As a trans community representative, I want to express my support for Pride and the Rainbow Fund which benefits from it.
Dr Samuel Hall MBBS, FRCA, Chair of Clare Project
The Rainbow Fund is a crucial source of grant funding for many grass-roots community-led groups in the LGBT+/HIV sector including those run by, and for trans and non-binary people.
I know there has been unrest recently following the booking of Britney Spears at Pride 2018, including, unfortunately, negative comments and unfounded accusations about Pride organisers and the grant-making body Rainbow Fund. These organisations are fully accountable and transparent, standing up to scrutiny and deserve both the respect and support of the local LGBT+ communities.
Whilst I will not deny that there are ongoing issues of safety for trans people at Pride which cause concern, there is a genuine will to work to eradicate transphobic behaviour and make Pride fully accessible to all members of our communities.
Unrest over ticket prices and financial accessibility is mitigated by offering local LGBT+ folk a free ticket in exchange for volunteering in the park. This is a great way to give something back, show support to the team who get this amazing festival together and make sure that proceeds continue to come back into the local communities, benefitting us all, all year round.
Pride isn’t just a party, it is the hand that feeds us, and we cannot afford to bite.
Dr Samuel Hall on why we should be talking about depression, often and widely.
Dr Sam Hall
As I write we are enjoying unseasonably good weather with temperatures on the weekend of the Brighton Marathon reaching the low 20ºs. Marvellous. I can anticipate the lifting of my mood as the trees begin to bud and the children are enjoying a well-earned Easter break. All this should mean better sleep and lower levels of depression (reference for readers with a thirst for academia: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4398445/).
It’s well documented that mood is highly susceptible to the circadian rhythm and that those of us who live at latitudes where there’s more darkness than light, such as we endure over the winter months, are more likely to report anxiety about lack of sleep. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is well-documented in northern climates. I really don’t think daylight saving time helps either. The arguments for extending daylight in the summer evenings and forgoing early sunrise are sound but I’d rather we just stuck to the same time all year round.
It’s not actual daylight saving time that is the problem, it’s the fact that we move back to standard time in the autumn. I’ve talked about this before – in the winter months I sometimes don’t see any daylight at all. Hospitals, where I’ve spent my entire working life, are notorious for poor access to natural light – I‘ve gone for whole weeks without seeing the sun as a result. The artificial light that one is exposed to in such settings does nothing to boost vitamin D levels or give a sense of wellbeing. All this means we should be spending as much time in the sunshine as possible (UV exposure and skin cancer risk notwithstanding), or at least near a window!
Suffice to say, however, that my lower mood in the winter months, and struggle to acclimatise to the shifting patterns of light and dark, coupled with a lifting of the spirits at this time of year, are small fry compared to the scourge that many suffer of full-blown depression for months or years on end.
I do have experience of this; 10 years ago I began to really struggle with my gender identity. I’d managed to keep a lid on my dysphoria for decades, distracting myself with a busy life of study, post-graduate training, marriage and child-rearing. Every now and again I’d crash and be unable to do anything at all, usually for a day or two, never much longer. But in my late 30s I had a crash that was sustained and prolonged. I found myself unable to do anything about it. I was irrationally tearful, erratic in my thoughts and actions, riddled with self-doubt and inertia. Apathy was always breathing down my neck and my ability to do my job/care for my kids/manage my life was severely threatened. It took me a long time (five years) to recognise that I was depressed – a chemical imbalance in the brain that I simply couldn’t ‘switch off’.
It took another wiser clinician to point out that I might benefit from antidepressants. Still I resisted. I wanted to know what this was all about. I took to spending as much time as I could alone, I stopped drinking alcohol, started running, ate less and ate more healthily, lost a lot of weight, and most importantly, finally came out as trans. I took St John’s wort, an herbal remedy known for its therapeutic effect for mild to moderate depression, which acts on the brain in much the same way as Prozac and similar drugs. At the time I wanted to manage my problems myself, and like many people, didn’t want my mental ill-health documented by professionals.
This is a really common scenario, as a clinician I know the stigma that surrounds mental ill-health all too well. It’s still a taboo subject in my profession. Many of my patients don’t like to admit to feeling depressed, and certainly amongst colleagues it raises eyebrows and alarm, especially if accompanied by the need for time off work. How are we as a profession going to address the insidious nature of this taboo, and liberate our patients to speak up boldly if we can’t even do it for ourselves? Time and time again I bring the subject up in the workplace only to encounter my own and others’ prejudice. It’s endemic.
Early on in my transition, when I was still plagued by suicidal ideation (thinking you might be better off dead and planning it), and sometimes coming painfully close to devising ways to end the agony of my reality, I remember my father pleading with me not to discuss my emotional wellbeing with my children, for fear that I’d somehow damage them, or worse, predispose them to the same (my mother suffered very severely from depression in her mid-30s).
But we have this all wrong. We should be talking about this, often and widely. Those among us who struggle to own and own up to our emotional and mental wellbeing glitches are doing the rest of the world no favours at all.
The charity of the year for the 2017 London Marathon is Heads Together, a partnership of mental health charities with a campaign spearheaded by HRHs William, Kate and Harry. This is an excellent campaign raising the profile and hopefully reducing the stigma surrounding depression and other aspects of mental ill-health. There are so many at-risk groups, single men, teenage girls, new mothers, the elderly, disabled, isolated, LGBT+ folk, the list goes on and on.
Suicidal ideation and suicide itself are robbing us of bright young things. People are crippled by mental ill-health. We know that the solutions can be ridiculously simple for many people, and yet strangely difficult to implement. Socialising in real life rather than online, avoiding drugs and alcohol, getting outside in the fresh air, exercising and eating well, finding things that foster enjoyment and a sense of community – all these and more can mitigate the weight of the black dog, but one of the best ways is to talk about it. Let it begin with me.
Dr Samuel Hall on why loving yourself first can help sustain healthy and happy relationships with others.
When it comes to writing this column, I’m usually awash with ideas until I actually put pen to paper, at which point all those brilliant soundbites and gems of wisdom that have been popping into my head for weeks suddenly seem to desert me! I’m becoming increasingly familiar with writers’ block, and have considerable sympathy for those who depend on writing to make a living. I really don’t think I could take the pressure. As I sit typing at this moment, we’re smack in the middle of what many people believe is the most depressing month, with plenty of evidence to suggest that we really do hit a low some time around the third week of January. So I can add a mild seasonal depression to my writers’ block, and only apologise readers if my ennui rubs off on you.
To combat this I’m determined to elaborate on the theme for this issue – love. I’m hoping that my thoughts on the matter will serve to elevate me and anyone who is reading this, out of the winter blues. I’m a lucky soul, I have a LOT of love in my life. I’m incomprehensibly loved by my wife, a fact which flummoxed me on a daily basis – why? what does she see in me? I can be such an idiot, insensitive, self-obsessed, coarse, lazy…. and yet she seems to see beyond all of that to something else. Something at the core of me which she finds adorable. Every now and again I get a glimpse of myself through her eyes, and a flicker of self-knowledge or understanding.
The thing is, it’s not really possible to sustain a healthy and happy relationship with another person unless you love yourself first; and loving oneself is no mean feat. We didn’t learn to do it when we were younger – most children get negative messages about being themselves from a very young age, and this sets us up from early childhood to not like ourselves very much. It’s a universal experience, unless life is consumed with the matter of one’s very survival; a shortage of food and somewhere safe to sleep doesn’t give time or space for emotional wounding.
Most of us have been royally wounded by people we love, some of us badly. It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault. We’re all human, and when it comes to parenting, which is our earliest experience of love, no one is perfect. Our parents (or others responsible for raising us) do their very best, for the most part, to love us. I only found this out when I became one. I know I do my best, and that will have to be good enough, but boy does it feel lousy sometimes. You see ‘my best’ is relative. I’m far from a perfect parent. My kids drive me crazy and often I just wish they would disappear so I can just have some peace. I get scratchy and techy and lairy (their word), sometimes I’m downright unreasonable with them, and sometimes I shout and say things I regret later. It’s all a bit of a mess really. Looking back at my own childhood I see the same features of intent and purpose in my parents, coupled with spectacular failure at times. It has humbled me to realise that I really am no better at the job.
Allowing all of this to sink in leads me to a place of forgiveness. I can forgive my parents for their mistakes, and forgive myself for mine. I can look at the parts of myself I don’t like very much and learn to embrace them, so that my tolerance for my own mistakes becomes greater, and I can largely say, in my fifth decade, that I do love myself. Hopefully not in an egotistical fog of self-aggrandisement, but rather in a gentle and generous way. I apologise for my behaviour when it’s not reasonable, I don’t dwell on my mistakes, I forgive myself when I have messed up and I let go of the past as soon as it has passed, rather than hanging on to and building up grudges for future reference.
It’s been a battle to get to this point. Blood and tears have been shed and a few psychotherapists have been left reeling. But it’s all been worth it, because I truly think that today, in 2017, I can honestly say I do love myself. I’m proud of my achievements, of my tenacity in the face of adversity, I’m proud that I persevered with my transition in the face of resistance and anger from my family. And I’m especially proud that now, some years down the line, my family seem to be falling in love with me for the first time. I feel that acceptance of me as a transgender man is imminent, and that they’re looking at me with new eyes. It’s hard not to attribute this to my marriage last year. There is something about it that has caused a seismic shift in the extended family dynamic. It’s quite difficult to put my finger on, but I know that it has a lot more to do with her, than it does with me.
I think it goes something like this. I move from self-hatred to self-love over many years, which causes me to take the brave step of transitioning. This has the effect of making me a nicer person to be around. I’m being myself, not pretending to be someone I’m not. I like myself for the first time in my life. It shows. When she meets me she meets someone who is comfortable in his own skin and likes being who he is. This is very attractive. We hit it off, and start a relationship. She sees something brave and noble in this, whereas I see a woman who is divine in her understanding of me. She sees me. And through her eyes I see myself. I’ve come full circle and it’s beautiful. So thank you with all my heart to the lovely woman who is my wife. I can only pray that my love for you has the same impact on your life.
Dr Samuel Hall on why 2016 wasn’t all bad and where we need to be if we want to change the world.
Sir Ewan Forbes (centre)
It seems to me that ‘time’ passes more and more quickly. I’m sure this year only just began. Of course time is relative, the older you get, the quicker it goes. A year is almost one fiftieth of my life, but only one tenth of my youngest son’s, so no wonder this year has gone quickly for me. Depressing but true. Perhaps it’s time to stop counting time and just enjoy the passing of it, and more importantly, make sure that what I do in the time I have left really means something.
In any case, I sincerely hope that 2017 is a better year for the planet. It strikes me that many of us will be glad to have seen the back of 2016, with its seismic political shifts, the rise of the ugly twin towers of nationalism and uber-capitalism, miserable human rights records in the Middle East and beyond, as well as its more than fair share of creative human loss; David Bowie, George Michael, Caroline Aherne, Alan Rickman, Natalie Cole, Leonard Cohen, Pete Burns, Alexis Arquette, Gene Wilder, Prince, Victoria Wood, David Guest, Ronnie Corbett and Terry Wogan to name a few.
Oddly, it’s been a pretty momentous year for me personally, in a very positive way. 2016 is a year that I will not forget, for all the reasons listed above and more, but most of all because this was the year I married the love of my life. I’m truly blessed to have the commitment and love of a woman who has changed my outlook on life completely, as well as restoring my faith in humanity by loving me unconditionally despite, in spite, or perhaps even because of, my transness.
Dr Sam Hall
The events of the year just ended have forced me to reflect more deeply than I’ve ever done before about the human race and our part in the ever evolving story of humanity. I’ve been trawling the news in a desperate attempt to get to the bottom of so many questions. Why? Why did the US put a cut-throat businessman in the White House? Why did half of the UK want to separate themselves from the EU? What is the UN for if we cannot protect innocent lives during a divisive and deeply destructive civil war in Syria?
At some point I turned the corner from looking for answers to accepting things as they are, a revealing of the many faces of humanity, both beautiful and ugly, hopeful and desperate, love and its diametric opposite, which is fear. Fear, not hate, is the opposite of love. People do and say nasty things because they’re afraid. Afraid of losing their livelihoods; afraid of not being able to feed themselves or their families; afraid of ill-health; old age; incapacitation; afraid that their lives might have to change; afraid of realising that we are all worthy of dignity and respect.
Once you arrive at the conclusion that we’re all equal, and that any privilege we have is pure chance not merit, it’s hard not to weep over the state of the planet. We’re a generation of post-war babies who remember the past through our parents and grew up with a ‘never again’ mentality, honed in the decades following WWII. But guess what? We forgot to teach our kids. The growth of capitalism has rendered us all so small-minded, needing to protect ourselves and our material belongings at the expense of others. The so-called ‘Millennials’ are furiously scrabbling around in the history books to work out why the hell people are so selfish.
And yet there is hope. I see it in my children most of all. Bright young things, advantaged, healthy, educated and determined. Hell-bent on studying politics and sociology, inquisitive minds sure that they can do a better job than the generation they’re poised to succeed. And I sincerely hope that they do.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, so that anything good that flowers in our lives must have grown from a seed planted by someone who went before us. I look to those who trod my path in some way for inspiration. In the past I’ve written about Michael Dillon, a physician and the first transman to undergo phalloplasty. He died at 47 (my age now) in 1962, having led a trailblazing life which ended in the peace of a Buddhist monastery.
I’ve also recently stumbled across another transgender man who worked as a doctor around the same time. Born in 1912, Sir Ewan Forbes forged his way living as a man in a time when being openly transgender was not an option. He struggled with being raised as a girl in aristocratic circles and eventually managed, like Michael Dillon, to get his birth certificate changed, claiming that his registration as female had been a ‘ghastly mistake’, and going on to marry his wife in the Scottish Kirk (church). This allowed him to inherit his father’s baronetcy, restricted to male heirs, in spite of his cousin disputing his claim to the family title and chattels. The case went all the way through the courts to the Home Secretary before finally being settled in his favour in 1968.
These men sowed the seeds that I, and many like me, are reaping in our lives today. Although the necessary secrecy surrounding their lives and transitions meant that their cases were not used as precedents in later judgments on the legal recognition of gender variance, surely these men forged a path that had not previously existed – a path that I now walk, alongside others, which is rough-hewn, full of pot-holes, twists and turns, but a path none-the-less. It’s a path that I hope my treading will smooth out and straighten up even further.
I don’t know what events in my life could possibly be as monumental as those in the histories of these two men, but I do know that there are still very few of us in the public eye, and that is where we need to be if we really want to change the world.
Today, Sunday November 20, from 2-4pm at Dorset Gardens Methodist Church, Brighton & Hove’s trans community will be holding their annual memorial event for those who have died this year as a result of their perceived gender identity.
Those people may have been transgender, intersex, cross dressers or others, or they may have been mistaken for someone else.
What they have in common is that their lives were ended by murder or suicide because they did not conform to the gender roles expected of them.
Transgender Day of Remembrance has been marked internationally every year on November 20 since 1988, and although we do not see the levels of violence in the UK that are experienced in other countries around the world, it is a time of solidarity for those who are gender variant in some way.
The majority of murders are perpetrated against trans women of colour and the highest incidence is seen amongst sex workers in South America. This event is also held in solemn remembrance of those who have lost their lives through suicide, of which there is a particularly high incidence within the trans community.
Whilst the day is one that triggers regret and sadness, and a reflection on the meaning of suffering, it is also a source of hope for the future as we all strive towards a more inclusive and accepting society.
This annual event is an opportunity for trans people to come together with their friends and allies as well as local dignitaries and politicians who willingly express their support.
The Clare Project began as a monthly transgender support group in a Brighton & Hove beauty salon in 2000, with local grants supporting much-needed and affordable psychotherapeutic counselling.
Five years later, a joint venture with Dorset Gardens Methodist Church to create a safe space where trans people could meet, resulted in a regular weekly drop-in session, which has been running continuously ever since.
In 2015 Clare Project celebrated its 15th anniversary and undertook the ambitious step of becoming a Charitable Incorporated Organisation in order to oversee growing services including mental health and well-being groups, social activities, and an increasingly important on-line presence.
Clare Project is honoured to have been selected as one of the Mayors Charities for 2016-17 earlier this year.
Charity status (Registered Charity No 1165746) was granted in March 2016 and a newly established Board of Trustees has been tasked with steering the Clare Project into an unprecedented era of growth and change. This includes the fulfilment of their constitutional obligations, formalisation of the organisational structure, and changes to the staff and volunteers.
These changes include the departure of a stalwart and familiar face to many, Rosemary Allix. Rosemary was administrator for the Clare Project in its early days prior to becoming the facilitator at the drop-in, a position she held for a decade. She has long been the first port of call on-line, by phone and face-to-face for service users, often providing a lifeline in the darkest of times. Rosemary gave a large part of her time and expertise voluntarily, and will be remembered fondly by many.
The new board wish her all the best in her future ventures, and are grateful to former service user and volunteer, Julia Trangmar, who has kindly stepped in to hold an interim facilitator role while we arrange recruitment of two permanent members of staff to support the drop-in and other activities.
The newly appointed board members are:
Mx Taylor Blue: Taylor moved to Brighton from Yorkshire in 2013, and now lives in Kemp Town. He’s committed to social justice, trans visibility in the LGBT community and beyond…along with raw food, eco-living and his dog Wilbur.
Ms Kim Curran: Journalist Kim Curran has been Clare Project secretary for five years. She has been involved in organising many events and co-ordinates the Clare Project website. She is also vice-chair of a Brighton community association.
Nicky Cambridge: Nicky has been involved in trans issues since leading the Trans Equality Scrutiny for BHCC in 2012. She was also co-chair of the Trans Needs Assessment.
Dr Samuel Hall:Sam is a GP who lives in Brighton with his wife and five children. He is widely engaged in raising awareness of trans issues both in his medical role and voluntarily as Clare Project’s chair of trustees.
Ms Martine Howard: Martine lives in Brighton, has been involved with the Clare Project for over five years and has experience of working with a wide range of charities.
Mx D Humphreys: D lives and works in Brighton and is actively engaged in working towards trans equality both personally and professionally, through their policy officer role at the local council.
Dr Kate Nambiar: Kate is a doctor living in Brighton and runs a trans-specific sexual health service. She is committed to championing the cause of good access to all forms of healthcare for trans-identified people.
Christina Niewiadowski:Christina is a volunteer and drop-in committee member at the Clare Project. She has considerable skills and experience in managing small organisational finances and has taken on the role of treasurer to the board of trustees.
Rev Robin Selmes:Robin is a Methodist Minister who lives in Brighton with his wife and three children. He has supported and worked closely with a number of charities within the LGBT community and those who find themselves to be on the edge of society.
Clare Project is honoured to have been selected as one of the Mayors Charities for 2016-17 earlier this year.
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