. I didn’t seek out images of the male body, didn’t think about men in a sexual way. Instead, I spent much of my time obsessing over various women, thinking about how great it must have been to be them, to live like them. 

But, while I loved and adored Katie, had an amazing time with her, and delighted in the opportunity to be in such close proximity to the femaleness that I had denied myself during my adolescence, I wasn’t attracted to her in a sexual way. So I began to worry, particularly seeing as now my indecisiveness about my sexuality and identity had someone other than me that it could hurt. And, I thought, the longer I left it, the more it would hurt her. I described my experiences of this confusion in Croatia in my long poem of my late teens, Sunset Sex With Bailey Jay:

Before then, though, it was all joyous,
Simple. Innocent. And I loved it at the time,
Now more-so. And I suppose we can just hold
Onto that forever and never need go back 
Into no-man’s land again.
I’m rather sexually fucked up right now.
I go back and forth between
One idea and another, never remembering
The progress I previously made. My memory is
Near enough wiped every night while I sleep. 
There is a massive hole burnt in my brain.
A thunder storm has moved in over the sea tonight,
People are running for taxis, waiting in restaurants.
The cat sits outside during the storm,
Shaded from rain-flecks. She’s not allowed inside
With us, her owner is away, he comes to feed
Her on his motorbike once an evening. She’s
Moved from the windowpane. Just know that
I’ve bit my fingernails down waiting.

When I visited Katie again at her home in late July I brought up the topic of my sexuality, telling her that I had had doubts again but that I loved being in a relationship with her and wanted it to continue. After all, I had an amazing time with her, and women felt far more central to my identity than men ever had. We walked through the warm woods in rural Essex, me walking ahead and not making eye contact as I explained. 

When I got back from Katie’s I quickly went back to the same thoughts. Why did everything seem to be explained by Bailey, the trans woman with whom I had spent much of my free time in my first year talking, and who seemed to explain the pathway towards my own liberation, as well as have something to do with the revelation I had felt myself moving towards all year? Why, if I seemingly didn’t give a shit about men, and had always been obsessed with women, did I feel so uncomfortable being the boyfriend in my relationship? Why did my proximity to Katie only throw into relief my extreme discomfort with my own body rather than relieve it if to be in a relationship with a woman was all that I had ever dreamed of? Why did my skin crawl? Why did I want to jump out my body?

Then, the thought came: what if I’m trans? It would certainly explain a lot. While this wasn’t the first time I’d considered myself as being trans, it was the first time it had been serious- and terrifying. I sank doubly deep into my depression, unable to tell anyone about my affliction. If I was just gay I could just come out, and that would be easy. My life would hardly change. The sadness sat in my cheeks. I felt like I could never smile again, and couldn’t tell anyone why. 

Then I thought, wait a second, what if this is just another hypochondriac thing? This time it felt a lot different, but I jumped at the chance to explain away what was by far the most terrifying and life-ruining thought I had ever had. No, it’s just your mind playing tricks on you, I said. It’ll be over after summer. Your whole life you’ve loved women, now you’re in a relationship with a girl you love spending time with, you got what you wanted. 

In early September 2019 I flew to Malta with my university friends for a week drinking and sightseeing. On the plane I could only think about how desperately I wanted to kill myself. I closed my eyes, swaying from the hangover as we took off at 7am. I was dying, I couldn’t tell anyone. 

Then it was second year, and a few weeks later the photo at bop was taken. Months passed, and I broke up with Katie in January 2020. 

Over the next 2 years things continued much as they had. I battled to convince myself that it had come out of nowhere. Forced it to conform with the narrative of my hypochondria. I came out as gay, which was easy (like many, my parents are progressive on gay stuff, less so on trans stuff): the only difficulty was that it felt totally untrue. It felt like I had thrown away my one chance at living truthfully, and was now consigned to a gay maleness that had never interested me in the slightest. 

I told a few friends about what had happened, that I had ‘convinced myself that I was trans’ and that I had a history of doing things like this. That it was ‘internalised homophobia’.

But it hadn’t come out of nowhere. Since my childhood androgyny and half-girlhood had waned, I had spend a decade longing, thinking about how amazing it was that women were women, how fantastic it must be to be a woman. Longed for it. Become obsessed with trans women, read up on everything trans, the magical concept of transness. Its promise of euphoria and delight- and its freedom- until I saw it as the promise of freedom itself. 

That’s what I was trying to say with the bop photo: look at me there, look i’ve aways been like this, believe me when I say this didn’t come out of nowhere.

It always comes back to my first year of university, when I first started to see proper glimpses of myself living the way I always wanted. I lived in a sunny room by the water in the middle of college. The reflections from the water cast beautiful shadows on the ceiling and I lay in bed dreaming and talking to Bailey about transness. 

Not only did Bailey seem to offer the key to my own liberation, but there were so many other things during that year that, looking back, should’ve made me think, wait, what if I’m trans, before I got home and entered into a relationship that would send me into crisis. 

Like how when whenever I met anyone new at university I was quick to tell them about Bailey, to make sure that they associated me with her, to know that my psychic relation to this trans woman was somehow a part of my psychosexual identity. Just like I had on the balcony in Greece, I waved pictures of her on my phone: look, this says something about me, look I’m like this too. 

Or when I first bought make-up in 2018 to wear at university and felt so free and planned to wear it everyday. Or when in at the start of second term (January 2019) I bought a load of girls clothes and more makeup on Asos and would wear it in my room on quiet nights. Or when I started wearing make-up and sometimes blue lipstick out on nights out, and liked it when my friends noticed it, or started wearing the girl’s socks with rainbows on them out around town. Each time I added a thing, and talked more to Bailey, and felt closer to a revelation. 

Or my intense desire to distance myself from what I saw as gay guy femininity- drag and all that- being only interested in wearing ‘natural’ makeup, to dress like a ‘normal’ girl, to eschew flamboyance and campness. 

I remember in my second term, in the height of my obsession with Bailey, vividly imagining the effects of estrogen would have on me and thinking yes I’d probably like all the changes and feel more comfortable but then thinking nothing more of it. I’d look at my arms and think yes, of course I would like it if I had softer skin, looked like a girl. Actually, I’d probably be able to do all those things I’ve always been obsessed with but for myself. Then I’d just shrug it off. The revelation would come when it came. 

Occasionally, on long evenings alone between piss-ups, in my room by the water, the thought would rear its head. Then I’d do something to confirm I wasn’t trans. Like: badly put on lipstick and make up and look at a mirror and be like well that doesn’t look like a woman/ I hate how I look here, and I’ll never pass, so I can’t be trans. 

Then I’d take my make-up off and put on my women’s pyjamas and sleep in them to just try to stop the rolling feeling of intense discomfort. To just feel normal. To feel like I could even catch a breath.

I knew there was some secret but whenever my own transness came up I just shrugged it off, partly, I think because I didn’t believe I could ever pass. And, knew that my friendship group at uni were transphobic, and that even if my parents turned out to be surprisingly accepting, they would think it came out the blue. I’d hid so much of myself.

On the 9th of March 2019, second term of first year, I took a small dose of LSD on my own and had an enlightening experience. 

That afternoon I sat in my room thinking about love, about what my life meant, and what my life would become, though mostly in highly abstract terms. I felt very free, if full of the slight, trepidatious anxiety acid tends to bring with it, and deep within the gender issues I had continued to lightheartedly shrug off. 

After the trip finished, I messaged my best friends from Sixth Form to discuss the answers I had come to. The answer, I said was ‘Bailey or love or whatever’. Then I went on to the topic of how I was going to live my life differently after what I had discovered about myself:

it is more feminine though, I guess
i’m gonna re read the tao de ching

This, I believe, and this acid trip, and the way I felt so totally ready to live my life over the following few days, my belief in this femininity I had discovered about myself and the way I wanted to move forward, was the closest I ever came to transitioning before my crisis a few months later. But I didn’t transition then, I waited two more years. 

For two years, I forced myself to fall in love with my own unhappiness. That way I accepted all the ways I felt, all the ways I settled for not what I wanted. I tried to live as a gay man but was really a non-entity, and, during this period, felt the least myself and the least free I ever have. I pushed away all my thoughts about women, stopped talking to or about Bailey, thinking that they were too real, and thus conflicted with my putative gayness- which I characterised as ironic and artificed. 

I forced myself to like gay stuff, to push away all those little tokens of freedom or liberation I had picked up over the years. Then, finally, at the end of third year, I decided the time had come: it hadn’t just been that summer, none of my thoughts, desires or discomfort had disappeared. If anything, they’d gotten worse. So I decided to go through with it, and started transitioning when I moved to London.

Though, by now, things were in a different colour. Where in first year transness had meant liberation and freedom, now it felt like something I had rejected with all my power that I had reluctantly given in to. It wasn’t the revelatory affirmation it would have been had I decided to transition before going out with Katie. As I wrote in the Bailey poem quoted above, ‘before then it was joyous./ Simple. Innocent. And I loved it at the time.’

I felt weathered, old, beaten down. Over the two years or so I’ve been transitioning, I’ve started to regain that feeling of liberation and have felt it in new, amazing ways. I feel the most real and comfortable and ready to live as I ever have. 

Figuring out I am trans and accepting it was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It has been my greatest feat, harder than any other success or hardship I’ve ever been through. All through my first year of university, in my early conversations with Katie, sat next to her on a bench, looking up at the wintery trees, I had believed that there was some big secret about me, that had something to do with womanhood and transness, the way those concepts made me feel, but that was hidden from view. I thought drugs would take me to it. They gestured towards it, but I had to accept it on my own. 

Like Ming in Bellies, transitioning has made my worries about dying, my worries about there being something deeply wrong with my body that I can’t tell anyone about, recede into the background. I rarely think about it. I’d be really interested to learn about how dysphoria, and the pain it brings, can manifest itself in more societally acceptable ways like repetitive health scares.

I guess it was always going to have to be traumatic in some ways. In first year, it just felt so lighthearted, so spiritual, so enlightening. And now, as I’m recapturing that feeling, I discover each day how it is deeper, richer, and more complex than I had imagined from my room by the water.

12/08/23