Sitting in the open window of Stormbird, I watch as a swollen, steamy summer evening sets in. South London is humid, and clothes stick to strangers’ backs as they walk past, bloated grey clouds dimming the yellowing light. My arm hurts: I’ve just had a slew of bramble blossoms tattooed up my tricep and the protective covering throbs with my skin. I don’t dislike the feeling. A book is open in front of me as I wait for my best friend to join me for a pint, but I don’t read it.

My gaze is instead stuck deep in the limited view before me: Delivery scooters needle their way through cars and pedestrians, traffic snarls and snorts towards Camberwell Green, and smokers linger outside the Hermit’s Cave opposite, pints reassuringly in hand. Cuttings of conversation filter in through the window; I don’t hear them. My eyes are lost to an evening tumble of feet on a damp pavement, and my mind is lost to memory.

I moved to Camberwell in 2014 and still, in some ways, consider it home. I’ve not lived in South London for years, let alone Camberwell, and though I only lived there for 10 months during my first year of studying at Camberwell College of Arts (for my second and third years of study I lived in Tulse Hill and Brixton respectively), whenever I pass through I feel a familiarity despite its ever-changing face—a comfort tugs at my bones as much as stepping through my door after a long day.

I left home for university with a number of dreams clutched tightly in my mind. I was somewhat scared to move to London and leave the comfort and familiarity of Gloucestershire, thrilled to be starting at a prestigious art school, and eager to move out of my hometown and to begin, in whatever way I could, to transition.

Transition is nebulous and multiplicitous; it is not a singular—though lengthy—event, and nor is it always easily definable. It is many things to many people: some trans people may medically transition with the intervention of hormones and surgery; others may not.

Social transition is outward-facing and invariably painful, regardless of medical transition or not. We come out innumerable times—from the enormous, jagged, terrifying disclosures, to the incidental, offhand ones in taxis, shops, to new friends, and strangers—again and again; changing our names; navigating work or school or family. We transition every day and in countless ways. It is never easy.

My transition began incrementally—although I was out to friends at home, and to some extent, my parents, this was the first real, tangible opportunity to do so. One that wasn’t the occasional house party, to test the edges of myself, to discern who I was and who I might become. This was by no means an experience unique to me—almost everyone who chooses to leave home does so with hopes or aspirations, but this felt like another opportunity at life. I’d get to, finally, live life my way. I was, after years of dreaming, beginning to transition. I just never anticipated the role pubs would play in doing so.

***

I struggle to write about the importance of several pubs and the formative role they played in my figuring out who the fuck I was without falling into cliché or hyperbole. There is no succinct nor pithy way to delineate the space they afforded or the confidence they bolstered. In doing so, in writing and unwriting lines about what they meant to me, I end up doubting what they actually did mean to me.

““Their rooms are a universe away from study, work, and perhaps even ourselves as we leave one version at the door and step into another. ””

But pubs, those third spaces—in my case third to university and home, my weird, disappointing halls of residence shared with an absurd boy from Newcastle who’d seemingly never washed up in his life, and a quiet, sweet Portuguese girl—do sometimes exist beyond the realm of everyday life. Their rooms are a universe away from study, work, and perhaps even ourselves as we leave one version at the door and step into another.

The pub, each with its varying characters and acts, allowed me something between a dress rehearsal and an opening night each evening. Here I could trial run the identity I’d been gathering the courage to fully, completely inhabit throughout tentative months away from an old life.

Early-stage transition is fucking wild. Mine was hard: with hormones waiting a while to kick in I ‘passed’ like bricks through a sieve, and felt perpetually hypervisible, waiting for a punch to land, or hatred to be spat. I’d get the odd derisive or malicious comment, but I was braced for far more than actually arrived. These pubs, in various ways, invariably and entirely incidentally, acted as a sanctuary of sorts.

***

The Joiners, a pub I’ve written about before, is an unremarkable, but well-intentioned locals pub with aspirations to forever be more than its frame would provide. As students we felt anomalous—the bar staff seemed unsure of what to make of improv dance shows thrust upon the small stage usually reserved for live music (always promised, never witnessed) or shit poems read in the toilets, while a more traditional type of regular watched the football in the front room or generally existed in a less brattish and ostentatious manner. We weren’t, of course, anything new—just self-conscious.

I felt safe here in the Joiners: I struck up a friendship with one barman, an almost-caricature of a London geezer who in the same breath told me how he’d thrown someone off a multi-storey car park whilst telling me if anyone had a problem with my being trans, he’d “sort them out”. My hackles were (are) always up: I’d expected, via my own prejudices as a sheltered middle-class kid from the Cotswolds, hostility from him because of who I was, and indeed, who he was. Instead, I had fierce support from a supposedly violent bloke who regularly offered us disco biscuits by the bagful. He called me Princess; I couldn’t tell if he wanted to fuck me or just found me intriguing. We drank Guinness together.

The Old Dispensary sits just off the crossroads by Camberwell Green, and is a dark, dense pub. It is not an ‘old man pub’ in that the term itself is stupid and offensive, but it is, otherwise, an old man pub—albeit one full of art students. It is by accounts an Irish pub, though no memory of mine confirms that in any more detail than a blurry and faded painted map on a wall and Guinness on draught.

The Old D was where I learned to like whisky—after a swig of Johnnie Walker Black from my brother’s hipflask months before I drank Jameson and Redbreast and felt grown-up—and would become detached from time and stay beyond closing. We’d leave for chips across the junction, slack-jawed and blithering, and fall away into the night; this was living, some semblance of freedom.

We’d freeze in the smoking area reading poetry and arguing about nonsense. I learnt the solidarity of strangers through aggressively pro-trans graffiti on the toilet walls, and argued with transphobes through fat markers on the paint. I left such a vehemently self-conscious vitriolic paragraph up high on a wall, calling Germaine Greer a cunt—bolstered inevitably by pints and whiskey—that I still feel sheepish, though my point stands. I wonder, from time to time, if it’s still there.

The now-demolished British Queen was a pub we happened on seemingly at random, though it was presumably found by Django—a crust punk with a talent for finding hidden gems. Tucked away from our usual routes—our desire paths from campus to famed falafel and shawarma restaurant Falafel and Shawarma and various other pubs—it sat amongst a number of blocks of flats and like a shrub overshadowed by oaks, it felt unloved and out of place and time.

Part-covered in glazed brick, as though it had been half slathered in mortar and dipped in a bucket of oxblood tiles, this pub had clearly seen better days. The carpets were worn, the dartboard all but destroyed, everything in need of love. The Millwall memorabilia, tired interior, and few patrons didn’t wholly signify that this was a pub welcoming of people like me (whether ingrained prejudice winning out or learned wariness, I’m unsure) but I had a foolhardiness and soft armour—if any at all—that came with a lack of experience, and my mere 19 years, plus the booze was cheap, and we were students.

““He called me Princess; I couldn’t tell if he wanted to fuck me or just found me intriguing. We drank Guinness together””

I remember pints of John Smith’s (with blackcurrant—after Guinness and black), bikes filling the hot concrete box of a garden, and an unendingly generous landlady whose time was always freely and unendingly given.

***

Later, with my friend and her boyfriend pleasantly crowding my now darkening window of the Stormbird, I question the role pubs play for me now: less sanctuary and proving ground, more passing place. As anyone who’s read any intro to gender studies will proclaim, gender is a performance (Judith Butler, again and again), and so pubs have become another location for whatever act of this epic I’m in the midst of.

Though now bereft of the invincibility and bravado—itself in a heady fistfight with a deep, deep fear of any act of transphobia—of my very late teens, it was then easy to put up armour and swagger my way through the insecurity. I’d always pause at the door of any new pub, pulse-quickening when scanning for danger, but I’d always enter regardless. Now, with greater experience under my belt and a keener nose for hostility—and with transphobia more pernicious and virulent than nearly a decade ago—I’m perhaps more cautious.

I often think about writer Emma Inch’s essay on the safety of pubs, and how that’s never a given when you’re queer, or by extrapolation trans, or non-white. Unlike Emma, I didn’t find the sanctity of queer bars until much later, when I needed their safety and nurturing harbour less. But like Emma, I’ll always keep an eye out for danger and pause at the door, senses on the lookout for another punch or some venomous phrase.

I may have settled into my skin more than at 19, but those formative pints, in those surprisingly caring spaces, with those friends who brought me up, will stay with me for life.