Ray: Harms of Gender Identity Ideology Part II
A big brother in mourning
Before Ray’s interview, we had an exchange. He initially contacted me on DMs to say that he had read Kim’s story and although he didn’t believe what I believe about transition, he was thinking about talking to me. “But I think you would probably call me a TRA and not want to have the conversation” he said.
In fact, he and I both shared quite a few beliefs; that trans people deserve proper access to health care; that dysphoria is real and can be devastating; that there are a range of potential treatments, including transition; that transition should be a “last resort” a “nuclear option.”
“But you sound so reasonable,” he messaged me. “I’m concerned about talking to the enemy, lol, but look, if you’re giving me a veto over the final version of what you write, let’s talk, anyway. What harm can it do.” I was rather touched by that, and thought, well, if he does talk to me, I had better do him justice.
Ray and I did talk. We zoomed one afternoon in late summer. He has a leaded light in his office, and the sun was coming through the coloured glass and making lovely pools on the wall and on the bookshelf, giving the small room a jewelled, underwater sort of feel.
He was hesitant at first, but when he started talking, the words came out slowly, deliberately, and they just kept coming. What he said was so close to my own experience that I had to swallow back my tears. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to tell him to stop, it was too much, I wanted to make it better somehow, I wanted to say “it’ll be alright” or some other kind of platitude, but I kept my part of the bargain. I bore witness to his grief, I listened, and he just kept on talking.
I have changed some details to ensure Ray’s anonymity and that of his family, and I have edited for length, structure and clarity, but these are his words. All names have been changed, which has required a bit of “fudging” at times, for reasons that will become clear, but Ray has signed off on me publishing this, as is.
“Like Twins.”
I was born in September. My sister Clara was born the following August. There were only eleven months between us, so we grew up like twins. We were always in the same class at school up until her accident, and we spent all our time together as kids.
She was blonde. She had these great big eyelashes. She was so smart, smart like a whip. She just caught the knack of things without even trying. Mum bought her a skateboard one summer, and within a couple of weeks she was zooming about on that thing like it was part of her feet.
Mum and dad stayed together, but… how to put this kindly? I’ll just say, they were not a happy match. My father was quick to anger and my mother quick to depression, so they fed off each other. It was a cycle, and Clara and I ended up caught in it. He never hit my mum, but he would break things and throw things and punch the wall, and my mum would cry. I used to try to protect Clara, distract her, occupy her, whatever, but she saw it, and it hurt her. I wonder now whether that was part of it, deciding she didn’t want to be like mum.
Clara
Clara was a walking contradiction. She was into all things girlie. She loved her long hair. She spent ages plaiting it and putting it up in all kinds of styles. She loved her dresses. She was always trying to persuade mum to take her shopping for new ones. She wasn’t into make up. I say that, but she once went into mum’s make up tin and made herself into a “warrior” by painting her whole body, head to foot, in stripes of lipstick, nail polish, eyeshadow and permanent marker. Mum was fit to be tied trying to get that off in the bath, I could hear her calling her all kinds of “terror” and “minx,” shouting that “you’ll be the death of me, you’ve got school in the morning!” and Clara wailing back “stop scrubbing me so hard, you’re scrubbing my skin off!” She was maybe five at the time? Wild. She was a wild kid.
Once she’d chosen whatever mad outfit she wanted to wear, and fixed her hair, Clara would go out in the street and play with the boys on their own terms. She would fight anybody, she would race anybody, beat anybody on the skateboard. She was absolutely fearless. She used to climb higher than any of the boys, swim out further. She never turned down a dare. She once jumped off the highest cliff at the quarry into the water, the cliff that nobody ever dared to jump before or since. She did it in her best Sunday dress for a 50p dare, and I honestly think she was lucky to survive it. She would come back home with her dress ripped and her hair dishevelled and then go out and do worse tomorrow.
She was a tiny ball of energy and I loved her so much. I want to say I was protective, but that wouldn’t be exactly true. Even though she was so tiny, she could always stand up for herself. Maybe I emboldened her. You can climb higher if there’s somebody to catch you if you fall. She always knew when we were kids that if she got into more trouble than she could handle, that I would have her back. We were like Ying and Yang. I was the sensible, older one and she was the wilder, younger one. I loved her.
I am maybe painting her out to be a bit wilder than she really was. She did have a quiet, loving side as well, she used to curl up next to me on the sofa, watching a movie and go to sleep on my shoulder.
Sport
When she was eleven, my mother decided that she would have to do SOMETHING with all that energy. She asked her to choose a sport. I don’t want to say which one. I don’t want it to lead to her being identified. She was, anyway, pretty much immediately effortlessly brilliant at it. By the age of twelve, she was competing in national competitions. She was tiny, but so athletic, so naturally athletic. All that time, energy, courage, fierce competitiveness that she’d put into climbing trees seemed to go into her sport.
I was never anything special, I’m just boring and ordinary. Middle of the road. But there was always something magical about her. Something fierce that I never had. A drive. A spark. I’m just quite happy to be your average Joe, but she could never have been that. She was like wildfire. She had so much gravity, so much fierceness. She was tiny but everybody looked at her wherever she went. She had an energy that drew people in. Do you know what I mean?
My parents were happy enough to let her go to things, happy enough to pay for things. They had money. And it got her out of the house, out from under their feet. They really just palmed her off, like they always did. I don’t know why they had children at all. They never seemed to want to be around us. They’d pay for us, private tutors, sports, schools, whatever, but they never had time for us. Honestly, they had even less time for Clara than me.
I Let Her Down
By thirteen or fourteen, she was, I believe, flirting with eating disorders. She was obsessed with her weight and controlling her food. She talked more about that than she did about her training. I think I focussed on her difficulties to the exclusion of my own. I was always trying to get her to eat, making her food, taking her out for milkshakes, talking to her, listening to her, trying to get my parents to engage with her. They wouldn’t. I was all alone with my own problems, and hers as well. I feel like I let her down.
When she was fifteen and I was just sixteen, she was in a car accident. She was badly injured. I didn’t know at the time, but there were a couple of days where it was touch and go if she would survive. My parents were locked in their own worlds throughout it. The way they talked about it was distressing to me. It was more about them, and how they were going to cope with a “disabled daughter” than it was about Clara and what she was going through. She did not end up with any significant disabilities, but it was the end of her sporting career.
She did two years of physical therapy. My parents paid for it privately. Everything could be paid for, by my parents, but nothing valued. She worked very hard, as she did at everything. She managed to get a very respectable set of GCSEs, although she stayed back a year to do them. She started her A-Levels at seventeen. She really did seem to have, if not taken the accident exactly in her stride, made up her mind that she was not going to be beaten. I saw her fierceness, and her determination coming back strong in her. It was so good to see her back to herself, more like she was when she was younger.
She wore nothing but sports gear, track suits, for years there. But in her A-Level year, she started looking more like the adult version of her kid self, always over the top. She would wear fancy dress to parties that weren’t fancy dress. She once wore a full Cinderella ball dress to a house party, wig and all. Everybody else was in jeans, and she didn’t give two hoots. She mismatched on purpose, big biker boots and a wee pair of dungarees, but then a flowery straw hat on top. Or she would wear a man’s suit, but then throw a flowery scarf and high heels on top of it. Always incongruous. She made everybody laugh. Her friends just seemed to accept her how she was. There was no romantic attachment on the horizon, but she seemed to have lots of friends, and a life going on, and I was happy for her.
Start of the Downward Spiral
Then, just before her eighteenth birthday, she went out drinking with her friends on a Friday night. I usually stayed sober if I knew she was out drinking, so I could go get her if something happened. Sometimes she needed me. That night, I went out with my friends, and I got pretty drunk. That’s on me. I will regret it every day for the rest of my life.
She sent the first answer phone message at 1.06 am, slurring her words, saying she had lost her friends and that she couldn’t find a taxi. I didn’t pick it up, I didn’t hear it, I was in a club. She left me another message at 1.17 to say that she was going to walk home. At 1.34 she messaged me to say that she was going to jump in the car with a “friend” instead, as her feet were hurting. I didn’t pick up any of the messages. That’s on me. It’s on me. I should have stayed sober in case I needed to drive to get her. But I was drunk, and going home in a cab.
She had got in a car with a man she vaguely knew. They hung about in some of the same circles. He was in his late twenties, which makes me suspicious for a start. Why was he hanging about teenage girls? He picked her up, took her to his house, and raped her.
She didn’t have any memory of it, but he definitely raped her. I saw the state she was in. He didn’t just rape her, he brutalised her. I saw the bruises. I could see it in her eyes in the following days and weeks. She had never looked like that, not even in the hospital after the accident. She just looked blank, but with an occasional tear going down her face. No expression. No response. She wouldn’t go to the police. She felt as if she had brought it on herself. She spent whole days rocking back and forth saying “it’s my fault.”
That was the start of a huge downward spiral for her. She was always slight, but she stopped eating almost altogether. I bought her Complans and energy drinks but she wouldn’t eat. She was cutting herself, and drinking every day. She shaved off all her hair and her eyebrows. She attempted suicide several times. She washed down 200 paracetamol, a bunch of anti depressants and a load of tranquillizers with a litre of gin, and had to have her stomach pumped. She tried to hang herself over the bannisters but fell down and broke her wrist instead. She cut her wrists in the bath. She tried to jump off the bridge into the river at a local suicide spot, but was stopped by passers by and brought home by police.
The Aftermath
My parents wouldn’t access professional help for her. I guess they blamed themselves, and didn’t want anybody else blaming their parenting. They didn’t want fingers pointing at them. I listened to her for hours. She never made much sense, just talked round in weird, disconnected circles. “It’s my fault, it’s my fault, my shoes are hurting me,” like that, and then onto something completely unconnected.
I wanted to find that man and kill him, but I just listened and held her. She cried and cried and that was ok. But then she just sat there, absent and vacant, not responding. That was the worst. I felt like it was my fault, like I had put her there for that bastard to get his hands on her. I could have cut out my heart. I was a kid. I was a kid really. I didn’t know what to do or how to help her.
The News
And then, all of a sudden, my sister, who had just turned eighteen, and who was in the middle of a mental health crisis worse than any I’ve ever seen, a “losing my grip on reality” mental health crisis, sat us down to tell us her news. She looked calmer and happier than she had since she was raped. In fact, she looked positively cheerful, if slightly glazed about the eyes. It was at my parent’s kitchen table, and to this day it just feels like a bad dream. I thought she was going to tell us she’d found religion or something.
She started to talk. “I’ve been talking to the doctor about what’s going on with me, and I’ve realised, all this difficulty is because I’m trans. I’m transitioning. Please call me Brandon, and use he/him pronouns. I’ve started testosterone, and I’m going to get an official dysphoria diagnosis from the doctor, and start on a proper script soon.”
I told you before we spoke, I am in favour of trans rights. I think that trans women are women, but this was beyond me. My sister was five feet tall, slight, and even skinnier than ever. She had been raped less than three months previously. She was in a huge downward spiral of mental ill health, including serious suicide attempts as regular as clockwork. It was impossible for me to see this as anything other than a further descent into self harming behaviours, further cries for help.
But my parents jumped on it. I could not understand it. I cannot understand it to this day. My dad said, brightly, “oh Brandon, is that why you shaved your head?” I looked at him, incredulous, saying nothing. “If you were keeping that inside, it would explain so much,” said my mum. I said nothing, I sat there like a fucking idiot, like a coward, saying nothing, and I will regret it for the rest of my life. I just sat there. I think I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. Everything sounded hollow to me, as if they were all down a tunnel. Unreal.
I should have said something, I should have stopped it. How had she started testosterone? She was still wearing the bruises that man put on her! When she was talking in weird, nonsensical circles only the day before? When she was spending most of her day staring into space? Who had prescribed it? Whoever did it was not following the proper guidelines. I think they should be struck off. If it was even a doctor and not just something she got off the internet. If it was even true. I was dumbstruck. I said nothing.
That’s when I started to realise that something was going wrong with the trans thing. What happened to my sister was absolutely not health care for trans people. Trans people absolutely deserve access to treatments, they deserve to be recognised as the gender they choose, they deserve proper health care. But that was not it. That was helping a raped child to harm herself further. It was abuse. I think everybody involved should go to prison. I don’t know how anybody with dysphoria can go anywhere near the health care system as it is. It is a fucking disgrace.
But god knows why, my parents gleefully jumped on the “trans” bandwagon. She wasn’t fucking trans, but on they jumped. They paid for her to have private treatment, where she got a “proper” prescription for testosterone at her first visit. Within six months of the rape, she had a double mastectomy. I believe that she lied to the doctors, or that they didn’t properly assess her medical records. As it was, all the mental ill health got blamed on being a “closeted” trans man. I still can’t get my head around it. Medical doctors did this to her. They took the Hippocratic Oath. Medical doctors. I really believe that when all this comes out and people realise what’s going on, people will go to prison. I hope so.
Disappearing
She started to disappear. I felt like the girl I knew was disappearing inside a strange shell. We drifted apart. I didn’t recognise her. She was still obviously female, slight, small, fine featured, but she was growing a beard, and had a strange, scratchy voice. Not deep so much as… scratchy. I wanted to badly to tell her, you’re making a mistake. How could anybody looking not see what a mistake she was making? She was a kid. I was a kid too, I didn’t know what to do. She stopped speaking to me when I went away to university, just after she had the mastectomy, six months after she was raped. I told her, “you’re my blood, I’ll always love you, if you ever need me, you know where I am, I still have your back, just like always.” She looked sad, but she said nothing, and turned, and went back into the house.
That was the last time I ever saw her.
Very shortly after that, I found out from a mutual friend that she he had moved in with the man who raped her. I can’t understand it to this day. It is just impossible for me to get my head around why she did that. It made me question everything. I know that somebody raped her, I saw her face, I saw her bruises. But could it have been that man, the one she decided to move in with? Why did she do that then, if he raped her? It just seems mad to me that she moved in with him. That she stayed with him. It makes no sense to me. Something doesn’t sit right with me there. Did she lie? Did he groom her? Coerce her? Was something going on that I don’t know about? How was he with her, when she looked like a teenage boy? If he was straight? I can’t get my head around it, not still, to this day.
Come and Get Me
Then, out of the blue on her nineteenth birthday, she called me up and said, “please come and get me.” I was away at university. I was also in therapy at the time. I was working through some of the co-dependency stuff I have going on. I run to rescue people. I’m better now, but I still do it. My wife tells me, “quit being Mr Fix It.” I was forever dropping things that really mattered to me, to drive half the length of the country, to “fix” things for Clara. My therapist was supporting me to look at why. And to ease away from doing it.
Well, Clara sounded calm. Like she was asking for a lift. Not like she was in crisis. She just wanted me to go get her. I was going away on a weekend with my then girlfriend. I had it booked. But I should have known, I should have known it was for real, that Clara wouldn’t have called out of the blue if she didn’t really need me. We weren’t speaking, and she called me and asked for help. I should have known there was something seriously wrong.
I asked if she was in danger, she said she wasn’t. I asked, could I send somebody round, like police or mental health services. She said she needed me to come. I said I couldn’t come. I asked was there anybody more local. She said, no but it’s OK, I understand you can’t come, it’ll wait, I love you, and then she hung up the phone.
I can’t remember if I told her I love you back and I wish I could remember, I have tortured myself about that. I can’t bear to think that she died without knowing that I loved her.
I can’t bear to recount the autopsy or the police stuff to you. I can’t bear to think of her there, all alone. Top and bottom of it is, she killed herself. She killed herself on her 19th birthday, because I couldn’t save her. Because my weekend with my girlfriend was more important than my sister’s life to me on that day. Because I decided that having a drink was more important than she was and as a result, that bastard raped her, then she started taking testosterone, that surgeon cut her tits off, and now she’s dead. It’s so unfair. It’s so fucking unfair.
I can see her, how she was, with her golden hair and her skateboard, and her lipstick in stripes on her face, climbing all the trees. I want so badly to go back in time to when I was her big brother and I was everything to her. She was so wild, she was my wild half, always daring me to be braver, to take a risk, to be somebody. I don’t give a fuck about co-dependency any more, or therapy, I just want to go back and save her, and I can’t. I can’t fix it for her, and if I think about it now, all these years later, it still breaks me up.
I saw her in the coffin, but she didn’t look like herself. She looked like our cousin, when he was a teenager. I felt like I was looking at a stranger. I didn’t kiss her, she looked too strange, her skin felt too cold under my hand, and I torture myself about that too. I wish I had kissed her on her forehead, because no matter what she had been through, she was still my sister and I should have kissed her goodbye.
Sometimes I feel like I want to go get her out of the ground and yell at her that she can’t be dead, she’s my sister, but dead she is. My mind rebels against it. It plays tricks on me. Sometimes, I think it was our cousin in the coffin, and Clara is still out there, zooming off down the road on her skateboard, her dress flying out behind her in her wake.
Both my parents died too, not all that long after Clara. My father dropped dead with his tie on. He had a heart attack. They tried to save him in the ambulance, but they said in the end, he was dead before he hit the floor. My mother died shortly after that. They said it was a stroke. I think that both of them died of broken hearts. They weren’t even old. They blamed me til the end for not going to help Clara that day. She was always their golden girl, despite all the mayhem she caused, and I was the scapegoat.
I don’t care. I would take all the blame in the world, if I could only have her back, if I could only go back and save her.
I can’t, of course, I know rationally I can’t. I’ve done a lot of processing over the years. But when I talk about it like this that the feelings come back. My wife tells me, of course she knew you loved her, but I would give a lot just to be able to go back and tell her that one last time, and kiss her forehead, so that she knew for sure.
That was my wife brought me tea earlier. She knows about all this stuff. I think meeting her is what stabilised me. I was out of kilter for a bit there, I got really sad and stuck in my house for ages. I dropped out of my degree, got drunk a lot, and I didn’t want to do much of anything. I suppose I was depressed. My wife kind of saved me, you know? Got me back into the world. I finished my degree there, and I’m working. We got married. We toasted Clara at our wedding.
Here, could you tell over the monitor? That my wife is pregnant. She’s showing a bit in real life. She went for the 20 week scan, and they told her, it’s going to be a girl.
I don’t usually gush, but I gushed all over the place that day. I told my wife in the car after, I can’t wait to be a father. I’m going to be so hands on. I’m going to be down playing on the ground and wrestling and making mud pies and changing nappies. I’m gonna throw her in the air, and read her a million stories, and I’m going to encourage her and have her back and tell her she can be whoever she wants to be in the world. I don’t care what she wants to wear or who she is as a person, she’ll be my princess, and I’ll make sure she hears every day that I love her, and I’m going to spoil her absolutely rotten, and I’ll not care if she gets every single dress she ever wears filthy dirty and comes home with muddy socks every day of her life, and fights all the boys with sticks, she’ll still be my princess and I promise to only ever be a little bit cross with her, and I told my wife, I’ll love the both of you until I die.
My wife listened to me gush, and then she very quietly suggested calling our daughter Clara.
I paused, but I said no. I didn’t want to call her Clara. I couldn’t do that to a child. It’s too much of a burden of a name with the history it has. I don’t want to feel sad and angry and frightened about my sister every time I look at my little girl. I’ve told you what kind of father I want to be, and it’s not the sad, frightened, angry kind. I’m going to be better than that.
Well, said my wife, Clara means light, so how about we call her Lucia, that means light too. I said, “Lucia it is, but we will have to promise each other to surround her with light and joy every day of her life,” and then my wife said, “Lucia Joy,” and that was us both, bawling in the car park like ninnies, and not caring a jot who saw us.
Lucia Joy is due, would you believe in less than three months, just before Christmas, and I can’t wait to meet her.
It’s just that I wish Clara could have been here to meet her too.
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