Becoming Myself: The True Story of Thomas Who Became Sara (10 page)

My uncles asked me to sing during the wake in honour of Nan. They told me how much she loved me and that I was one of her favourites and of how she enjoyed my visits late at night on my way home from my work with the Peace Corps. She also appreciated my bringing her bottles of stout and Gold Bond cigarettes. She especially appreciated that I continuously ran the gauntlet of my mother’s fury, defying her insistence that I keep away from Nan. I don’t know what happened between Nan and my mother, beyond my nan calling my father a ‘bastard’. But it was enough to leave my mother feeling embittered towards her until just before her death when something changed and brought them to some form of reconciliation.

They reminded me that Nan thought of me as that ‘lovable little fucker’, as she had called me just a few months earlier. My nan was my oasis, I could confide in her without fear of things ever getting back to my mother, and, whereas my mother seemed to hate the sight of me, my nan was always delighted to see me. She was the only one I felt I could truly trust.

On the following night Nan was removed from the house to the church of the Assumption. We walked behind her coffin. The next day was the funeral mass and she was later buried in St Fintan’s Cemetery in Howth, near where she once lived. It was extremely hard saying goodbye to my only ally.

By the time I’d left my teens behind I had developed a very intense personality and was strongly committed to whatever it was I believed in. I was also very loyal to those I cared about and who showed kindness towards me. And I’d already learned the importance of a well-rounded education, coupled with an open mind and tolerance towards those who happened to be different. And why would it be any other way, because who knew more about what it meant to be different than a young woman living in the body of a young man?

That was how life was to be for me, during the 70s. Busy, busy and even more busy; that was how I drowned out the sound of Sara’s cries for help and how I tried to rid myself of those ever-present nightmares of her being buried alive. I had joined the Peace Corps when I was seventeen and then the local folk group. We sang at twelve o’clock Mass every Sunday and for the patients at the Cheshire Home in the Phoenix Park. Every year we held our peace concerts. They were always a sell-out and extremely enjoyable. Folk group practice was every Thursday evening in the Dominican girls’ school. I also worked for Welfare Action, an organisation dedicated to helping the poor, a couple of nights a week, as I liked the idea of helping others less fortunate than myself. We visited peoples’ homes to do painting and decorating, shopping, gardening etc. We also arranged delivery of goods donated by members of the public to poorer families, which could be televisions, furniture etc. I later became the leader of the local Welfare Action group, and later still became the coordinator of the Welfare Cadets, which was established in May 1978.

Ever since surviving my first suicide attempt and my ever-growing desire to get away from my family, I found that my
job and voluntary work gave me great solace. But nothing could compensate for my sense of loss at not being my true self. It is fair to say that my alienation from my family was copper-fastened during this period, as was my alienation from Sara. What I didn’t really appreciate then was just how much of a weirdo my family considered me to be, especially because of my helping others. They simply could not understand why I would join the Peace Corps and be such an intellectual. They were forever slagging me off, because of my vocabulary and my taste in clothes and music. They let on not to like my taste in music, while playing my records behind my back and wearing my clothes out on their dates, all the while saying that I could not accompany them to dances in the
TV
Club and the Apartment. I was cramping their style and I was too boring, they said. It is entirely true that I was not the best of company when out with them. This was because I was finding it increasingly difficult to converse with my peers as a boy, when all I felt inside was this girl wanting to find expression.

It was during this period that I began to be excluded from an increasing number of family functions. My mother and one brother in particular made sure that I was excluded. Every time an invitation was issued for some function or other, this brother would say, ‘I’m not going if Thomas is going’. To which request my mother always acceded, while pretending to do her best to change his mind. She never did and the reason was increasingly clear; he was the undoubted favourite. Everyone towed the line and ignored me at every opportunity; so much so that when their own birthdays or other celebrations came up, I was either completely excluded or given a token invitation, in the hope that I would refrain from attending. I was getting the message and so found reasons
not to attend, but this never stopped me from helping them whenever they needed me, and need me they did.

Happiness is not a word I would have used to describe any stage in my life prior to my going public about my condition. Were there times when I was happy? Of course, but they were so intermittent and too often accompanied by an immediate sense of dread as to render them difficult to remember. There were those special moments when I discovered a beautiful piece of music or heard a song that went straight to my heart, or the times when I did well at something and had it acknowledged, but they were in all truthfulness, few and far between.

I would go for long walks through the fields off Le Fanu Road and up and down Ballyfermot Road; going to the church in order to pray for direction and to be able to make some sense of my life and my family’s treatment of me, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. These were just some of the ways in which I tried to get time for myself and connect with God in order to get answers to my questions. But the divine was always too abstract and inaccessible, I felt, a remote power but with great control over our minds and spirits.

I tried to find God directly through my own prayers; never able to understand why such an intelligent God would have me pray to him in mindless repetitions. Of course, I was to discover later on that he doesn’t want us to use mindless scripted prayers, chants or mantras. He wants us to talk to him intelligently. But that was for later on, for now I had to be content with asking questions about why He had allowed me to go through so much turmoil. Of course, I didn’t know that, even as I was going through my own difficulties, my sisters were also going through their own traumas; something I could never have imagined possible.

Some of my greatest fun moments at this time were the Peace Corps’ trips to Glencree. I went on quite a few of them and always enjoyed them immensely. We also travelled up to Corrymeela on the Antrim Coast, near Giant’s Causeway. These trips were part of the North-South exchange, in which we were attempting to get a better understanding of the different cultures and their feelings about the Troubles. At the time, there wasn’t a day or week went by without a bomb going off or someone being murdered. Then there was the massacres, such as the Miami Showband. There were moments during this period when I thought the world was going to end, such was the darkness of the clouds that hung over this country. It was hoped that these meetings would help to create a common understanding and tolerance towards each other and that this would help towards a more peaceful society within Northern Ireland; or as we called it, the North. It was quite an experience driving through the border checkpoints and seeing all the British soldiers and their weapons and armoured vehicles, a mixture of awe and fear.

I was coming towards the end of my teens and with it came an intensity of mind and a vacant heart. Sara had been abandoned in favour of ‘fitting in’. Everything she was and could have been had been smothered and it seemed for the most part that she was gone for good. The nameless teenager entering womanhood with all her desire for life and all that that should have been, was buried alive and for the most part forgotten. However, Sara may have been sent to limbo, but she was not for staying there.

Over the coming years, Sara would find her own way of defying Thomas’s suppression and though it was very
secretive, it did allow her to give some defiant expression of her right to
be.
Sara and Thomas had begun a countdown towards ultimate separation and Sara claiming her right to life. But what was to become of Thomas? Only time would tell.

I
know of men and women who have married rather than admit to being gay and in many cases have entered the religious life for the same reason. In my case, I dated because I wanted to be normal, not because I was gay, lesbian or bi-sexual. (Gender identity disorder is not to be confused with sexual orientation: there are differing sexual orientations in
GID
and non-
GID
people.) I came through this whole period without any conclusive answers regarding my sexuality. It was to be one of the least concerns for me during this whole period and for the most part this remains the case. At the time, I simply felt a desperate need to be loved and to live a normal life.

I was at least seventeen before I managed to get a date, which by the standards set by my brothers, made me a late starter. My brothers had been dating at a much earlier age and they were beginning to wonder about me, not that they were any help. I was absolutely hopeless with chat-up lines and couldn’t ask a girl out to save my life. I was far more interested in good conversation than chatting up girls, which, under the circumstances, should come as no surprise. I’m sure it
must have made me very boring but I simply never got the ‘chatting-up’ bit.

When I was dating I found it extremely difficult to think of girls sexually and I found it equally difficult listening to boys talk about them in that way; and yet, at the same time, I wasn’t attracted to boys either. For me, friendship was always far more important with girls than anything else and I found myself able to love them in that way; most probably because I was overwhelmed at the mere thought of having a girlfriend as opposed to a girl friend. This led me to get carried away at times, coming on too strong. Try as I might to get it right, I was simply incapable of being a competent dater, and this was to show itself in so many ways; not the least being my inability to draw a clear line between being a ‘boy’ dating ‘girls’. I wanted to talk about girls’ things and not the things boys would talk about, which I’m certain must have been very disconcerting for the girls I dated.

I remember doing a Personal Development course in Newcastle West in 1998, and on the course many of the women were surprised at how much I knew about women and about
being
a woman. But they were also extremely doubtful when I told them I’d never made a single pass at a woman (maybe they’ll believe it now!) and that I always felt extremely uncomfortable having to be the one to ask women out on a date. I told them I never once used a chat-up line on a woman, which again they refused to believe. And of course, why wouldn’t they, after all they saw me as a man and not as a woman. Looking back, these encounters, which grew in number and frequency over the years, were to become my unconscious way of trying to integrate as a woman, despite my best efforts to consciously suppress my feminine traits.

Given the choice between my male colleagues at work and my female colleagues, I much preferred the females. If I had to choose between talking about sports, cars, machines, war films etc. on the one hand, and relationships, children, fashion, makeup, socialising, with girls on the other, then there was no competition. I would certainly opt for the latter. But of course I was stuck trying to fit in with my male colleagues, which I found intolerable. Nonetheless, I did try my very best to fit in and to prove I was as normal as everyone else during this period and beyond.

My attempts were frustrated by the fact that I was getting absolutely no feedback from anyone. I can well understand why people would have felt confused about where I was coming from and what my motives might have been, as I was experiencing so much confusion myself and was desperately trying to come up with answers that would set me on the path to ‘normality’. This was especially a problem with my efforts at trying to determine my sexuality; something I still feel uncomfortable dealing with. The best way I can describe it is that I am sexually ambiguous and that it is not a major issue in my life. However, none of these realisations were to be of any help to me during my teens and even during my twenties and thirties.

When I eventually managed to get a date I really wish I hadn’t. The girl I asked out was a member of the Peace Corps. It was my brother’s 21st birthday party. It was due to be held in the Green Isle Hotel on the Naas Road. I asked a girl on a normal date first but she turned me down, so I resorted to impressing her by inviting her to my brother’s party. I decided to pluck up the courage to ask her during the week of our peace concerts in the Dominican Covent. She turned me
down flat, but I wasn’t giving up that easily. It just so happened that my eldest brother was having an engagement dinner in the Green Isle Hotel, so I asked the girl a second time if she would go out with me to the Green Isle, and this time she agreed. But the dinner was cancelled for reasons I can’t remember, so I had to come up with a plan B. I told her I would take her to the La Dolce Vita club in Mary Street. It was a new club that was
the
place to go.

I was all dressed up in my best and full of excitement at the prospect of having a nice date. However, when we arrived at La Dolce Vita we were refused entry on account of us not being members. I suspect that the real reason was that we were both under age, but the doorman was very discreet and clearly didn’t want to embarrass me in front of her. The problem for now was that I didn’t have a plan C! But she came to the rescue by suggesting that we go and see
Gone with the Wind
. I was only too happy to agree and so we went. While we were watching the film, I did the usual boy thing of trying to put my arm around her shoulder. I was so slow about it that I made snails look like sprinters. When I finally managed to get to the other side she was completely unresponsive so I discreetly removed it while I cringed inside.