Another Effing Sarah

After everything that had happened up until this point, it's safe to say I spiraled. Did I do it spectacularly? Was it a mess? Well... it was sex, alcohol, a lot of weed, a trip across to Auckland, experiencing sexual assault for the second time in my life, moving to Brisbane, getting engaged... and landing in the middle of a double murder investigation (which deserves a series of posts on its own). I managed to hit the ground in a way that only I could, but I also met a couple of genuinely amazing people through the absolute shit show I had found myself in. I think it was during all of the above that I was living as close to being Sarah than any other time in my life. The girl I was engaged to was someone I broached the topic of not feeling comfortable in my own skin with, and her response to it was to play with changing my name. Did I tell her that changing my name to something else that was masculine wasn't going to help the issue? No... but it did give me a bit of space...

The nineties were a curious time for transgender representation in the media. On one hand you had the brutal and destructive portrayals of transwomen especially in movies like Silence of the Lambs and The Crying Game , and then you had the other end of the spectrum in movies such as The Birdcage, Priscilla Queen of the Desert , and other outings that would prove to be problematic. But if you've been around any discussion I've taken part in that revolves around trans representation in film and media or Twin Peaks  (shameless plug: I reviewed it for Insights), you will inevitably hear me gush about David Duchovny who was somewhere beautifully in the middle with his portrayal of Denise. By this time the internalised transphobia had already set in and started chipping away at the idea of ever coming out as Sarah (look at me talking like a woke liberal special snowflake). Transexuals or transvestites were weird fetishists who got off sexually on wearing women's clothing. Buff...

Part 2 - Notes: First up: content warning. Second: not light reading Third: I couldn't find anywhere here for humour or something sweet, in fact this was utterly exhausting to write. I will make room in the next entry for something light, or a joke. I promise. Read gently. I wish there was an easy way of explaining how I understood myself and my predicament growing up. Sometimes it felt like something had gone wrong with my genetics and I was just the unfortunate girl caught in a meat-suit that didn't match her insides. Sometimes I thought I had done something disastrous in a previous life and this was my punishment. Like, really, want to know what I think "Hell" is? Spend every day seeing yourself in the mirror and feeling either disappointment, disgust, or that you were on the receiving end of a really bad cosmic joke. Sarah was the name I chose for myself in my imaginings of if I'd been born a girl instead. I saw myself as a redhead, pale, and always wi...

Let's jump back for a moment and rehash an explicit point I made in saying that myself as "Sarah", and myself as "Michael" aren't separate personalities, but presentations of the same person. "Sarah" is who I am and always identified as internally, and "Michael" is how I looked or presented to the world because... that's what I did and didn't know any better. Or there's my favourite analogy: Sarah is who pilots the meat-suit "Michael", but everyone thinks that the pilot is a boy, when in fact... the pilot is a girl. So talking about what comes next is easier to talk about these two aspects as different, but please understand... I'm perfectly sane (aside from PTSD, anxiety, depression, and a little paranoia... but you be me without acquiring these things, yeah?). So if this is confusing to you, then imagine how I felt? Do you understand how hard this is without falling back into philosophical talk, or theories o...

Thirty-eight years is how long it took me to be able to feel at home in my own skin. In all that time I lived with a secret that I couldn’t tell a lot of people, and the people I did tell I could probably count on one hand. How do you tell people that you were born wrong? How do you tell people that how you look is absolutely the antithesis of how you feel? How do you do this in a time growing up where people and members of your own family made jokes of you because you were the “gay of the family”, or when people in your social circles referred to people as “faggots”, “poofters”, and “fucking trannies”? It was always going to be a difficult task.  It’s ironic though, because in high school especially, it was later revealed that the people who had bullied me so relentlessly for apparently being gay (read: different, and them not possessing the capacity to even understand what the actual reasoning for this difference was), would be the ones who were having secret homosexual enc...