INTRODUCTION
My name is Alison Rumfitt and I am a cisgender woman. That’s what I’ve decided. You can make that decision for yourself; it is perfectly possible. I’ve always been cisgender. I was born this way and I’ll die this way. I don’t write books about transness, nothing of the sort. My books, such as they are, aren’t even about queerness (whatever that might mean). I don’t write books about myself or things I’ve experienced. Any resemblance between characters in things I’ve written and real people is purely coincidental. I write horror and I write satire. I write purely for the entertainment of myself and others. Let me state it clearly: I am not subversive. I am a cisgender woman. I say this last part over and over to myself. I repeat it many times each day. My girlfriend wrote it down for me and she now helps me practise this affirmation, this plea. No … let’s start again. Let’s not mention that I have a girlfriend. They aren’t rounding up the dykes yet but with the way things are going I give it, what, ten years before they are. The other day in a café I heard a cis woman say to another cis woman in a hushed and serious tone, “Doesn’t it scare you, Claire, doesn’t it just feel like The Handmaid’s Tale is coming true.”
I’m writing this right now in 2030, and if you’re reading it then that’s a bad sign. You shouldn’t be reading this. It might mean I’m dead I suppose … If I am, burn my shit. My partner might still be alive, and I don’t want her to face persecution should these words fall into the wrong hands. If you, dear reader, are the wrong hands, then go fuck yourself. I hope you die. Kill yourself, etc. I’m sure that worked, so if you’re still reading this it means you’re not the wrong hands. Keep reading if you want to.
This country is a grey country. It has been grey as long as I’ve lived. Even on the hottest summer days it is grey, and in recent years two things have become certain: it’s getting hotter and it’s getting greyer. I’m writing this on 5 September, which, if you are reading this, I want you to note as an historic date. The UK government just put out a decree banning transgenderism. This doesn’t personally affect me because, as I said, I’m a cisgender woman, but it affects a lot of people. It’s scary. I’m scared. It’s not really clear how they plan on enforcing this ban: perhaps, as some people on Newsnight claim, the ban is only theoretical. How a ban can be theoretical they never seem to say. Perhaps the ban is only there to discourage and not to literally ban, which is something I’d believe more if it wasn’t a literal ban.
I’ve just been thinking a lot. About this mess and how we got here. I came out when I was twelve but even then, the Tavistock was basically a fucking traffic jam, each and every kid stuck but not suspended. With every passing day their bodies changed in the wrong direction … okay, it was less like a traffic jam and more like a group of people stuck standing on an escalator moving down when they’re trying to move up. I’m not really a cis woman, but let’s keep that our little secret, dear reader. I got so used to coming out that I know I’ll miss it, so let me do it one last time: I am transgender and I am a lesbian and I’m scared. I came out at twelve and finally transitioned at fifteen. I screamed at my Mother, saying that irreparable damage had already been done. What was the point. I’d always look like a fucking boy. And my Mum held me close and said that just wasn’t true, the world was getting better. They were making progress every day. Even the Conservative Party just pledged to try and reform the process to make it easier for trans kids! That was then, and this is now: that future my Mother promised me never came to pass. I got my tits and my cunt, thank God. The Tavistock was bombed by a terrorist. The rest of the GICs were defunded little by little, year after year, until they barely had the money to treat the patients they already had, let alone take on more. Society in the UK – and worldwide, too – became obsessed with the spectre of the transsexual: the aberrant, abject societal glitch, the perversion, the rapid-onset virus praying on poor, defenceless kids. I knew that people didn’t like trans people, but when I was a child that was sort of a background static buzz. During my transition, that background static buzz grew into an all-consuming scream. Loud enough to make your ears bleed. It spread from person to person like wildfire. It started with a couple of Guardian journalists and a sitcom writer, but soon their brain-eating transphobic parasitic mindvirus had washed across half of Britain’s media landscape. Children’s authors, news anchors, entire papers and magazines, musicians and directors. People who thought of themselves as well-meaning liberals were utterly consumed. Soon, they could only think of things in relation to trans people. Everything was linked to us: Putin and China, COVID and abortion bans, declining literacy rates. I don’t know exactly why they became so obsessed with us. I just wanted to have a nice life and write my little extreme horror novels in peace. I guess I ended up writing in response to it, though, and I’ll never know what sort of writer I would have been if I didn’t live in this fucking world that forces me to write about transphobia. Maybe I’d write cool horror stories about vampires raping werewolves, ones with no subtext at all. I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen the success I was lucky enough to have. I never advertised that I was a transgender woman, but I also never advertised that I was a cis woman, back then at least. People tended to assume that I was trans because I knew enough about the intimacies of trans life. My first book, TELL ME I’M WORTHLESS, was an unsubtle book but it got the job done: it was a haunted house story about a house called Brighthelm in Brighton that was haunted by the spirit of a Victorian eugenicist and his wife. It concerned a group who were called there to prove whether the house was really haunted, like the group in Richard Matheson’s THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. I thought it was pretty good back then, and I still do. It sold pretty well for a book that extreme (who can forget the moment where poor hapless Geri is sexually assaulted by her own reflection?), and I made a name for myself. My next book was titled EVERY MONTH THERE SHOULD BE BLOOD and was about a trans woman on the run from an abusive relationship who took shelter in a women’s refuge. She never discloses that she is trans, which I suppose was an autobiographical element. Unfortunately, another girl appears who happens to be fleeing a vampiric stalker who has bitten her. Cue violence. It did just as well as my first book, and some critics said it was a little more subtle. I think they took TELL ME I’M WORTHLESS’s habit of hitting the reader over the head with theme to be a negative, and maybe it was. But it was deliberate. I never wanted to write a subtle ghost story. Subtle ghost stories were all the rage back then. Most of them ended on a note of ambiguity. Mine ended on the ghosts being revealed to be real and all the characters that made it to the end burning alive, which was much more fun. I saw less backlash for the first from the growing transphobia industrial complex than I expected, but the response to the second more than made up for that. I guess that was when it really struck me, and now, looking back, that’s when I should have gotten out. I didn’t, and now it’s too late. The borders are closed. The union flag is waving from the top of every tower, and every tower is burning.
The other day on TV I happened to catch a rerun of an old British sitcom from the early 2000s. I must have watched it at some point as a child, but I’m surprised I didn’t remember it beforehand. I’ve tried to copy it down as best as I can below. The writer of this show went on to go noticeably insane about trans people on Twitter. He was one of the first to do so, in fact. A lot of his colleagues in the media were disturbed by it at the time, but, over the years, they all started to join him, every last one. In the episode, one character has an affair with a trans woman. When he tries to break things off with her – not for her transness, for different reasons entirely – she reacts violently. But it’s before that violent comedic reaction that the most telling lines are uttered.
TRANS WOMAN: You don’t think of me as a woman, do you?
MAN: What? Of course I do.
TRANS WOMAN: It bothers you that I used to be a man!
MAN: No! I love that you used to be a man – it’s your thing. I love thinking about that operation you had.
I love thinking about that operation you had. There it is. Nearly two decades of this bullshit. Longer than that, of course. But this past two decades in particular have been bad. Things have been deteriorating. I could have left before, but I was scared, I thought I might be a coward if I did. I’m a cis woman, I am in love, I’m scared, and they love thinking about that operation I had.
Copyright © 2023 by Alison Rumfitt