My father was born in Buenos Aires, my sisters (one of whom lives in Canada) were born in Lisbon and two of my grandparents were buried in the foothills of the Pyrenees. My mother is half-Norwegian, I have American cousins and although I let the side down by entering this world via the maternity ward at Maidstone Hospital, I spent the first two years of my life in Moscow.
So, my baby talk was Anglo-Russian and my first teddy bear was called Misha. Then my diplomat dad was posted to Portugal and by the age of five, having been to a local kindergarten, I spoke English and Portuguese (all now forgotten), more or less interchangeably.
Oh, and one of my sisters recently took a DNA test and it turns out that our familial genes are around 50 per cent Nordic, 45 per cent Celtic and barely five per cent Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps mine are very different despite our identical heritage, because I think of myself as absolutely British and, more specifically, English. My voice would be instantly recognisable to people around the world as that of a well-spoken, educated Englishwoman, which is absolutely fine by me.
For all our national imperfections and the undeniable blots on our record, I am unfashionably proud of who we are, what we’ve contributed to the world, and what, at our best we stand for. I’m certainly more of a monarchist than a republican. An entire lifetime spent under one remarkable queen and fourteen prime ministers who were mostly mediocre, at best, will do that to you.
Of course, those views might be nothing but conditioning; the inevitable consequences of my haute-bourgeois class and fancy Eton and Cambridge education. Then again, my parents never had much money and I only went to public school because the government paid most of the fees, so I felt very much like a chippy outsider amidst all the privilege and entitlement. That was compounded by my sense that there was something odd about me, something that did not quite fit in with the other boys.
That otherness was manifest in various pieces of the unique existential QR code that forms any human identity. These were the seventies, when most boys decorated their rooms with pin-up posters of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini and hid sticky copies of Mayfair under their beds. I had a fringed, crimson satin Biba lampshade and covered my walls in pictures of beautiful models in lovely dresses, taken from the Vogue magazines to which I subscribed. And I spent my free time hanging out with girls: the daughters of teachers, who lived at the school unnoticed by most of its pupils.
What if I didn’t just like the girls, but actually wanted to be one?
Some people assumed I was gay. But I gradually began to realise that there might be an even more outlandish possibility. What if I didn’t just like and even fall in love with the girls, but actually wanted to be one? Might I be some kind of Rocky Horror Show character, a spotty, bespectacled, not-so-sweet transvestite transsexual? Fifty years ago, that struck me as a terrible curse, a source of shame and disgrace to be denied, repressed and fought. Today, in our identity-obsessed times, to be trans is to find oneself trapped in the culture war’s Bakhmut: shot at from both sides in the bloodiest, most destructive and most pointless of all battlegrounds.
Given that I am one of the very few trans women who has even a minor, barely audible public voice, I certainly feel a sense of obligation to represent people like me, and try to add some sense of reason, balance, factual evidence and personal experience to the debate. But the irony is that now that I have finally transitioned, surgically as well as socially, my being trans feels like no more than a minor twist on my day-to-day life and experience as a late-middle-aged, middle-class white woman, with a totally age-inappropriate crush on Harry Styles (one shared by
a significant proportion of my girlfriends, by the way).
In fact, one of the most striking aspects of being a transwoman in Britain today is that in real life, no one gives a damn. I am never, ever treated as anything other than female by random strangers, shop staff, tradespeople, friends, or family. And when I am obliged to explain why I want to change the name on this or that account from Mr to Ms, and David to Diana, no one ever bats an eyelid.
Amidst all the furore about trans women using female toilets and changing rooms, I have never had the slightest problem in either of those environments… other than the endless queues for the Ladies, of course. In any case, being a writer, or a parent, or a West Ham supporter is as much a part of my self-definition as my gender identity. And really, how much do any of these little boxes matter anyway?
Right now, I’m waiting to be told when I can have the CT scan that will determine whether or not I have a malignant tumour in my spine. And so, faced with the ultimate fate that we all have in common, what I actually feel right now is not English, or posh, or trans, but all too mortally human.
Diana Thomas is a journalist, editor and author of sixteen novels, none under her current name
