We plough the fields and scatter

    One of the great rituals of rural life in England this past weekend, the Harvest Festival. A church service to give thanks for the year's produce, a display of prize marrows, grapes, and a sheath of corn in the church, and donations to the food bank. And old familiar hymns, like the title of this piece: "We plough the fields and scatter".
    It was a gorgeous warm day, and I'd been outside for most of it picking blackberries. Sunlight streamed in through the church windows and the door was open. Afterwards we stood around and had tea and cake while the children explored the gallery. Yes, our church has a gallery. I remember doing the same thing about four decades ago when I was a youngster with a group of kids who are spread out to all corners of the world now.
    It's kinda odd to be somewhere so familiar, yet with a crowd of relative strangers. I know most of the people there but not very well as most are fairly recent arrivals and move in different circles form me. Other than the under-12s I was the only one present born into the village. Welcome to a step on the Londonshire property ladder.
    I'm going to move back home sometime in the next month or two. Live at my parents place, the house I grew up in, for the first time since my mid 20s. It makes sense on two levels, both financially and to be there for my dad, but it's not where I expected to be. People in their early 40s don't tend to live with their parents, even in these straitened times.
    There is however and advantage to it all. If there's a place I'm in tune with, it's the countryside I grew up in. I know its every nuance, its noises, smells and sights. Even in the darkest days of a damp December I am at home in a way I have never been in the city. And as that rare thing in an English village these days, an adult born into the community, I know the history of everyone and everything. If we had a pub, I'd probably have my own chair by the fire.
    I don't know what the next year will bring. Whether I'll still be working for my current employer this time next year or whether I'll be pursuing the startup idea I first developed about five years ago. Either way I need a bit of stability, and despite a bit of commuting for my current job a move back home will give me that.

Expected to achieve

    I went to school with a few people who've done rather well for themselves. One or two household names, one of whom's known the world over. And a fair crop of the 1%, bond traders and people involved in other dubious financial endeavours. It was that kind of school.
    I also went to school with a fair number of people who've never really made much of themselves, that dread phrase "Never achieved their potential". I guess that group contains me. And one or two who just dropped off the edge, like the person who secured a place at an elite institution but who I last saw sometime in the early '90s as a very ill looking down-and-out begging at Oxford railway station.
    As I've mentioned before in these pages, my school was one of the more rarefied examples of what we Brits confusingly call a "public school" which to the rest of the world is a private school. In my case I went there because I passed an extra exam as an 11 year old blacksmith's kid from a small village primary school, and Margaret Thatcher picked up the tab as part of a bold experiment in social mobility called the Assisted Places Scheme.
    Public schools are an odd mirror of the Real World. One in which most of the people are not exceptionally talented, but are fortunate enough to have rich parents who pay for the privilege of having their offspring constantly told that they are. And in which the expectation is that all pupils are destined for great things by right not by achievement, because to people with such talent achievement is a right. Contempt for people of lesser talent - otherwise known as those in the state education sector - is an unwritten part of the curriculum based mostly on complete ignorance.
    The customer for public schools is the parent not the child, and the product is exam grades rather than well rounded young people.
    It's an odd thing, experiencing all that at school. Firstly because you pretty soon realise the world isn't like that if you go out into it without the cushion of an excessive parental fortune. Success in any field has infinitely more to do with luck than talent, whether that luck lies in being in the right place at the right time or in having the right doors opened for you by who you or your parents are.
    But secondly there's another much more insidious effect of that kind of education. Someone has been bred to achieve by right, yet by the time they've been out in the world for a while it just hasn't happened. They aren't rich, they don't manage an empire, and nobody knows their name. Even though their achievements are by any rational measure not half bad they feel as though they have failed. In our connected age this effect is amplified by the never ending barrage of friends and acquaintances puffing their smallest successes and glossing over their failures.
    This last is something I think ironically I was sheltered from by the great failure of my life. The dotcom crash ruined the careers of huge numbers of people just like it did mine, but such was the culture of tech startups that there was always the illusion of success in the next one to keep you going.
    It might seem odd to be spending a Saturday morning in such navel-gazing, but it's been on my mind this week because of yet another acquaintance catching the School Bug. No, not the runny nose all the people with kids get a week after the start of term, but the pushy parent bug of wanting to ensure that little Nathaniel and Penelope have what their parents consider to be the best possible education. And as is so often the case when the pushy parent moment arrives, they single out the One They Know who Went To Public School to help them justify their educational prejudices.
    What I try to tell them of course is that there is more to little P & N's futures than exam results and they might end up with children better able to cope with 21st century life if they sent them to the comprehensive instead. Which isn't what they want me to say, I'm supposed to reassure them that public school is the only choice for youngsters so obviously gifted, they'd only learn how to deal drugs if they went to school with the feral youth from the estates.
    I really hate the British obsession with education for all the wrong reasons.
    I should be painting a picture of Nathaniel & Penelope in a couple of decades time, living in shared houses and working in peanuts jobs for "good" employers while slowly realising that the success that should have been theirs by right isn't going to come, and that somebody else will always be there to rise on the back of their achievements. And unlike previous generations they probably won't be able to claim the person getting the breaks had more privilege than them.
    At the moment the prospect of having a family of my own is something I'm having to fight to maintain a hold on. I know I won't catch the Pushy Parent bug in quite the same way.
    I hope I'll manage to instill in my children the idea that they can succeed if they try and have a bit of luck, but also that lack of success and failure are not necessarily the same thing.

Scratching the tranny itch

    "Q: Why do transvestites move to the Manchester area? A: All they want is a Wigan address! ". They don't make jokes like they used to, do they.

    As a deeply closeted youngster my tastes in female clothing sometimes ran into the world of costume fantasy. I had no wardrobe of my own, but that didn't stop me lusting after the clothing I saw on TV in films and costume dramas. I guess like teenagers everywhere the things I wanted had to have the maximum of bells and whistles. 

    Perhaps fortunately, rural England in the 1980s was rather short on flamboyant historical costume. I'm guessing many closeted trans youngsters experience something similar, and probably like me such thoughts recede for them as they grow up. I mean, I'm sure it'd be fun to swish around in a Victorian ballgown once in a while, but you wouldn't wear it to Tesco, would you.

    But it's important not to be ashamed of such thoughts if you've had them. Guilt and shame are the things that imprison us in the closet, and just as it's important to cast them off it's important to realise that natal women feel no shame in their costume fantasies. A while back I visited the historical costume museum in Bath with a friend. I found myself feeling the familiar slight shame as I viewed the lavish gowns on display, before realising that I was sharing the gallery with about thirty natal women who were having exactly the same thoughts as me. There's no shame in that.

    Recently I had the opportunity to exorcise a clothing desire from my adult closeted years. One you might wear to Tesco, but not one that suits someone my shape so I'll draw a veil over the specifics. The sartorially sensitive might be reading, after all.

    So there I was in the mirror, a facsimile of the smart and professional woman I'd wished I could have been years before.  No shame or guilt, very comfortable except for the shoes, but that's always the way. But nothing special, just me looking back at myself. An old itch scratched, and finding it ceased to be an itch long ago. Which is the point really, one of becoming comfortable with myself and no longer needing the desperate crutches of clothing obsession I once had.

How much do you need to know?

    There was a teacher at my secondary school who was - presumably still is - a deeply unpleasant man. His speciality was punishment, and he seemed to derive a vicious pleasure from punishing young teenage boys. We were fortunate not to have been his pupils in the era when teachers used canes. In his case the playground view was that he took just a little too much interest in this aspect of his work, and in the way of young boys of course this took on an angle involving rumours of gay sex. Did any of us have any real knowledge on the subject? I certainly didn't, he never tried anything like that on me, I was bigger than him. And I never walked in on him in the book cupboard with a third-former among the history books or anything like that. But the fact is he was abusing his position and damaging young lives, I still have nightmares about school today because of people like him, and I know I'm not alone in that.
    Could I go to the police? Of course not, much as I wish I could send him into the nastiest jail imaginable. I'm guessing that however much damage he did, he wasn't breaking any laws in what I saw him do, and I can't do so on the basis of playground rumour.
     If you're British, you'll probably have guessed why my teacher is on my mind this morning. The story of the moment is that the late 1960s and 70s TV personality and sanctified charity fundraiser Jimmy Savile has turned out to have had a penchant for sexually assaulting young teenage girls.
     The shock comes of course because it's not really a shock. I first heard rumours about Savile about twenty years ago when I was working at the wilder edge of the media industry. They sounded like idle tittle-tattle, but we're told for those close to the epicentre it was more than just common knowledge. Others have done plenty of outrage at this both faux and otherwise, where I find the worry is at a more personal level. How much do you have to know before you go to the police?
    So in an odd way I understand why Savile survived in a culture of rumours. The people with real evidence - those who walked into the dressing room and found him with a 13-year-old - are unforgivable, but for those who didn't I can see why it would have been very difficult for them to do anything about it. Like my teacher, he was in too unassailable a position.
    I wonder how guilty I'll feel though if an ex-classmate of mine ever comes forward with a more serious tale about our teacher.

Never out of style

    As a very young child with a quietly desperate desire to cross-dress, I used to fixate on the fashions of the day that I found pretty. This is probably a tale that could be told by many readers of this blog who found themselves in the same situation.
    For me in the early 1970s this meant the brightly coloured prints, long sweeping skirts, floppy hats and frills that the adult women I encountered were wearing at the time. Laura Ashley's influence lay heavy upon rural England at the time.
    I still have something of a weakness for the looks from that era, watching an episode of The Sweeney from those days I find my attention divided equally between the cops, the cars, and the fashion.
    I was less of a fan of late '70s and early '80s fashion. The Shake 'n Vac lady's blouse and skirt didn't do it for me, but as a teenager later on in the '80s the fashion excesses of that decade caught my fascination once more. Those meringue-like ballgowns you'd see on television spectaculars back then were probably the pinnacle of my deeply closeted teenaged aspirations. Yes, I was a mixed-up youth who seemingly preferred quantity over quality.
    Now I am a no-longer-closeted adult with a fashion sense all of my own it is interesting to look back at the past few decades and re-evaluate those looks. My life fitting in as a scruffy bloke has left me without the fashion baggage that a natal woman might have of having to move with the times and update my own look, but it has left me with something of that cross-dressers burden, the risk of being attracted to something inappropriate simply because I like it. Browsing vintage fashion web sites it's easy to spot the bad choices, the 1970s huge collars and paisley for example, but what about the ensembles that don't quite cross the line? One of the women who made an impression on me back them was my cousin, at an inch shorter than my current height the tallest natal woman I know, and from her example I learned that tall women can carry off a large brightly coloured print with aplomb.
    Good style is good style, whatever the decade it was produced in.

Dead cow

    The title says it all really, yesterday our oldest cow died. Not a sad moment, in that she was a geriatric amongst cattle, over twenty years old which is well beyond a bovine three score years and ten. In her prime she was the matriarch of our little herd, but as she became decrepit we had moved her into our back field where she pottered around unmolested by younger animals. Yesterday morning she was on her feet in the sun, by early afternoon she had died. Probably a better end that having her hip give out and being euthanised by the vet.
    There was a time when we'd have fired up the digger and buried her, just as farmers would have done for centuries. I remember doing exactly that over twenty years ago for our first matriarch, as a spotty teenager learning to use a backhoe on the clay. However since the BSE panic in the 1990s the Government have insisted on the incineration of dead cattle that don't enter the food chain, so this morning a truck will come to take her away.
   Of course, our back field is not close to the road, so my afternoon yesterday was unexpectedly spent moving her with our ever-handy digger. Quite a task, cows weigh a hell of a lot and even though the rain has now gone away the digger still managed to get stuck more than once. Unfortunately the extra load had a habit of lifting the steering wheels off the ground, making it a difficult machine to control. So a hot afternoon with chains and a Kawasaki Mule, inching the larger vehicle through the mire in a cloud of diesel exhaust.
    A somewhat undignified final journey for the cow.
    My normal walking of my parents dog was a little later than usual yesterday. Grubby and aching from my exertions, when the dog plunged into the river I succumbed to temptation and went for a paddle, something I haven't done for about thirty years. I didn't emulate the dog in going for a swim, water up to my knees was refreshing enough.
    As I return to my week in an office I'll no doubt be asked about my weekend. I'm not sure whether a dead cow counts as Polite Conversation.
   

Unwilling smallholder

    A Sunday evening after the first few days of full summer heat, I'm sitting on the sofa with a half-consumed pint of cider, enjoying the cool air. That slightly sticky hot day feeling, and the accumulated aches of a couple of days keeping the farm ticking over.
    The British countryside is about at its best in early summer. The vegetation is all brand new and there's not yet too much of it. The whole place echoes to the sound of hungry forage harvesters and their attendant trailers collecting the silage harvest, but that is as much transitory as it is part of the agricultural year.
    We were out this morning to check the cattle and to pick up a pile of fencing stakes and hurdles from  the field they have recently vacated. 'Hurdles' might bring to mind rustic woven withies, but these hurdles are large galvanised steel sectional pens, for which we needed the trailer behind our little 4-wheel-drive truck.
    It is a lot of fun, barreling down a minor road on a hot summer day in a vehicle with no weather protection beyond a roll-over bar. I have been bathing in SPF50 sun cream so my recently-lasered face escaped burning, but I was in the interesting position of having my hair blown all to hell by the wind. And filled up with blossom petals.
    It's been a weekend of machinery. The wonderfully named Billy Goat rough grass cutter, my parents' lawnmower and our little Italian cultivator with its incredibly reliable Japanese diesel engine. The latter would not have been my choice on Saturday, I had to do the job in three stages due to the heat. Still, all's now set for this year's vegetables.
    My parents are both worried that all this will get beyond them. It worries me too, that place is the only real home I've known. My wife and I have had various sometimes-unconventional abodes, but they've always been temporary. My parents place has always been a constant.
    My wife suggested to me again that I should consider transitioning, as she can see the effect of all this stress. I can see her point, but I'm still not ready to consider it. Life can be annoying sometimes.
    I dug a couple of rows of potato ridges. Those will take the earlies, one of next weekend's jobs will be to dig another two or three for the main crop. If this sounds a bit late, it's because our soil is very heavy and damp. Annoying to cultivate, but handy in a drought.
    I'm attached to this smallholding lark. I could do it, I know. But it's not for the faint-hearted, and I would be well-advised not to pursue an impossible dream.

So they gave me a camera phone...

    Regular visitors here will probably be used to my periodic tales of the part of rural Southern England in which I grew up. I will always be a native of the British countryside no matter where I live, so it's hardly surprising you'll find it here.
    As a regular wanderer on the bridleways and public footpaths I find I take a huge number of photographs. I'm by no means a photographer by inclination, more someone seized by the urge to capture scenes in which I see beauty. Sometimes I'll end up using pictures on this blog or cutting textures from them to use in my work, but usually they sit neatly organised by camera and date on my backup system.
    It's a shame, not using those pictures.
    So this year I've decided to do something about it. I've started posting some of my countryside photos to a new blog. The idea is that it'll track the seasons in my part of the world as they happen and allow me to share some of what I see. Purely a photography based blog and restricted to rural pics, there will be no trans content there, no cider or old cars.
    The clue to my level of photographic enthusiasm is in the name: So they gave me a camera phone... Not for me the pursuit of the latest optics, my camera came from Motorola via Orange. It's not in any way a good quality camera but it makes up for that by always being to hand, offering an immediacy of reportage that many enthusiast cameras simply can not match.
    You can find this blog here, at http://jennyalto-pics.blogspot.com/.

Jenny's first Christmas

    It is a side-effect of becoming more open about who - what - I am, that those around me make assumptions about my path. My mother, my sister, doctors, they all take it for granted that I am on my way, I will inevitably start living full-time female before too long, say good-bye to the bloke. In my current state in which I sometimes feel as though I am hanging on by only my fingertips this can become a little difficult.

    I may lead a charmed life in which all about me are accepting, but sometimes you can have a bit too much.

    Last Sunday, Christmas day, I spent the day as the oversized girl rather than the scruffy bloke. At my parents place, parents and sister in attendance. Red cowl-neck jumper and long black skirt, very festive. My mother's reaction when I broached the subject a while back was "We're going to have to get used to it eventually so we might as well do it now".
    As it turned out, everything went well. My dad was a little embarrassed at first, but that soon passed. Normal Christmas day for us. Except I was a lot happier, not stressed or depressed. And they now know what to expect from me in girl mode.

    My sister bought me some very high quality cosmetics for Christmas. Wow. :)

    As always it's a little difficult to return to the bloke after an event like that. But I now know I can be girl at my parents place should I need to. It's not going to happen often, but I look forward to enjoying some of the sweltering rural summer unencumbered by boy clothes, for instance.
   I have wanted to do this for nearly four decades. I remember as a child wishing desperately that I could be like my sisters, or the girls at my primary school. And now I've done it, as an oversized ersatz woman approaching middle age.
    I never expected it would be this easy. I should have done it many years ago, perhaps I'd have saved a lot of grief.

Dressing up

    We're all so damned serious about all this, aren't we. Sometimes I think so to the extent that we lose some of the fun along the way. Take dressing in silly clothes, for example. I have an acquaintance who wears daft outfits and posts photographs of herself doing so. I mean really daft like her latest, the full-on showgirl lingerie look with beehive hair, while doing mundane household chores. Every time she posts one of her pictures I hear mutterings of disapproval, as though she's gone too far this time, she's not taking this seriously. 'Cos Real Transsexuals, it seems, never dress up in silly clothes.
    It's true, there is no sight quite like a middle aged bloke dressed up in the showgirl lingerie look. Probably about as bizarre as a giant-sized bloke like me in a summer dress at Sparkle, I'm guessing. But that's the point, that's her way of dealing with this mess, of letting it out so she can hang in there for her wife. Others go for maid outfits or bridal gowns, name your poison. A lot less self-destructive than my attempt to bottle it all up, by my estimation.
    I was set thinking along these lines by a post somewhere else asking "When did you first know?". Because from that question I started thinking about what happened after my childhood crossdressing. What did I wish I was doing, as a deeply closeted teenager?
    I remember being heavily influenced by costumes on the telly and in films. A teenage me swooned over the nurses outfits the likes of Barbara Windsor and Hattie Jacques were shoehorned into for the Carry On films (Google it!) and would have given anything to swan around in the lavish ballgowns so beloved of period costume drama producers.
    So have I just shot myself in the foot, destroyed my credibility to Serious Transsexual eyes as surely as if I had changed my avatar to a picture featuring myself in a rubber French Maid outfit? I don't think so, because I'm sure I'm not the only confused and closeted trans teenager to have had such thoughts. A mind under the malign influence of huge amounts of testosterone can do funny things. I know I'm not the only person to have watched Titanic for the female costumes, hell I'm pretty sure I can name natal women acquaintances to whom that applies.
    Given that I now have the money and the acceptance to indulge myself in the wardrobe department I suppose I could go nuts on silly clothes. And believe me, someone my height could make a very imposing Victorian lady. But I haven't, even though I might enjoy it. I guess that once I'd got over the Wow! factor, I'd just feel rather embarrassed. You wouldn't after all wear such an outfit to Tesco.
    Equally though I can't find fault with my showgirl acquaintance. Her path is a little more flamboyant than mine, but no less valid. And since I've just revealed my past costume propensities I guess let she who is without crossdressing sartorial sin cast the first stone!

While the sun shines

    It's hay making season in my part of the world. Very evocative smell, that of fresh hay. It takes me back several decades to the golden summers of the 1970s when we used to make hay.
    Everybody's childhood summers are golden, aren't they. In my case it's true as it happens, here in the UK we had a run of droughts. Every Brit who was alive in 1976 remembers where they were when it first rained.
    Our haymaking was a bit archaic even by 1970s standards. A Fordson Major and the kind of machine that was not uncommon in the years following the war, a rotary hay turner converted from horse drawn to a three-point linkage. Both machines long-gone now, the hay-turner surviving longer than the tractor.
    Our neighbours have a much bigger machine, a modern John Deere and a multi-headed hay-turner that unfolds on hydraulic rams to cover much more area. He can do in half an hour what it would have taken the Fordson half a day to achieve. Progress, and in this case that's a good thing. It's tempting to be nostalgic as I was when I snapped this pic of another farmer using a red Fergie for the job a few years ago, but given the choice of a morning on the metal seat of the Fordson versus half an hour in the air-conditioned Deere I know which I'd choose!

Jungle warfare

    I spent the other evening in the company of a Billy Goat. No, I haven't gone all goaty on you, between you and me people who keep goats are a bit weird. A Billy Goat is a self-propelled petrol-powered brushcutter, and as is my custom at this time of year I was using our rather venerable model to mow my parents' orchard.
    The growing season for meadow grass starts in early May. Ground nesting birds move in, the flowers come out, and for a while in June it all looks like a scene from a Timotei shampoo advert, except one featuring apple trees.
    By July the vegetation has reached out-of-control proportions. We don't have a handy baby elephant, but I'm sure some of it would be as high as its eye if we did. The birds have all flown and the wild flowers seeded, so it's time to reach for the Billy Goat and tame the jungle. It's hot work, but the machine makes a good job of it and lets the light in around the trees. More importantly the air can get in and keep the damp away, otherwise there are all sorts of mildews and other entertaining afflictions that can strike down your apple crop in its prime. In a few weeks a little bit of new growth will see the orchard carpeted in green velvet, just in time for the odd bit of casual scrumping as the early varieties ripen.
    Mine is a tenuous connection to the land these days, that of a hobby farmer who works shifting words at a desk in an air-conditioned office in the big city.
   

The Local Tearaway

    Today was our first real summer day here in the South Of England. The rain and cold winds are behind us, hello to blue skies ans middle-twenties Celcius temperatures. I spent yesterday in my somewhat improbable girl mode at my friend Dawn's BBQ so I already had some sunburn, highlighting a slightly unfortunate feminine neckline.
    Walking my parents' mutt this afternoon, it was as if the local fauna was all out enjoying the weather as well. A pheasant - a non-native species introduced for hunting, so they're all half-tame - decided to hide from us by flattening himself down in the grass, resulting in a rather amusing two-dimensional flat pheasant that stood up and looked sheepish for a moment before scuttling off when he realised he'd been spotted.
   More obliging was the hare in the picture. As I sat on a fallen log while the dog lay out and cooled down it was quiet enough that two of them came out and that one came within mobile phone camera range. I really must get an ultraportable camera or a phone with a better camera, Motorola really didn't give me the best tool for the job. Anyway, you normally see hares running away at great speed, so to have one fairly static in front of me was an unexpected treat.
     Scandal is in the air in the village I grew up in. A stone garden ornament has been nicked from the garden of one of the incomers. Pretty obviously an opportunist with a van, but as so often happens the old farts have suggested a suspect on nothing but baseless rumour. Our farming neighbour's son, a blameless youth in his early twenties with a liking for machines that burn petrol. He rides a motorcycle at times, therefore he's inherited the mantle of Local Tearaway.
    I know all about being a Local Tearaway, because twenty years ago I was one. Someone's electric fence batteries were nicked (Yeah, the rampant crime of rural England in the late '80s!) and because I was the handiest representative of Da Yoof, my name was mentioned. The previous Tearaway, our other neighbours son who is now a respectable farmer, probably breathed a hefty sigh of relief and turned back to his trials bike.
    Back then I drove a slightly later and even rustier model of the Rusty Old Wreck. This car was a bit faster than the Wreck, but not by much. In the eyes of the old farts though it was driven like a maniac, simply because I was driving it, even though the same speeds by them in their '80s Euroboxes were quite acceptable.
    Yes, being the Tearaway in the car your granny probably drove, how rebellious.
    I think my reign as Tearaway ended when I went to university. I made the transition from ne'er-do-well to Person Going Somewhere you see. I'm a bit hazy as to who picked up the mantle but my guess is the current holder is about three Tearaways removed from me. He has my sympathies, some things never change.
    There's just one thing. I'm unaware of a female Tearaway. Sugar and spice and all things nice.

Dad

    It was a Sunday morning in 1975 or early 1976. I was about five years old and I was sitting on my bedroom floor wearing one of my older sister's cast-off party dresses. I honestly can't remember what I was doing, probably just normal playing, whatever a five-year-old did back in the mid 1970s. My sisters were nowhere to be seen, probably out in the garden playing Cowboys and Indians in those far-off days when children playing at persecuting indigenous minorities with toy guns was considered acceptable fare. I wouldn't have been with them because at that point the age and gender differences between us were starting to become more marked and they were beginning to tolerate rather than include their younger brother. I guess my parents would have been outside too, or maybe my mother was downstairs. Either way I was alone and safe from interruption, free to be a little girl for a while.
     I guess most junior cross-dressers will have a similar story to what happened next, my father came upstairs unexpectedly, it seemed I was required for some reason. Horror of horrors, there was no time to change so there I was, discovered in girl mode. Crap. Surprisingly the expected censure never materialised. I think he took it as my simply playing some kind of roleplay game, so he played along with it, delivered my summons and went back downstairs. My young age probably helped, I suspect had I been discovered as a fifteen-year-old the circumstances might have been a little different.
    I quickly changed into my little boy clothes and went downstairs. Nothing was said, but for me everything had changed. I was convinced from then on that my parents Knew Everything and so started a lifetime of concealment and suppression that culminated in my becoming a suicidal thirty-something.
    It came as a great shock to me last May when I had the Long Chat with my mother and found that they didn't have a clue. That Sunday morning which had been such a significant event for me had evidently slipped unnoticed into the ether and my bloke act helped my my physical appearance had evidently been of Oscar-winning proportions.
     In all of this the one person with whom I have never discussed any of it is my father. He knows of course because my mother has talked to him about it, but me? Somehow I don't know where to start. I know he'd be embarrassed as hell, and I'm certain I would be too. I'm afraid I find talking to women a lot easier than I do talking to men, at least on anything other than "safe" bloke subjects.
    I guess I don't *have* to talk to him if there is no need. An acquaintance recently had a deathbed reconciliation with her father, at least I am fortunate in my parents that there is no estrangement so I won't forever regret not having "that" chat.
     I just feel some regret that I don't feel able to, that's all.

Class, it's an arse.

    One sentence, and I was momentarily speechless. "This is [Me-as-bloke], he went to [The school I attended over twenty years ago]". Not defining me by my achievements or my relevance to the subject in hand, but by where I went to school. To be fair I think the speaker might have been using it in the context of illustrating my academic background as much as my social standing, but even then it speaks volumes that he chose to mention my schooling as opposed to my university education or nearly twenty years in industry.
    Of course, it wasn't where I went to school that was of interest. What was being said was something more fundamental about how the speaker viewed me, he was saying to the other party present was simple: "This person is one of us". "Us" being public-school-educated and therefore some kind of sound chap. If only he knew, eh!
    It's a sad fact that as a species we are obsessed with status. Why should it matter to someone where I went to school? And would his interest in me have waned had he known that his assumptions about me based on where I went to school are largely wrong? I doubt he knew I went to school on one of Margaret Thatcher's Assisted Places so I suspect if he had I might have been introduced in different terms. He probably wouldn't have said "Scholarship boy" in the same tone as someone like him might once have said "Fag", but suddenly where I was educated might have been less emphasised. If it had been my choice I wouldn't have told him about it because it isn't important, but sadly he's someone who knows through other means.
    I find it annoying that there is such an assumption of privilege that goes with an expensive education. Both from within the "club" as with the speaker above, and from outside it. I am seeing a lot of discussion on this topic at the moment in light of the composition of our present Government, and I think that such commentary gets the relationship wrong.

    Privilege does not automatically follow private education, it is private education that usually follows privilege.

    My education came my way as part of a *(Delete whichever following sentence fragment your politics deem appropriate) bold experiment in social mobility/huge diversion of taxpayer's money by a Conservative government but while I wouldn't deny it has given me opportunities that I would probably never have seen had I attended my local Comprehensive, it hasn't led me to riches. Instead I had an isolated and difficult teenage period followed by a fractured career through different parts of the wilder areas of the media industry, all of which has led me to a small rental flat rather than a palatial mansion. David Cameron, Boris Johnson and their cronies are where they are not because of the school they attended but because they are dyed-in-the-wool toffs, I wish everyone would stop lumping people like me in with them by extension.

Cultivating a style

    Until now, clothing has not emerged as a topic on this blog. You see, because we're all serious about this business, we can't be caught talking about frivolous things like clothing. That would make us all sound like a bunch of transvestites, and we couldn't be having that, oh no.
    So apart from the occasional rant about socks, I've kept schtumm on the subject. But a few weeks ago Lucy revealed "It ain't about the clothes" to be a deplorable cliché, and that opened the floodgates, at last I can hold forth on matters of fashion.
     I suspect it must be something we who are born male bodied but aspire to be female all suffer from at some time or another, an obsession with passing. (Do FtMs share this, or do they lapse into comfortable blokedom and not have a care how they look?) Some girls never seem to lose it and no matter how far into stealth they run or how much painful and expensive FFS they endure they still see the bloke looking back at them in the mirror when nobody else can detect a trace of him. Others take a diametrically opposite tack and flaunt their impassability, shaking off adverse comments with boundless self-confidence. I admire this last group of ladies immensely, they seize life and just go with it in a way I simply would not have the courage to do.
    My obsession with passing has largely er... passed. It took the form not of an obsession with making myself passable but a crushing depression that as an oversized bloke I'd never make it or fit in as an extreme oversized woman. The experience of going out presenting as female has taught me that the whole experience has a lot more to it than simply how you look, and that a face that betrays your origins or physical size that makes you the first person people look at in a group are only components of a much wider mosaic of female presentation.
    In short, to be accepted as female you don't need to pass as such, but to mount a credible picture, to present to the world with style. And it is acquiring that style that has replaced passing for me as a consuming interest in this line, particularly at this time of year when the sales can place so much temptation before you.
    Compared to some in my position, I am fortunate in my history. I was never a closet crossdresser. As I spent my early adulthood suppressing all this, I never had a stash of clothes, I never had awkward visits to charity shops, there was no cache of lingerie for my wife to discover and I never purged. So I never evolved an inappropriate look or wardrobe and I never found myself tempted into any of the multiple "scenes" that hover round the edges of our grouping. As my friend Dawn puts it, "It all looks like a lot of fun, but you wouldn't wear it to Tesco now, would you!".
    Instead, as I began to explore cross-dressing as an adult I did so in the company of my wife. I was able to tap into her enviable sense of style as well as to expand on my own tastes and in doing so I hope I managed to avoid the more grievous faux pas that so many women, both FaB and otherwise fall in to. I might only have had the mirror and my wife as critics at the time but I avoided the "Mutton dressed as lamb", the "Mother-of-the-bride", the "Bet Lynch", and worst of all for a tall girl, the "Short fat girl on stilts"¹. So at least when I stumbled from the closet, I knew I didn't have to worry whether my clothes were age or occasion appropriate, my wife's training through many hours of sitting together drinking coffee and people-watching had seen to that.
    It comes down to why you decide to crossdress. My simple desire in all this is to be accepted as female in my everyday life. For reasons I've covered in depth, that isn't about to happen, but part of keeping the girl quiet involves dressing as though that were the case. So when making my choices the consideration is: If I were full-time, would I wear that to work, or would I wear it to Tesco? Thinking about the outfits some of my female colleagues choose to wear to work, that's a rather wide target.
    One of my biggest surprises in all this is that I have become a label victim. No, I don't flash my wad by wearing designer logos in an attempt to prove to the cognoscenti that I too have no taste, instead I've found myself becoming very picky about the brands I buy. It was inevitable that I would not look at brands aimed at different groups such as teenage girls or petite women, but I've found the brands that have the style I want, and have become a devotee of their products. Hardly surprising when you think about it, it's one of those Duh! moments, I'm just doing exactly what I've observed all the women around me doing for years.
    My sister made an observation to me a few months ago, that I have never cared for my clothes as a bloke. In fact what she said as someone who was five years old when I was born, was that when I was a very young child I didn't like wearing my little boy clothes and couldn't wait to take them off. Now she knows all about Jenny she said, so many things about me made sense to her.
    So I've cultivated a style. I'm not flattering myself that it brings passing in itself, but that's not the point. My wardrobe contains outfits in which I feel confident because I feel they flatter my ungainly shape, fit in with the environments I wear them in (Or would wear them in, in some cases) and do not draw attention to me in themselves. And if there's one thing that all those years of people-watching have taught me, it is that if I've achieved those three things then I'm ahead of the game compared to a significant number of the people who pass our coffee shop window. And none of them ever think for an instant about passing.

Good luck to you all in the sales!

¹A lot of female clothing in larger sizes is designed to flatter short fat women. If a girl with legs up to here wears those kind of clothes that's what she looks like.

Girl of her time

    One of the more entertaining diversions among my workload has been investigating visualisation techniques for large data sets. Without going in to too much detail we have a very large and very dry heap of stuff that can be rather interesting if you pore over it for a while, and part of my brief has been to find ways to bring it alive and engage people with it.
    So I've been browsing the world of data visualisation. And wow, there are some amazingly clever designers out there coming up with extremely cool ways to present data. For the curious, try Infosthetics, ChartPorn and Information is beautiful. They won't change your world, but they might change the way you look at some of it.
    On my travels I happened on the Baby Name Wizard. 130 years of baby name statistics very neatly searchable in graph form. Want to know how old-fashioned a name is? Here's the tool to do it. Jemima? Don't even go there!
    I've read more than one account from bloggers in this sphere as to how they chose their names. This isn't mine, because I didn't really choose my name. Well, I suppose I did, but I didn't choose it, a sub-five-year-old me did. Jenny wasn't such a bad choice I guess, to my pre-school self she represented everything that at the time I wasn't. But just think, had I left it until adulthood, how much more cool a name could I have had as a girl?
    The Baby Name Wizard delivers its verdict on my choice with devastating accuracy. I wonder if you can guess which decade I was born near the beginning of?

Jenny goes to school

    Recently I have been sent away somewhere. Back to school. Over twenty years ago now, silly, isn't it. I didn't really want to go but I was sent there by a few recent blog comments. If any experience in my life has marked me for decades it's attending that school, seeing as how I credit it with pushing me firmly into the closet and setting me up for my first decade in adult life as a clinical depressive. Even now as I'm in a far better condition thinking about my time there can send me perilously close to a panic attack.
    Funny how a supposedly "normal" experience can do that to you. I mean, the other kids, my classmates, they don't have panic attacks about the place. Most of them probably never even think about it now, lucky sods.
    I attended what we here in the UK call a "Public school", a confusing description for what is really a private boys school (our public schooling system is normally referred to as "State school"). I was there because I managed to pass an extra exam and earned an assisted place, part of an initiative from the Government in the 1980s to broaden the social base of such schools and encourage social mobility, as they saw it. Maggie (Thatcher, for those on Mars in the '80s) paid my school fees, my classmates were all the rich kids, and I was the outsider. It's debatable whether Maggie's scheme was money well spent overall, I guess there must have been kids who really were pulled out of the mire by it somewhere and I know I have a better education than I would have otherwise because of it, but I feel it taught me the hard way that there is a hell of a lot more to growing up than a so-called "good" education.
     My mother is a teacher. To her, success comes through academic achievement alone, and she wanted her children to have the best opportunities available. I don't blame her for that, it stood her in very good stead for her career and she similarly wanted the best for us. So she put a lot of effort and personal sacrifice into ensuring that all of her children achieved funded places at the local private schools that had the highest achievements. To this day I am approached by acquaintances who have found out where I went to school, anxious to assuage their middle-class guilt about considering sending little Tarquin or whoever to the same place, and I am afraid they are often shocked by the toned-down-for-polite-company version of my views on the subject.
    I'm acutely aware that it would be too easy to couch any description of someone's schooldays as an appallingly vomitory piece of mis-lit. After all, teenage years are difficult for everybody, not just closeted t-girls, and I'm sure you won't find many teenagers with a complete absence of  scars. So I'll resist the urge to wallow, and limit myself to observation as far as I can.
    People who didn't go to a school like mine often have certain preconceived ideas about such institutions and their pupils. Often based upon lurid tales of corporal punishment and homosexual shenanigans handed down from the sensational fiction of a different century, they have a basis in truth if you've read accounts from the 1950s such as the autobiography of the UK broadcaster John Peel, but by the 1980s such practices were long gone. What hadn't gone was the atmosphere of institutionalised bullying upon which the past excesses must have thrived. It's fair to say some of the teachers would not have found  employment in the state sector at the time and would be the target of frequent legal actions were they still teaching today. Add to that about five hundred barely controlled teenage boys for whom Daddy's chequebook meant they lived consequence-free, and an ethos that placed academic achievement far above any form of personal or emotional development and you had just about the worst environment in which to place any youngster, let alone one with gender issues.
    I was picked on when I was at school. I was different, I didn't come from the same background as them. My parents picked me up in a tatty old Allegro or a Peugeot pickup truck rather than an Audi or a BMW, I was worse than crap at sport and had no interest in their games anyway and I just didn't fit in with them. How can you fit in with nasty kids when all you want to do is dress up like your sister? Back then if asked in confidence I'd have told you I was a transvestite, with such little information available I even wondered as a teenager whether I might be gay, something I pretty soon realised I wasn't when I encountered gay people at university a few years later. In an atmosphere of constant homophobia at school the one thing I find amazing is that I can't remember ever being accused of that particular transgression.
    To deal with it all I became an aggressive little sod. Not so little as it happens, I was bigger than all the other kids so if something got physical it was unlikely the perpetrator would make the same mistake a second time. I learned the bloke act too well, so much so that it took me twenty years to lose it. I learned that kids who live consequence free will lie and cheat their way out of any situation and I also learned never to trust people in authority unless they've earned it because they will invariably take the easiest-looking option, and if someone said the big kid done it then that was always good enough for them. Most of all I learned to lock the girl away in case she ever peeked out enough to be discovered, and for that alone if not for all the rest I hate that school.
     It would be unfair to portray only the negative side of the experience though. Aside from the ineffectual intellectual ditherers and sadistic scum among our teachers there were one or two inspiring people who really did try to make a difference. In particular I feel lucky to have been one of the last generations to have been educated by people who fought in the Second World War. Having lived through that they stood apart from their colleagues in having entered the profession to make the world a better place rather than to just provide a career. If I hadn't been taught about Shakespeare and Chaucer by someone who genuinely cared about his pupils rather than just the results they would achieve, I suspect I would have left school a lot more screwed up than I did.
    So I had a "good" education, British style. My parents genuinely thought they were doing their best for me and Maggie probably got value for her money because I passed my exams. Would I have had a better time of it had I gone to the same school as all my primary school class? Difficult to say, though I suspect I would have. My exam results would probably have been different, but I think the value of attending a co-educational school alongside people whose ways I'd spent the previous six years learning would have outweighed that.
    When you are a child, you believe every path you are guided along by your parents or teachers must be the right one. It is only later that you can sit down and analyse where things went wrong. It's easy to say here "No child of mine will go through that...", but the fact is my children, should I have any, will also face the consequences of their parents' unwise choices for them. I had better ensure that none of my choices have such a lasting effect.

Lament for a lost friendship

    A school is often not the happiest of environments for anyone who is a bit different from the norm. Children are free from the social niceties, rules, checks and balances with which adults police themselves and they have little thought or care for the effects of their actions on others so they are ruthless in their treatment of those who do not fit in.
    At my school, I did not fit in. My background was not the same as that of my classmates, my interests were not the same as theirs, I was bigger than all of them yet completely useless at and therefore uninterested in their sports which really annoyed them, and though I didn't fully understand it at the time my brain didn't come from the same parts bin as theirs. As a result I was bullied and marginalised, and responded by becoming a troubled, aggressive and angry teenager.
    I was fortunate enough to make three really good friends back then though. One of them I'm still in touch with from the other side of the world, one of them slowly drifted away and the other, well he disappeared abruptly in a way that has vexed me ever since.
    J was always the very quiet kid, very clever, never put a foot wrong and never in trouble. The opposite of me then. We found ourselves thrust together in those dreadful activities dreamed up by PE teachers for non sporty kids that are supposed to foster an interest in sport but don't, and discovered in each other a surprising amount in common. We were both car nuts, we both really appreciated the natural world and we both enjoyed exploring our city's byways. Amazingly, a pair for whom school cross-country running became a release rather than a chore!
    Also, surprisingly he was the first bloke I ever met who was a committed feminist. Now since then I've met blokes who've professed feminist views as a means to pull the birds, but in J's case he meant it, and since he was as bookish as I was technical he'd done all the background reading to support it. Like me he came from a family of powerful women so none of this was foreign to me, something that surprised him because back then my politics differed significantly from their current direction.
    I stayed in touch with J through university, we hung out together in our holidays as young blokes do, wasted far too much money on bar-billiards as I recall. At the time I'd have described him as my best friend, he was certainly the friend I'd known the longest.
    Then, about a year after we'd both graduated and were earning our first pittances in the real world,  J's mother was found to have cancer. There followed another year of treatments and hospitals, radiation and chemotherapy, but sadly she passed away. And abruptly J disappeared from my life. He was never in, my answer phone messages were never returned, I never saw him again. I honestly do not know what happened.
    In the fifteen years since then I have gone through various stages of worry and guilt over his termination of our friendship. Did I call enough, should I have kept trying? Was he somehow wondering where I'd got to? Had I done something wrong? Was it something I said? Then a few years ago I realised this: He never called me, not the other way round. So for some reason, probably personal to his grief for his mother, he decided he needed to be alone and cut himself off. I still can't release myself from a tinge of guilt that somehow I must have let him down, but at least now I realise it was a two-way street. I know his father didn't approve of me as a teenager, maybe that had something to do with it. Great, I always wanted to be the Kid Your Parents Warned You Against!
    More recently I've wondered whether J and I had more in common than we realised and whether he too was struggling with gender issues. Nothing to back it up, after all I was as deep in the closet as it's possible to be in my teens and twenties, but I've never since found quite the same connection with a friend and as a teenager I certainly never knew anyone else whose interests diverged in the same way as mine from the usual male teenage obsessions.
    I'd like to think one day we'll bump in to each other unexpectedly and renew our acquaintance. I don't do school alumni get-togethers because most of the people I'd meet would be most likely to give me a burning desire to slap them so I've no idea even what he's doing these days, but the profession he works in means he might be around my city from time to time. It's still pretty unlikely though.
    I guess this post strays away from my usual fare of large-and-loud writings on gender variance, old cars and very large ladies shoes. But something reminded me of J yesterday evening for the first time in a while and I've spent the day musing about it all and still trying to make some sense. So you, dear reader, have become my dumping ground for the resulting page of navel-gazing. Don't worry, the Rusty Old Wreck and the Turbocharged Rollerskate will return in due course.

Angry (TG) kid

A week or so ago, Emma-Claire posted a piece about her schooldays. She described her experience of being picked upon once because one of her schoolmates in her words "decided i needed Toughening up". Well done to her for later punching the kid's lights out!
I've found myself brooding somewhat on her piece in the darkness of a snow-bound commute. I hope she won't mind me using the word she mentioned in her piece, "soft", her path was different from mine at school in that she was the soft kid at her school while I was the aggressive kid at mine. The aggressive unpopular kid, I should add, there were plenty of other aggressive kids at my school but kids hunt in packs and are ruthless when they spot anyone who's a bit different so I was never part of any crowd.
I am pretty sure now that I was responding to my gender by being aggressive. It's the easy way out, especially when you're larger-than-average. The school I went to was very traditional in its outlook for the 1980s so there would not have been any support from that quarter.
Did I take a wrong turn by not being a soft kid at school? I'll never know. I played the angry kid, and I did it well. Rather too well, as it happens. I have no sympathy for the other aggressive kids I went up against, to a man they were racist, homophobic little turds and no doubt transphobic too, had they known.
At least I don't have picking on the soft kids on my conscience.