Secretly watching trans blue movies | On 'Disappoint Me'

You almost definitely won't believe this, but when I was a young queer I spent many good, long, nights at K Road's Family Bar.

“We’re going to Family!” was a queer rallying cry and if you heard it on the street, you knew you were in good company.

It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve been there, I didn’t even go one last time before I packed my bags and landed in Edinburgh, but I think about it sometimes.

The lad in the sequin suit and the beautiful hotel he took me to back to (someone seeing us on the street and calling out ‘faggots’), the guy that was obsessed with bouldering and let me hang off his toned, muscled arms, the Australian couple and standing on the balcony of their apartment over looking Myers park deep middle of the night.

The guy and his partner, who was throwing up in the Family toilet, telling me they’d rail me if they weren’t so sick with the drink (is that offer still standing, fellas?).

Am I bragging? Maybe.

When I look back on all of that, they were good times, fun times, but I always felt outside of myself. I always felt like part of me was putting on a show for the people I was with, and also for myself: this is queer culture, and this is how you live it, and this is what it means.

At Pride last year I rebuffed a guy and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, just kept following me and my pal around like a disease-infested puppy.

I walked out of the premiere of Pillion after a wrestling match between the leading couple turned into a rape scene and the audience chortled.

To this day, I’m one of a vanishing few who don’t think Pillion was masterful film making.

Straight spaces never felt like the place for me either.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was told that I could be an activist or have a freelance income. My options were share my pronouns and try to be visible for the trans community in commercial settings or not have any work at all.

Some people will say shut up and take the money, some people will say I shouldn’t be so ‘in others’ faces’ about it. They’d tell me I shouldn’t be running this newsletter or I shouldn’t be writing this essay because it’s going to put the people in my target market off, as if someone reading about the fact that I have a life outside of this screen, this company, this brand, is going to destroy any chance I have of building a business.

I’ve gone from feeling like I was performing in one aspect of my life to feeling like I’m performing in another - do I talk about being non-binary? Do I talk about trans rights? Do I talk about how the EHRC, media, and governmental policy are actively hostile to trans and queer people....or I shut up and take the money I can get because I have bills to pay and mouths to feed?

This great big performance, this feeling of existing between spaces and within them, this feeling of always being on the outside, getting the joke a little later than everyone else, making the trade off between being vocal about queer and trans rights or shutting up and taking the money, it’s all so...

... formative.

Somehow, I only learned this in the last few days.

The world you exist in and the way you exist in it, shape the world that you’re going to live in by shaping the relationships that you have with other people.

“We get the love we think we deserve” is the most memorable line in all of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and it’s the one that’s shaped the way an entire generation thinks about love (only to be usurped by John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars who dared to tell young millennials and older gen Z that they should aim for better) and this is no more true than it is for marginalised communities.

The other night I was researching European trans history and I was surprised to find out that there are two significant trans people in history. The first is from 1322 and the second is a French person from the early 18th century. In the case of the French person, they were the first person recorded to be living as a man and a woman and they were respected in their social structure.

The overarching problem with trans history is the overarching problem with a lot of human history: the records, simply, are not there. They were usually never kept, sometimes they were destroyed (we’ll get to that). There were more trans people, we just don’t know about them.

Where records are kept, they are sparse and they usually relate to two things: 1) Parish records. These were stitched together at best and disorganised at worst 2) prison and arrest records.

The challenge with the former is that the name and gender someone was born with would have been recorded, but it was recorded under the name and gender they were born with.

The challenge with the second is that as these were legal records, they were often kept under people’s legal names, the ones recorded at birth, which were not always the same as the ones they used. These records also depended on you being arrested for a crime.

What we do know is thin but encouraging: the term ‘transgender’ is a 20th century term, so people who were trans before then would have identified the way they felt they ought to and lived the life that suited that expression.

Outwith Europe we know that there were cultures, including in the Pacific Islands and North America, where non-binary and trans people were known as ‘two-spirit’ and along with other queer people in society were accepted and had places in that society.

So, what happened?

Jesus happened, that’s what happened.