I think I've said this somewhere else on this site, but I'm in an accordion band (not naming it for confidentiality reasons). We play hymns and marches at concerts and parades, mostly in summer but elsewhere in the year too. This year, us and another band joined forces to hold a 10-minute act in the Belfast International Tattoo, which ran on the 6th [Friday] and 7th [Saturday], a total of three times. The Tattoo, by the way, is a huge concert held in the SSE Arena every year, celebrating and promoting funding for the Ulster-Scots Agency and Ulster-Scots culture / traditions.
If I was who I was a year ago, this would all be great — I enjoyed myself at least a little, though I spent most of my backstage time either drawing on my phone or replaying Ace Attorney Investigations. However, I'm not who I was a year ago anymore, and in the place of the man who enjoys playing in accordion concerts, I stand, a trans woman who no longer enjoys it, for one main reason and lots of much smaller ones.
This whole Ulster-Scots event was 99% Protestant, and has been for all of its existence. Our band is a Protestant band, and so are the other bands, the Irish dancers, et cetera. That's the problem. We weren't just parading to display Ulster-Scots tradition. We were, under the hood, parading for abolition of trans rights, or at least for protecting the idea that trans people are still their assigned-gender-at-birth.
…I may be slightly exaggerating, but that's absolutely how it feels to me. My mum's a transphobe, and with her all of my Protestant family. The bandmaster is a transphobe. The deputy-bandmaster is a transphobe. All other members, bar me, are transphobic, and I've been forced into this band of bigots since I was three years old, and now can't leave without leaving the country entirely.
Protestantism itself is also implicitly anti-trans. Foremost on my mind is the Scottish gender bill that the DUP (primary Unionist party) requested the UK Government to block, though I can't find where I read about that. Buuut, one of its members thought that homosexuality could be cured with prayer, so it's not too far-fetched.
I'm being made to put on a display that oppresses me. I think of the uniform as hiding my identity and forcing me to blend in.
To avoid doing it next year, I NEED to cut contact with my family before my first year in university ends. I NEED to get out of here. I CANNOT keep living like this.
It's 1am, and I'm tired and literally sore, so I've probably missed a few details I thought of when formulating these thoughts. I might add some things tomorrow, when my feet stop burning. Night.