Like many survivors of trauma, I have always struggled to see myself reaching old age. Long term plans sit in a swampy fog, the shadowy shapes of them barely visible, hard to conceptualise beyond the academic, bullet point description of:
- New apartment
- Get married
- New Job
I genuinely find it almost impossible to believe I will be alive beyond the end of the year. The accepted terminology for this is a ‘sense of foreshortened future.’
For many years, this led to a life stalled, content to go along with the survival option, playing the role of cishet subservient Christian wife and mother, because what was the point of rocking the boat when I was never going to make it to shore anyway? When I finally took the definitive steps into transition, it was due in part to the global pandemic, when all of us had been confronted with the possibility of a foreshortened future.
In one sense, I know I made the choice to grasp the nettle in the spirit of ‘now or never.’ But I must be truthful and say there was also a reckless motivation that was less about taking my chance to be happy and more to do with believing nothing really mattered because I’d be dead in six months anyway.
Astonishingly, I was not. I was divorced, penniless, and working 60 hour weeks to make ends meet, but I was very much still alive.
During this turbulent period of my life, I began working in care, with a specific focus on dementia. I began testosterone while I was there, too. That decision had also been borne from the same desperate prompt of ‘might as well try, I’ll be dead soon anyway.’ It was a physically grueling job, as all of my minimum wage jobs had been, but I was also unavoidably confronted with the reality of living long.
At first, the indignities of age were the most obvious aspects. Providing personal, intimate care for the elderly is a challenging and sensitive task, especially when that person is in cognitive decline. But after a few months, I knew each resident’s personal foibles, knew what could soothe their anxiety, what made them laugh, what small habits they still clung to as the details of their long lives became as opaque and misty as my own future had always seemed.
I was mostly read as a man. The first resident that died during my time there believed I was her dad, and would tell me, in incoherent whispers, about the food she had packed for her picnic. Passing was an asset with the male patients, especially the ones who became aggressive and intimidating towards female residents and members of staff, but would respond well to the assertiveness of another man.
One of the curious aspects of a trans experience is how much you notice the social dynamics of gender, and it was deeply confronting to realise that some men, as dementia deleted their personality piece by piece, retained only the most brutal instincts of domination and submission.
I began to consider what I would want, should I ever be in this position. Beyond the deep ethical questions around prolonging life or deliberately ending it, I recognised that, as much energy as I may have given to peeling back the layers and masks to be myself right now, I could very well be in a twilight existence where I didn’t even know my name, let alone that I had carefully chosen it.
As time went on, I had the honour of sitting at the bedside of many people as they came to the end of their lives. People for whom I had cared as their entire personalities melted away. I laid out corpses, washing and dressing humans who had long forgotten everything that made them beings. One day, whether I retained perfect clarity to the end or not, however much my body changed, this was what lay ahead for me.
I slowly understood that it didn’t matter. Life ends, but that inevitable ending doesn’t diminish in any way what has gone before it. On the contrary, the uniqueness of human experience is even more precious for its finiteness. One transphobic meme jeers that when we are dug up in a thousand years, our gender will be invisible in what is left of us. But the truth is that transness is just another part of being human, and every part of being human is transient and no less real because of it.
I have lived with a sense of a foreshortened future for most of my life. I suspect it will linger on, somewhat ironically, for the rest of it. But each day I live, shaving greying stubble from my jaw, hearing a voice that sounds like me when I speak, making the most of being at peace with my body as I, whether I believe it or not, grow old, I understand that those shapes in the fog clear for everyone only as we get to them.
The trick is to just keep going.
About the author
Kay Knighting: I am a working class trans butch writer and poet from England, in my very late 40’s, and currently beginning a new life in Canada with my partner. As a survivor of conversion therapy abuses and religious trauma, living with cPTSD, my work draws from my own experiences of clinging on to hope in painful places. I see my role within the wider LGBTQ+ community as visible butch, encouraging positive masculinity and advocating for everyone to have the opportunity to live as themselves without apology.
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