Penny Blackwell - Loki's Joke

2012, English, Penny Blackwell,

Full title: "Loki's Joke: How I learned to stop fighting and be a woman"

"Loki's Joke is Penny Blackwell's autobiography. Written in the style of a novel, it shows how she spent the first sixty years of her life fighting to be happy inside the male body she was born with. It follows her journey from rejection of her true identity through to its final acceptance and resolution.

Loki's Joke is much more than just another transgender or sex-change story. Certainly that influence runs throughout, but the story shows how only slowly did the author realise how the identity problem was influencing every decision and every aspect of her life.

Penny, who started life as Paul Blackwell, was born in Croydon, South London, England. The story begins with his upbringing in a string of orphanages and homes for the children who had been orphaned by World War Two. There was the converted army barracks in Reading where corporal punishment was accepted, and the orphanage in Hastings where he met a person who was to influence, in absentia, a good part of his life. (Penny's second book, the novella The Hermit and the Ivory Box, describes this person more fully.)

There was Fegan's Homes in Stony Stratford, where he met his 'most memorable parents', and The Oaks in Thornton Heath where he was nearly adopted, only to be dropped mercilessly when the prospective mother became pregnant with twins. With adulthood came international wandering.

Paul married in 1977 and inherited four children. Frances, his wife, knew about his gender dysphoria but accepted it, assuring him of her support at all times, even if he changed. An exciting life then of house and home building, of travel, of meditation and political protests, and yet even more travel, followed. But then began a period of Frances' mental and physical decline, starting when she and Paul volunteered as English teachers in Poland.

Back in Australia Frances declined further and was hospitalised. She recovered for a while and she and Paul enjoyed further adventures, to Iran, Turkey, Italy and walking Hadrian's Wall, before Paul finally changed sex, with Frances' love and support, in 2003. All went well for a while until Frances endured three more breakdowns. She finally died of a heart condition. Penny began writing the story in her late twenties in an effort to come to some understanding of her predicament.

Thirty-five years later, following its resolution and the death of Frances, she was free to continue the story in an effort to show the world that people in her predicament are not alien, but fellow humans trying to live a normal, full and natural life."

Available via Amazon