Advocate Feature
Struggles of Yasimi Quiafe
|
-Before Yasimi Quaife took her Here is an edited extract from her diaries |
|
Saturday, Oct 7,
12.l2pm:
.... visited last night, hah, that’s all I want to write. I wanted to be
peaches and cream, but the cream turned sour. We drank, and early in the
morning I painfully told him I was transsexual, the last thing on earth he
expected to hear. He cried in my mother’s arms, we all cried. I sat on Mum’s
bed while Mum hugged him. He said so many horrible things, on the impulse of
shock. I felt like such a crab, he fell in love with me. I tried hard not to. I
kept my heart steady and wrapped it in my protective shield. I knew if I fell
for him as much as he fell for me I’d be absolutely crushed, and I am.
He couldn’t understand why I didn’t tell him in the first place, it’s hard to
say that to someone you really like, so I did the astonishing, I told him
earlier than I thought, Mum and .. . had a fight and thru Mum and
I've learnt a lesson I should have learnt a while ago — never play hide and
seek with a guy. Be straight up. Tell the guy who’s interested in you that you
are a transsexual
It was hard, can you imagine what it’s like to tell a man that you’re a
transsexual woman. It’s like ripping our heart out and sharing with him a
terrible secret you wish was only a nightmare. He couldn’t believe I was this
person.
I don’t deserve to be like this. I deserve to he a female like any other other.
I hope to God one day that transsexual people can be accepted as much as
heterosexuals. That’s what we are, heterosexual women caught in a gender trap.
I wish people would understand that. I can’t live Roy life as a male. I would
ill could. I didn’t choose to be like this. I always have been. Transgendered
people are born. It’s not a choice and I chose to live and live as a
transsexual, the woman that I am.
senses leveled. I knew deep within me that he’d find some kind of understand.
lag for me. He slept beside me, I touched his face, his hair, and longed for
him to hug me. to at least touch me. I really blew him away, what a shock, it’s
not common place talk, you only see trans-people on Tv or in the paper, but
this is who I am, and I do have. . . friendship, he still loves me, and I like
him awfully a lot. I don’t want to be hurt though, it’s as if I can’t feel love
anymore and I hurt him, I realised and I know that being transsexual feels so
alone and crisis happens around you like with
and you have to look past it all, you have to be strong inside. Life goes on
and I'm a part of the living, and I am going to live and sued. I want future
and young transsexuals to know my strength and conviction to be the way I am.
without that,
society and life breaks you.
I’m terrified of being a widow. One day I’m going to be married to a man who
loves me and who I love too. I have such a battle ahead, such a long way to go.
Life is so hard for everyone and last night is never going to happen again.
I’ll tell a guy I like that this is what I am, if he chooses to walk away and
joke about me to all his friends well that’s his problem. And if he has a huge
heart and a wonderful mind and sees that I am a woman and a human being, then
destiny shah be ours.
Saturday, Oct 21, 237pm:
moved in yesterday, new HP lounge suite, into the garage, now carpet, one of my
darling sister’s escapades. I hope she stays, but with. . . you never know. Her
life definitely is not over yet, she’s only 24. Who’d want to settle clown at
24. I’ll settle down when I’m 60, settle down when I’ve done all imagined
possible I want to do, when I wake up and realise I need a facelift.
Times for sitting in my wicker cushioned settee on the veranda smelling jasmine
and roses, drinking vodka and lemonade and eating fudge, think of the sexy
young lusty waiting to ravage my
nails. Perhaps I’ll live in the city. Oh, who fxxx cares I’m not 60, yet’
Oh, and wonderfully ecstatic news, transsexual Georgina Beyer is now the brand
new Mayor of Carterton, oh, she’s coming to Whangarei sometime to visit John
Banks. I hope I get to meet her with bubbly congratulations.
I am going to make it, and that beautiful day that’ll come when I walk outta
the surgery room physically as a woman. The final jigsaw pieces slapped in
place, a free female gender in a body I deserve, to roam and explore, to make
love, to live longer. And if I don’t make it, if! don’t live, I want the world
to see these pages. I don’t want to die unknown, I want to leave something
behind that people will remember me by.
Sunday, Oct 22, 9.lOpm:
Oh, my heart glistens with joys. We went to... birthday last night, . . . and
stoned, a little drunk, and it wasn’t a battle to keep my festering shyness
away.
Wed, Oct11, 11.l9pm:
Well, I rang ... Cafe and may possibly have casual work, if all goes well. I
got a few signatures on my Job Plus card for appearance and put my name down at
some other food places. They all say “keep on trying” try, try, try, well, I am
trying. I rang and offered volunteer work at Lifeline but the lady there was
dippy and scatty, she said she’d get in contact with me but didn’t get my
number so I had to tell her three times, but we’re all human, we have our
scatty days.
The lady at the NZES better not rub me up the wrong way by saying I haven’t
tried hard enough, but then, when you’re in employment you forget about the
ones on the dole without work, who gives a fxxx is the general un-uttered
attitude.
I saw. . - on my way to phone around for work. Her uncle passed away and they
were about to take off to lay down a hangi, so obviously the funeral has
already been. She sounded surprised I was looking for a job and I was too. 1
had ideas of starting in Auckland, my life, you know, but I suppose I could
work in this hell town and get good references so I at least have something to
show future employers. And modeling, I’m going to see June DaIly-Watkins tomorrow.
The bus is leaving at 9.2Oam, it’ll be a hell of a day, the last thing I want
is to be stranded in Auckland. I’ll only have an hour or so to do what I have
to do then catch the 1.3Opm bus back to Whangarei. I hope it works. I hope to
God I get modeling work, “Farmers” catalogue spreads or “Katies” spreads,
anything. Anything to get my life rolling, anything to be part of this crazy
world, and not just a lonely person existing.
I saw Les Girls on Holmes tonight, Carlotta, I’d love to dance in Les Girls and
be a dance troupe like that. I always had wild thoughts of running away to the
Kings Cross and joining Les Girls, but I want to go as far as I can as a person
and when it really comes to that
gripping stage of people knowing me as Yasimi — the transsexual, I’ll start a
career that’ll lead me to fame. But God know what’ll happen to me, I may just
be a head full of dreams built on hope, but we all have dreams. It just takes
guts to make them a reality.
Tues, Oct 10 cont:
I told the NZES of my sexuality and that it isn’t easy finding work with people
who accept me, some people don’t, but I won’t tell the shops I approach that I
am a transsexual, like I told that dippy lady at NZES. She thought I told her
to shock her, to throw her off guard, why the hell would I do that. I hate
telling people but I wanted from the start to avoid confusion, only to fad out
here that on the computer screen under sex in my file was ‘F’. I hate people
thinking of me as a transvestite, I’d rather tell them and avoid being thought
of as something that I am not. I have the psyche and mind of a woman and the
misfortune to of been born in the wrong body. Tam not one of these transsexuals
that says they are neither female or male. I never have been a male in mind. I
never have related to them emotionally. I am a person that relates to females,
I am a person who is very feminine
I don’t try to be anything that I aren't, I’m not animated,
I’m not trying to be a woman. I am me, a human being, a transsexual woman, and
that’s all I can be. I may not have been born physically female, but I am not
an ‘it’, I’d have no genitals and no breasts.
It was so disheartening hearing “no’s’ from all these cafes, time is running
out for me, I’m surviving on a thread of human sanity, I want to make it so
badly and only once this month have I thought of suicide, of starvation until
death, and I hate these feelings.
I hate the thought of what that would do to the people and family that like or
love me, to mum and . . and...
Monday:
I think I’ve blown their minds, one day I’m quiet, bowing and still individual
but sad, then the darkness shifts away like a 11 year long cloud and the sun
shines. I now know who I really am.
I feel so ecstatically happy, Mum only knows so much about me. I shall not go
out with her much anymore, anyway she’s another who like the limelight, she can
hack me stealing it off her.
— Love Lu Lu