Queerphoria

Soula Emmanuel (she/her) was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Greek father. She studied at universities in Ireland and Sweden, emerging with a master's degree in demography. Her debut novel Wild Geese was published by Footnote Press and the Feminist Press in 2023. In 2024, it won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize at the UK Society of Authors' Awards. She has had work dramatised for BBC Radio 4. She currently lives on Ireland's east coast.

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The below work contains discussion of domestic violence and transphobia.

Gigi and Sotiria

North London, 2006

Out of the silence, Gigi hears a voice. It is not her own, nor the one of which she dreams, inexpressible but transfixing. It is a strong, deep, clear bell-chime - the sound of an older woman, weary and nicotine-stained. It seems to surround her, pulls her from her sleep and wrenches her into the bedroom in which she grew up, one she has redecorated for her new self but which retains in its walls so much of the former.

She opens her eyes. The woman gazes at her from across the room, casting a holy shimmer at Gigi through the early-morning darkness: a small, lollipop-shaped figure with tinted glasses.

Gigi wishes she had a baseball bat to hand. 'Who the hell are you?' she asks, in a startled, squeaky voice.

'My child, my child,' the woman says, raising her hands as if to show they are empty, 'who I am is not important. You will only be able to sing when you discover your own identity.'

'I know exactly what my identity is. I am Gigi Galani, and I have half a mind to call the police right now.'

'Ah, the police,' the woman says, laughing to herself, 'I know them well.'

'I bet you do, you weirdo. But this is the Metropolitan Police we're talking about. They're nasty bastards. They'll shoot you for fare evasion. Look, if you don't leave right now, I'm going to scream.'

'Yes, you should scream! That will help.'

Gigi, sitting on her bed in a skewed string top, hair unbrushed, face unadorned, looks with confusion at the woman.

'My name is Sotiria,' the woman says. 'Sotiria Bellou.'

'You're Greek?'

'Yes. I have been sent to help you.'

'By who?'

'I died in 1997. Throat cancer. The cigarettes got me in the end, but where would I have been without them? I have been sent to help you with your singing problem.'

'OK,' Gigi says, and then she remembers that she is sitting on a bed in her childhood bedroom, looking at this eccentric apparition. There is only one explanation for all this: it is clearly a dream. She is obviously asleep right now and pulling this wackiness from her subconscious. She turns over to her side and attempts to go back to sleep.

Then Sotiria starts to sing.

But before Sotiria, there is Natasha. She sounds so beautiful when she sings. Old Greek ballads, dancey numbers with a sway of her hips, sometimes even Whitney Houston. Every Friday, the men in the audience bang their hands against their tables as if trying to restart a heart. With a wink of her eye and a swish of her train, she owns them. They wave their lighters, they coo at her, they festoon her with twenty-pound notes. She is a doll with a perfect voice, one that does not fade and does not change. She dances effortlessly between languages, thanking the audience in Greek before declaring: 'I will be Evita at the Enfield Civic Theatre next month. Tickets are on sale now, so please come along!'

She will be Evita. As far as Gigi is concerned, Natasha already is.

The restaurant in question is Yia Mas tavern, owned by Gigi's father, and where she is employed as a waitress. It is a gloomy space once dimmed by a thicket of cigarette smoke, until they changed the law and her father turned down the lights further. This place has been central to the community since it opened in the eighties, when Gigi, then a toddler, then a boy, was its curly-haired little mascot. It has served dutifully a catchment of pernickety Greek emigrants and traumatised Cypriot war refugees for almost twenty years.

'Isn't Natasha wonderful?' Gigi says to the customers as she gives them their food and their cheap beer. The praise for Natasha is easier for Gigi to handle if she pre-empts it, if it is coming from her and not them. She praises her makeup, her furiously straightened hair, her slender figure, her voice, her voice, her voice.

'Yes, she is a star!' they reply.

A star indeed.

Gigi is twenty-two years old now. She has grown up surrounded by these people, and she has become herself in their gaze too. They don't get it, but they are kind. They tell her that long hair suits her, that she should have grown it out years ago, and she can't help but agree - she has squandered so many years. Why didn't you tell me this earlier? she thinks to herself.

The women are better. It took some getting used to for Gigi's mother, to remember names and adjust expectations, but Greek women are strong and don't take any bullshit. As long as she behaves the right way, she is accepted, and more to the point, she is valued. The local women tell her that now she is a woman, her father should be more willing to contribute to her upkeep. This is music, so to speak, to Gigi's ears.

Sotiria's voice is metallic and sharp. It seems to make the nails vibrate in the walls. She sings as if to chastise, as if reciting a litany of life's woes for the thousandth time.

Open the window, open the window she sings in Greek, demanding the acquaintance of a lover who has deserted her, but for Gigi it is the sound of her longing for a former voice, this stubborn girl who tortures her by doing nothing at all.

But then Gigi remembers where she is. 'Shhhh!' she says. 'You'll wake everyone up.'

Sotiria stops, then looks deflated. 'I am trying to help you.'

'I get it - you are a singer. Everyone is a singer except me.'

'You are a singer.'

'I was a singer. I used to have a beautiful voice before I hit puberty. High and clean and pure. I was in school choirs and everything. I could have been a star.'

'Can I tell you a story?'

'Do I have a choice?'

'You always have a choice. When I was seventeen, I married a bus conductor.'

'Congratulations.'

'His name was Vangelis. My family married me off to him because they did not want me to be a singer. They wanted me to go away and be a quiet, dutiful little wife in a village in the mountains. They thought that having a husband would tame me. And my god, he tried to tame me.'

'What did he do?'

'He was an abusive, violent drunk. No sooner had I become a woman then I was almost trapped in a horror show from which there was no escape. You are lucky a young woman like you isn't married off nowadays.'

'That wouldn't happen to me, because-'

'Because you are a transsexual?'

Gigi is startled. 'How do you know that word?'

'I keep up with the news. I'm dead,' she says, cackling, 'not deaf! Anyway, you are lucky to have choices, even ones I would never have dreamed of. Now, this bus conductor, he got me pregnant but then beat me up so hard that I miscarried.'

'My god.'

'Yes,' Sotiria says placidly, 'it was terrible, but look at me: I am an old woman. I made it out.'

'How did you do it?'

'Well, I found a bottle of vitriol, sulphuric acid, used for cleaning, and I threw it in his face. I went to prison for six months, and let me tell you: six months in the clink were better than five minutes with that bastard.'

'Did you kill him?'

'No, no, only his pride was wounded. And his face was disfigured but,' she says, scrunching up her nose, 'he was never a beauty.'

They both laugh, and then Gigi exhales. 'You're a singer and a violent criminal. I feel much better about you now.' But the next thing she knows, it is morning, and she is waking up, and she is alone with her old self again.

Gigi has a problem: working for her family doesn't count. It simply doesn't count. It's a job, she gets paid for it, she pays tax on the money she earns, but nevertheless, it doesn't count.

The Gender Recognition Panel are uneasy with work like this - they want good, honest transsexuals to be working outside the home. The Gender Recognition Act was brought in two years ago, in 2004, though it is less about recognition than about forcing people like Gigi to fit into a preordained pattern. She might have assumed that her family's acceptance would be an advantage in applying, but what they really want are strong, independent and, above all, compliant individuals, not those who have been shielded from bigotry by the kindness of those closest to them. It is almost like they don't believe she has suffered enough.

It is bad enough that her dealings with the clinic at Charing Cross have left her with documents she may wield whenever she is challenged, which say:

Giorgia Galani has been formally diagnosed with male-to-female gender identity disorder (transsexualism) and is a patient of this NHS clinic. She should be treated as a woman for all practical purposes. I may be contacted by telephone if you have any other queries.

No one has ever asked for this letter and carrying it around makes Gigi feel like a child, needing...