Becoming Myself: The True Story of Thomas Who Became Sara (8 page)

On one occasion when I was doing the shopping I was asked to get Durex! Of course, I hadn’t a clue what they were and so asked the guy who wanted them. He told me they were like a chocolate éclair! I put them on the shopping list and handed it into the girl in the newsagent’s, then left for the chipper. When I returned to the newsagent’s, the girl asked me out loud what I wanted Durex for? I was very surprised by the question and tried to explain that they were some kind of chocolate éclair cake. She said, ‘We don’t sell them here, love. You’ll have to go to the chemist for them.’

So I did, and much to my surprise, received the dirtiest of looks from the staff. ‘We don’t sell them here,’ they said in scornful tones. When I returned to the factory, I told the guy who’d requested them, but all he did was laugh with his mates: ‘Jaysus, Dunne, you’re such a gobshite.’

On another occasion, shortly after I’d started in Weavex, I
was told by one of the fitters to go into the steam house and ask Charlie for a bucket of steam. On this occasion I was certain they were having me on and confidently said, ‘Yis are having me on. There’s no such thing as bucket of steam.’

But the fitter replied, ‘There is, if you put a cloth over the bucket.’ So, off I went again like the proverbial turkey to the slaughter and asked Charlie for the bucket of steam and if he would mind letting me have a cloth to cover it. He said he hadn’t got a cloth, but that the steam would stay in the bucket if I ran with it to the fitter’s workshop. I did, but surprise, surprise, there was no steam left in the bucket by the time I got to the workshop a mere twenty feet away! I displayed this kind of naïveté a few times before I copped on.

One of my jobs was to clean the canteen and later on the games room. The lads used to leave their unfinished lunches behind and I would eat some of them, because I frequently left home without any breakfast or lunch and had no money to get anything from the shops, having spent the little I had over the previous weekend, or having loaned it to my mother. This was only one step up from the times when I picked sweets up from the ground on my way to and from school because I had no money at all and it was better than going hungry.

At this stage, I was making my first tentative attempts at dating, without much success it has to be said. I met a girl in Weavex and fell head over heels for her. I was irrepressible in my efforts to get her to go out on a date with me, but it was to no avail, though we did become friends and I got to visit her at her home on Ballyfermot Road. I would find out what music she liked and I would make sure to bring along her favourite singers, Glen Campbell, the New Seekers and The Stylistics. One of her all-time favourite songs was, ‘Honey
Come Back’, and I tried to woo her by singing it at the top of my voice, much to her chagrin. I still blush thinking about it.

For some time I had fancied that I would write a song. She inspired me to do just that. I can’t remember them now, but there were quite a few and they were very intense. It was much later that I figured out that I had been writing the kinds of songs that I would have wanted someone to write for me. Alas, she remained unimpressed at my gallant efforts. But she couldn’t put me off and for years I wanted to date her more than any other girl I knew.

At a dinner dance at the Fitzpatrick Hotel in Portmarnock, she looked beautiful in her cream floral dress and my heart melted at the sight of her, but she would not dance with me, much to my frustration and disappointment. I have such strong memories of that night and of the Chicago song: ‘If you Leave me Now’, as I felt that she was not to be mine. She had left Weavex shortly before this event and it was to be the last time I saw her for another two years, and in the most unexpected place.

I loved to sing and I did plenty of it while working in Weavex. The lads on the night shift would ask me to sing for them whenever I was working late. My favourite song at that time was ‘Power to All our Friends’ by Cliff Richard and ‘Red, Red Wine’ sung by Neil Diamond. When I sang ‘Power to All our Friends’, I did the same actions to the song that Cliff had done in the Eurovision Song Contest. I would stretch my arm into the air while bringing my knees together. The guys loved it and found it very entertaining.

However, as much fun as we had at work, bullying was frequent. One very hot summer’s day in 1976, another worker and I were working extremely hard unloading and loading a
forty-foot container in sweltering heat. No surprise then that we were sweating like the proverbial pigs. When we needed to take a break, we went in behind the sewing machines where it was nice and cool. The next thing we heard, a girl called out to the supervisor at the top of her voice: ‘Girls, can you get a terrible smell? Jean, Jean there’s a terrible smell over here.’

The supervisor came over and started to sniff in an exaggerated fashion. She then came over to where we were standing and proceeded to sniff me from head to toe. ‘Jaysus, you smell like a smelly dog. Stay there until I come back.’ She went up to her office and returned with a bottle of perfume and proceeded to spray it all over me. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘that’s much better’.

The months and years passed, until I reached the age of seventeen. I had been promoted to the position of auxiliary weaver, but was still stuck in the packing and dispatch department. Then, I was approached by the production manager at about 8.30 on a Monday morning.

‘Thomas, what age are you now?’ I replied that I was seventeen.

‘Then would you be interested in training to be a weaver?’ I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I accepted immediately, especially as it meant leaving the packing and despatch department for good. It also meant a significant increase in my wages, which delighted me, especially as I thought it would please my mother. She seemed indifferent to my news and when I asked for a pay increase she told me I could have an extra £1! I was so disappointed and angry, especially as around this time, I learned that my other brothers were handing up a great deal less then me.

What made this even more unfair was the fact that I was earning far more than any of them and worked very long hours to do so. I was determined to rectify this situation and bided my time. A few months after starting my training I started shift work, which meant another significant wage increase and left me as the biggest earner in the family, but still, after I had handed my wages over, I was the lowest paid. The only good thing about all of this was that it meant being away from the house more, especially with my other work on behalf of the Peace Corps.

But no matter how much I had appreciated the promotion there was always going to be one major downside; I wasn’t able to have my conversations with the girls and I did miss them a lot. I thoroughly detested the manner in which the men spoke to the women or spoke about them behind their backs. I was mortified by the pictures of nude girls in the
Mirror
and the
Sun
and the calendars on display in the maintenance workshop.

One of the most embarrassing experiences of this period was when one of the weavers asked me if I ever had wet dreams. I had heard about them but wasn’t sure what they were, so, rather than display total ignorance, I replied that, ‘I do wake up sweating sometimes!’ That was a cause of great mirth as was my speech impediment — I had a lisp. I would be in the canteen or the rest room when some one or other of them would say, ‘Thomas, say “chlicken and clchips”.’ There was no malice in it, though it was embarrassing. Many years later I was to regret losing my lisp after being told that it made me sound very feminine; just another of those ironies, I suppose.

The experience of the wet dreams made me more determined than ever to pin my parents down and get them to tell
me the facts of life. I went home from work having spent the day preoccupied with how I was going to broach the subject with them. I decided to ask straight out: ‘Mam, would you please tell me the facts of life? I’m seventeen now and still don’t have a clue, and it’s getting embarrassing with the fellas at work asking me questions about wet dreams and stuff. And I still don’t know how to ask girls out.’

She just told me to speak to my father, that he was in the shed and that it would be the ideal time to catch him, especially as he was in a good mood. So off up the garden path I went towards the shed, with my stomach in knots, and asked Dad the same question. And now I was to receive my father’s wisdom on women and how to treat them: ‘There are just two things you need to know about women. First, make sure you never get
VD
, and two, make sure you never get into a joint bank account with a woman.’

That’s it? I thought. I was dumbfounded. With my ever-growing sense of detachment from being a male, I couldn’t relate to what he just told me, particularly given my innate dislike for being a man to begin with. There was, though, the final awful realisation that this was not a man in whom I could ever confide, who unashamedly stated that men who molested women and abused children should be castrated and yet who would prove guilty of that very sin himself. Hypocrisy, it seemed, was to be the norm in adult morality.

T
here was nothing on my body that would ever let you think I was a girl, except maybe the missing Adam’s apple. There were no scars that would in any way indicate that I was wounded and there was nothing on the outside to show that I was in the most excruciating mental and emotional conflict, but I was and it really did hurt. Heaven knew and did nothing, at least that’s what I thought until fairly recently. Now, I realise and accept that this simply is not true. Heaven did indeed have its purpose, but waited a lifetime to reveal it, and all the while I had to cope with being different, very different.

Puberty and adolescence can be traumatic at the best of times, but going through adolescence with a conflicting gender identity is so much worse. It is very difficult for most of us to admit to being confused about sexual matters while
we go through this phase in our development, but the constant uncertainty surrounding who I was, and now am, made it extremely difficult to know my sexual orientation and it was to be many years before I was to understand the complex process I was going through. I had a growing awareness of being alienated from my own body and at times even from my own mind. I became increasingly conscious of being double-minded, or double-gendered in the way I viewed the world around me. My obvious preference for female company and friendship was becoming much more pronounced and causing me no end of problems socially.

It never really occurred to me that I was wrong to expect to grow breasts and to have my periods along with every other girl. I genuinely believed that I was sooner or later going to start entering into womanhood with a body to match how I was feeling inside. But as time went on and the wrong parts started to grow and expand, then I truly did freak out, albeit internally. I was absolutely terrified by what was happening and could only scream back into my own being because it was simply impossible to explain this to anyone else, and I do mean anyone. Had I done so then I am absolutely certain I would have been put into a psychiatric ward.

I was utterly certain that I was living and dying in the wrong body; that instead of having a penis I should have had a vagina and that instead of having a flat chest, I should have had breasts. How was I to explain just how freaked out I was at having facial hair and chest hair, when I knew I should not have had either. I became obsessive in comparing myself to other girls, wondering if, just maybe, things would suddenly change, that the dreadful mistake would finally be realised and that my body would be put right of its own accord. But
it never did and I was left to obsess and fantasise about how my life might have been had my body developed as it was supposed to.

I wondered how on earth girls could complain so much about their periods when, to me, it was one of the greatest affirmations of their womanhood. I cried at the thought, and grieved over it and the fact that I would never have that experience; that I would never get to complain about my own periods, to take them for granted and feel so complete and so completely normal. I, Sara, lost my own right to live as I should; as a beautiful teenage girl sharing all the same apprehensions about entering womanhood with all my teenage girl friends. It just never happened for me.

It is only now that I have researched my condition that I understand why my body didn’t do what I had always expected, and indeed longed, for it to do. Mine was a male body containing a female gender identity and the two were completely irreconcilable. Although there were still some indicators that things should have been different. For example not having an Adam’s apple; my voice being very soft, along with my hands and getting pimples around my face and mouth regularly on a monthly basis, which I was later to learn was female acne. I was often questioned about why my hands were so soft and feminine looking, despite them being large and used to the same hard work as the guys I worked with. Then there was my distinctly feminine posture and hand movements, which, though I tried desperately to hide them over the years, were still spotted by some and even raised some questions about my sexuality. Looking back, there was outside evidence even then that my body was not as it should be.

Just like any teenager, I became more naturally inclined to worry about my body and personal appearance, but some of my interests and concerns regarding my clothes, personal hygiene and social interactions were becoming decidedly more feminine, but because I was afraid of being called a ‘cissy’, I became quite adept at hiding some of my instinctively feminine traits, especially my body language and deportment.

The most marked development at this time was in my emotions and communications. My emotional development was definitely shifting more towards the feminine rather than masculine. It was also during my teens that I began to experience what can best be described as out-of-body experiences and became more detached and divided from myself. There was a little girl inside screaming from within my own body, trying desperately to fight her way out of years of conforming to my male upbringing. But there was no giving up this time and, despite the many long years it was to take Sara to claim her right to live; she, I, was determined to assert my natural birthright, regardless of how I looked on the outside. But for the time being, it would be more about skirmishes rather than full-blown battles. Winning the battles was still a long way off.