What's Love Got to Do with It? Read online

My baby’s coming. I don’t know what to do.

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘When you feel the pain, that’s a contraction.’

  ‘What’s that? I don’t understand.’

  ‘When you feel the contraction, just push.’

  ‘Push, push what? What should I push?’

  I collapse back on the bed as another wave passes over me. Something must be wrong. Surely it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  But I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I keep saying until, somewhere in the red darkness behind my eyes pressed shut, something breaks, tears and explodes from within me.

  So scared I can’t breathe. I am holding my breath and I don’t know whether I need to breathe in or out. Finally I gasp and open my eyes to see a baby being lifted out of me.

  The nurses look concerned, the baby comes up and up.

  A girl.

  ‘Is she supposed to be like that? Why is she so blue?’

  ‘The umbilical cord is wrapped around her neck,’ one of the nurses says, leaving the room with my little baby.

  ‘Where is she taking my baby?’

  ‘You’ve torn quite badly; we’re going to have to stitch you up.’

  I can’t move, my legs are in stirrups. I start to shout and scream for my baby.

  ‘If you don’t stop, well leave you where you are and you won’t be stitched up.’

  I lie back, look at the ceiling, trying to smother my whimpers, so they will sew me up and let me see my baby. It takes them a lifetime to finish.

  ‘Right,’ the horrible nurse in charge says; ‘you can see her now.’

  And they bring her in and a nurse lies her on my chest.

  ‘But I don’t know what to do. How to hold her, nothing.’

  ‘Just feed her!’ the nurse yells. ‘It’s not hard.’

  ‘I can’t, I don’t know how. I’m so sorry; I didn’t go to antenatal care.’

  The nurse looks me in the eye for a moment, shakes her head in disgust and walks out. The rest of the nurses follow, leaving me with my baby, not knowing what to do. One of them reappears with a bottle a few minutes later. ‘Don’t bother trying to breastfeed her. You better use this,’ and she leaves.

  Now I have my baby, I feel even more alone than ever.

  All I ever wanted was for someone to hold my hand and tell me that they loved me.

  I had my baby girl and I was grateful for that. But at the same time my little glass bubble I’d put us in was starting to crack. I was so alone. I had no one to help me. I wouldn’t open the door when the health visitor came around and frequently got myself into a panic with baby Lauren. It was just so overwhelming.

  She couldn’t keep her milk down. I was panicking. I took her to the hospital and they said, ‘We are keeping you in.’

  I didn’t ask questions. This was serious.

  But it wasn’t, not in the sense I imagined.

  I was using the wrong-sized teat on the bottle. There were different sizes. I’d just used the one that came with the bottle.

  They kept us in for four days before discharging us. They wanted to see what I was like with Lauren.

  And I was fine.

  But inside, I was a wreck. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as post-natal depression. My mind, already so stressed, was filled with awful thoughts, the worst one of which was that social services were after my baby. I played out multiple scenarios where I would have to escape from social services, who in reality were barely aware of my existence. I moved and moved again until no one knew where I was, and I was in a town where I’d never even been before in a flat with mushrooms growing on the stairs, no heating and it was getting colder and colder each morning, until I could see my breath condense in the bedroom and frost on the inside of the glass.

  I’d never felt so alone, so scared.

  JOHNNY/JEMMA

  Like all the people whose stories are in this book, I met Jemma (formerly Johnny) through my outreach work. We ran into one another when I was going through a tough time, mentally. The first thing that struck me about Jemma was her looks. She was stunningly beautiful and only her eyes hinted at her long and difficult journey. Before long, she was sharing her story with me and, by doing so, Jemma helped me more than perhaps she knows. Jemma’s story makes it clear that if we face our fears and follow our hearts, we can accomplish almost anything.

  I already knew I was a girl by the time my mum, drunk, was having sex behind the sofa to supplement her income while I sat watching the TV, sound turned up (Go, Go, Power Rangers!) to try and cover the human noises coming from behind me on the carpet. These were my earliest memories.

  I must have given the obstetrician pause for thought when I was born but, still, despite my ‘ambiguous genita-lia’ he declared me a boy, just like that. By the time I was three I knew he’d made a mistake, along with everyone else. I played like a girl – just couldn’t play any other way, though I would have to hide my games from Dad because he’d beat his little boy, a futile and bullying attempt to make a man of his son. I was too slow to hide the My Little Pony one day when Dad came up behind me, yelling, ‘You fucking gay bastard!’ and then the world exploded into millions of shining coloured stars before I could turn around. My ears hummed for hours afterwards, I winced as Mum tried to comb my hair. He hit her, too, and my older brother and sister, but never as much as he hit me.

  When the beatings didn’t work, I had an operation. The doctor told Mum and Dad not to tell anyone: ‘Our secret,’ Mum told me, through tears. I felt then, as a six-year-old, that Mum knew this was wrong but us girls were powerless to do anything about it. Dad and the doctor wanted me to be a man and that was that, end of discussion.

  The reassignment surgery, carried out on the NHS, was, I now think, the cheapest one they could do – moving muscle and tissue around without worrying about the long-term consequences for me, worrying what it would be like to live with what they’d done, what it would feel like. ‘Feelings’ were not high on their list of priorities. I was an embarrassment to humanity, and felt barely human as I listened to the surgeon deciding and then talking through what he was going to do, without looking at me, apart from a brief hello and goodbye. I knew they were wrong, wrong, wrong, but I decided to believe him when he promised he could turn me into a little boy and, as Mum and Dad wanted this, and I wanted them to love me, to be a proper child to a dad who wouldn’t beat me and might even like me, I went ahead and watched the patterns of paint on the white ceiling spiral above me when they gave me the lovely premeds, and it was time to count down: ten, nine, eight . . .

  Waking up dry-mouthed, in pain, with bandages that pulled my skin tight, it didn’t feel right. As soon as I had the strength, I lifted the sheets and looked. My stomach was yellow with antiseptic from the belly button down and bandages covered everything. Being in hospital was hard, sleepless nights from other sick children I didn’t particularly feel like talking to; food that was too hard to eat even when I finally got my appetite back and was starving; and sleepless nights as the nurses clacked and clattered, rattling pills.

  Funny thing was, I didn’t feel any different. I still wanted to be a girl. Maybe with time, I thought.

  I loved learning and was a bright child, keen to know everything the teachers wanted to tell me and more, but I ruined everything when, happy to show one and all I was now a boy, I showed my curious classmates the results of the operation. My form teacher, Miss Masters, took me to one side.

  ‘Johnny, you’re not supposed to show your peepee to anyone at school,’ she said as kindly and clearly as possible.

  ‘But, Miss, I’ve had an operation to become a proper boy. I want everyone to know so that they can be friends with me now.’

  Although I loved lessons, I was lacking friends. Boys didn’t want to play with me because I wasn’t like them and didn’t like football and fighting, and girls wouldn’t play with me because I was, supposedly, a boy.

  While most boys hid porn magazines from th
eir mums and dads, I hid Bella and Woman’s Realm under my mattress and it was there that, aged eleven, I learned about what it meant to be gay and lesbian and that some people had sex changes. One man, living as a woman, said he was transgender and, forever grateful to these wonderful magazines for all their knowledge and exploration of other worlds, I realised I wasn’t alone. I looked the word up in a huge dictionary in the school library. So my gender identity didn’t match my assigned sex. So, I thought, the operation hadn’t worked and, therefore, to exist successfully in this world, to live and love, the closest I could get to what I felt was gay.

  Mum, who was a lot more macho than most mums, and old school besides, knew this. I knew she loved me despite the fact I wasn’t ‘my father’s son’ because every now and then she’d quietly present me with a new My Little Pony that we both had to keep secret from Dad. When I was twelve she let me watch a TV documentary about a transgender woman called Julia. The outside world vanished as I watched, absorbed beyond distraction, fascinated. Mum and me wouldn’t talk about my desires and I knew this was just how it had to be, but I understood what Mum was doing.

  I also knew not to talk about my uncle, who was part of a religious cult, how he liked to get into bed with me and rub himself up against me and commit what his cult would call ‘gross unnatural conduct’ when Mum and Dad were out and he was babysitting. I hoped he’d go to hell.

  My brother and sister knew but were just relieved it wasn’t them that Uncle David picked on. It was my bad luck that I was a particularly beautiful dark-haired and feminine-looking little boy – a ‘little angel’, as Uncle David would say.

  We lived in a three-bedroom house. Dad worked in a fire-extinguisher factory as some kind of foreman and we were well off compared to some families at school, but I would have swapped with the poorest. Dad held back most of his wages from Mum, giving her barely enough to live, let alone feed and clothe us. Most days, after tea, Dad would hit Mum who was ten years younger and almost half the size. Some nights were worse than others but this routine stayed the same until Mum started to drink before Dad got home, which made her clumsy and forgetful, and Dad, grateful for any excuse to yell, called her a stupid whore, a useless cow, and hit her even more. Running from the rages, I listened from my room as Dad blamed Mum for me, that ‘little fucking poofter’ and then I would hear through the wall as Dad, perhaps moved by Mum’s sobs, or more likely the need for a good night’s sleep, told her not to cry, that he was sorry, but if she would just try and be a better wife then he wouldn’t have to hit her quite so much.

  Because Mum started to drink through the day and she started having sex with strangers to pay for her growing addiction, she didn’t notice that I started to eat more and more, stealing biscuits from the tin, bread from the barrel, sugar from the bowl, cereal from the box and this, along with seconds at school, as well as all the extras from the kids who didn’t want the sandwiches their parents made for them, meant I started putting on lots of weight – and, by thirteen, Dad was calling me a ‘fat poofter’.

  Dad kicked Mum out when I was eleven years old and said he was keeping us. We all wanted to go with Mum. Dad’s new girlfriend was even younger than Mum. She wanted babies but needed to take special drugs to help her. I found the pills and threw them down the toilet, no more babies born to that monster.

  The next morning I woke up in pain, Dad was pulling my hair, pulling, pulling, lifting me off the bed, yelling: ‘You fucking little gay bastard!’

  ‘Stop, Dad, please, stop!’

  He let go, throwing me back down on the bed and then shouted as he grabbed the wardrobe and pulled and half-picked it up before throwing it on top of me. The terror of death that came at that moment was all-consuming. The mattress took some of the impact otherwise Dad would have been up for murder, or more likely convincing the police that I’d fallen from the wardrobe while trying to climb it, playing in my room. Next thing, the wardrobe was gone, Dad’s arms were thicker than most men’s, enlarged by lugging fire extinguishers around year after year; he was proud of those arms. It was impossible even to think about the possibility of resisting as pulled me up and started to smack my head on the dressing table, over and over until the stars danced in front of my crossed eyes, the words ‘gay bastard’ shouted, repeated over and over, coming through muffled to my singing ears. He stopped, but pulled my hair again, and dragged me, screaming, through the house, down the stairs, along the hall to the basement door, knees and hands thudding as I reached to hold my hair, to stop it being pulled, and then down to the ground to try and stop my body bouncing off the wooden stairs. He dropped me on a rug already unfurled on the cold concrete basement floor and quickly rolled me up inside, until I couldn’t move. I had asthma and could hardly breathe as he sat on my chest, leaning in very close to say: ‘I’m not done with you yet, you gay bastard. I’m going to come back and break every bone in your body. In fact, I might as well kill you, you’re only going to die of AIDS anyway.’ Then the pressure lifted and I heard his steps receding upwards; the door slammed and was locked.

  I had to escape. He was going to kill me this time. I choked for lack of air and dust that seemed to leap from the rug every time I struggled to move. My arms were trapped behind me. I twisted and turned, starting to panic. The rug was so heavy and wound so tightly. I started to feel light-headed; I hadn’t long before unconsciousness would grip me. Grabbing a breath of air, I twisted and practically dislocated an arm to pull it out from behind me, up and over my head and out of the top of the roll, and this gave me just enough space to start to squirm my way out. I lay panting on the cold floor for a good few minutes, until the pounding in my ears had faded to a soft hum.

  The windows, ceiling height on the inside but at ground level on the outside, were really narrow. I was really fat. I had to try. Using metal shelves for a ladder, I clambered up. The inside of the pane was wet and, being February, freezing cold. The window latch, stiff from disuse, was slippery with water and didn’t want to budge. I pulled and twisted at the lever until I was sweating, veins popping and, as I was about to give up, the lever squeaked. I pushed and the window opened upwards and outwards. Still dubious as to whether I’d fit, I was nevertheless the most highly motivated I’d ever been in my life, and so I reached through with both arms ahead and, pulling on the corner of a raised paving slab in the front garden, I hauled my head and shoulders through, and got as far as my hips before I got stuck, rain pelting on me as I wiggled, terrified that Dad would see me at any moment and would either drag me or kick me back down into that basement. Tearing my pyjamas, I strained, the metal frame bruising and cutting into my skin, the window now moving in its small iron frame as I pulled myself, millimetre by millimetre, into the outside world. Clutching my torn pyjama trousers, I didn’t even feel the rain as I ran, crying, panting, head ringing, barefoot through the streets, running, running, running, in absolute fear of my life, until my breath gave out and, still fearful of being caught by Dad, I hid under a bush and, whether from shock or the cold, I passed out.

  I woke up in a police station. Warm and dry and in someone else’s clothes. It was 3a.m. I had no memory of getting here. The cops were kind and smiled at me, tight-lipped, but some of them didn’t look me in the eye. I had a black eye and a shining lump in the middle of my forehead from where the wardrobe had hit me. I don’t know whether they went to see my dad, they just told me that I was going to stay somewhere safe.

  ‘Somewhere safe’ turned out to be – thanks to a lack of care home places – a secure unit for deeply troubled children. Sure enough, it looked like a prison for kids, barbed wire curling over the tops of the walls, not a smile shared between the drab-looking staff. This was a jail for car thieves and drug addicts, most between fifteen and seventeen years old. I was by now thirteen, camp, feminine, quiet, broken, intelligent and liked to study. I might as well have had a target stuck on me.

  ‘I’m going to die,’ I thought as I was escorted into a room with four older boys who could
immediately see what I was. Kids like to single out those who are different and had no trouble identifying me, for I was extraordinary in the worst possible way.

  The next day in the bathroom, showering, I washed my hair before realising something wasn’t right, the shampoo was too thin, the smell – I screamed. Someone had peed in my shampoo bottle. Darren, a tall, dark-haired, tanned boy, was top-boy and regularly trashed my things, shoved and pushed me, calling me a poof, at which point the others would join in. They even took the trouble to take it in turns to wake me up at different times through the night so I was zombie-tired the next day.

  On the plus side, we drank milk, had chocolate and I could have a bath – things forbidden to me at home by Dad. We had to share the chores and I was quite happy behind the hoover or wielding a duster but, eventually, the abuse got to the point where I, the victim, was pulled aside for causing disruption among the other children.

  ‘We didn’t have this trouble before you got here,’ one warden said as he walked me to a huge boardroom full of adults, where the leader of the local social services department, a terrifying lady called Irene, who walked with a limp (it was rumoured that she had a false leg and would beat kids with it), made me stand up in front of the other adults before saying: ‘You are homosexual.’

  The adults around the table seemed to loom darkly, in and out of focus as I watched the scene. It seemed to happen at a great distance. Light-headed, I looked down at my feet.

  ‘Jonathan!’ she snapped. ‘You are homosexual, aren’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I can’t hear you. I want you to tell us you are a homosexual. In your own words.’

  I nodded and murmured a tiny ‘Yeah’ in reply.

  ‘You are a threat to the other children, to the smooth running of this institution,’ she said. ‘It is necessary to isolate you.’

  I was taken from the boy’s side. ‘Oh what relief!’ I thought. ‘Put the gay boy in with the girls. Of course, what could be better!’