Camille Valbusa

This is an ongoing project about Ola, who is fighting the UK government to do a gender surgery and also for the acceptance of her family. 

"Dear me, first the good news is that as you are reading this you didn’t commit suicide although this fact will be a disappointment to your first wife but more of that later. No doubt you will be reading this either in the Fox and Geese or Paul’s living room listening to obscure music in a haze of dope smoke – see below – as you so rarely go home now. Would you like me to forward you a picture of your parents to remind you what they look like? You are right not to tell them, though. Second, the drugs and alcohol don’t work and will just take you to a lot of friends funerals.

Thirdly as the old truism goes be yourself everyone else is taken. Your abject failure to face up to who you are will cause you untold grief and self-destruction on a scale comparable to a global conflagration. 

You have known who you are from about five – okay this is a time before the internet, computers, homosexuality is still illegal, JFK is alive, England hasn't won the world cup and the echoes of the trap door through which Ruth Ellis dropped are still reverberating through the nation’s conscience. Until much later this internal conflict will hinder your life more than you will realise and will in effect run the years into an inseparable mess indistinguishable only by the nature of the disasters that befall you.

On a positive note your anger, sense of injustice and desire to change the world for the better will reap some rewards in the future so keep it unlike your dress sense which is dire – a word of advice drop the acid after getting dressed not before and don’t cut the hair! But you will but you manifest itself in the service industries who have read him but instead of grasping it as literature will think it is a training manual. Much humour will be had over a bank manager who sees transgenderism at the forefront of organised crime! Ultimately your cowardice will lead to the one thing in your life you will forever regret but the irony is that without that failure you probably would never meet the one real love of your life. You will end up having three near death experiences apart from the suicidal ones – these occasions will be known as marriage. The loneliness you feel now will stay for a long time but as a friend said to me “I’ve been to Wetwang” and I said “it's your own fault!” should see it now!

As Tolstoy said “everyone wants to change the world no one wants to change themselves” so obviously no Gender Clinics in pre-revolutionary Russia. It will be years before you realise you are not alone and that it is not some weird psychotic process going on but that is no excuse for not facing up to being who you are and trying to change the world first.

Your humour, writings and music will keep you sane, pity you will throw most away later, it is the path you really should have followed but then again if you can’t face up to being yourself nothing is surprising. You should learn from the fact you have lots of friends who are girls rather than girlfriends and the nature of those relationships but you won’t for years. If only you could grasp how much your self-destructive ways will corrupt your life but then again in some respects you will get away with it. Self-doubt, alienation and a sense of being outside stems from you know where. That's why you are fixated on the music, literature and films that you are. The “Red Desert” is your life in a movie and the quote you so love from the film “there is something deeply tragic about life but I don’t know what it is” is a lie for you – you know what the tragedy is and it has always been there. By the way, it will be 36 years before you see it again and it will affect you even more. And you will still like Led Zeppelin (so sad) but you will deny ever liking Tubular Bells. Years later your love of Kafka will experience  manifest itself in the service industries who have read him but instead of grasping it as literature will think it is a training manual. Much humour will be had over a bank manager who sees transgenderism at the forefront of organised crime!

Ultimately your cowardice will lead to the one thing in your life you will forever regret but the irony is that without that failure you probably would never meet the one real love of your life. You will end up having three near death experiences apart from the suicidal ones – these occasions will be known as marriage. The loneliness you feel now will stay for a long time but as a friend said to me “I’ve been to Wetwang” and I said “its your own fault!” "