How Not To Meet People

It’s Summer 2023 and I’ve left Oxford and headed for Brighton, a vibrant city on the south coast of England. I’m only staying for 3 weeks but this feels very much like the beginning of the end, or hopefully the end of the beginning.

My plan was, or still is, pretty vague really. When I left Oxford my home it was sold (but subject to contracts being exchanged, and proving to be problematic in itself). I have been told it’ll be 3 or 4 months before it’s all complete, after that, I have no home anymore. So I need to find somewhere new, and Brighton seems to be the safest place for someone like me to go and start a new chapter, maybe the final chapter, in my life.

I am on my own. There are people who care about me, but no-one really around me, and no-one who really understands what I’m going through. For the first time in my life I have no parents, no people who fulfil that role really. I have no partner, my 22 year long relationship that was really keeping me going, ended in 2018. My Mum died in April 2021, and I want nothing to do with my Dad ever again. He was never really a parent anyway. I fell in love (again) recently, but my heart took over, I got hurt, I felt invalidated and unsafe. I have a good relationship with my therapist, but I only see her for 50 minutes once a week, and nothing seems to fill the massive hole that I feel like I have right through the centre of me.

So here I am, 47, trans, struggling with trauma and mental health problems that I will never fully recover from, I’m alone, I have no job, I don’t know when I will feel able to work again, I’m getting paid a percentage of my pay but that will end in about October time. From then on I will have no income. I am fortunate though, because I have some savings that I can live off for a while, but this whole situation feels very scary, unstable, and unsustainable.

I managed to find a place to get away to in Brighton, just for 21 days, because I reached out to a group helping Queer people like me, on social media. I am thankful for that opportunity but at the same time, I cannot just run away from my problems and I need to get things done.

I am not getting anything done really. I am struggling just to get myself up, showered, dressed, and put on my makeup. Just looking at my face in the mirror hurts. There is so much in that reflection of me. On top of my Gender Dysphoria, trying to cover up the bluish tinge of facial hair which doesn’t completely go away no matter how close I shave or how much colour corrector I put over it, when I look in the mirror, I feel my trauma, I see my ageing, I see my loneliness, sadness, and my grief staring back at me. I see that the dark patches under my eyes have got much worse, as well as not sleeping well, I am probably anaemic, since I am now vegan on top of having eating disorders (which I rarely mention to anyone). Then I start to feel anxious because I don’t know how I can get out of this and be part of society again. I have this inner dialogue as well, telling me I just need to eat, or I just need to look at places to live, pick up the phone, book some viewings for some places. The thing is, I feel totally exhausted. Sometimes I tell the universe to “leave me alone”, then “please don’t leave me alone”.

Because this is it, I am terribly, deeply lonely. I feel lost, and I want someone to come along and help me. There’s no-one there really. There are people, as I mentioned, who care, but no-one can really help me, other than myself, but I don’t feel able. On top of that I really hate feeling like a Victim.

So I managed to get myself out of my home in Oxford, on the coach and train, with a load of clothes and some instruments (no way was I going to go away without something to play!).

I needed to get away, I needed to get out of the house which has started to not feel like my home anymore. Nowhere feels like home anymore.

I am right now in someone else’s home, while they are away, someone I’ve never met. I have their things around me. It’s a really nice place, but it’s not my home.

I need to meet people, but I haven’t really socialised for a long time. Actually, I have been used to having a partner to socialise with. Outside of my relationships, my main experience of meeting people was practically hanging around on the streets and in shared houses as a teenager, and that led to some really bad experiences.

I’ve got a problem really, because I’m vulnerable, I’m now openly trans, and while I am very smart about things like boundaries, I am still quite terrible with my own boundaries.

I probably just need to find a nice bar somewhere, and just walk in, on my own, and well, I don’t know, speak to people?! Or find a group that meets up somewhere. This can feel terrifying to me, though I don’t necessarily show it, and often I just feel hopeless. I think importantly, I am scared of not fitting in, or being rejected.

Instead of stepping out of my comfort zone and doing normal things to go and meet people, I got to Brighton, and I headed for the beach which is nearby, and I did the one thing I’ve always done, which is use my creative expression. I knew that if I hung around with my mandolin and played a bit, people would talk to me, and I kind of feel safer in that situation. I have a purpose, I’m doing something that people like.

The first day in Brighton, I got to the apartment, unpacked, and then headed for the beach in a nice long dress with my mandolin tucked under my arm. I walk toward the sea and then I stood and played for a while. A young woman came up to me, very apologetic for interrupting, then told me how much whole image and sound was amazing. I thanked her, I really appreciated her comments, and she walked off. Part of me wished she’d have stayed to chat though, or invited me over.

I walked up the beach, and I played and danced to the sea a bit. I started to cry a little, but I’ve recently felt unable to let it all out. I’m suppressing it, I don’t feel safe to let go and be that vulnerable anymore it seems. Not even on my own. Actually, I think I’m now more careful about expressing my emotions to people, probably partly due to my last relationship, where I found out my partner had been seeing her other partner more than me, because of my intense emotional state. Something which just confirms the feeling that I will be rejected if I show people how I feel.

I know it’s not my fault, I feel the damage though. It’s partly why I started this blog, but this is a lonely place. I’m just writing to myself mostly.

After playing to the sea I walked back up the beach again. I bumped into a man who complimented my playing. He told me he was having a jam with some friends nearby, and then he asked me if I wanted to join them. Well, see now I think something else happened here, because of what happened with him a few days later. What I think really happened, was that he heard me playing, and went out looking for me, and waited, and I think the way he invited me, might have been a bit pushy, not in an overt way, but it was like I had no choice. I let my boundaries down, didn’t think about it enough, and just thought and possibly said something like “Yeah, why not!”.

We walked on together, he told me he was homeless and had just bought a camper van. I later found out the camper van was parked in his dad’s driveway.

We met a group of musicians. The man I’d met was 49, the youngest of the musicians was 18 I think, plus there were 2 teenage girls there as well. I was introduced to people and we started jamming. I’m a very experienced musician, I tend to be able to jam with anyone at any level of skill. One of the guitarists was far too loud though, clearly very cocky, not really sensitive to anyone. I thought about suggesting he turn down but then decided it wasn’t really worth it, I was just checking people out, seeing who is who, and what’s what on the beach. I didn’t really feel like I had anything in common with a bunch of men with guitars and a drum, been there, done that, and the whole thing was boring me to be honest. Instead I ended up spending more time connecting with a black woman in her 60s, who joined in on tambourine (and occasional interesting vocals). I felt like the others were tolerating her. I felt she’d probably had a difficult life at times, probably struggled with her mental health, however, I felt I had more in common with her and another older woman there than anyone else.

I carried on going to the beach every day with my mandolin. One day I was sitting down and a woman came by, older, very short hair, shaven at the sides. We caught eyes, she started to walk part then turned and made a gesture. I think about playing my instrument (as I wasn’t at the time, which come to think of it now, is an interesting point that perhaps it’s not all about playing an instrument). So I gave her a welcoming gesture and she sat down. We started talking about being Queer, she also preferred to call herself that, rather than Lesbian. I didn’t think I might be being ‘picked up’ but actually wasn’t bothered by that, I felt safe and the conversation was good, we seemed to connect. She was from Spain, she’d gone to Italy on her own at 15 years old to play football. Then she suggested we go and have a coffee at a cafe nearby, so we did that, sat outside, talked more about various things but mostly Queer stuff. I felt a good connection, then she had to leave, kissed me on both cheeks and off she went.

Perhaps later that day or the next, I went to the beach again. I walked along the promenade a bit, and spotted the man I’d met for the jam previously since he had a distinctive black broad brimmed hat. I was just going to walk on by but he spotted me and called me over. One of the younger musicians was there, also another young man turned up, who seemed nice. The man with the black hat was getting more and more complimentary about me I think. I started to think to myself that I really don’t want to get stuck with this guy around but then he wanted to exchange numbers. At that point I didn’t feel like I could easily refuse without overtly pushing him away. I wanted to try to keep it to being about music. So I reluctantly gave him my phone number. Black hat man had started to annoy me though, he had more than a whiff of bullshit about him, also I felt like his body language was invasive, coming in too close with me. He asked me about my singing voice, and if I had any recordings of it. I said I hadn’t, mainly because I struggled with it due to Gender Dysphoria.

Later that day when I got back to the apartment, I realised I had a recent video of an improvised performance which included me singing in it, so I sent Black Hat Man the link. I don’t think he even read the message though.

After not hearing anything back from Black Hat Man for about a day, I got a message from him, saying he was going to be at the beach later at about 2 pm. I replied that I had some things to do but might be around there after 3 pm. I went to the beach later (because I wanted to anyway), he messaged me telling me where he was, saying he was sat near the DJs at some reggae sound system. So I thought “Great! I love reggae, maybe I’ll get to dance a bit!”. I couldn’t find any Reggae going on though, I looked around to see if Black Hat Man was around, but I really wasn’t interested. Then I got some silly text message from him like “where are you at?!”. I just said “walking backwards and forwards” (in hindsight, here is a point at which I could have implied a boundary and showed him I wasn’t really interested), and he replied something about “I’m next to Upside Down”. I had no idea what he was going on about but then realised I was near this big upside down house thing on the promenade.

Just as I got to the spot where Black Hat Man was, I got a text from him, which he later told me wasn’t meant for me.

The text read something like “I’m getting a massive hard on watching this woman’s butt in front of me!”

Uh oh. All of a sudden I started feeling very unsafe. At first, I thought the text was for me, and wondered why the hell he’d send me that. My gender dysphoria kicked off as it was essentially the kind of thing men send to each other, and I’m a woman, I wondered if I was being treated like I was one of the lads.

Yeah, the man was sitting on a beach, looking at women with an erection, and just informed a woman that he was doing so!

Then he spotted me and called me over.

I didn’t say anything about the text. He was on his own and instead I started getting quite blunt with him about some other stuff. He started complaining about his dad having loads of money but not giving him, but also talking as if working for a living was below him (yes, the self entitlement of a privileged white cis man). I told him it’s his Dad’s money, maybe his dad didn’t want him being dependent on him. Also, annoyingly, he was probably a bit drunk. He started to bang on about his music production skills and how good he was. I realised he was really trying to impress me. He asked more than once if I had a powered speaker, which I didn’t, at least not on me. He really wanted me to listen to some song he’d produced and said he’d play it on his phone. I told him it wasn’t a good idea to demo your art on a shitty little phone, partly I was also annoyed because I didn’t want to listen to some piece of rock music at that point, then partly because I was aware of the couple on the beach in front of us, and felt embarrassed at the idea of being with some drunken idiot playing some music on a shitty phone.

After making it pretty clear I wasn’t interested, he decided to play me the song anyway. Even worse, he very deliberately put the phone on my leg, my bare leg, on my thigh. I picked it up and reluctantly held it to my ear instead. The song sounded ok, but of course, distorted, and tinny sounding. I couldn’t bear to listen to the whole thing all the way through and he started talking through it, about how some bit of the song was ‘dark’ because he wrote it. After a while, I was getting really pissed off and just handed him the phone back. I think he was getting the message. I wasn’t impressed.

Here’s how, aside from the ‘hard on’ text message, things got worse:

Black Hat Man started to tell me how he really likes ‘trans porn’. Not only that, he used the word ‘trannys’ as well (which to me is derogatory). I was almost speechless. So first of all he’d sent me a text message about perving over women on a beach, now he’s telling a trans woman how much he likes wanking over trans women! He said it’s his ‘kink’. My feeling of being unsafe got a lot worse. I also got pretty angry but what I did was I told him “Let me be clear, I am no-one’s kink!”.

Oh yeah, he also started with the “I’m not gay, I like women, I like female form” shit. Then he whispered “but I like cock”. He’d pissed me off enough for me to decide I’d embarrass him. I wouldn’t normally do this about someone’s sexuality, but I decided the guy was a total wanker and deserved it. So what I did was say, quite audibly, people around might hear something like “I don’t think you need to be worried about people here hearing you like cock!”. It worked, he looked embarrassed.

I had been looking for a way out for a while now of course. I had decided way back I wasn’t having any more of his shit but was feeling too scared to just get up and leave. However, the final straw came when he told me he was waiting for a friend to arrive, and that friend also really likes trans porn. Not only that, his friend is known for offending people, and, in Black Hat Man’s own words “he’s a bit of a neanderthal”. Oh joy, I’m a trans woman, about to be around 2 fucking shitheads who like wanking over trans porn and getting erections while perving over women on the beach. I think Black Hat Man’s insinuation, or excuse for his mentioning he likes trans porn, was that he was merely warning me about his friend. Part of me wanted to stick around so I could meet the neanderthal and give him a taste of his own medicine, publicly. Black Hat Man spoke to his mate on the phone who was nearby, to tell him where he was, but then he also wanted to go to the toilet and he started putting his shoes on. I thought to myself, what happens if this other guy just turns up while Black Hat Man is in the toilet?!

I decided I was having no more of any of this. I told Black Hat Man since he’d told me what he had about trans porn, I did not feel safe, and I was leaving. He protested that ‘maybe’ he’d given the wrong impression about his mate. I told him that it was pretty straightforward to me, and I walked off.

The beach was really crowded. It was the hottest day of the year, and full of people who’d probably come from London for a day trip. I wasn’t safe, this wasn’t a Queer crowd. I felt really exposed, got the usual looks from men who had ‘spotted me’ and if I’d have hung around much longer I probably would have had a go at one of them publicly. I was scared and started to act like a, well, traumatised woman among a bunch of wankers. So I hurried back to the apartment.

Of course, I then got some half arsed ‘apologetic’ text messages from Black Hat Man, but with idiotic words like “haha” and “lol” mixed in. “Sorry if I upset you hahaha!”.

I replied to Black Hat Man that it wasn’t funny. He replied with “Oh ffs… It’s chill…” etc, and then finally a ‘sorry again’ with a red heart.

I did not reply. At this point I have decided not to block his number, as it may make him try other means to contact me. Instead, if I hear from him again, I will make it very clear I want nothing to do with him.

I have now been avoiding that part of the beach. Yep, I’m restricting myself.

This is why lots of women simply avoid any contact whatsoever with men. This is what it’s like for women, and Black Hat Man probably isn’t one of the really dangerous ones, just some sad prick.

Well, I have wondered if perhaps he surrounds himself with teenagers, because they are less likely to call him out, and perhaps while he’s not explicitly dangerous to an older woman like me, he could be to teenagers, or indeed anyone who isn’t assertive about boundaries at all. Oh but then again, that could so easily be me, couldn’t it.

The thing is, I have met some nice people by doing what I do, but maybe it’s not worth it. Or at least I should be a lot more careful, but then, I just went for a jam, I tried to avoid the guy, but clearly I need to be a lot less open with people.

Then again, not only am I a woman, but I’m trans, and on the other side of things, there are other women out there, who treat me as if I’m not a woman, as if I’m like Black Hat Man, and they don’t want me around them, they want to make me spend time in the same spaces as people like Black Hat Man, and worse. I can’t just go to the toilet, without fear. Personally I think I’ll take my chances in the women’s toilets, since this whole thing is about gender really, and I’m a woman.

I am also alone it seems.

Copyright © 2026 Siobhán Sarelle