There are so many words, phrases, labels and insults that the world has used to categorise and describe me in order to shape and own an understanding of me that fits neatly into a structure built from patriarchal demands and the gender binary. I was never good enough. I was born femme, questioning everything about gender in a family unit in which drugs were an accepted form of self-medicating currency. I was born outside of their world; the words and labels used to call me were always shouted out and across the divide, the divide that I knew existed before I knew that the sky wasn't really a solid blue shape.

'A drug user, a fucked up addict, a sex worker, a mess, a waste of space, a whore, HIV positive, has an 'Aids Defining Illness', isn't dead yet but will be if they carry on like that, addicted, needy, transgender, sex swap, transsexual, a tranny, undetectable, broken, needs fixing, not good enough, not trying hard enough, not real enough, trying too hard.'

“More often than not the words used to describe me have placed me outside of society and outside of desirability. I have had to fight my whole life to feel good enough to take up space.”

Sexist, misogynistic, demeaning, denigrating and reductive, their terms for me have left and still leave me feeling cold, worthless and undesirable. Often the terms to describe me throughout my life have been medical, diagnostic, formal and hostile. More often than not the words used to describe me have placed me outside of society and outside of desirability. I have had to fight my whole life to feel good enough to take up space.

Recently, 'undetectable equals untransmittable' has become the latest set of words I have been given permission to use to describe myself in order to try and gain entry into the arena of intimacy and touch that I've not felt free to enter for many years. Maybe it is my age that makes me feel excluded, or maybe it was the age at which I started to 'fall apart' in societies’ eyes by becoming an addict and then HIV positive. Maybe I'm stuck there; I'm not ashamed to explore that notion. I contracted the virus at a time before medications. I existed for a few years as a person who was told they were dying from AIDS. I was also a drug addict for all of those years, why would I stop? Drugs helped soothe the fears.

We are all products of our time. As a product of my time, I became so immune to the slings and arrows of medical and discriminatory labels and insults that I baulk now at using more of them, words like 'undetectable equals untransmittable' with which I might gain access to a space in which I can be seen, be safe, and be desired.  'She's clean', they'll say.

“More words and more labels just feel like wearing an exhausting, increasingly heavy blanket...They don't make me feel sexy or present, they make me feel empty...”

I've had versions of that my whole life because society deemed me born broken, a 'gender outlaw' to use a term from Kate Bornstein.

More words and more labels just feel like wearing an exhausting, increasingly heavy blanket, the kind the artist Joseph Beuys uses to symbolise the cruelty of war. They don't make me feel sexy or present, they make me feel empty, like the labels have taken over and they wear me now and force me down.

'Transgender, HIV undetectable and therefore untransmittable, middle aged, long term recovered, not broken but heavily scarred from being broken and broken some more by society for being scarred, 'what's wrong with you, toughen up, it's only banter, it was only a finger I pushed into you'.'

I want to write a sexy piece, a piece with flirty ambition, I really do, but it's not there, it's not in me at the moment, not today. I can't be sorry about that.

Maybe it's the tough times we are living in that make me feel this, but none of the labels or words you'd have me use to describe myself make me feel sexy or safe. Including, perhaps especially, 'undetectable equals untransmittable.' I simply feel compliant to a system that always deemed me wrong and broken. Speaking out on a dating site about the level of HIV virus in my bloodstream in order to be allowed to be fucked feels like the least radical act of self-care I've ever contemplated. It feels like now I have to do all the work of society to reduce me down to a choice between a bad choice and a worse choice.

Is that my training, is that my life lesson?

I suppose if you've never felt broken by society you might be willing to wear new labels to please them, but I want more for me because I want less.

I no longer seek acceptance.

“I wonder what a radical safe sexual space might look like for me and it hits me like a velveteen encased sledge hammer.”

I'd love to experience love and intimacy and sex, but I'm not sure I can go beyond the halfway point you've seldom allowed me to get anywhere near. Society has only ever allowed me to live at its edges, no matter how well my books sell or my hair flicks, or how real I look, or how little like an outsider I seem. You've always marked my card and I'm genuinely tired of that.

I wonder what a radical safe sexual space might look like for me and it hits me like a velveteen encased sledge hammer. A radical safe and sexual space would be one in which I am label-less, one where I wear or carry no words to gain acceptance or to be loved.

I've never known that and it genuinely looks radical. Who'd have thought a fucking empty, silent space might be the most radical space of all.