What Inspired me to Start JHournal?

Hey everyone!

I wanted to write an overview mission statement about my work on JHournal and the origin of my idea to create a platform separate to social media, that was easily searchable and gave an honest insight into my experience travelling as a trans person.

To give people reading this more context, I am chemically intersex, which means I had a totally different experience of puberty to most boys. I had two options from that point, leave things alone and see what happened, or go onto puberty blockers or a combination of hormones to move towards feminine, or masculine. I elected not to go with either option and to embrace living in a grey area, that way I would be able to have children without complications, I wouldn’t need to rely on medication and I could explore what life was like being able to switch between my expressions of masculinity and femininity. This however means that I have not gone through the process of legally changing gender, my marker is M, and my face is what it is. For fifteen years I lived everyday in feminine presentation, that does not mean I was aspiring to look like a woman, I was inspired by characters in video games and iconic characters throughout history.

Being one of the largest LGBT creatives online, I started creating connections in a variety of different cultures. Working in Europe, Asia and North America by the time I was 18 allowed me insight into various cultures and there is always a historical acknowledgement of people who are born like me. Someone who experienced a grey area in terms of their development. In our culture in the UK, it’s taught that it doesn’t exist. It’s a reality, I do exist and I’m not going to be shamed or treated as if I’m lesser than anyone because of it. During my teen years I was modelling and treated very well, however I lived with rose tinted glasses. My expectation was that if I was kind and created amazing work, people would respect me for my talent, and for the most part people did. However there are many people who are in positions of power who are shamed of their own secret self, that they project their shame onto people like me, and I discovered transphobia throughout my early 20s when moving into more mainstream media.

I started to be booked in countries like Dubai for some digital beauty presentations. I was consulting with different brands who were launching into the Arab world, and I loved it. I helped arrange events in malls in Kuwait, and I remember one particular experience working for an agency in Paddington, we had hired out a park and was putting together just a summer children’s event for an Arab client and I was told not to wear makeup. I then turned up in makeup and one of the organisers forbade me from wearing one of the branded T-Shirts, and I literally lost my mind.

I then later developed more of a professional approach to my makeup work and I started to do demonstrations on stage. A client booked me to work again in Dubai, this time in person, and I sent over my passport to book the travel. When they saw in my passport my image looked like a girl, I was told that they would be unable to continue with the booking. This was a shock to me and I received no responses to my questions why. It was only when I spoke to a travel agency that I was told that it is Haram to impersonate a woman, and I immediately reached out to my kind and empathetic muslim friends who educated me on the perspective of how I could be perceived from the Arab world. I have respect for everyone in their faith and belief systems, however if you want my talent, you respect me in return. In these instances I was not respected and I could have potentially met a very scary situation at security when entering the UAE. This type of thing was completely void on social media and I could find no information about it.

Then I reached out to agencies that worked with travel influencers, and I was told directly that they do not work with LGBT creators because of the limitations of travel, there are a lot of commonplace homophobic tactics to booking creators for the visuals of any marketing materials in travel. This isn’t even transphobia, this is same sex coupling in the visuals. So I was blown away, because I was under the impression that so many people had already done LGBT travel blogs, but there is an entire different side of this that affects people of indistinct gender expression.

Many times I have been through security and been stopped and searched in extremely invasive ways because of my passport image. When I’ve returned from working in the US, going through border control with my passport has been a scary and bizarre experience where the long haul flight has left me with facial hair. If there was an issue with someone of my experience travelling, that should be clearly explained before their passport photo is submitted or accepted. What happens with women with PCOS who develop facial hair, are they met with this same thing on a long haul flight? What if I’m booked through a third party in the Maldives and meet with this during border control in Male? What happens if I was going to the UAE and held in border control as someone breaking a law I was unaware of? I had zero information about this and the awful experiences it could cause. I am not impersonating anyone, I do not use female spaces, I was born into this body, and it’s fucking fabulous and does not impact on the culture or beliefs of any other person.

The amalgamation of the above experiences really tugged at my motivation because I am not going to accept this type of stupid lack of awareness. I was born like this, I pay my taxes, I am not going to have my job impacted by peoples inane biases. This needs to change. And young people need to be aware of the dangers that can take place when travelling and working and there was nothing at all online. When I started to delve into more travel for LGBT, the majority of this was driven by the sex industry and clubbing, which is a fabulous side of our culture but not one that I have familiarity with. There is nothing relating to solo travel or environmentalism, which are things that I’m passionate about. And as with my campaign with the United Nations, I choose to speak about my passions because of what I love to do as a person, my gender identity or expression is irrelevant to what I do.

That’s my mission, that’s why I started JHournal and I hope the content in travel inspires people to breakdown more boundaries and create more educational pieces relating to our experiences travelling.