My Dark Side

Stephen Whitehead

Description

The true story of how one British man chose castration and a new identity as a woman, rather than continue to live his life as a man. But before he eventually submits to the knife, Alan Taylor's life is as a policemen and eventually as a senior manager at Heathrow Airport, is an intense and often lonely sexual odyssey, a journey which includes most every type of sexual practice, many you couldn't imagine, and, not least, true love.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 13 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785380013
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
MY DARK SIDE
Ally Taylor’s Sexual Odyssey

Stephen Whitehead



Publisher Information
My Dark Side Published in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Stephen Whitehead to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2014 Stephen Whitehead
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Dedication
For LGBT people everywhere



About the Author
Dr Stephen Whitehead is Visiting Professor in Gender Studies at Shih Hsin University, Taipei, and Asia Programme Coordinator for Keele University, UK. He lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand with his wife and stepdaughter. His books have been translated into 17 languages. www.stephenwhitehead.org.



Quotes
The Gender Binary: The way society divides individuals into men and women as distinct and opposite categories. The individual is then expected to perform their gender and sexual identity according to the dominant rules, codes, languages and symbols associated with the gender category and prevailing within particular social and cultural locations.
See Whitehead, S., Talahite, A. and Moodley, R. (2013) Gender and Identity: Key themes and new directions . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
‘The hardest performance for any man is learning how to convincingly be one’
(The Relationship Manifesto, 2012, page 53)
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’
(Philip Larkin, ‘This Be the Verse’, Collected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)




Forword
From Stephen Whitehead
Some life stories are just so challenging and unusual they urge to be told. This is one of them. It is the story of how Alan Taylor, male, becomes Ally Taylor, female. Now there are countless post-op transexuals around the world but you can be sure not one has had a life quite like Ally. Born in 1956 into a lower middle class family in Sandhurst, England, the youngest son of a class-conscious shopkeeper and his passive, dutiful wife, Alan’s journey takes him into the police force as a 17 year old cadet, on to British Airport Authority management in his 30s and 40s, and eventually retired and living as a physical and legal woman in northern Thailand with a Thai female partner. Along the way there is pretty much every type of sexual encounter and activity one could imagine (and many you couldn’t), together with parental rejection, sibling acceptance, deep love and its tragic loss, despair, depression and finally, redemption and contentment.
This is a highly sexual and erotic story which readers will find compelling yet also perhaps hard to understand. But see beyond the compulsive public masturbation and desire for sexual humiliation. See beyond the gay sex, the straight sex, the BDSM clubs, the policeman breaking into homes to defile women’s clothing, the respectable cross-dressing executive with a devoted wife. See beyond a grey-haired ageing Ally now living with a middle class professional Thai woman in a remote part of South East Asia. Instead look upon Ally Taylor’s life and see our human condition in all its messy, complex, confounding reality.
Picture a forty-something male senior manager in an organisation you are familiar with. He is tall, muscular, strong looking, undoubtedly male and masculine, confident and able – he embodies self-assured maleness and management conventionality. Each morning he arrives to work dutifully wearing his dark suit, shirt and tie, the traditional uniform of men managers everywhere. But underneath that attire Alan Taylor is wearing his wife’s nylon stockings. Each night he goes to sleep wearing a baby romper suit.
This is not simply a man feeling he was born into the wrong body, a transgendered male who always felt he should have been born a female. Nor is this a man who was expected to be straight and turned out to be gay – such labels are a convenience that surely do not fit into this story at all. This is a man who came to so reject his manliness, hate all things masculine, loath not only his own maleness but that of all men, that he had himself surgically castrated, his penis replaced by a vagina.
To be sure, this book will shock in places. Some of the sexual practices will disturb you. But perhaps this book will help you reflect on and reconsider much that you assumed about gender identity and what is deemed ‘normal’ in terms of human sexuality. Ally’s story defies simple analysis. But every aspect of it is true. Nothing is contrived or invented. It doesn’t need to be. The reality is compelling enough. All human life is here, in this story about an individual’s quest to remake himself, physically and emotionally, not only for love, not simply to refashion an identity, but also for sheer sexual pleasure.
The background to this book:
Ally lives not far from me in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She is 57, retired from British Airport Authority, Heathrow, and a post-op transexual. She had the operation in Thailand shortly after she officially retired. She now lives with Took, a 39 year old Thai woman. Ally is legally and officially a woman, as her British passport confirms.
I first met Ally in 2011 at a mutual friend’s birthday party in Chiang Mai, close to our respective homes in that endearing and ancient city in Northern Thailand. At first somewhat taken aback by this now ageing woman with the still strong masculine features, I was immediately intrigued by her story. Shortly afterwards I invited her to take part in two recorded interviews on my Relationship Manifesto Podcast Series, which is freely available on itunes and been listened to now by thousands of people around the world. During those two, one hour recordings I interviewed Ally about aspects of her life. The story was so amazing, bizarre and unusual, and Ally so willing to reveal the most intimate secrets about her past and current lives, that I then decided to record her full life story with the aim of writing her biography.
Through late 2011 and early 2012, I did over twenty-five hours of recorded interviews with Ally. This book is the outcome of those interviews.
Stephen Whitehead
1st May 2014



Forword
From Ally Taylor
This book by Stephen will tell you all you need to know about my life, my journey, who I was as a man and how I became who I am today - a woman. I know my life journey is not unique – there are many transexuals around the world – but it has certainly been interesting and eventful.
Like all of us, my life journey, my very identity, began as a child; an innocent, totally unaware of the world around me or the world I was going to emerge into. And like all children, my parents were a profound influence on that life journey.
In fact, if my mother and father had been different, maybe me hiding my emotions and behavior as a child may not have affected the rest of my life to the degree I now bear witness to.
Perhaps gender reassignment surgery would have been unnecessary.
My exterior appearance now reflects my interior. I am able to live as a woman, without fear of people suppressing my emotions and I do feel complete.
Filling my life with what most folks would term ‘perverse’ or ‘kinky’ behavior and keeping it secret from judgmental people (e.g. most of society where I lived), I found sensual pleasures made me happy and my outward appearance made more resolute from the strength of satisfaction I gained from within my secret world.
I now realize that most of the fetishes and obsessions I developed since the age of four years old were actually replacements for what I needed from my parents. It took the removal of my penis to provide me with a balanced view of sexual arousal and to stop the obsessions practiced for over 40 years so that I might achieve some semblance of internalised, comfortable feeling of gender identity.
I am very happy now though I do reflect on my life with a small sense of regret. Should someone ask me if I would live my life the same way again, I would say definitely not. I would start my journey earlier, cutting out the conformity of living within defined boundaries and thereby hopefully achieving contentment at a younger age.
However, if my parents had been different …?
Ally Taylor
www.allytaylor.com



Chapter 1
Fantasy and Reality
Secluded private spaces, dark restricted closets, pungent smells, the touch of women’s clothing, a profusion of eroticism. Just five years old and Alan’s sexual odyssey was beginning.
The youngest of three children, Alan was born and raised in Sandhurst, Berkshire. The town, situated close to ancient Bracknell Forest, is archetypically English boasting not just the famous military academy for army officers, but links with the likes of Winston Churchill, David Niven and Alec Waugh. It’s a part of Britain that remains rooted and unchanging at least in location and appearance. In close proximity to London yet in culture and lifestyle a world away, a network of ancient Roman roads and the Thames river valley serve to underline its Englishness. Eton college and Windsor Castle are a few miles to the north, go s