Becoming Moss: Alfie to Alfi
In front of me sits my new (provisional) driving license. Beside me is my tattered deed poll, returned once again to my desk after being scanned, seemingly chewed and spat out, and posted off to all ends of the name-change-bureaucratic-web. On top of it lies my old debit and credit cards. Behind me, my wallet containing my new cards. The name on them reads Alfi Christopher David Zafer Moss-White. That is also how my university, GP, student finance, and bank must correspond with me, because the passport office will not acknowledge proof of my new name being used unless it includes all of my given names, even if those given names were on my old passport. Moss is my mother’s maiden surname, its addition is self-explanatory; the omission of the ‘e’ from ‘Alfie’ is less so. It could seem arbitrary, and in some ways it is. It could be read as a typo, and that was what the Psychologist said when reading out my deed poll in an assessment for a gender dysphoria diagnosis, at the beginning of this year. ‘Unless that is a typo’ is what he specifically said, muttered as an afterthought, an almost peripheral remark, whilst I was paying him £600 for the hour.
In the Tai Chi form that I’ve been learning over the last year, there is a move that appears repeatedly throughout the sequences, involving an almost flippant backhanded strike made just after one has gathered their qi as a sphere between both palms; one slightly turns their head to acknowledge the strike, before pushing forwards again. That is what such remarks remind me of: barely acknowledged, but no less damaging. But just as the sphere of qi must be ‘broken’ for this strike to be made, so too must a breaking occur before one makes such a comment. And within that breaking can be seen a person’s sadness, their hate, their anger, their insecurities. In that sense, I am thankful: my experience of queerness first revealed to me these cracks; my experience of transness has let me stare into them. I have never been unfamiliar with prejudice: my diagnosis of autism in 2011 and life living with it, before and after my diagnosis, taught me what it was like to be othered. But I was rarely hated for that thing, nor did it ever put me into the public scrutiny. Though I had seen the world presented back at me through various filters of discrimination, I had not seen it through the filter of hate. I knew how it felt for someone to discard you, but I did not know the feeling of someone wanting to undo you.
Britain is a sad, hateful, angry and insecure place. It is also my place of birth. London is my home, all I know, yet it is not separate from this hate and anger and insecurity. The fabric of South London, of its streets and hills and people, is woven into my being—but it is also where I first faced such backhanded strikes of hate. To realise that you are not what you thought you were is to be uprooted and to uproot. One must search the upturned soil of self and its environments, and decide what to take with them. For myself, the realisation of transness has involved another component: that you may not be able to take anything. To realise that some of your homes may no longer be homes, that there may be hate for you in something that you have only loved.
For some years now I have known and not exactly hidden that I am not cisgender. That knowledge and my acting on it never went much beyond that thought, though. ‘I am not this.’ I did not pry, let alone elaborate—and perhaps out of fear. That sort of nonaction tends to allow the mould of prescribed identity to harden. Gone were the days of malleable-teenhood: where I once could have gently pressed my thumbs into the clay and felt it receive them, I now felt a hard resistance; I was now a man (according to others). But hardness eventually breaks, and that is what happened: one day something cracked, and no amount of patching would fix it. Even when I was able to temporarily cover the crack, I was not able to forget what I saw through it for the brief time that the light spilled in: that I was not what I thought I was.
To realise that one is not what they thought they were is to make the first unintentional step of a journey that involves no return. One may look back, but that is all. They might even try to go back, but the path quickly loses its form, or one their footing. Many such attempts have been made since that moment; I think I just stumbled back from one recently. In that sense, I am still writing this from a place of discovery: I am still figuring out exactly what I am, and it might be that this ‘thing’ is just a perpetual continuation of that questing, that the nature of my self’s dust is to never settle (indeed, it seems to be kicked up with even the smallest of movements these days). I don’t like to share updates to even my close family before I know for certain what is happening, so this is out of character for me, and even further out of comfort. In any ordinary circumstance, I would not be writing this. But these are not ordinary circumstances. I write this to combat the forces that wish for transphobia to become ordinary. I fear the evil of hate but I fear more our ability to normalise it.
I write this also because I am ultimately a hypocrite and a coward if I do not. I write it because I feel called to—indeed, it is my very fear that is my calling. I said I fear the evil of hate, and that is true, but I do not fear the enactment of that hate on myself as much as I fear what I may see within the person behind the act, within the breaking sphere. I fear that within that moment, I may lose faith in my oldest belief: in goodness. My faith wavers now. I sit beside my pond in the shade of trees I have grown up under, I listen to the water trickle and the wind in the leaves and the birdsong around me. I marvel at this life, and with these natural forces I feel the currents of change and feel them within myself. But I also know that outside of this space there exists other forces that wish to deny my right to be. I know that these darker forces have manifested inside of me—that is part of their power. But my fear, above all, has always resided in the quiet denial, dismissal, nonbelief or nonacceptance in response to a person’s existence. Within the effect of such a response is a death of the self far more scary than a physical one. It is beyond heartbreak, in part because it involves a unique discrepancy between there being this thing that has defined one’s entire life, caused so much hurt and even more sorrow, made them who they are whilst also being about who they are—and it might just be rendered invisible, shrugged off by someone they hold in the same precious space. There’s an awkwardness to this. I fear the smaller breaking of spheres I might witness in this dismissal. My mind flickers between people I have met in my life, those still close and those who I’ve had chance encounters with, and I wonder what they would think if they knew what I was or what I would become. I can attempt to meet hate, disgust, upset; but I cannot meet apathy. It is formless, impossible to grasp. It is often the force that allows hatred to prevail.
I should first address the underlying question: what am I? What pronouns do I use? Something between nonbinary, genderfluid, and genderqueer feels most appropriate. ‘They/them/theirs’ is most appropriate, but I don’t mind ‘he’ slipping in in conversation. But one day, and perhaps a day soon, you might look at me and the only appropriate word would be ‘she’. It may be that I never change from that form, or that I realise that the space between me and my true self can only be crossed by hormone correction. It may be that that form is not the one that you would like to see me in—now is the time to question that, and why that is. I have had to do so within myself. Because it’s true that it is far easier, safer, more convenient if I present in a way that aligns with my assigned sex at birth, even if that involves always being misgendered. But the pull of who we are will always be stronger than who we would like to think we are: I have evidence of this, of almost a lifetime of the latter being toppled in a moment by a quick drag of the former.
It is helped, but not helped, that I am often gendered as my assigned sex and therefore am seen as cis. This ‘privilege’ is generally quite brief though: if having to write a 10,000 word gender narrative ahead of my assessment revealed anything to me, it is that humans are good at picking up things that we are not even aware of. I was othered for a very long time before I knew that I was other.
In ambiguity as with anything, there is a cost, and where I gain I also lose. Where I may hide and be protected from danger, I hide and lose something greater. Where I have presented more loudly in a direction away from my assigned sex, there has been a light, and from that has been cast shadows. It is in those shadows that the dimmer, murkier flickers of hate are able to be seen. I realised then the insurmountable strength in trans women, especially those who do not easily pass, and yet continue to step outside as their true selves. I mention this part because it’s the important, privileged flipside to ambiguity: even when cis presenting, my gender has been questioned. That is convenient, as far as freedom of choice goes. Our struggle may be the same, but in that area, my life has been easier.
But ambiguity throws people off. We like to know things and know where things sit, because that gives us a sense of control over these things. That’s why death and the universe are terrible to people—and in a way, life as well. It’s a hell of a lot easier to reduce this existence into a material or capitalist scope; make something mundane and you’ve made it safe. We are not taught to embrace not knowing something and to not feel shame in that, especially when it comes to anything about ourselves. No, I don’t exactly know what I am; I never have. I’ve never even been quite sure if I’m a photographer, I just take photos. I am—that is all. The only thing I have ever been sure in is my unsureness, both in my practice and identity.
Yet, rest assured to those in my life who this applies to: I am still your bro, mate, bredrin, darg, g, etc. Equally, in my other friendships, I’ve always been one of the girls (or close to, given the prior circumstances) and always will be. That will never change. I am still my sibling’s brother, and my responsibilities in my family remain that of the eldest son; but they have also been that of the eldest daughter, and my role for my sibling has also been that of an older sister. This is without any conscious doing, and is one of the parts of my narrative that made me believe that the signs of a person’s true gender are present from early on, and that people respond to them without even realising. Who I am is who I have always been. I think we humans are pretty good at reading people, and that this thing that I am, that makes me have to write this text, that may be the trigger of hate in another, perhaps in you, has always been there. It may not have been so obvious, but it was always there. It is there in all of my work and has been present in my practice as both a means of access and of resistance—before there was even a word for it, before that word was spoken.
Brother, sister; daughter, son. On one hand, I am none of these things; yet on another, I am all of them. That is why I have deliberated for longer, even though I had the first understanding that I was not cisgender almost four years ago. I feel both genders within me and I feel another third thing that sits aside from them. When it comes to gender expression, that’s another matter (Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, a trans woman, explains the separations of sex vs gender vs expression quite well). I am referring to the thing that I am when all is stripped back. That’s a hard thing to find, with all the noise and distractions in our lives. We should all try to find it though, to try to understand it, to hold that person’s hand. We all need that inner touch; it’s just a bit more pressing when you’re trans.
I think for many people, it is slightly easier to understand forms of transness that they are able to apply inversely to their own lives, and that’s why you get words like ‘becoming’ or ‘deciding’. It’s partly just not knowing any better, but it’s also this fallacy of agency and that, for the most part, the largest self-actualised changes most people undertake in their lives stem almost entirely from intellectualised decisions, or at best feelings that come from some other tangible external thing. Sure, I can understand transitioning! We weren’t happy with our old house, so we moved. But transness isn’t a decision; if it was, many people, given the past and present circumstances, wouldn’t ‘do it’. The faff of changing domain names alone might’ve been enough to put me off. The only decision lies in one’s acting on that innate feeling, and even that comes as less of a decision than not having any other choice. This is the area that I do not know if cishet people can ever relate to: being something you are not, and trying to go along with it. It kills you. You can push it to the back and focus on other things, but it will remain there and eventually resurface. Our lives are something much more than just simply existing in bodies, and to not live as our true selves is to not live at all. Sometimes that divide of living/not-living can be concentrated in just a person’s pronouns. Like the omission of ‘e’ in ‘Alfie’, ‘they/them’ recognises this part of my identity and the life experience that has shaped and been shaped by it.
I think being nonbinary can be harder for cis people to understand, as there can be less tangible ‘evidence’ or decisions associated with it (such as hormone replacement therapy, surgery, their effects, etc.). On the surface, one can still appear as aligning with their assigned sex. That is where my hesitancy in being satisfied with language alone lies: viewing someone as their true self, when that goes against the constructed form of them, requires a total dismantling of that former perception of them and a doing away of the binaries that we apply most things to. It may require educating yourself on gender vs sex, the effects of testosterone and estrogen, and even challenging your former ideas and beliefs. That’s no easy task. I ask you to do it for me.
Words became a form of survival for me early on in my life, as I realised the necessity in being able to explain myself. But I am tired of explaining. I am tired of accommodating people’s stupidity and I refuse to call it anything else but that whilst people are dying. I would love to sit and explain everything, but people are dying—my people are dying. Here is where my anger which has built over the years spills out. I have dwelled on this, and the practice of compassion that has always pushed me to protect others now pushes me to call you an idiot, if you refuse to ‘get it’. I see no other way to urge you to educate yourself and if nothing else, to be kind. If you ‘don’t understand this whole trans stuff’ or ‘this pronoun business’—or worse, if you hold a prejudiced opinion, then you’re an idiot. I might love you, I might think you’re very smart, but you’re an idiot. I am willing to answer questions—any, if they stem from a place of wanting to know. I will not, however, debate with you. There is nothing to debate. I asked you to see me as my true self, but I will not wait around for you to do so.
I have spent most of my life not knowing, then knowing and not acting, then acting and not speaking. There is a cost to this, in the wider whole as in one’s soul. This applies to all of us, regardless of our position: to be separate from an issue is to deprive yourself of a part of humanity, of something that you are part of and that is a part of you, something that you need. In an age of capitalism, of artificial structures and systems and even artificial art, where things feel less and less real and our connection to our true natures have become only more strained, the path of activism is one that may allow us to come back to ourselves. That path begins wherever you are. It may begin here.
There is the departure from one’s idea of themself, made involuntarily when they realise that they are not what they thought they were. Then there is a second departure when one acts on this. That is when the print of that first step truly forms, and the way behind one truly obscures. One path is outwards, one is inwards; both lead to the same place. I made my first inward step some time ago and I am making my second step outwards now. Ahead of both, the way is uncertain, the horizon dark—but I am not alone. The forces of evil seem to surround us right now, and so strong are the products of them that part of the reason I have not put this out sooner, or found these words or written them, is how often I’ve been reduced to wordlessness in my sorrow, in the face of these products. How many times have I sat in my room or garden, with the news of a trans person’s death weighing on my soul? How many times have I—we—sagged from that weight? Yet to fall is to rise again. I am not in a position to call on others to have hope, but I can call on you, sister, brother, sibling, to have faith in that simple function: of getting up where one has gotten down. Evil and hatred know only one direction, and that is where they ultimately fail. But goodness and perseverance know the ebb and flow and the swings of the pendulum. I have—I must have—faith in that, even if one such swing may last my entire life.
As mentioned before, that backhanded Tai Chi strike is followed by a sort of forward strike. Then the arms draw inwards, stretching out on either side, almost in a reversed hug before gently pushing out again. To open the heart, but push out that which threatens it—that is how I interpret this move. That is how I have learned to be. I know little, hold fewer suggestions and have even less authority to make them, but in my encounters with hate and prejudice and in all that I have learned elsewhere, that is how I have learned to be. Let in, push out.
I don’t agree with the idea of coming out, or the circumstances that have forged the term. I agree even less with the shock factor of it, how it in some ways accommodates the cisheteronormative narrative, and how it enables this idea of people ‘becoming [insert thing they always were]’. But for the sake of visibility, and for the sake of the larger cause that I believe in, I must lean into it here: I am trans. Though self-doubt trickles off each letter of the statement—even now—I must make it: I am trans. Whether I acquire hormone replacement therapy or get hench in the gym or do both or become some other undefinable ambiguous floating fluid thing, I am trans.
I find transness hard to speak about (who doesn’t): I have so much to say and there is so much to speak on, but I’m not a spokesperson (everything expressed here has been my opinion, and not necessarily an agreeable or correct one). But I don’t want to brush over things, but there is so much to cover. The only way I can try and cover all the ground, or all the ground that I feel most concerned about being left uncovered, is by saying this: my experience of queerness and transness has been one shaped almost entirely of hurt, adversity, and a profound sense of otherness. I suspect most people like myself share that also. What may appear as a sudden revelation to you has been, quite frankly, a mundane reality for me. Profound in its nature, but made mundane by suffering and prejudice. In other words, it anything but flippant, and that goes for nearly anyone’s sexual and gender identity. I am saying this because I know that some simply do not take transness seriously; they see it as a fad, something people are doing because others are doing it. There is a larger truth to that, but these some fail to search for it: more people are coming out, yes, but that is because it is safer to do so—or, like with myself, they realise the need to, for the greater whole. Safety in numbers, or, as I said before, having little choice otherwise. And behind those individuals who have been reduced down to trend-chasers are lives woven by difficulty, unknown, hurt, loneliness and, above all, fear. Lives which have been carved out with a strength unimaginable to many, and at an age younger than most. You see joy and liberation—behind these things, or even upholding them, are the words ‘in spite of’.
There is one other component of one’s identity, one that I realised—and was uprooted by—only after my assessment: its relational quality. If I am alone or by the sea or in a forest, I don’t ‘feel trans’, nor do I think about gender. There is still ultimately a relational mirror in these settings—any biological dysphoria still exists—but it’s not as large or as constant as when in society. I reflected on my gender for years, meditated on it, allowed myself to waver, and came back to my initial conclusion in which I felt a resolve that I had not felt before elsewhere in my life. But the foundations, having not fully left my own thoughts and one or two conversations with friends, were not used to the outside conditions. These foundations were built with my life experience, shaped by gender incongruence and discrimination from others, and the trauma from that; they were as true as true could be; but they were not tested. I realised then that I could not take another step without laying everything bare to myself and others, that this was needed for any further discovery to be made. Even if I do not reveal the explicit details, the vulnerability is still there—here. That is why I identify with the term trans.
Meaning ‘across’, ‘the other side of’ in Latin, trans describes for me the journey that has defined and will continue to define my life, in this body that I have been accorded. I was born on a shore that many never leave, and though I may return to it one day, I can never return as the same person I was when I left. I came back, but I went across. Transition, transgression, transfer, transform, transcend. I have swum in a sea I thought I would only look at. How lucky to be granted such an adventure.
Photos from April, 2025. Title ‘Becoming Moss’ borrowed from poem by Ella Frears.
