One experience of straddling

I’m about 9, and I’ve partnered doc martens with a tutu and I’ve scrawled lipstick across my face for no reason whatsoever.

‘You’re a funny one,’ someone else’s mum says to me, I was quite a funny thing growing up, people were often calling me funny. And I absolutely loved to be funny.

A dance teacher said they had to sweep the studio after I'd been to get rid of the dried mud that had flicked off my skin. I’d usually come from rugby.

I would volunteer to carry the shopping because my shoulders were broader than my sisters. Like right angles they are, while her slope downwards.

‘How long have you had short hair,’ asks this boy on bumble.

‘Since I was 12, since my parents divorced.’ I went with my friend, Abbie, on the W8 bus in a red cardigan and had it chopped off.

I'm hovering over the census box where I tell them who I'm attracted to... Do you mean right now? Or tomorrow? How do I identify? Again, do you mean right now as I sit here in my boxers, white vest and with a girl in my bed or next week when I'm going on a date with a 35 year old man?

‘So why did you decide to cast the male role with a woman? They asked my director. When he was played by a guy, the male playwrights voice became too strong and with a girl, we are able to sympathise with them. But you never feel like you’re watching two women.

‘Mummy why is there a boy in the changing rooms?’ I laugh because it's funny and I love kids, but I was about 15 so 12 years later I still remember it.

I feel pleasantly invisible sometimes. I think it was easier to run up the road in ballet tights to class when my hair was cropped above my ears. We used to shove our feet into trainers without ballet shoes already on. I think it’s easier to run to catch a train now when I’m 27, past a group of men with nothing better to do than to stand on the street.

‘So, this is the bit where Annabel comes in.’ The music is explosive, it slows for a while as rehearsed dancers kuru gracefully like swans across the studio and the teacher is catching me up. I mean the music is thumpingly explosive, the teacher slaps her hands together demonstrating the step of my feet and she lives her eyebrows showing the length of time I'll have my feet off the floor. Everyone laughs and my heart is racing because I can't help but love it but there's a funny element and I'm not totally sure why.

There's a couple of days a month where I want to wear skirts or dresses. I bought a couple so that I'd have them there as options but most days I look at them and question who clicked purchase.

At football training I arrive on my second-hand Peugeot, and this is where everyone else thinks I fit in this is where all the light-hearted humour is about, because I’m boyish or funny or - I've been coming to football training for almost four years and I still get horrifically nervous every time, I'm not part quite part of the group here either, I feel different, I feel like I shouldn’t be scared of the ball hitting me in the face and to be honest, I’m not that good at football.  

‘Who was the right winger who played for Enfield, ’my dad asks.

‘The fast one?’ I say and he says she wasn't that fast.

‘Siobhan was fast.’

‘You are faster,’ he says’ that's why she bullied you.’

‘Did she bully me?’

‘Yes a bit, I think so.’

‘They all just found me a bit funny.’

The coach said I used to dance on the bull.

That's a good thing.

I think I was meant to be dancing with the ball.

Just a heads up, I said to my new agent, I'm often more successful going up for male parts.

I tweet, I've just written myself out of the role that I’ve written. With theatre, I can get away with playing a woman but not on television. My friends laugh at this, I'm being silly of course. I am a woman how can I not pass this one? I reintroduced men back on to my dating app preferences, I felt the need to re-evaluate my photos, take down the thirst traps and the chiselled angles, replace with curly haired sweetness. I removed the ironic jokes and replace with cripplingly embarrassing anecdotes. The likes come flooding in.

‘Are you sure you're not gay? Somebody on my first job asks me.

‘I love my boyfriend so...’

Overhearing, ‘you have a boyfriend?’

Yeah…

A baffling silence.

There are a few things, this one’s quite butch, this one they were originally a man, this one is flirting with the Queen, she's sleeping with his sister, he's a guy but they’re auditioning everyone. I love being all of these things and I am hugely proud to be, and I am more than these things, I am everything that's been so far and what is yet to come. But maybe it's not funny anymore, just saying, for the young ones growing up, maybe we don't have to laugh or even notice. Maybe anyone really can be whoever they want to be. And that is a note to myself as well. The laughter sometimes puts a lid on growth and growing is so much fun.