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I knew life had been really tough for my sister Yasimi. She
was a transsexual and committed suicide after years of torment. But it wasn’t
until I found her diaries in the attic, the day after her
funeral, that I really understood what she had been through. I sat down with
those six books and didn’t stop reading until eight hours later. I’ve since
spent the last five years working towards getting those diaries published so
they can hopefully help people in similar situations — and now that’s about to
happen.
My younger sister was actually born my brother. Then called Kane, she was five
years younger than me and always felt different. When she was six, she asked my
mother why the teacher made her play with boys and my mother told her, “Because
you’re a boy.” She was horrified because she felt like a girl. By the time she
was a teenager, she was dressing as a girl and getting beaten up daily at
school because she was considered a freak. She had to leave in the end.
Then she changed her name to Yasimi and began living as a woman. She’d been
taking hormones and had breast implants and she really wanted to have a
sex-change operation. But she wasn’t coping as well as she seemed to be and
when she was 23, she killed herself.
After reading her diaries, I realised
it wasn’t being a transsexual that made her think life wasn’t worth living — it
was the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Between the ages of six and
eight, a person in our neighbourhood abused her almost every day. It only
stopped when we moved. I’d known something had happened but I didn’t know the
extent. Our family isn’t very close and there were lots of things we never
talked about. I wish I’d known as it would have changed the way I behaved
towards her.
7March2005
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