Content warning: This article briefly mentions imprisonment, torture and hate crimes against trans people.

I’m trans. It’s important that you know that upfront and straight away.

(I’m also a Star Wars fan, which will come up again briefly later.)

I’m the binary flavour of trans, and you may not realise I’m trans when you meet me. Oh sure, I’m a short man, but so is my brother and the seven gentlemen I passed on my walk this morning through the Inner West of Sydney. And yeah, I have big hips, but so does my dad – it’s a physical feature he wasn’t allowed to forget about during his boarding school years. My shoulders are pretty slim, but I’m working on that, channelling Arnold Schwarzenegger as I pump iron alone, in my room, with some semi-heavy dumbbells.

Point is, I tend to be Trans Incognito, otherwise known as stealth. This often saves me a lot of hassle, until it doesn’t.

But I digress…

Header image by: Evelyn Verdin

My friends and I are arranging a group trip to celebrate our 20th friendship anniversary. Two decades ago, we all up-sticked from our hometowns and arrived in Canberra as keen undergraduates.

It took only one week for us to find each other separately and then merge into a Single, Immortal Amity. And as cool as those words sound, the reality of this friendship is better. I am living the dream sold by American TV shows. We’re practically the cast of Friends, except less problematic and with far less stable housing.

(I’m not going to delve into the times we fell out, almost crumpled and lost contact, because such things feature in all relationships, even the immortal ones.)

So, picture the scene: we’re all huddled on our separate devices in our separate homes in our separate cities, states and continents, chatting on the Group Thread.

Where should we go?

I need cheap!

Can it be somewhere warm?

December is the best time for me.

Etcetera, etcetera.

I’m taking my time with joining in on the planning, because I know my contribution will be a downer. One of the realities of social, legal and medical gender transition is that the world contracts a little. There are now places I cannot go, countries that will punish me for being trans or for possessing certain trappings of transness because they’re considered sex toys.

(Though honestly, I challenge anyone to successfully engage in penetrative sex with my STP, Stand-To-Pee, device. It’s just not happening.)

I don’t want to be a Negative Nelly, or rather, a Negative Neil, but it has to be said.

Guys, I type, I can’t go anywhere that will throw me in prison or torture me to death for being a guy with a c*** – (we’re a little crude in our group chats) – I don’t even want to risk passing through their airports.

This rules out a startling number of destinations!

Fortunately, my friends are fully onboard with me not being incarcerated, beaten or murdered. As I said, they’re the best. One friend immediately proposes Thailand, and a quick DuckDuckGo search suggests that could work.

Now we can return our attention back to the myriad money and timing issues.

Except the anxiety in my belly remains, and it’s smothering the excitement I should be feeling – that old call to adventure that I want to feel again.

***

I’m 14 and I’m considering dropping out of school, but I go to a Czech international boarding school for a year instead. It’s my first taste of overseas living, and I’m hooked.

In the years that follow, I attend three more high schools and eight universities across seven different countries in three different continents, for time periods ranging from three days to six years. Until I reach the age of 28, it’s rare for me to stay in one city for a full calendar year.

I thrive in this peripatetic lifestyle. Oh sure, I’m stressed and anxious – you’ll often find me curled up in a ball on the floor of my bedroom, weeping a little – but I’d be doing that regardless of whether I was popping off to Ramallah or Damascus or České Budějovice the next day.

The cool thing about being a foreigner, I discover as a 14-year-old, is that you’re expected to make social faux pas. You’re meant to be odd, to stand out, to be the outsider, which means it doesn’t hurt so much when you find yourself standing on the edges, just a wee bit ostracised. It’s not personal.

(Unlike at home. There, it feels very personal.)

(So why stay home?)

Travelling as an autistic person, I quickly learn that I don’t enjoy short trips to foreign climes. Not when I’m alone, at any rate.

The energy drain involved in navigating check-in desks and new places day-in-day-out overwhelms me. Instead, I like to pick a village, town or small city, deep-dive into the language and culture and remain there for as long as visa arrangements and finances allow.

I don’t explore the sites of my new country so much as I explore the streets surrounding me. I find a place to buy fruit and a place to buy bread. I find a coffee shop that is the perfect blend of quiet and busyness to suit a single person on a budget. And I find my safe space: somewhere I can go and hide for hours and hours, however long I need to pull myself back together when I become unstuck, which is a common occurrence during this part of my life.

In Jerusalem, armed with rosary beads, you’ll find me huddled in the warm darkness of the Church of Holy Sepulchre, watching the monks, nuns, priests and pilgrims shuffling by in the muffled gloom of candlelight and incense.

In Sleat, that’s me on the granite rock beneath the wind-battered oak tree, sitting within view of the boats traversing the sea channel betwixt misty isle and mainland.

In Logroño, I’m the one with the book on the bench beside the Way of St James, wishing tired peregrinos “buen camino” as they hike ever westward to Galicia, dust on their shoes and scallop shells fixed to their rucksacks.

For so many years, I travel the globe, learning new ways and new tongues.

And then I come out as trans. And things change fast.

Suddenly, I’m back home in Brisbane stumbling over maps on social media that have certain places highlighted in blood red with warnings like: Here Be TERFS, Here Be Trump and Here Be Death By Stoning.

And it is at this point that a great fear awakens within me.

***

I’ve not stepped foot in an international airport since mid-2017. Some of that’s COVID related, some financial, but I’d be lying if I don’t admit that most of it is fear.

Since coming out as trans, I find myself suddenly scared of traversing the sorts of barriers I was crossing solo at 14, 15, 16 years old.

Too often I look back at that boy, that young man, who was still being referred to as a girl and young woman, and I am in awe of him. I am incredulous at his bravery, at all the things he did, the places he went, the people he met.

It sometimes feels like I don’t even know him.

Except, in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Of course I know him – he’s me!”

Like me now, that young man was scared. His hands would shake so violently it could provoke laughter in others. His belly would quake and convulse, so that he always needed to know where the nearest bathroom was.

And always, always, he carried with him a deep well of unhappiness, along with an utter conviction that there was Something Seriously Wrong with him.

Oh, he was brave all right, but that wasn’t due to an absence of fear. It was because every day he chose between dying and trying something new, and each day he decided that there was still so much more to see, so why not keep going?

I stopped lugging that unhappiness around with me several years ago now. I left it behind with all the feminine trappings I thought I had to maintain. I dropped it once I learned to accept my autistic self. (Short sentences that gloss over an extraordinary mental feat: the thought-by-thought labour of training my mind to see difference where once I saw weakness, to grasp hold of pride where once lay only shame.)

But I’m still not travelling anymore. And as my friends pass messages about exciting possibilities, I have to wonder. How much have I traded unhappiness for fear? And how much of that fear is based in reality? How much in fantasy?

I don’t know. But I think it’s time to prod those questions and demand proper answers.

I think it’s time to consider the possibility of crossing some borders again.

Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but I reckon I’m going to take that overseas trip sometime soon. It’s going to be terrifying, but I’m going to do it anyway, because life could end any day now, and there’s still so much more to see.

An essay by Kai Ash features in Someone Like Me: An anthology of non-fiction by Autistic writers, out now through UQP.