I was called a ‘s**z’ for the first time when I was six years old.

It was said unflinchingly and casually by another child. I told a teacher at the primary school I attended, and she told me not to take it to heart – that it was just ignorance.

This incident shifted my world on its axis. It was the first time I felt an ‘otherness’ about my existence; and I felt it with a cutting, stinging clarity.