Member-only story
Death & Tesco’s
A short explainer for regular readers. This is the first of a number of entries in the Medium Writing Competition (details here should you feel tempted). It won’t be entirely like my usual output, but hey! Nothing ever is. Hope you like it.
Now read on.
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When trans people talk of transition, the usual accompanying, comforting fiction is about continuity. Never fear, the line goes: you are not so much losing a son, as gaining a daughter. If that’s good enough for marriage, it’s surely good enough for transing. They’ll still be “the same person”, friends and relatives blithely declare.
This, though, is only part true. The me, pre, was deeply unhappy and very out of sync with pretty much the entire rest of the world. A classical actor playing the part of a middle-aged white guy — and just about getting away with it through an excess of convention and outward formality.
The inner J, which is as much deadname as you are going to extract here, did not like “himself”. As their fifth decade swung into view, they were increasingly at odds with men. A mix of distaste and simple inability to cope with them, wholesale. This, for a professional, was not a good look.
