Old Hermy's Never Die ... They Simply Smile That Way

A blog about ‘stuff’ your grandmother could, or would never tell you!

Republicans to introduce a bill making it compulsory for all intersex patents (pre and post operative), to be catheterised before being allowed to leave their homes and wear a bright pink catheter-bag in the shape of the Star of David.

Having got hot under the collar and cold in their reptilian hearts, the Republicans and their familiars, the right wing, testosterone fuelled ‘neo cons’. Are to push a bill through the Senate making it compulsory for all intersex patients (pre and post operative) to be catheterised before they can legally leave their homes wearing a clearly visible bright pink catheter-bag, in the shape of the Star of David.

While a chip implanted in their brains will cause intersex patients to spontaneously combust if they go, or think about going within a hundred meters of a public convenience, toilet, and rest room. Damming them to burn for all eternity in the flames of Hell, whose fuel are stones and intersex patients.

Praise the Lord for technological totalitarianism and pass the ‘hollow point’ ammunition before the queers and freaks, the transvestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites frighten the women and children again.

It is not just the home of the brave, land of the partly free, God fearing white majority. Where people get hot under the collar and ice cold in the cubicles about intersex patients invading their toilets and rest rooms, or purchasing goods in their shops, especially during the hours of daylight and on a Sunday.

Like the majority of people I tend to do a Tesco shop every other week, when one week I started to notice an increase in the number of pre-operative transsexuals walking hesitant and uncomfortable, about the various sections of the superstore. At the time I was uncertain whether to smile and give them a big thumb’s up, or do what I did instead, politely pretend not to even notice the five o’clock shadow.

Unfortunately, many of the middle aged women shoppers froze in complete amazement and disbelief, with a sedative ‘come down’ over the pre-packed bananas and un-sulphured apricots. Because something close to hysteria swept like a tsunami through the consumer calm and BOGOF (buy one get one free) predictability of the lunchtime shoppers.

God knows what it must have been like had any been forced out of fear to go to the toilets, I can imagine women spontaneously combusting and children being struck down, driven mad with conflict, confusion, and revulsion. While vigilante groups rushed around the hushed silences of this hallowed retail space with all the fanaticism of the Hitler youth asking: ‘Is that one?’

Never have I seen Tesco empty so quickly, leaving managers to distribute sedatives, sleeping tablets, tranquillisers, and individual therapy to the staff; before they could continue scanning the monochromatic normality of a two sex species. Though why seemingly decent, normal people, can get so excited, outraged and upset over a man dressing as and wanting to be a woman, I can never understand.

The only people most transsexuals want to harm are themselves and their own-hated genitals. While ‘passing’ undetected as a man or a woman is the ‘Holy Grail’, the social ecstasy of acceptance most will undergo personal mutilation and social exclusion in order to achieve. When a good day is one you can get through without laddering your ‘panty hose, or having some angelic faced little girl, pointing, ask loudly: ‘Mummy, why is that man wearing a dress?’

It is certainly not for equal rights and equal pay that male to female transsexuals become second class citizens, have themselves castrated and carry around two bags of silicon sawn into their chests for the rest of their lives. In what is unquestionably a man’s world, they will be forced to live, if live it be, without legal rights and social acceptance.

Reduced to the role of all ‘life unworthy of life’, damned in this world and the next by the Priests of hate, mercenary armies of Christian Fundamentalism and the stone faced Harpies of modern society. Unfulfilled, middle aged, menopausal women with bitterness for blood and the predisposition of angry hippopotamus, or an X-Factor audience high on the moment of blood sacrifice. When the darkened showers filled with Zircon gas and the pitiful screaming finally stopped.

It was that great philosopher, free thinker and pupil of Zigmund Freud, Carl Gustive Jung, who prophetically said in ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’ that:
‘The political and social isms of our day preach every conceivable ideal, but under this mask, they pursue the goal of lowering the level of our culture by restricting or altogether inhibiting the possibilities of individual development. They do this partly by creating a chaos controlled by terrorism, a primitive state of affairs that affords only the barest necessities of life and surpasses in horror the worst times of the so-called "Dark Ages."’
‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’ by Carl Gustive Jung, from R.D. Hull’s translation of his collective works.Because following the horror of ‘nine eleven’ and subsequent war without end upon a linguistic concept, terrorism. Fear is the chosen instrument of social and personal control, when no where, not even public rest rooms, are free from the terror of intersex individuals, the ‘other’, which is ‘life unworthy of life’ according to the Nazi’s and those good men and women who remained silent. Used along with the cohesion of punishment and reward, by most western governments and the technological totalitarianism they hide dusty and dirty beneath like a terracotta army of nodding dog politicians.

While the closer and greater that the perceived threat and fear are. The more absolute is the control that the military and industrial complex can exert upon the robots and automatons, the button pushers and lever pullers, the guards and watchers who service ‘Big Brothers’ unblinking Cyclops eye and technological totalitarianism’s growing personal data banks.

For the more unlike us is this perceived threat from the ‘other’, the alien invading our space. The easier it becomes for the media to demonise them. Young soldiers to kill them. The politicians to condemn them. The vacuous Vicars and Priests of hate to damn and condemn for all eternity, from the altars and pulpits of the white man’s, white God.

Which, were it not for the cracked and distorting mirrors reflecting the mortal needs of immortality in man, would be seen for the illusion and self-deception that religions control by and through, the foolish, desperate and ignorant talking in tongues and kissing snakes.

Fear blinds us to reason and the truth, makes excusable the inexcusable, deludes the delusional, is justification of the unjustifiable and like an iceberg, only a small fraction one tenth, is visible above the water. While the majority, the unseen nine tenths, remains submerged and silent, deep in the sub-conscious.

For those brought up with reds under the beds and a worldwide Communist conspiracy, intent upon destroying and overthrowing Capitalism’s teetering house of ‘credit cards’ and bankers bonuses. Intersex patients, especially those currently transitioning from one sex to another, are just the latest convenient ‘boggy man’, the enemy within, used to frighten the voters on both sides of the Atlantic.

More convenient cat’s to kick, to distract the electorate while politics cosy, convenient conspiracies stir-up another ‘pretext war’ to keep the twenty-four seven production-lines running into the next century. Intersex patients, pre and post operative are a soft target in the ongoing struggle against all that is different. All who dare to question, to doubt the historical litany of liars and those mentally ill, who hear the voice of a male God whispering softly, seductively inside their heads. Reassuring, reinforcing and encouraging man’s comforting social, sexual and religious stereotypes.

Damning in this world and the next any whom ventured beyond the monochromatic comforts of a species comprised of only two possible sexes, male or female. Who questioned the social stereotypes and personal expectations of human sexuality, or were unfortunate enough to be born physically both male and female and yet wholly neither.

A third sex of ‘mix and match’ genetic potential and psychological possibility, transcending the bi-polar myopia of either or, male and female, pink and blue straightjackets. Fitted perfectly to most at the moment of birth, bound forever more with these social and personal expectations. This is another of society’s clever, insidious, invisible prisons that like terror, limits still further human potential and variation. For the consequences of this ‘birth colour’, bind all to a life measured, constrained by expectation and social permissibility.

Reinforced by the dominance and dominion of man’s religions in a world where they rule through brute strength and animal cunning, women who are chained to the kitchen sink and the physical consequences of futility. Anything else is usually drowned in the horse-trough shortly after birth, kicked to death the moment their wrists went limp, or testicles failed to develop into those of a man, a real man!

While we continue to hate, fear and mistrust each other, while we confuse revenge for justice, modern technology insidiously alienates us from each other and the world all around. Reducing life to a classic computer game and spectator sport, cradle to grave brainwashing, social control, perception management and the most sacred of media spin, an alchemy capable of turning lies into truth and fiction into incontrovertible fact.

Conforming and confirming through social habituation and repetition, main-lined directly into the swollen visual cortex of those absorbed and re-born nightly to the collective consciousness of a species intent upon evolving back to the state of single cell amoeba. Absorbing individual possibility and limiting genetic potential to all but the top predators, the alpha males and ‘silver backs’ shinning with testosterone’s metallic tasting hormones and secret potions.

Three Cheers for the Bearded Lady
What a pioneer and example to us all, the bearded lady is! While all most intersex patients want, is to be normal and pass as male or female. Waxing, shaving and shaping our bodies into a chosen sex and the social/physical stereotypical expectations attached to a chosen gender identity.

And intersex patients think that we have problems with public conveniences (rest rooms), the indignity of hysterical menopausal hippopotamuses, right wing bigotry of the ‘neo cons’ and their familiars from a staunchly conservative military and industrial complex. Those who dream of Armageddon and concentration camps, the ultimate solution of the ‘great race’, the white race, and its genetic purity.

To be a bearded woman takes real courage, especially when living beyond the disbelief of side-show freaks, what a laid-back lady! I will always think of her when I pluck, wax, and wince in the name of stereotypical physical expectations.


The Boy with Pink Finger Nails
As for the boy with pink fingernails, if the mother did it without the child’s consent, personal wish, or understanding. Then it is probably another sad case of Munchhousen by proxy syndrome.

Personally I have always loved pink and as a young hermaphrodite (brought up as a male) wanted a pink bedroom and party dress, but my parents said no and I just can’t understand why. As for pink nail varnish, when I was young that was something you did on nights you stopped in to wash your hair and read War and Peace.

First you had to put on a base coat and wait for that to dry. Then the actual nail varnish before waiting for that to dry. Followed by a top coat and waiting for that to dry, all while drinking a cup of tea through a straw and struggling to blow over the heavy pages of War and Peace.

If the boy was a hermaphrodite than I hope for God’s sake they do not have to suffer fifteen years of mistreatment and forty-five years of misdiagnosis. Surely people are not still going through medical nightmares seemingly without end, unless you know different?

Intersex patients these days just do not know they are born, one coat of nail varnish (Miami – other colours are available) now lasts for up to ten days, why when I was a young hermaphrodite we ….

A medical nightmare seemingly without end – thanks to Hull NHS (Nazi Health Service)
Having been introduced to the weird and wacky ‘Catch 22’ world of medical misdiagnosis, where medical records that even if completely wrong, can never be removed, or changed. I explained some of the ongoing difficulties I was having getting any treatment from my local health authority.

Not that I expect medical help after the last forty-five years of receiving no treatment from the Health Authority, I do not see them starting now, do you? I have finally received a letter from a Mister Hitler or somebody, operations manager of Hull NHS (Nazi Health Service) one of the nineteen worse performing health authorities in the United Kingdom, and from my personal experience the most hermaphobic, transphobic, homophobic health authority - disgusting, shameful, unbelievable! And they wonder why many intersex patients have an abiding dislike and mistrust of Doctors and hospitals.

Things are so bad I will not even go to see a Doctor, what is the point when they do not even know what is wrong with you after forty-five years and two completely wrong misdiagnosis. According to these people I was firstly a schizophrenic, just for saying I did not feel happy as a boy and would prefer to be a girl. Then a transsexual according to a different psychiatrist, then not a transsexual according to the country’s leading expert at Charring Cross Hospital. Only to learn that not only did I not even have the balls for a sex change operation, I was according to the staff at Saint James University Hospital actually a hermaphrodite.

Though according to the local health authority and my medical records, decades later I remain a transexual. And they wonder why many hermaphrodites have an allergic reaction to Doctors, especially GP’s. After all, the most prolific serial killer the United Kingdom produced was a GP. Who because of the almost God-like standing of GP’s and Doctors, who are never wrong and above reproach, was able to get away with his crimes for years.

Is there anyone else who has, or is going through this kind of medical nightmare, seemingly without? I am unable to afford a lawyer, or I would take them to court, so any advice from anyone that has or is going through this medical nightmare seemingly without end would be much appreciated.

Bullying For God!

Like the majority of individuals born, or marked as different in some way from childhood. All I have ever known from standing alone in the corner of the playground, to the slow decline into old age, is, has been bullying, harassment, abuse, threats and personal intimidation. Then as now, the worse childhood bullies became the worse political bullies, those who through lies and deception, intimidation and bribery, got, get others to do the bullying and harassment for them.

Inevitably against someone perceived as being physically, mentally and emotionally weaker, or different to those who through mutual consensus, became judge, jury, and executioner. Hunting in feral packs, they victimised individuals struggling with confusion and dark conflicts, those with smaller genitalia than everyone else, those who they called 'it', or ‘that thing’ and you knew by the hatred and malevolence in their voice, they really meant it. You were nothing but an annoying insect to be crushed beneath their ‘Doc Martin’ boot, or fucked and hit until you bled and cried.

By the age of fourteen I was completely suicidal, not caring if I lived or died due to constant bullying and personal abuse. All that pubescent boy stuff was like a foreign language to me, because whatever happened to them physically and mentally, did not happen for and to me. I just became increasingly alienated and depressed. Because by this point in my short and brutal life, there was not an indignity, insult, threat or act of bullying and physical abuse I had not suffered.

Being a teenage boy with non-of the normal instincts, thoughts, desires, drives, and wants of a teenage boy, was not a pleasant, or an easy experience. Hence the personal development of a potentially fatal ‘death wish’, while I dangled from the frayed rope that held me from crashing to the earth below.

There had only been a few boys in the school who wanted to try and climb the 'Three Peaks', along with a teacher. So we all travelled over to the Yorkshire Dales in his Land Rover. Arriving before first light we parked close to the Ribblehead Viaduct and cooked up a hearty breakfast, bacon, eggs, beans and sausage, the usual carnivore crap.


Then we started up the first of the 'Three peaks' Whernside, which just looked like a big grassy hill with snow on the upper slopes. Having all reached the top and had a break the next goal was the climb down into the village of Horton-in-Ribblesdale, before climbing Ingleborough.


Once in the village our teacher explained that there were two ways up Ingleborough, the steep side, which was what we were currently looking at. Or the easy side, a longer walk around the mountain and the way he was going.


Filled with a sense of their own immortality and invincibility, two of the group decided they would climb up the steep side; one being the 'Alpha male’, Captain of the school rugby team, all round top athlete and sportsman. The other being me, a poor deluded 'puff' who wanted to be a girl; life is hell when you constantly have to prove yourself to be something you are not and in truth, never wanted to be.


The ‘rock face’ did not look to bad from down in the village, there were areas of vertical cliff, but I reasoned it should not be too hard to climb around them. However, when I reached the base it looked impossible, probably suicidal; around two thousand feet of ninety-degree ‘scree-slopes’ and sections of vertical cliff.
As for the 'Alpha male’ he started to go right and not left around the back of the mountain, along with our teacher and the rest of the group. We did not travel together because he did not like 'puffs' who wore dresses, make-up and like to take it up the arse. As far as he and the other boys were concerned, I was the lowest of the low, an alien beetle to be squashed without hesitation. So I suppose in a way my back was well and truly against the steep side of Ingleborough, I was fighting for my life, for some respect and acceptance.


So off I go up the side of the mountain like a confused and frightened spider, more stupid than brave, more girl than boy, more in love with death than life; already imagining the local newspaper headlines, when someone found my body at the foot of the mountain. It was hard going but I made steady progress up the loose scree, sending rocks rolling and bouncing down to the base of the mountain, making a kind of flinty clicking sound as they did. Of course the higher I climbed the more terrifying it became, especially if I looked down.


I managed to get passed the first area of vertical ‘rock face’ with no problem and had to go a long way to my right, to get around the second face. I think it was only sheer terror that made me keep going, my heart pounding like it might burst but keep going I did.


Reaching the cloud level was a relief; it meant that when I looked down, I could not see the base of the mountain. So it did not feel quit such an exposed and dangerous place to be. Though the muffling effect of the clouds blowing up off the side of the mountain, made the constant avalanche of scree sound as if the whole side were collapsing.


Exactly how high I had climbed, or how much remained to be climbed I do not know. For it was a different world up there amongst the twisting wisps of cloud, where no sheep grazed and only the sound of the wind and falling flurries of limestone scree, broke the perpetual silences of the weathered rock.


There was something strangely disorientating about it all and for the first time in my entire life, I felt alive and at peace with myself. Despite the feelings of complete terror stiffening my muscles and making my head throb due to complete physical exhaustion, which was why I decided to have a few minutes break, get a drink and an energy fix.


Just above me and to my left there was a large rock, so I thought I would be able to hunker down behind it. Which I subsequently did, only for the rock to roll away and me do a backwards somersault. I almost shit myself but somehow managed to cling onto the scree and rocks, in order to stop from falling hundreds of feet. I was so terrified that physically shaking I clung to the scree not daring to move, to afraid to climb up, or down.


It was around this point I heard a flurry of scree slipping away to my left and began to think someone was climbing, maybe twenty feet away. I even thought I heard a voice but when the cloud cleared briefly so that I could see, there was no one there. At least no one I could see, even though it felt as if there was.


Not only was there this person that was not a person, they, it, were trying to calm and reassure me, only not with words but a feeling, a sensation. Eventually I started to climb again, if only because it was obvious I could not stop there much longer, a cold wind was blowing in wisps of cloud and my muscles were beginning to seize up.


As I continued to climb upwards this person, or ‘thing’ appeared to keep level with me, always twenty or so feet to my left. It felt as if they were watching over me, encouraging and comforting me. Every time the cloud lifted I expected to see someone but never did. There was something strangely comforting yet frightening about it, something that made me want to go towards it, yet keep climbing as fast as I could to get away from it.


The top of Ingleborough was always a crowded place because it was no more than a vigorous stroll if you went up the easy side; people had even ridden bicycles up it. So there were a few surprised expressions when I came crawling over the top on my hands and knees. Casually stood up, brushed myself off and walked slowly towards the concrete triangulation point. Still shaking with fear as the world spun around me, my legs so stiff with terror it felt as if the bones might snap.


I can remember leaning against the triangulation point nonchalantly taking in the view, when in truth all I wanted to do was grab hold of it with both hands and never let go. As for this person or ‘thing’ that climbed off to my left and kept level with me, it appeared to just vanish, or cease existing when I climbed over the top.


Having eventually stopped shaking, I sat down and had a drink along with some food, while I waited for the rest of the group to arrive. Only one more mountain to go Pennyghent, the tallest, I was climbing that the easy way.


As for what happened, it really changed my relationship with the teacher and other boys, even our 'Alpha male’. Whether he went up the steep side or not, no one said and I never asked. But I had done something no one else dare; I had climbed the steep side of Ingleborough.


So what if I liked to wear dresses and put on make up, if I preferred other boys to girls, or always volunteered to play the female parts in school plays, especially if I got to dress up. Though I may not have had as much physically as other boys when it came to balls, I had balls and that confused them. So they left me alone to dream of sex change surgery, of being a girl and becoming as close to normal as I possibly could.


I never told anyone else about the person, the thing, the presence, or whatever it was that found me upon the desolate side of a mountain. Amongst the clouds and limestone scree, lost somewhere between life and death, male and female, earth and sky. This was the wall of paradise to which I clung alone, confused, and terrified. At least now I knew that something was protecting and watching over me, though what and why, I could not begin to imagine.

Now, where did I put that pink catheter-bag?


For all you need to know about intersex issues and conditions, go to the brilliant etrandgender.com web site.

Old Hermy's Never Die ... They Simply Smile That Way

A blog about ‘stuff’ your grandmother could or would never tell you!

A Familiar Medical Nightmare Seemingly Without End!

Before I start blogging, I should get the boring personal background ‘stuff’ out of the way. For those of you from a slightly older generation, a world before CAT scans, and modern medicines diagnostic miracles, where they ‘dunked’ witches, lobotomised those with psychological abnormalities, gave ‘aversion therapy’ to transvestites and imprisoned homosexuals. This may be a familiar medical nightmare seemingly without end.

My life story starts fifty nine years ago late in August when I was but another birth at the ‘maternity hospital’ that day. The only thing that distinguished it from the others was the fact that at the time there was a violent thunderstorm going on. This much I know because my father crashed into the back of a stationary car rushing to the hospital.

Childhood passed in the slow days of innocence and discovery interrupted only by a brush with deaths brittle, bony fingers. When aged eight and suffering from pneumonia and pleurisy, I was not expected to survive the night but survive I did.

Always a sickly child, I began to experience gender identity problems aged nine or ten and started wanting to play with dolls, be a mummy and have babies. Something that did not go down well, even in a theatrical family, my great grandfather had been a Shakespearean actor.

Increasingly unhappy and personally dissociated from all the boy ‘stuff’ expected from me. I already had a highly developed inferiority complex due to having a smaller penis than all the other boys of my age. For which I would be bullied and brutalised, especially during the long and lonely years of puberty when physically things did not happen, as they should.

I learnt quickly that what I thought and felt was wrong, discovering silence and secrecy to be the best way of surviving in an alien world. Aged twelve or thirteen I first started to hear about men apparently changing their sex. Being young and stupid I thought if I had one of these sex changes, then I could be a mummy and have children – wrong!

I now thought that I knew what I was, a transexual and more important what I wanted, a sex change. Though when I looked up the word in a dictionary it was so new, they had not included it yet. It took me until the age of fifteen before I finally saw a psychiatrist for the first time, explaining to him that I did not feel happy as a boy and would rather be a girl.

At which point the psychiatrist leaned forward in his black leather executive chair and said: ‘If I got a patient coming to see me, asking to be Nelson. The last thing I would do is arrange for a surgeon to amputate their arm and take out their eye. You are clearly a schizophrenic and with the correct medication and support, there is no reason why you should not live a full and productive life’.

It felt like having a scaffolding post thrust into my stomach while the earth opened silently beneath my feet, swallowing me and what ever life I might yet have had, whole. For the next eight years I was treat as a schizophrenic, given drugs, group/individual therapy and threatened with ECT. Little wonder I ended up with multiple addictions, withdrawn, depressed, and even more confused then all those years ago when I first asked for help to change my sex.

Not until my early twenties did I finally see a different psychiatrist, who not only diagnosed me as being a transsexual but actually began to encourage me to live as a woman. Even though at that particular point in time there were no treatment facilities for transsexuals in the United Kingdom.

He even gave me a letter stating I was currently undergoing treatment, in case I was arrested going into female toilets. Though ironically from the age of fourteen, it was male toilets where I had the most problems. Not yet having transitioned to living fully and for ever more as a woman, I heard about Doctor Randell establishing the first ‘gender identity unit’ in the country at Charring Cross Hospital.

With help from a psychiatric social worker I managed to get an appointment to see Doctor Randell at the ‘gender identity unit’. Happy and content for the first time in years following the initial diagnosis of schizophrenia, when even I knew that I was not a schizophrenic. They could hallucinate and hear voices inside their heads without having to take increasingly larger doses of LSD. The only hope and escape I discovered during my wilderness years in the wasteland of modern psychiatric pharmaceuticals, where the latest dance craze was the Stelozine shuffle and the Lygactil lurch.

I arrived at Doctor Randell’s office wearing an ethnic cotton top, jeans, sandals with wild, flowing hair. Most of the twenty-minute consultation was spent arguing about the fact that young ladies did not wear jeans, ending abruptly when he said: ‘I will not treat you’.

Shocked at having yet another scaffolding pole thrust into the stomach and out of my back, the earth again opening like a bottomless pit into which I was falling, twisting, turning, tumbling out of control. I managed to ask why? To which Doctor Randell replied coldly: ‘I do not think you are a transsexual!’

This was the second time in my relatively short life that a consultant psychiatrist might as well have put a gun to the side of my head and pulled the trigger, for all the help they gave to me. How I did not go under the first train to pull into the Charring Cross tube station I will never know. But survive I did, blooded, broken and bruised I had been to the mountain top and seen the promise land that lay beyond. The Polaroid photographs of those stiff and formal in their new skin he helped to create, in his own limited image of male and female.

With no help or hope of treatment at the only ‘gender identity unit’ in the country, I continued working towards transitioning permanently from male to female. Though in the murky past (1970’s) from which some of us managed to emerge, there was no pathway just a tangled forest to navigate your way through, alone, unmapped, unexplored and deserted. The only help we early explorers found came from the unflinching determination, to reach our intended goal no matter what the personal cost.

Some months later I saw an endocrinologist in Manchester at the Withington Hospital, who agreed to prescribe oestrogen. My intention being to spend a year on oestrogen before living as a woman all the time, during which I would need to change my name by ‘deed poll’ and do all the other bureaucratic ‘stuff’ necessary to live and be acknowledged as a woman in a modern western society.

At least the journey after many false starts and dead ends, had finally started. Such was my breast development after starting oestrogen that within a few months, I started having to wear waste-coats to hide them; making the terror of male toilets unbearable as I continued to try to hang with the boys. Having spoken with transsexuals who after years of taking oestrogen had little or no breast development, I thought I was just lucky. Of course the truth was, I was unlucky, very unlucky, as I would eventually discover.

I got on with life as you do, thinking, hoping that after a year when I wrote to Doctor Randell explaining I had now lived for as a woman and never wore jeans, or trousers once, he would finally accept me for treatment and eventually surgery. Not that he ever did, even though I wrote increasingly desperate begging letters every year. ‘Dear Doctor Randell, I have now been living as a woman for three years, what must I do to get you to help me please?’ He never did or would!

Finding it impossible to get a job as a pre-operative transsexual in a northeast English town, I decided to go into higher education with the intention of doing a degree in contemporary literature and ideology. Having clicked with a particularly good-looking man at some fresher’s event, we started to see each other. Only for things to get a lot more physical and intimate, a lot sooner then they should – at least having a micro-penis while living as a woman was a decided advantage, I could wear tight jeans and not appear to have one.

So I invited him around for a meal, Peking Duck, saying afterwards that there was something I think he should know, I am a man. He cried, I cried then he left and never spoke to me again, along with most of the students in our year.

Clearly I could not go on living like this for much longer, completely without any hope of treatment, or help. One individual can only take so much sexual frustration and personal depression before the dam, over full, eventually bursts with catastrophic consequences.

Going on and on as I was without hope of treatment, felt increasingly futile and I was close to the edge of my personal limits. When I heard on the grape-vine about a surgeon who had started to perform sex change operations for the National Health Service in Leeds at the Saint James University Hospital. Having written to him explaining about my situation, he replied saying that if I got a psychiatrist’s report stating that I had lived for a year as a woman and was psychologically ready for surgery, he would see me.

With hope the world felt a radically different place, the viscous mud’s making every movement a struggle finally released there grip upon me. Not wanting to wait several years to see a psychiatrist on the National Health Service, I found one myself and paid to see them privately. Much to my relief she agreed that I was of relatively sound mind and as ready as any individual could be for surgery.

Finally the life long struggle to change my sex was almost over, the journey started aged nine or ten at an end. Or so I thought, unfortunately fate and my micro-penis, had yet to complete the tangled web of misdiagnosis and personal confusion that bound my faulted life from birth. Finding a genius of a plastic surgeon like Derek Eastwood, was to be the one piece of good fortune I discovered in the whole sad and sorry affair, though just how lucky, I was yet to fully understand.

Even after that first consultation when he asked to examine my genitalia, I remember watching his face and the look of pity over my penis. Which at the time I thought was because he knew I had never had a sex life, never screwed anything, not even a knot in a piece of wood, and more importantly, why. However, the truth was that he knew I did not even have a large enough penis for successful sex change surgery.

Not that I particularly cared at that moment in time, running around the ceiling with happiness when he said he would be willing to operate. Only there was currently a years waiting list for surgery, a year! It had taken fourteen long and terrible years to reach this point, from when I first tentatively asked to change my sex. Twenty-nine years of life lost to what at times felt like a personal curse, a medical nightmare seemingly without end.

Rather than flash past that year felt as if it stretched on forever. At least I was enjoying being a student, even if the first year of a degree course was exhausting, hard work, especially with the reading list that we had. Having ritually crossed off the days to surgery, not for the first time did I experience the elastic nature of time. Though fate unfortunately had not yet finished with me, in fact it had not yet even begun unravelling the confusions it spun all about my futile attempts to escape its inevitable consequences.

The fist time I had been admitted to hospital expecting to have surgery, I was sent home the following morning because of a chest infection - so close and yet so far. I asked that upon the next occasion they give me ten days warning, then I would be able to complete a course of antibiotics and not waste Derek Eastwood’s time.

Which is what happened when I returned again to Jimmy’s some weeks later, this time less confident and optimistic. Only to have what felt like a tactical battlefield nuclear weapon exploded in my brain, when I learnt for the first time. Not only did I not have a large enough penis for a successful sex change operation; I was according to the staff at Saint James University Hospital a hermaphrodite.

These I always consider as falling into two general kinds, the lucky ones being the open kind, those who at birth have clearly observable physical abnormalities and consequently receive treatment for the condition. Then you have those like me, ones I regard as closed hermaphrodites that at birth appear to have perfectly normal genitalia, perfectly formed. Which does not go on to develop as it should throughout the individual's life, usually due to undiscovered combinations of undeveloped internal organs.

Just before the first operation with me out cold, the hospital photographed my genitalia and physical anomalies for my case notes. When shown to other consultants they identified my penis as that of a five-year-old boy – I was twenty-nine at the time. At least after finally being diagnosed correctly as a hermaphrodite and treat surgically, I understood why my penis never developed and I started to feel the way I did; not due some psychological problem or trauma but because of physiology.

That was the point, standing dizzy and alone upon the crumbling edge of the abyss, when I realised just how completely fucked I was, had been all my life. Not even the balls for a ‘sex change’ operation, though on the plus side I did not need the usual ‘breast implants’. Nor did I particularly want to be anything more than a 36C because at the time, there were reports of these implants bursting when people were on-board planes and the silicon, leaking into their bodies.


Needless to say, I had never screwed anything or been to bed with a woman and not just due to physical inadequacy, but because whatever happened when a man saw a woman and that old black magic called love. Drifted upon the breeze with the subtle scents of hormones and theramones, simply did not happen to me.

If I thought life was bad and at times not worth living before this point, laid in my hospital bed thinking what kind of existence am I going to have? Feeling like a primitive single cell amoeba climbing from the primal slime of creation, a thing that was neither fish nor fowl, now utterly dependent upon the skills of the medical teams and whatever solution they could offer.


Indomitable indeed is the human spirit, even in the face of complete and utter hopelessness. As I lay recovering from the physical effects of surgery, I started scanning the vacancies page of the Guardian looking for job opportunities for eunuchs, though I was not able to find a single one.


Unable to face what had, was happening I returned home and told even my closest friends that the operation had not succeeded (but not why) and I would need to return, once I recovered sufficiently, for further surgery and whatever solution the medical teams had to offer. My only hope lay with their skills and brilliance, fortunately the surgeon was a genius, which I told him, so there was no need to be completely stressed and terrified, or start thinking about committing suicide.


Though my nursing friends did not help at the time, saying they thought he would use skin grafts to solve the problem. Leaving me thinking what hope would I ever have of finding a man to love, scarred by skin grafts. So I bought the largest piece of cannabis I could afford and combined with strong painkillers, got stoned and stayed completely off my head for the eight weeks before the next operation. Hanging as I was at that point in time by the slenderest thread of hope, vibrating taught in the wind with the edge of the abyss crumbling to dust beneath my feet, because I was fucked, completely fucked.


It was a heavy burden I carried, one I chose to carry alone because of shame, a feeling of personal inadequacy, failure, embarrassment, and fear. Not that I had ever been anything but a bemused interloper in the world of men and their pubescent fantasies, most nights I cried myself to sleep and reluctantly counted off the days to further necessary mutilation. Not that I had any choice on a journey long ago started amidst conflict and confusion, a journey that could have only two possible conclusions, death or re-birth.


There was no getting off the roller-coaster ride until it ended, no hope but that of further surgery and the great unknown into which I had reluctantly stepped. This was a secret I could trust no one to keep but the medical teams and my GP. A last taboo from the world of men that had cursed and blighted my life, when in all honesty I had about as much use for a penis as would a fish for a bicycle.


Fortunately the next operation was scheduled during the summer break, allowing a few weeks for me to recover before we were due to return for the autumn term. The arrival of a telegram four day’s before surgery was scheduled; asking if I would call the ward did little for my tension and stress levels. Expecting to be told it had been cancelled, I was surprised when they asked if I would go into the hospital immediately and I mean next train immediately.


Being late afternoon before I received the telegram and contacted the hospital, I agreed to get the four o’clock milk train the next morning and for reasons I was yet to fully understand, they meant first train. Physically shaking with apprehension and fear bordering upon terror, I spent the rest of the day in a daze getting my hospital bag together, telling friends what was about to happen and making sure someone could water my plants and feed the cats.


As if already dead I returned white faced and shaking with apprehension, to face whatever that fate inconsiderate as always, had to offer. Frantic as a fly trapped in hardening amber, my growing anxieties about extensive skin grafts and the resultant scarring proved to be unfounded. Genius that Mister Eastwood the surgeon was, he being way to clever for anything as crude as skin grafts.


The procedure they intended to perform had only been used once before at the hospital upon a woman with cancer. This was to be the first time that they had used it upon someone of mixed gender, a third gender of those with both male and female sexual characteristics.


Still not scheduled until the end of the week, I first had to undergo a lengthy and at times uncomfortable period of preparation. Before the two consultant surgeons who would perform the operation, could work their combined magic and give back to me some hope of a life, in particular a sex life. Because though I was not physically attracted to women, fortunately it was not the same with men and I wanted nothing more, than to fuck until we could hardly walk, before love started to complicate an already complicated situation.

The day before surgery the Consultant and his eager, enthusiastic entourage, had come into my room. When he ran his finger from one side of my lower abdomen to the other explaining they intended to make a small cut, just below the bikini line he kept stressing. At the time I remember thinking he meant a small cut two or three inches somewhere along that line.

But no, he meant from one side of the lower abdomen to the other, just below the bikini line. Because when I eventually came around for the first time from what had been a lengthy procedure involving two consultant surgeons, I felt like a dead chicken that had been gutted alive, with more tubes coming from me than there are on the London underground.


The moment that I regained consciousness with a young Doctor at the side of my bed, he said: " … we have taken your appendix out as well". Having thanked him with all the enthusiasm and gratitude I could muster under the circumstances, I lay thinking: ‘As well as what?’


It was immediately obvious, even to my limited perceptions as I drifted into and out of consciousness, partly because of the tubes and the way I felt physically, this operation had been far more invasive and extensive than the first. Nor was I to be allowed solid food for the first week, while every few hours night and day, someone came to draw off the contents of my stomach through what they called a ‘riles tube’, using what looked like an unfeasible large hypodermic without a needle.


With the dizzying, drug dulled passage of time and removal of the tubes I began to feel more hopeful and optimistic that I had been pulled, still barely alive from the burning car wreak of my life. Only with the withdrawal of pain relief some day’s after the surgery, because certain organs were not yet functioning as they should, did I again experience a sense of hopelessness due to chronic pain and discomfort.


The analgesics having being stopped mid-morning, I managed to go until the early hours of the following day. When crying with pain and unable to sleep, the on-call Doctor allowed the nurses to give me an injection and once again I fell out of control into oblivion’s welcoming blackness. Only to become aware of my surroundings the following morning, with the slurp of stomach contents being drawn away by a nurse.


Fortunately, one by one my various organs began to work, all be it sporadically and excruciatingly painfully at first. So that with the passage of each milestone upon the road to eventual recovery and removal of potential complications and there physical consequences. I again returned, yet still a shadow, to the world of those blessed with being born normal, the ordinary men and women.


The Joe the plumber and Jane the nurse occupant’s of consumerism’s crystal palaces and pleasure domes. The mad men’s fantasy’s of war and peace before the chrome and glass temples of the military and industrial complex and glossy new lies of the spinning men, the hollow men, the changelings and tricksters, masquerading as sincere politicians, while behind clever prosthetics, cold reptilian blood flowed.


Life goes on. Slowly I began to recover and was eventually discharged from hospital, returning home a stranger to myself and my cat’s, who at first did not even appear to recognise me. It was to be a few weeks before I could even go out though fate, inconsiderate as ever, was yet to throw one final knife into my back. After so many weeks I was instructed to perform what the hospital called dilating, this involved pushing what I suppose was a large dildo into myself, before eventually being allowed to have intercourse.


Unfortunately, when I tried to do this, it was not possible. With what solid ground I had finally found beneath my feet crumbling away, I completely freaked out. Having telephoned the hospital to explain I was unable to dilate they, understanding of my stress and panic, re-admitted me a few days later and performed one final, relatively minor operation. Explaining that there was nothing to worry about, it was only where they had joined two parts together that had become constricted.


Then it was a question of trying the procedure again in a few weeks, fortunately this time it worked and I began to count down the weeks before I could have sexual intercourse. When fate finally smiled upon me and I found the perfect teacher, a mature man and classical guitarist with the strongest fingers and tongue I have encountered before, or since.


My first experience proved to be a disappointment, he orgasmed but I did not, which left me thinking ‘and I went through all this, just for that’. Not until the second occasion a few nights later did I finally orgasm for the first time, a real leg trembler that turned my brain to mush leaving me completely hooked and searching for the Holy Grail of sex, multiple orgasm.


Admittedly, after all the surgery I was at first a little promiscuous but hey, I was making up for lost time and is that not what all second year students did, have lots of sex and party? Especially after the final occasion when I had gone to bed with a man before surgery, who the second I took my clothes off had an asthma attack and I mean a bad attack. So bad we slept with the lights on so I could wake up every hour just to make sure he was still breathing, needless to say, nothing remotely sexual happened.


While for obvious reasons I did not relish the idea of having to explain to the police what a person of mixed gender such as myself, was doing with a dead man in their bed. At the time he completely freaked me out and I hope I did not scare him for life. We should have kept to the bird watching because he was never the same with me again; at least I can laugh about it all now.


Life goes on. Eventually I became more selective, while trying to repay my debt to society and the Health Service in particular, for literally saving my life – what a ride! Only to become caught up in the First Gulf War, having by this point converted to Islam, become a Sufi, a follower of Ibn Arabia and learnt classical Arabic. What can I say that has not already been said better? Other than I came out of the six week air campaign well ‘wobbly’, feeling like a criminal and murderer.


Though the full consequences of this death and destruction upon an industrial scale would not wake from the silences of memory for years, where they lay suppressed, forgotten and festering under thickening layers of relative normality. If you can call spending twenty years involved in the forensic profiling of child murderers, serial killings, and terrorist attacks normal.

Because eventually it made me sexually frigid and was to drive me mad on the afternoon that a double murderer was found guilty of crimes I, as a small part of the many teams within a team that is a modern criminal investigation, helped to profile eighteen months earlier. When I burst into tears and subsequently cried my heart out for thirty or forty minutes, before I could begin to compose myself, every time it was mentioned.

So bad did this become, I was no use to myself let alone another investigation. I took a year out to deal with all the post traumatic stress, only to never go back to profiling with the exception of one final case. While the best I was ever to become, having built a growing reputation locally, then nationally and internationally. Nazi lying Labour was already involved in a long-term act of targeting and revenge against the only gazelle in a lion’s enclosure.


When as part of my responsibilities as an officer of a Law Centre, I informed a ‘local government audit officer’ about allegations, along with reports of criminal activities and abuse of office. Which would result in the local Labour Council being put on special measures and having to lose the next local election, or be taken to court on mass.


The only other person who knew what I was about to say, the centre’s co-ordinator, would receive the customary pieces of Judas silver and a job with the local council for life. Upon that fateful day when I learnt he already knew and given the questions he asked me, when I went into our conference room and asked: "Do you know, really know what is going on in this city?" I was already a dead thing walking shaky and hesitant from the moment of impact.


He already knew, so there was no need for me to sacrifice my professional and personal reputation and eventually the Law Centre, out of a misguided sense of civic duty and personal morality. The rest as they say, is history with the Vatican and a mad, bad collection of those talking in tongues the language of Christian fundamentalism. Going on to persecute and harass me for thirty years for being something I was not, a transsexual, shame on you all!


Frigid, mad and suffering from the effects of multiple post traumatic shock it would take seven years of personal Hell and the writing of four books. Before the various marsh gasses eventually bubbled and blopped through memories brackish, stagnant water. Seven long and lonely years before I could regain my trust in men enough, to even think about having sexual intercourse again.


Seven years of existential nausea, when I withdrew from the world and even myself. Not trusting nor daring to open myself to another living being, least of all a man. When all I ever profiled was the sadist and sickest that men could do. Mostly but not always to women and children, non of the many forensic profiles I helped to work, involved a woman and the phenomena of the female suicide bomber was something I had yet to encounter. But get through the swirling vapours and poisonous gases I eventually did.


Seven years before I got my libido back and sex became a potential for pleasure, only to discover that my own body had again become traitor to my hopes and desires, at the very moment I emerged from the caves darkness. Blinking, confused, dazed into the clear light of a new day. It was impossible to get a penis beyond the point where all those years ago, they had joined together two pieces of my Heath Robinson insides and I was again proper fucked. Or would have been were it not for the join, which became traitor to my sexual needs and desires for a second time.


Because to date I have been trying for over a year and a half, eighteen months, to get what is relatively minor surgery, a ‘z’ and ‘e’ plaste that would make such a difference to my life by allowing me to have intercourse. So far without any success or progress, while the initial frustration has given way to depression.


Not until I had been raped, subjected to domestic violence and the insidious way male bullies destroy your self-confidence and create an imaginary dependence, based upon the fact that it would never happen again. Treat with considerably less respect and with less rights than a camel, subjected to the sexual controls, exploitation and expectations men have put upon women from the dawn of history. Not until I lived with the inequality and patronising garbage that came from having more balls than brains. Did I fully understand for the first time the liberation theology of ‘The Female Enoch’.


Because for me, normality was just a dream that I would never know in this world. Little wonder at the time I used to think that if there was indeed a God, he (sic) must really have had it in for me and was just a bastard, a complete bastard who was probably nothing but a frustrated Freudian empiricists. As for penis envy I admit to that, which is why I probably like the ‘silver backs’ and men with big ones, the real throat ticklers.


While thanks to Nazi lying Labour and its concentration camp Doctors, I have just waited over three months for a decision on whether the Trust will give me the funding to see a surgeon with experience of the procedure I need. Over three months when I was told it would take a month for them to consider my application for funding and I am no closer to getting treatment on the health service than when I started, now over one year and eight months ago – bing, bang, bung, bonus.

The following is a letter of complaint that I have just written to the chair of the local health authority:

‘Dear Sirs,
　
I should like to make a formal complaint about the former Hull and East Riding Health Authority, now known as Hull NHS, regarding repeated misdiagnosis and a complete lack in the consistency of diagnosis and treatment covering a period of forty-five years.

Unfortunately, my personal difficulties started in the mid-sixties aged fifteen when I first visited a psychiatrist regarding gender identity problems that began aged ten or eleven. Having explained I was not happy as a boy but would prefer to be a girl, at which point the psychiatrist leaned forward in his chair and said: ‘If I got a patient coming to see me saying that they wanted to be Nelson. The last thing I would do is to arrange for a surgeon to amputate their arm and take out their eye. You are clearly a schizophrenic and with the correct medication and support there is no reason you should not live a full and productive life.’

Left with no uncertain terms about his diagnosis and expectations, I was then treat for schizophrenia until my early twenties, he even wanted to give me ECT (electro-convulsion therapy) for saying I wanted to change my sex and did not feel happy being male. When I eventually saw a different psychiatrist from the Hull and East Riding Health Authority, he diagnosed me as being a transsexual and began to encourage me to live as a woman. Even though at this point in time there were still no treatment facilities within the National Health Service for transsexuals, this did not happen until Doctor Randall started a ‘gender identity unit’ at the Charring Cross Hospital in London.

With the support of a psychiatric social worker I visited, I was eventually given an appointment to see Doctor Randall who at that point in time was regarded as the leading authority upon transsexuals in the country. We spent most of the twenty-minute appointment arguing about how a young woman should or should not dress in the seventies. The consultation ended when he refused to treat me saying that in his opinion: ‘I do not think that you are a transsexual.’ He would then have written to my GP and explained his decision and hopefully why, something he would not do to me.

Despite the devastating consequences of being refused treatment at the only unit in the country, I struggle on for another six years, by this point living as a woman despite there being no hope of treatment or help from the National Health Service. Before hearing of a surgeon who had started to perform gender reassignment for the NHS in Leeds at the Saint James University Hospital.

Having contacted him and explained my situation, he tells me if I get a psychiatric report explaining that I have fulfilled the requirements and am ready for surgery, he will see me. I then pay to see a psychiatrist who agrees that I am ready for surgery, having by this point lived as a woman for much longer than the required year.
When eventually I went into hospital for surgery I was just about to start the second year of a degree course as a woman. Only to discover that I could not have a successful sex change operation because I did not have a large enough penis. On the plus side I had my own breasts, did not need implants, and was according to the staff at Saint James University Hospital not a transsexual but a hermaphrodite.

Fortunately the surgeon Derek Eastwood was a genius and rather than face skin-grafts, currently the only solution for intersex patients with insufficient penile tissue for routine reassignment, over which I became increasingly anxious and depressed in the weeks between the first re-constructive surgery and next operation. I was offered a new procedure used only once before at Jimmy’s upon a patient with cancer. This would be the first time they had used the procedure upon an intersex patient.

Which was why they took photographs before the initial surgery, to accompany articles in various periodicals, explaining about a new procedure for individuals who were unfortunate enough not to have sufficient penile tissue for the normal re-constructive and reassignment procedure. Over which I have no complaints as everyone involved in the surgery and after-care at Jimmy’s were completely brilliant.

Given Doctor Randall’s letter to the Health Authority and the subsequent outcomes of the surgery I underwent, I had assumed, mistakenly as it proved, that the local Health Authority would now be aware of what happened and why. With my medical records amended to provide some consistency of diagnosis and treatment.

However thirty years later, having become frigid due to ‘post traumatic stress’, something it took seven years to recover from. Because I was unable to ask for help and support, due to previous bad experiences with Doctors and in particular members of the psychiatric profession. I then found myself unable to again physically have intercourse, as it was impossible to get past the scare tissue where two sections had been joined together.

Hence the reason I started to ask for relatively minor surgery from the local Health Authority one year and seven months ago. Having found it impossible to get past the join immediately after surgery, at the time I had needed what they called a ‘z’ and ‘e’ plasty to open the obstruction.

The first GP I spoke with appeared not to understand what I was talking about and I left without help, or apparent hope of treatment. It was to be a further year before, having become increasingly depressed, I tried again to speak with a different GP about the physical problems I was experiencing and this time, I was intent upon not taking no for an answer.

He wrote to the local Health Authority’s ‘Exceptional Treatment Requests Commissioning Department’ in October 2010 asking for funding in order to see a consultant in Leicester. Four months later and having heard nothing I see a different GP asking if anything has happened regarding the request for funding, explaining that I was a hermaphrodite and had been unable to undergo the normal reassignment due to the size of my penis. He asks if I will return the following week in order for him to read my medical notes. At which point he explains to me that according to the medical records held by the local Health Authority, I am a transsexual!

I telephoned the ‘Exceptional Treatment Requests Commissioning Department’ following this visit to ask why the local Health Authority still regarded me as a transsexual after the surgery I needed and if there had been any progress with the request for funding. Only to be told that they had written to my GP in October 2010 asking for further information but as of February 2011 had received no reply.

Clearly my complaint is not about specific Doctors who can only go on what medical records tell them but Hull NHS, with its inconsistency of diagnosis and treatment for the past forty-five years. Who, incredulous though it is, fail to even note a diagnosis from the country’s leading expert on transsexuals whom thirty-six years ago. Refused to treat me because he did not think that I was a transsexual, leaving me to live for over six years as a woman without any hope of treatment, or help.

But more important still, completely ignore the outcomes of surgery performed thirty years ago. Because I have never meet another transsexual that did not have a large enough penis for re-constructive and reassignment surgery. Who did not need breast implants and had the other physical anomalies and abnormalities I did.
Yet I still remain according to the Hull NHS a transsexual, having been diagnosed over the past forty-five years as a schizophrenic, a transsexual, not a transsexual according to Doctor Randell the country’s leading authority, a hermaphrodite, and finally a transsexual again. You certainly know how to help people!

I would like to ask that my medical records and case be independently reviewed to reflect a consistent and accurate diagnosis based not upon pages of misleading psychiatric notes, misdiagnosis and missed opportunity to actually help a patient. But the physical constraints and consequences of the surgery I needed at Saint James University Hospital (Leeds) in 1981 and why?

Yours sincerely’

Is there anyone else out there for whom the nightmare never ends or am I just unlucky?

Love the new web site at etransgender.com