Greetings from London, England, UK..(not a small Canadian town)
'I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired..'
Janis Ian 'At Seventeen'
In a slightly different version to what I give most people...
I'm born in West Yorkshire but first home was Glasgow, then back to Yorkshire from school age, I left home at the first opportunity (16) to London.
I've always felt different and had trouble fitting in. Started crossdressing at 12, first psychiatrist at 14 (which was the beginning of the end with my family) and I pretty much figured by the age of 17 that I could be female.
But I was scared, things were difficult with my family, I didn't have much confidence, and I wanted to be sure. You see, you only get one life for sure, and how you live it, well, it's everything. I played along for some years in London with the 'crossdresser theory' given by psychiatrists and doctors and treated my life as a voyage of exploration, experimentation, and discovery.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 I had decided to do something creative and became a writer, a playwright, and basically to escape my own reality went off to eastern Europe (Poland) to do the 'man thing'. I settled in Poland in 1993, became successful as a playwright and director, learning the language and crossing over into Polish culture.
I pushed myself, ended up living the life that most men dream of, became someone in Polish theatre, culture, the entertainment industry. But I never felt anything, no happiness, no love, nothing. Then I got married in 1996 and it hit me like an express train. I wanted to be my wife.
Only I was in the middle of one of the most homophobic and transphobic countries in Europe, well known to boot, and married to a woman who wanted me as a man. She knew about the gender issues, and later when we divorced understood. Spent five further years trying to transition, but keeping up the best I could..
You know when you discover something is a lie you stop believing it, and my male persona crumbled, I faded almost as quickly as I found success.. But still couldn't see a way out. I lived for some years a double life successfully, so successfully that some of the neighbours in the apartment block where I rented thought I was a married couple. Then I started getting e-mails addressed to my female half from journalists asking me to talk about being transgendered. Push was becoming shove.
It was 2005 shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II.. the LGBT community in Poland were demanding equality and the popular right wing politicians were of course against it, backed up by the Church. I moved to a small town in the south to rebuild my artistic career, and succeeded.
Thinking back it was mad, but then I had a different mindset and really believed I could use some of my popularity to bring about change. I came out publicly, my producer was slightly supportive until the backlash. My downfall was spectacular - in the space of eight days I lost my career, artistic reputation, my translation business, my contacts, most of my friends, my home, all bar one or two friends.
I ended up street homeless in Warsaw, in the snow and temperatures of minus 20 degrees. At the time I thought I was going to die. In the end I managed to scrape together enough money to take a train to the German border and spent four days hitchhiking across Europe with whatever I could take with me, back to London.
Since then I've worked my way back up from being street homeless in London.. itself quite a journey but things are okay now. I'm female 24/7, transitioning, and working to develop a new theatre company in London.
I'm cool with being who I am, it's exactly as Nature intended me to be. I could have done a whole bunch of stuff differently, but then I wouldn't have learned what I know now.
