He got me a job in Spain collecting glasses in an LGBT bar, and paid for my ticket there – he told me to go and figure out who I was. He helped me realise that this wasn’t how I should be living. It took him two months, but after a while I trusted him enough to tell him what was going on at the weekends. Wednesdays were the days I would talk to people. By the time you realise just how bad it is, it’s too late – you’ve been conditioned, so you go, because you have nothing else.Ī sous chef at work noticed a pattern: at the beginning and end of the working week, I’d be sullen and uncommunicative. It’s a similar process to grooming – it happens slowly and incrementally. But even then, for some reason, I took myself to that place every weekend. I bombed out of school and became a kitchen porter. I collapsed mentally – I was doubting my gender, my sexuality, my own mind. I didn’t have anybody to help me – and I started to believe that, actually, they might be right. To be told for hours at a time that what you say is wrong, you learn that it’s better to say nothing at all. They were determined that through prayer, through these long talks, that I would reach a kind of holy conversion.īut that was just never going to happen. I told them that I wasn’t gay, it was my sexuality that I was in conflict with – my gender identity, or what I now call it: that I was transgender.īut they didn’t understand it. “Why do you think you’re gay?” They tried to convince me that being gay was a terrible choice. “You’re not gay, you’re not gay,” they said repeatedly. And I genuinely mean talk at me, I never got to speak.
It’s simple – if you’re tired, you’re more likely to agree to things.Īfter morning mass, I’d sit for hours and hours in an office with someone talking at me. The lack of sleep was deliberate – to make you more compliant.
Then I’d be allowed to go to sleep, but I had to be up for 6am for another mass.
I would have food, and then it was time for prayer, which went on until 1am. I would get there on a Friday evening, in time for mass.