Life on the inside; coming out – Ken’s story

Abstract

Ever since he can remember (at least from around 3 - 5 years old), Ken Loman (pseudonym) (born a girl) identified himself as a boy. His deepest wish was that ‘maybe if I wake up tomorrow my body will be right … that there’s been a big mistake’.

Instead he ended up always trying to hide it. ‘I didn’t feel I could tell anybody because they’d think I’m bad or that there was something wrong with me. The clothes I liked to wear and the things I liked to play with were always of the opposite sex.’
Growing up in Utrecht until the age of 7 and then moving with his family to Phalaborwa didn’t exactly provide the optimal social context in which to adjust to gender incongruence, let alone living with a mother and two older sisters who disapproved of his behaviour.

A middle-child with sisters 3 and 4 years older ‘who didn’t like me very much – we had lots of fights’ and two brothers, 8 and 15 years younger, Ken found his dad to be ‘sort of OK, especially when I was young’.