Photo by Sharon Kilgannon, alonglines.com
This is Reuben’s testimony in Chapter Six (Safety, abuse, fear, violence, mis-gendering, barriers)
of the ground-breaking Brighton Trans*formed book.
I owe Transformers and Allsorts a huge amount for giving me a place where I could figure out how I wanted to be and how I was going to be and how I was going to make myself happy.
When you know you don’t have to give somebody background on the history of pronouns and the history of the terminology and X, Y, Z.
Something else that I like about Brighton in that sort of same sense is that a lot of things don’t need to be said, don’t need to be explained. Not necessarily because everybody here is 100% educated on absolutely everything, LGBT or queer explain to a lot of people about a lot of different identities. Like beyond my own as well, and also I feel like I need to justify myself a lot more when I’m in Essex or in other places in the country versus Brighton. Because it so diverse, and people come in all different sort of shapes and sizes and identities and expressions that it just doesn’t need to said. Things are what they are and they don’t need a massive history attached to them.
Read more intimate and heart-warming stories from transgender people here.
