A voice
When I got my first MS symptoms I had only been transitioning for 5 years. I was at a hen do in Ibiza and my body had started to betray me. We’d go out for the night and back to our place at 5am and I’d be completely destroyed the next day; I hardly drank and I didn’t feel hungover, I felt breathless, like all the air had been sucked out of the room, nauseating and empty. I now know of course the signs of fatigue.
This trip was one of my favourites not because it was Ibiza, not even because I loved the people we were with so very much, but because of how much a girl I felt. My friends did my hair, I dressed up, and there I found a family that accepted me entirely, unhesitatingly, as a girl.
Being trans is a tricky thing. I wish with every cell that makes me that I had been born a girl, that I had been raised a girl, that I had dreamed and loved and failed and thrived as a girl in the world. I wish it so much it breaks me.
But my body was not that of a girl, though my every instinct told me I was one, though I am one in the most important ways.
I couldn’t tell anyone, much less transition, when I was young. I was 28 when I finally accepted the feelings I had dissociated from, finally accepted that secret longing, my secret self. I started to transition soon after.
The effects of a male puberty leave a painful legacy that takes time and work to overcome. I had intense pulsed light to remove my beard, I took hormones to feminise my form over many years, I learned what looks good on me, how my frame behaves in different kinds of clothes, I learned to style my hair when I had no adolescent experiences of a mother or friends helping me to learn.
Much of the time I felt deeply self conscious, I’d be in meetings talking about a child with their parents and I’d work really hard to make sure that no one could tell I was trans. People finding out you’re trans is dangerous, I’d learned the hard way, so staying secret to stay safe became a hallmark of my experience. A low level anxiety was always present, a vigilance against the possibility of being seen.
My voice has always been a key challenge of my transition. I taught myself how to train my voice and the fear that someone would hear my transness when they couldn’t see it kept me working hard on it.
Over the next 5 years I’d worked on my makeup, my appearance, managing the effects of hormones, getting bottom surgery, working on my voice. I remember many examples when I’d be in a room with someone I couldn’t trust to be safe to know I was trans, and I’d feel the tension in my body, in my throat, all defences raised to shroud myself in confident femininity, hiding in plain sight.
But there were moments, precious moments, when I felt truly free. Ibiza was one of those moments, when everything worked just right. My makeup was on point, my dress was right, my voice was exactly where I needed it to be, and I could relax into myself, my true self, and just be in the world. Confidence, authenticity, gender euphoria.
But MS had also stepped into my life, though it would be another year before I learned the name of my enemy, and MS had disturbed these precious, fleeting moments of freedom.
Then Covid happened.
I self isolated, held all my meetings online, and along with everyone else withdrew from the world.
Between MS, immunosuppression, a bunch of relapses, and Covid I shifted into survival mode. I stopped thinking about the future, I stopped thinking about transition, I stopped wearing makeup, buying clothes. And maybe the worst of it all, my most traitorous act, I allowed my voice to deepen. I feel a lot of feelings about this time, but the thing I feel most guilty about is my voice. I feel very much like I betrayed that secret part of myself I’d kept so hidden for so long, like I betrayed my authentic self.
And there were consequences.
The reason we transition, at least one of many, is the corrosive influence of gender dysphoria. The feeling is the most profound I have ever experienced. It is like my soul is crying. In those most precious moments where I can relax into the world as a girl, a weight that I only realise has been so heavy by its lifting, is suddenly gone. The feeling is euphoric, like I can finally breathe.
That’s why my lack of effort is such a betrayal. I have permitted that weight to re-enter my life. I first noticed it when I went to Vienna this year. I was in a place where no one knew I was trans and I had one of those precious moments. It was beautiful. The weight I hadn’t realised I’d again started carrying was lifted.
So I have decided to begin anew. I have started voice training again with the same therapist I saw a decade ago. I’m wearing makeup more, thinking more about my presentation, and remembering how to embody my authentic self again.
But things are diffferent now. I’m a wheelchair user, I get fatigued, my fingers are numb, and I can only really see out of one eye clearly, and all these things mean that I have to re-learn what I once knew intimately. I need to learn to embody Cora as a disabled woman in the world.
There are elements of intersectionality that make things interesting. I’m more muscular than I once was, for a start. I want to emphasise that I know women can be muscular, but when you exist in a world that is constantly looking to identify trans folk as trans, and not infrequently then doing something unkind, using any incongruence as a marker, a sizeable bicep is suddenly a threat.
But what I want to do most of all, more than anything else, is to do what I did in Vienna, make friends as full Cora in the world. Not as the openly trans person in the room, but as just another woman in the world. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to work on my voice, get myself back to embodying my authentic self in the world, disabled Cora…