Hope, then Excommunication, and then Hope Again

Howdy, and hello. I’m Ben, and I count myself as an optimist in hiding. I used to be openly optimistic, but the world and its people are going through some stuff right now, so optimism feels like folly. I still retain some hope, however.

Hope on its own is not a useful commodity. This is why I like Geeks for Social Change. GfSC endeavours to literally, actually do things. A better world is not imagined into existence: it is imagined and built, two tasks which go hand in hand.

Back to hope. Sometimes hope goes away for a season. We’ve all experienced this. Let me tell you about a bad time I had, because bad times are relatable. Let me tell you about my excommunication! After that, let’s revisit hope.

Edification versus excommunication

For almost half my life I helped to run a holiday camp for teens. I attended it as a young person, and it improved my life immeasurably. Imagine a Christian computer camp. What a thing that is to imagine! It was there I finally met my people: geeks, the awkward, the cool, the esoteric and the autistic – before I knew a word for this. One of the first places I found people like myself. From 2004 until the plague came, I helped run the thing. It was always the most exhausting week of any year, a holiday which ends leaving you in need of a holiday. An edifying time and place, and a hearty one.

The holiday camp resumed again, post-plague, but in 2023 Scripture Union (the organisation running the camp) brought in a new policy for team volunteers: they had to sign a ‘core beliefs’ agreement containing a fundamentally transphobic paragraph. This, I could not do! The culture war had finally caught up with me.

I’m quite openly non-binary, and am by no means the first of my transly-gendered ilk to have passed through that particular holiday camp. I counted it as a demographic I was particularly placed to encourage: those with hearts in the intersection of computers, faith, and extraordinary gender circumstances. I could not sign in agreement, and I let the organisation know this. They invited me to meet online with their representatives, where they let me know, with several apologies, that I could never again volunteer with them. I was excommunicated!

To be honest, this was not the first sign of the organisation’s trad views on gender. Applicants to volunteer on their website could choose from a huge list of titles for use in correspondence, including ‘mr’, ‘mrs’, ‘prophet’, ‘squadron leader’, and several specific branches of the nobility, but they had never included ‘mx’ among the options. (For this reason I’d been receiving communication as Fraulein Swithen, which was a valid option). And now their policy had placed the gender binary on the same level as the gospel. I suspect the issue between SU and me was not wholly down to the paragraph. Despite having kept (most of) my birth name, I am conspicuously non-binary, and one of the more buxom Bens one could ever hope to meet. They could not countenance so buxom a Ben.

I went into a season of despair. The one week of the year where work seemed to matter and to help, and I was anathema maranatha.

“If you’re an early casualty in a proper war, you’re lucky, because you get to miss the rest of it. But in a culture war? Now you’re a spectator”. This is what my diary from back then claims. I don’t like rereading my diaries, because very little of them is quotable, and very much of them is simply sorrow.

I was left thinking back a decade: to the early days of my transition. As early as 2014, I had prayed with gusto, vowing that I didn’t want my gender to be an obstacle in doing God’s work. And you know what, dear reader? I don’t think that it is! I’m always keen to blame myself for things, but in this case, I thought: if an obstacle has emerged here, it’s not my gender, it’s the transphobia! This was an important realisation.

Fruitless, but not hopeless

Pain persisted. I felt I had lost one of my purposes in life. But hope regrew, however slowly and haltingly. I will tell you why, by telling you a little more about myself. I mentioned that I had retained most of my birth name. I remained Ben because, despite going through many possible female or unisex names, I could find no name that suited me better. However, I got rid of my middle-name. It felt necessarily symbolic to have my ‘Richard’ removed. The name I chose to replace it was Helga. It felt and sounded right, and while researching, I realised a kinship with St. Helga of Kiev suited me perfectly.

St. Helga (also called St. Olga) was three things I could relate to: first a defender! Someone defending her people in what is now Ukraine felt like a fight I could get behind. (Her methods are more drastic than I would ever recourse to: I would never bury a boatload of diplomats alive, but apparently she did so with aplomb). Second, she strove to be a missionary. Thirdly, she was a complete failure! Her attempts at missionary activity got a total of zero conversions. In her lifetime, her work bore no fruit at all. However, what she did lay the groundwork for the next generation of missionaries. Her failure helped the people who came next.

This is where I find a great deal of hope. We can strive and prosper, or strive and fail – and this does feel like an era of failures and disappointment – but the work we do, and the infrastructure we set down, can help those who come after us to succeed, to be free, to establish peace, justice, gender gladness and a world where billionaires don’t have all the money, power or teeth they desire.

Knowing that I don’t need to succeed, prosper, change the world artistically, socially, psychologically, spiritually or miscellaneously is one of the greatest things I ever learnt (along with ‘you’re not actually obliged to finish a pint/book/multi-series-TV-show if you’d rather not’). If we try with only the slightest success, maybe we will have helped the next lot.

This is how I’m glad to introduce myself: I’m Benjamilian (I made the forename longer and more festive) and the things I do may not prosper in any of the ways I hoped for, but this doesn’t make them a waste, or the world worse off.

Incidentally, I later realised the reason ‘Helga’ felt right was that I was accidentally encoding a Simpsons reference into my name: ‘Kippers for breakfast, Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithin’s Day already?’ ‘Tis, replied Aunt Helga!’

Hyacinths and Horso

So what have I been doing for the past two-and-three-quarter-years since my ejection? I've mucked in for friends as a seamstress, photographer, song-writer, encourager, and briefly as an animator (but that's another story) – I endeavour to have a small amount of every possible talent – plus I audio-edited a trans news podcast for a year or so, though I got burnt out and stepped back from it after the Cass Report rumpus. I also seek any opportunity to be materteral to friends in need. (‘Materteral’ is like ‘avuncular’, but femme, and the nuance feels important. It has a note of the maternal, but a little more chaotic). Sometimes everyone needs an additional aunt.

And two-and-a-half years ago, I also started working on Trans Theft Horso! To explain what, why and whence TTH is, let’s go back a smidgen further into the past. Twenty-two years ago, I lived in a small university housing block at Bretton Hall. My parents found my new home ugly. I found it liberating and beautiful. The housing block was named ‘Swithen’ and I made it my name. Swithen, the building, no longer exists. It was obliterated after the college closed down, but I return there in my dreams. In 2022 it inspired my first video game, Buy Hyacinths. Despite its title, taken from a poem, it was free for one and all.

Buy Hyacinths regards one of the first human sheep to go to a human university. I made it in three months, because sometimes a stern deadline is the only way to literally accomplish something. Despite its setting, I was careful not to make it a thing of nostalgia. It was bright, but full of endings and small injustices.

To my great surprise, Buy Hyacinths won half a bronze medal at Queer Games Festival in Melbourne. Sheepy (the sheep) was non-binary, and their housemate Febby transitions during the events of the game’s years. I was delighted and surprised – I had entirely forgotten I even submitted the game for consideration.

I decided to play though all the festival's medalists – as a mark of respect, as well as curiosity. These were great and astonishing games, but the thing which hit me most of all was the overwhelming sadness. Queer stories rooted in moments of pain, abuse, the coldness of coming out and the risk of violence related to living as one’s self.

These are vitally important stories to tell, but so many in quick succession? Bleak.

This galvanised me! I thought, I will make another game, a queerer game than Buy Hyacinths, and in it there will be trans joy. There will be delight. Where trouble comes, it is not be rooted in the very nature of your gender. LGBTQIA games can have more hope than this! And so I set about making Trans Theft Horso, a vibrant adventure into the wild west, seeking hormones, justice and a real kind of freedom – but with one’s non-binarism as a strength, a seat of hope. Making friends, petting animals or taking the time to play an instrument are all sources of gender gladness (or GGs) in the game - an attribute far easier to acquire than to lose.

In the game, there is great injustice, a rise of fascism, a seemingly unfightable culture of hostility – not on the basis of gender, so much as difference, of broad xenophobia – but by striving to right the small injustices, and taking relief in the small comforts and victories, the future is not entirely grim.

Back when I began making Trans Theft Horso, I sincerely hoped its themes of fascism and the far right would be irrelevant by the time it came to fruition. Well, they weren’t. The world managed to get tighter since 2023. It did not want this to be a timely game! But perhaps this is a merit: it points to the need for hope, for gender gladness, for mutual support, and taking active steps to help in the small matters.

Making a game is a labour of love, but the result is ultimately a small thing, a trifle, a piece of encouragement. Back in my college days there was a poem by James Terry White engraved on the library wall, which I took to heart:

If thou of fortune be bereft,
And of thine earthly store have left
Two loaves, sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

I’m glad if I can provide the occasional hyacinth.

I used to live in fear of visibility. I was worried what would ensue if the organisation behind my holiday camp cocked a snook at my true form. Since my excommunication came to pass – long ago at the beginning of this page – I have tried to live more visibly, more openly and more honestly. There was a time I wouldn’t mention my gender or even my politics except among likeminded friends, in safe spaces and cosy communities. I wouldn't even have dared put ‘trans’ in a title in the olden days. In some ways I’m glad to have been turfed out by the holiday camp’s charity, if it has stopped my era of quiet acceptability. This is not a time for silence or complicity, or for being a doormat – a role I have excelled at – but for visibility and audacity, for saying and doing.

Trans Theft Horso has been out since July the 15th (St. Swithin's Day), and I've been pleasantly surprised by the response to it – and especially to its title and the song in its trailer. So what comes next? At the end of a project, we get to choose what comes next. Something hearty, I hope. Something edifying, and pointing to a better future. Perhaps a less solitary endeavour. We shall see! While I find a better answer to this question, I will continue to seek opportunities in need of materteral attention, and will continue to seek an audience for Trans Theft Horso, and to keep it updated and alive. ‘What's next?’ remains an open question, for you and me both, dear reader!

Trans Theft Horso will be exhibiting at AdventureX convention in London this November.