I quote T.S. Eliot a lot, especially when thinking about the contents of my heart and mind. Here are some of the bits that speak to me, or rattle around my head, or have the right sort of memorability to be little modernist earworms.

First, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a poem so bound up in its protagonist's inability to communicate his emotions it can't help but have resonated with a trans girl who stuffed most of herself in a box for a quarter century and time and again found herself flailing around ineptly with the bleeding severed tendrils of an emotional existence.

"Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;"

"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?"

" And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.” "

"Do I dare to eat a peach?"

"Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

There are more, bits that I kind of remember but out of context or as familiar friends I'm forever meeting again for the first time... You can read the whole poem at poetryfoundation.org/poetrymag…

This is from a thread I posted on Bluesky last night. I usually keep my transposting there, but it's been suggested that I need to publish it long form.

So here it is.

Storytime.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Sarah. This would have come as a surprise to her parents because they thought she was a little boy called something else. Sarah herself also didn’t know she was called Sarah because she hadn’t yet met the friend who suggested it to her.

But what’s in a name? Point being, here she was.

Except for some reason everyone told her that she was a boy, and when naked she kinda looked like one. Sarah found this quite confusing and also didn’t understand why the other kids who looked like her were so bloody horrible to her.

But again, that didn’t matter so much, because there were plenty of girls to play with and Sarah got on with them quite well.

One day Sarah was watching TV with her parents and a comedy sketch revealed the existence of, “women who used to be men”.

Sarah asked her mother what that was about, and her mother explained that there was something called a “sex change operation”. Young Sarah noted two things:

1. This was a real thing
2. Her parents thought it was a very very bad thing.

As Sarah grew a bit older, she would notice other things from popular culture. A man had accidentally discovered how to permanently remove facial and body hair with lasers. There were people called transsexuals. There were men who liked dressing up as women.

All these things seemed important.

But they were also scary, and also clearly not the sort of things that her parents or anyone in their circle would approve of if they knew that Sarah was thinking about them.

One day Sarah was playing dress up with her friend, Kirsty. She was about 7. Their mums saw Sarah in a dress and laughed hysterically. Sarah was humiliated.

It slowly got harder and harder for Sarah to play with her friends. It was becoming clear that whilst this was considered cute when Sarah was 4, or 5, or even 8, it was starting to get a bit much, but the boys were just dreadful. Sarah got on ok with a couple of them, but mostly she just played with her computer.

Her parents, especially her father, thought she was doing this too much. Sarah was terrified of her father, who bullied her, and bullied her mother.

When Sarah was 9, her parents divorced. They were both having affairs. She carried on living with her mum, and her little brother, and the two siblings did not get on. Their mum had to work a lot of hours to make ends meet. Sarah’s old friends weren’t much interested in her any more; they were more interested in the boys that Sarah was supposed to have stuff in common with.

Sarah spent more and more time alone learning to use her computer. She got really quite good at it. Her mum worked evenings in a pub near a local Catholic private school. The teachers drank there.

Her mum would tell the teachers about her kid, who was “really good with a computer”. Eventually this interested them enough that they wanted to meet this kid.

Apparently Sarah made a good impression on them, because they offered her a scholarship. At 11, Sarah went off on a full scholarship as a day pupil to this Catholic boarding school. It had a uniform. Different for boys and girls. Sarah had to wear the boys’ uniform.

Sarah couldn’t make friends with the girls and the boys bullied her, but Sarah’s teachers were fond of her. She did well academically, even if she got in a lot of fights.

It was clear to Sarah though that her teachers and the priests who ran the school thought that people who had the feelings that Sarah had, the ones she didn’t tell people about, were going to hell.

Sarah started to go through puberty. She felt extremely alone. She carried on doing well academically, but the light started to go out of her eyes. When Sarah looks at old photographs now, from that time and later, the eyes just look dead.

And then Sarah’s body started doing … things.

And the girls that Sarah desperately wanted friendship with, she now wanted other things from them as well.

She wanted physical intimacy, but more than that, she wanted to be one of them.

And she couldn’t tell anybody.

And it hurt.

A lot.

There were TV programmes that occasionally featured “transsexuals”. These people were all portrayed as pitiful parodies of women. They all seemed sad and the things the programmes showed … well Sarah didn’t see herself in them.

Sarah was 15. Sarah didn’t know how full of shit the media was. Yet.

Because she wasn’t like the transsexuals she saw on TV, and because she was going through puberty and occasionally had blood in her testosterone stream, Sarah assumed that this must be some sort of transvestic fetish that she had. She didn’t know that when people do weird sex things, they don’t actually occupy their every other waking moment either, like when they’re brushing their teeth, or walking the dog, or doing their homework.

Sarah was good at maths and sciences, but she could be a bit slow on the uptake in other ways. If Sarah had thought about it more, she would have realised that a person’s core identity will manifest throughout their personality and sexuality is only one part of that, but she was operating in a limited information environment, and anyway, her sexuality was disgusting and she was going to hell for it. Everybody said.

And her eyes were lifeless.

And she had nobody to talk to about this. It didn’t even matter that they would hurt her if they found out.

It mattered more that she was so utterly ashamed that if anyone found out, she would have to die. Nobody would want her. Not even her own mother.

Sarah was by now a shell of a human. She lived for her special interests and not much else.

And there was no light in her eyes.

Occasionally, when she knew that she wouldn’t get caught, she would borrow a bra or something. Sometimes this gave her a sexual thrill. This just confirmed that this was a fetish. The whole “I’m not even a person any more if I’m not a girl” stuff was obviously irrelevant background noise.

Sarah got the grades to go to Cambridge and study computer science. Away from the priests, and exposed to new ideas, she started to realise that a lot of what she’d been told was bullshit. Especially the hell stuff. Especially the stuff about how LGBT people were bad people.

But she was still very ashamed. That stuff runs deep.

And her eyes were still dead.

During her time at university, Sarah, who had never actually had any kind of intimate relationship because she was a hollowed out shell of a human being, met Sylvia. They became friends.

Sylvia was also studying computer science but in the year below. Sylvia’s mother was profoundly emotionally abusive and she didn’t want to go back to her during the university holidays.

When Sarah graduated and started working, Sylvia got a summer job at the microprocessor company Sarah was working at. Since they really only knew each other over the summer; everyone else had got jobs elsewhere one gone home, they spent a lot of time together.

And then one day they ended up in bed together.

Sarah wanted to tell Sylvia the thing, but she was ashamed. So ashamed.

Eventually, Sarah and Sylvia ended up engaged. Sarah couldn’t marry Sylvia without letting her know. It wouldn’t be fair.

But she was utterly fucking terrified. Sarah was 26 years old by then and the company she worked for had floated on the stock exchange and made her wealthy. She paid off her mum’s mortgage and thought about looking for a house with Sylvia.

But she had to tell her this one, catastrophic, world-ending thing. She didn’t know how.

She told her she felt better in a dress sometimes. Felt better if she painted her nails sometimes. God, it was terrifying!

The world didn’t end.

The. World. Didn’t. End.

THE WORLD DIDN’T END

Sylvia was not disgusted. Sylvia, it seemed, was a little bit bisexual.

The dam started to crack. Sarah grew her hair out. Told a few of their friends. Some of them actually thought it was cool and fun.

One of them told her she looked like a Sarah.

Sarah’s friends started calling her Sarah in private.

Even if her eyes still had no light in them.

Sarah reached 30. She’d told people the thing. She wasn’t even really hiding it any more.

But she still remembered the pathetic transsexuals she’d seen on TV.

And her hair was starting to thin on top. There didn't seem to be much time left to do what she secretly knew she needed to do.

Sarah’s friends told her she had amazing eyes. Particularly her female friends. That there was something that triggered profound emotions with her eyes.

This is because if you looked into Sarah’s eyes, they were dead. All that was in them was pain. Deep, endless pain.

She had read some stuff, in secret, when nobody was looking, and then less secretly, about transgender people.

Some of them took oestrogen apparently.

Sarah didn’t understand why. It seemed controversial. She thought being transsexual was about an operation. Nothing more.

And then one day, just after her 32nd birthday, when she was presenting as a woman half the time in public anyway, but increasingly realising her body wasn’t going to keep letter her do it, Sarah got drunk, broke down in tears, and said, “I have gender dysphoria and I need a sex change”.

And over the next months, Sarah saw doctors. She saw several. Most were useless. Her last hope was a private doctor called Dr Curtis. Obviously though he would tell her that she wasn’t actually like the people on TV, and therefore he couldn’t help, and if he said that, there was nowhere left to go, and no possibility of further existence.

He didn’t say that. He said that he thought Sarah was a very straightforward case of transsexualism.

And a few months later he gave her an oestrogen prescription.

Sarah started to take the pills, and over the next few months, for the first time since she was a little girl, the light came back on in Sarah’s eyes.

The light is still on. It’s been back for 19 years now.

Epilogue: the media lied. They picked people carefully. They edited carefully. They utterly misrepresented these trans women because their audience wanted titillation, not education.

Well, most of them.

Sarah met other trans women after that. Lots of them. They were not sad parodies. They were amazing strong women who loved their lives and their womanhood. They are the best of us.

The media lied about them, and who they are. It still does.

And it was always about the oestrogen. The media lied about that too.

Or rather they simply did not get it, because nobody ever thought to ask the actual women taking it.

If by some chance you read this, and you see yourself in it, and you’re crying, or you want to but can’t (that’s testosterone doing that to you, by the way), know this:

Your sisters love you and are waiting for you x

Thinking about the exceedingly low regret rates for gender affirming surgeries compared to basically everything else. I wonder whether it’s because the only people who can get them are those of us so utterly persistent and determined in fighting all the bullshit to actually get what we need.

Other problems aren’t like this. You have a problem with your heart they figure out what it is and book you in to get it fixed. Sure there’s a waiting list and counselling about the effects and side effects, but ultimately the doctor proposes a solution, you assess it and agree, and stuff happens.

You break a leg: they shove it in a plaster. Why the hell doesn’t the analogous conversation go “well yes I see the problem. You’re a woman but you’re suffering from bollocks. Soon have those off”?

(I know the answer of course. To much of the rest of the cis world transition is something incomprehensibly bad, to be avoided at all costs, including the patient’s own well-being, or indeed their life.)

Sure, regret rates would probably go up. Greater accessibility of any surgery probably means more people will be unhappy about some aspect of it. But the sheer amount of pain and harm that would be relieved… it makes me wonder.

Whisper it softly, but are gender affirming surgery regret rates… too low?