My Early Life

At a very young age, I found myself playing with the other girls and not mixing with the boys. I preferred their activities to the rough and tumble of the boy’s games. At primary school I was starting to get bullied (verbally) by the boys who decided to call me a ‘sissy’ because I wouldn’t join in their games. I remember feeling quite proud that they recognised me as being feminine and girlie. When I was asleep and dreaming, I was always a girl in my dreams. Every night I would pray so hard that I would wake up the following morning without my penis (at that age, the difference to me between girls and boys, is that boys had a penis and girls didn’t).

I finished primary school and started my high school life, where I learned that I would have to toughen up or end up being physically, as well as mentally bullied – so I learned to erect a barrier and hide behind that facade. I was a quiet, studious ‘boy.’ I felt like a stranger in an alien world, and it became even more difficult when I realised that I was attracted to a boy and I had my first crush. We became good friends and I was going to go away with him and his parents on holiday, but I think he realised that it was more than just friendship on my part and he passed me a note one day in class, saying the holiday was off. I just burst into tears. To his credit, he never divulged anything to his friends.

College gave me more freedom in my relationships, and I found I was attracted to girls, as well as boys and had some short-term romances. I had every intention of ‘coming out’ then, but I was so frightened, I simply didn’t have the courage to go out and buy clothes etc

When I started University, I rented a small flat in Manchester. This was an amazing and yet overwhelming time. Not only with the variety of student types, but the assortment of bars and nightclubs in the City. As a ‘mature student’ now, I was finding it hard to suppress my growing feelings of being unable to cope with the body that I had been born with and it was during my first year, that things started to come to a head.

One evening, in the depths of another deep depression, I phoned a student helpline and I got put through to a wonderful female student counsellor. She listened as I sobbed out my truth about myself over the telephone – I think I poured my soul out to her during my ‘confession’. She didn’t laugh (as I was half expecting) and I could feel her empathy over that phone line. The dam I had built up within myself was finally breached and I felt more optimistic about myself than I had done for years. She put me in contact with another trained counsellor and from there I meet other like-minded people going through their own transitions. I was now on a clear and defined path, to become the woman I was meant to be.