I am now a Woman

I live in Cork, in Ireland.

I am not Irish. I am British. A plastic Scouser, if we are being geographically and culturally precise, which we absolutely should not be.

I am also very dyslexic.

So when I recently booked tickets to see Stewart Lee, I did a classic dyslexic Stevie manoeuvre and got Wexford and Waterford mixed up in my head.

Not hard to do, really. They both begin with W. They are both cities somewhere to the right of me on the map. That is apparently the full extent of my internal Irish geography.

The difference is that Waterford is a manageable after-work drive to see a stand-up show.

Wexford is absolutely bloody not.

Bollocks.

So there I was, driving across Ireland on a work night to see Stewart Lee, a comedian I had not seen live in about ten years. Last time I saw him, I was still in the old life. I was probably training for Ironman around then. Deep in the age of endurance sports, discipline, suppressed weirdness, spreadsheets, overwork, and whatever masculine superstructure I had constructed to hold the whole machine together.

This time, I was driving there as Stevie.

I arrived about forty-five minutes early and found the nearest place with food. It had RAMEN written in large letters on the front, which was good enough for me. I went in, ordered a pad thai at the counter, took my little number like it was McDonald’s and sat down waiting for food before the show.

“Does it come quickly?” I asked.

“Yes,” the girl behind the counter replied.

Perfect.

A few minutes later she brought over the pad thai.

And an empty ice cream cone.

Just balanced there on the side of the tray like this was the most normal thing in the world.

For a moment I genuinely wondered whether Wexford had developed some sort of avant-garde Thai dessert culture I was previously unaware of.

Pad Thai à la Ninety-Nine.

Then I realised.

In the corner of the restaurant was a self-serve ice cream machine.

Unlimited.

Oh my God.

Two little boys over there had constructed something that looked less like ice cream and more like a large-scale engineering project. One of them had managed to create a towering vertical spiral roughly equivalent to an elongated Marge Simpson hairstyle. It was honestly impressive structural work. If a civil engineer had walked over with a clipboard I would not have questioned it.

And unbelievably , unbelievably after watching these children essentially attempting to build the Burj Khalifa out of soft serve, I exercised restraint.

I produced what can only be described as the most sensible little cone imaginable.

Tiny.

Measured.

Demure (by my standards)

Honestly, if there had been an award for Moderation in Frozen Dairy Consumption, I should have received it on the spot.

Then I wandered off to the show holding my tiny little cone like a middle-aged woman who finally has her life vaguely under control.

And one of the oddest things about the entire evening was that I slowly realised I am never frightened of existing in public.

That sounds dramatic, but I do not mean in Cork or Dublin, where there are enough students, tech workers, artists, tourists and miscellaneous oddballs floating around that nobody really cares what anybody looks like anymore.

I mean the little service stations.

The tiny places.

The in-between towns.

The bits of Ireland where you half expect somebody to stop stirring their tea and quietly say:

“Well now?”

But nobody did.

I walk in and out of service stations in the middle of nowhere buying coffee and strawberries and using the toilet like a completely ordinary woman driving across the country and nobody ever questions me or looks at me at all.

Nobody stares.

Nobody ever challenges me.

And I’ve realised, with a strange sort of delayed shock, that I simply move through the world now.

Not perfectly. Not invisibly. I am tall, and transgender, and still carrying bits of unfinished business around with me. But the basic social contract had shifted. The world was reading me as what I was presenting as.

And I think that mattered more to me than I realised.

There is probably a whole review to be written about the Stewart Lee show, but this is not it. The relevant part is that a section of it concerned the modern industry of culture-war comedy. The arena comedians who can fill Netflix specials and giant theatres talking endlessly about trans people or whatever outrage topic is currently paying for somebody’s third swimming pool.

At one point I remember thinking:

I wonder if there are any other trans people in this audience apart from me.

For a brief moment I almost wanted to stand up and wave.

Hello. One here. Carry on.

Obviously I did not do that, because I am not completely insane, despite mounting evidence.

But something happened during the show.

I relaxed.

Not dramatically. Not in some cinematic moment where violins begin playing and everyone in the audience turns to look at me while a beam of heavenly light arrives from the ceiling.

I just slowly stopped guarding myself.

I laughed.

I smiled.

I let my hands come up near my face.

I noticed my posture had changed.

And suddenly I became aware that my mannerisms had completely shifted from the person who had last seen Stewart Lee a decade earlier.

Not performed femininity.

Not “look how feminine I am” femininity.

Just ordinary softness.

Girlishness, even.

And then, sitting there in the dark, looking down and seeing my body, my cleavage, my hands, my shape, I had the strangest internal moment.

Not an argument.

Not a political position.

Not a piece of gender discourse.

Just a sentence.

I’m a woman, aren’t I?

And the extraordinary thing is that I do not think I had ever fully allowed myself to say that before.

I had said I was transgender, of course.

I had said I was transsexual, because I am old-fashioned and slightly impossible.

I had said I was transitioning.

I had said I was not biologically female.

I had said all the correct caveats and disclaimers because part of me had been trained by the argument before I had even made the claim.

I always knew the objections.

You’re not biologically female.

Yes. I know.

You went through male puberty.

Yes. I know.

The voice.

The electrolysis.

The history.

The body.

The documents.

The past.

Yes. I know all of it.

For years, I think I let those objections live inside my own head rent-free. I would not let myself say “I am a woman” without immediately summoning the prosecution case against myself first.

But last night, in a comedy venue in Wexford of all places, something shifted.

I did not feel like a man pretending to be a woman.

I did not even feel like a trans person trying to earn permission to use a word.

I felt like a woman with an unusual history.

A woman whose body had travelled a strange road to arrive where it had arrived.

A woman with a voice that still belongs partly to the old operating system.

A woman with some remaining bits of electrolysis still to finish.

A woman carrying a history most women do not carry.

But still a woman.

And once I felt it, I could suddenly understand why the voice has become so psychologically important to me.

Because the voice is no longer “my voice.”

It is the leftover voice.

The residue.

The surviving artefact.

The last major thing still emerging from my body that does not match the person sitting inside it.

And knowing that voice surgery is now close, knowing that this final huge incongruence is not permanent, has changed something in me before the surgery has even happened.

It has allowed me to stop treating the voice as evidence against myself.

It is not evidence against me.

It is just history still making noise.

After the show I discovered that I had somehow driven across Ireland with one tyre sitting at a PSI of 14, because apparently the universe wanted to add a little mechanical jeopardy to my gender epiphany.

I stood in the rain pumping the tyre for what seemed like half my natural life, then finally began the long drive home through sideways Irish rain.

At some point I pulled into a service station, bought a large black coffee and an absurd quantity of local Wexford strawberries, and continued driving west through the dark.

I sang for a lot of the journey. I never ever listened to Queen, but I found myself doing Freddie Mercury impersonations half the way home for some reason.

And somewhere on the road between Wexford and Cork, because I am me and incapable of simply experiencing an emotion without immediately subjecting it to internal parliamentary debate, I started thinking:

Well. If somebody asks me now, what am I actually going to say?

Would I really say it plainly?

Would I actually say:

I am a woman?

And somewhere in the rain the answer became yes.

Not because everybody has to agree with me.

They do not.

People can think what they think.

I can think what I think.

But I no longer feel the need to hand people the opening statement for the prosecution before I am allowed to describe my own life.

This is how I feel.

This is what I know.

This is the language that finally fits.

By the time I got home, the rain had developed into one of its more advanced Irish forms. We have ordinary rain, sideways rain, forty-five-degree rain, wet rain, dry rain, rain that appears to come upwards from the ground, and rain that seems to have been personally briefed against you.

I opened the front door and found Colonel Chesterton asleep on the sofa like a naughty child who had stayed up waiting for his parent to get home.

He had discovered all of his timed treat dispensers in the kitchen, worked his way through his private little advent calendar of snacks, and left only one tiny poo as a welcome home gift.

I gave him a cuddle, watched a bit of telly and went to bed.

And I went to bed feeling something I do not think I had ever fully allowed myself to feel before.

Not that I wanted to be a woman.

Not that I was trying to look like one.

Not that I had earned the right to become one if I worked hard enough, passed enough tests, apologised enough, or explained myself clearly enough.

Just this:

I am a woman.

A woman with history.

A woman with scars.

A woman with a leftover voice, for now.

But a woman.

And God, it felt lovely.