Free Life Worth Living by Lady Colin Campbell

quantified, but no amount of success could conceal the fact that I had chosen a career which already bored me. There was much about apparel design that appealed. I enjoyed the creativity of draping garments and sketching designs, and could happily do that for hours. The precision and attention to detail required drove some people mad, but I found it absorbing.
    My problem was more fundamental. I simply could not summon up enthusiasm for a profession which was not intellectually challenging in any way. I needed a profession where new ideas were continually required, not one where they entered into the equation in the beginning, when one was sketching and selecting designs for a collection, but thereafter became statics which had to be translated from paper into cloth and could not be changed.
    I was still registered as a boy. The embarrassment of just getting through each day was so acute that that alone made life unbearable right from the start. Each instructor looked at the list of students, saw my name and the gender ascribed, looked at me, and delivered a variation on the same theme:
    ‘There must be a mistake here. It says you’re male and you’re obviously not.’
    Although I had long since learned how to maintain my dignity by deflecting embarrassing questions with enigmatic retorts, each time something like this happened I wished I could simply disappear. Naïvely, I had expected to blend in, because FIT was a fashion institution whose students and instructors covered the sexual spectrum so comprehensively that it was sometimes hard to tell whether you were in a college of queens, city of straights, mid-town Manhattan or on the isle of Lesbos. Yet instinctively, people picked up, as they had at St George’s, that I was not a gay boy.
    Whereas the earthiness and lack of sophistication of native Jamaicans had led them to trust their instincts and call me a girl, here, in America, where people thought more and trusted their observations less, they were in a dilemma. If I wasn’t a gay boy, what was I? This question seemed to so perturb one or two busybodies that I was hassled on more than one occasion by the school authorities. Once an instructor asked me in front of the whole class if I could try to look less like a girl, to which I replied, ‘I’ll try if you can make an equal attempt to look less like a swine.’
    To her embarrassment, the class erupted into laughter, and it was she, not I, who was left looking like a jerk.
    As people got used to me, the novelty of my appearance wore off. Thereafter, everything was fine until the beginning of the next semester, when the school psychologist called me into his office and told me there were concerns about me. He offered to help me define my sexuality, whatever that meant.
    ‘And how do you propose to start?’ I asked naturally, having learned the art of giving people enough rope to hang themselves with.
    ‘Maybe we can start with you not wearing nail polish,’ he replied.
    ‘I don’t,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye.
    He actually had the temerity to grab my hand to check my nails before saying, ‘Well, even if you don’t wear nail polish, you wear lipstick, and it offends people.’
    I informed him that I did not wear lipstick either, and that I could hardly be blamed if my diet was so healthy I had lips with colour in them.
    The encounter with the psychologist was the final straw. I went to see Dean Brandriss, told her I wished to withdraw from her school, and left. Knowing that Daddy would not approve, I did not tell my parents until afterwards.
    What to do now? Whatever career I chose, I intended to start living in my true gender full time from now on. Money was not an immediate issue, as I had enough to last me for the remainder of the school year. But I would have to work to support myself in the longer term, and quite possibly to pay for whatever medical treatment I was going to need. In the meantime, the basics were taken care of: I had an