Goodbye, Noah Richards

Chapter 1

I can pinpoint the root of my involvement in all of these events back to one prominent day in my life, one that even now haunts me. It started like most evenings, Dad got home from work and we all sat around the table eating dinner, I can't remember what it was we had been eating, it's not really that important, what is important was the conversation.

I would like to preface this by saying that at the time my parents had no idea I was trans; not that that makes any difference to how harmful what happened was and how out of line my dad's opinion was; the only person who did know was my best mate Frankie.

The conversation started with my mum, we had been talking about the lineup for the Olympics that summer when the conversation came to Laurel Hubbard, she's a weightlifter for New Zealand's team and the first openly transgender female to compete in their correct gender category at the Olympic level, and my mum, rightfully so, thought that this was amazing.

I agreed, having been a swimmer for years growing up, as well as a county-level rugby player, seeing Laurel being able to compete at such a prestigious level gave me a quiet hope that one day, when I was finally able to be myself and be comfortable, I could go back to that and be excepted.

My dad however had other opinions.

It started from just a comment about how he didn't believe she should have been allowed to compete against other females as, incorrectly so, he believed that her muscle make-up would follow that of a male's no matter how long she had been on oestrogen. It immediately set me on the defensive, it's difficult to hear comments like this from anyone, especially your own father, so calmly I started trying to explain to him, how oestrogen and testosterone work and that no, a transgender woman's muscle build-up would not be the same as that of a male's visa-versa and that the screening process for transpeople to be able to compete at that level in the first place was so rigorous and designed in such a way that if there had been any doubt in that then she would not be able to compete.

The thing about my dad is that he doesn't like to hear that he's wrong, and when he can tell he's losing an argument he aims for what hurts most. So, as had happened so many times in the past, his voice rose, and he got angry. So in retaliation, I got angry too.

There are only two times in my life that I can ever remember being truly scared of what my father was capable of, this was one of them.

The shouting lasted for maybe a minute before my dad delivered the blow that ended it all. He kicked me out, he gave me no time to get anything other than my phone, which luckily I paid for, and my shoes.

I had no money, no charger, no jumper and no way of getting anywhere safe other than walking. My closest relative lived 10 miles away, which took that out of the question as it was already getting dark and I had work the next morning and Frankie wasn't answering his phone.

I don't really remember much else from that night, I remember my phone blowing up with calls from my mum and my dad, and I remember declining almost all of them. I remember finally answering my mum and her telling me that my dad was sorry and that he wanted me to come home so he could apologise properly and that I could 'go back out afterwards' as if it had been my decision to leave in the first place, but that's it. I don't remember the next conversation with my dad, I don't remember leaving to go to Frankie's, I don't remember telling him about the feeling of someone staring at me I had while waiting for him to answer the door and I don't remember coming home. The only reason I know these things happened is because of what other people have told me.

I had felt a lot of things around my family growing up, but fear that being myself was going to cause me to not have one anymore was never one of them.

I came out to my parents a few weeks later, the details around why aren't necessary, but my dad's reaction shocked me, in the space of two weeks he'd done a full 180, he had problems with it obviously, but his opinions were never that of harm, it was more the difficulty around the change in pronouns and name. It was weird. It was never easy, it took him nearly two months to call me Noah, and it took longer than that to use my pronouns, but he never threatened to kick me out again.

That didn't stop the paranoia, all around me people I knew, who were unable to tell their parents about themselves, were telling me how proud they were of me for being able to be myself. All I wanted to do was scream at them that I was still terrified every day that I'd wake up and that would be the day that the other shoe had dropped. That would be the day that my parents would decide that they were done with me, done with the panic attacks and the days when my dysphoria was so bad that I couldn't go to college and that I would be back to that day from only a month ago where I had no idea whether I was going to have a place to sleep that night.

But I'm not going to sit here and tell you I was not lucky, I know that there are people who would love to have the parents that I have. What I will tell you is this, I was not scared to go to uni, I had no fear of leaving my parents behind and getting as far away from it all as possible. I didn't know that this was going to happen, and even so, I still don't have any regrets.