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I began my transition over three years ago and that was when I realised my true sexuality. I think it was because I finally felt happy in my body so I felt comfortable being a man with a man!
I thought being trans and having Cerebral Palsy, it was going to be a tall order to get a date let alone anything else? I met my partner two years into my physical transition so I was a lot more confident with how I looked. My disability and the fact that I am trans has never been an issue in our relationship and at the moment I am content with just chest surgery.
When I was a kid I kind of felt genderless, I enjoyed my dad treating me like a boy and I always wore boys clothes. My parents didn't really mind my chose of clothes until I was in my late teens when I suppose I should have 'grown out of it'.
It was only when I began uni that I discovered that I preferred wearing male boxers and no crop top that I was made to wear throughout school. It was actually when I was watching the Channel 4 TV programme My Transexual Summer that the penny finally dropped! I remember thinking 'that's actually how I feel'.
Most don't have a problem
People who do not know me and do not have much knowledge about how to communicate with somebody with a disability, cannot even understand that I may be gay let alone transgender!
I have noticed that some of society tend to believe having a disability is enough of a complication and don't understand that I needed to change my gender. Somebody once said to me, 'don't you have enough going on?' My answer to this is that obviously I did not choose to be born in the wrong body, any more than I chose to be disabled.
Before I met my partner, I went through a period of using dating and hook up apps. At the beginning I believed it would be difficult to get anywhere having a double whammy, a disability and being trans. In actual fact I found that if I was open and up front with people, the majority did not have a problem with anything!
- There's much more for men interested in transition in the Men's Health Forum publication Your Body, Your Health
- Useful links for trans men.
| This article reflects the experience of the individual. It is not health information from the MHF under the terms of the NHS England Information Standard. |
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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