I had a secret

I had a secret and I was always afraid of what people would  think if they found out the truth.

The media made fun of people like me. My friends and family made jokes about people like me. I even joined in at laughing at jokes about people like me.

But keeping a secret like this just makes it worse. Sometimes I almost felt almost that others could see my secret anyway. I was always painfully aware of my inner thoughts, I felt isolated, and ashamed. Like it was written on my forehead. So I mentally beat myself up and tried to avoid other children as much as I could.

And  it didn’t even stop the bullying. I was still bullied for not meeting standards of masculinity expected of me – I wasn’t very good at sport, I was rubbish at chatting up girls, I hated football, and there was something else that I couldn’t hide. Shy in the changing room. Embarrassed about people my body – swimming and changing after sports. I was called gay when I was 11. And ‘Sharon’ for a week while on an organised camping trip.

I kept pinning my hopes on it one day just going away forever. I always thought it would go away eventually, especially if I tried really hard to be a man.

Sometimes I thought I might be gay, but, no, that would be too simple. This was something else. Why did I keep imagining myself as a girl, dreaming I was a girl, waking up and remembering I wasn’t and becoming upset? If I wished enough could I make it happen? Well, yes, but it took me years to realise that.

At 10 I put on a dress and it just felt right. After that the flood gates were open and I that is almost all I thought about for a long time after that.

From age 11 when I saw the boys all going off being happy doing boy things and girls doing girl things, and some boys and girls breaking out of their gender expectations, but I just wanted to be a normal girl, maybe a bit tomboyish at times – anyway I became really unhappy about not finding a place to fit in and not being able to be who I wanted. Nobody had told me I couldn’t but I felt too scared to be myself.

At 13 I told my parents I wanted to die so they brought in a psychiatrist to talk to me to find out why I was so unhappy. I still didn’t tell my secret top anyone.

Go forward 20 years –and I was married to a woman, thinking that marriage would stop me from having these unwanted feelings. But they never went away, they just got stronger and stronger; and I became less and less happy.

Through the years I’d been scared of what my family would say, what my friends would say, what workmates would say; scared of what the neighbours would think. Scared of embarrassing my family.

In a few years I began to have a nagging  feeling that I was living the wrong  life, or not living at all. Those feelings got stronger and stronger and eventually brought me down into deep depression. I couldn’t keep trying to ignore it. Occasionally I would buy girl clothes and go out dressed as a girl and these were some of the few times I was ever happy.

Eventually when most of my friends had gone, my long term relationship was over, I was single again, I still couldn’t stop worrying what people might think. Even after all that was left was me and my feelings it was still a few years before I could tell anyone.

In the end all the things I worried about losing by being out; well, I lost them anyway. Because while I was keeping my secret I was also beginning to lose myself. Because I wasn’t a woman inside a man trying to get out, but I actually was a woman, I identified as a woman, I felt myself to be a woman, and I was living a lie. I was pretending to be a man because to face up to the truth just seemed to scary and too difficult.

Coming out was an accident. But it was a happy accident that gave me the courage to carry on being out.

I had two Twitter accounts, one as Stella and the other as the male version of me that everyone knew. I tweeted a selfie of myself as Stella on the wrong account, and then deleted quickly as soon as I realised. Too late! A friend had seen the pic. He said it was fine. And he said I looked good. Over time lots of people told me I was brave or inspirational or that I deserved to be happy, which is a far cry from how I’d been use to thinking about myself. I started connecting to more women as friends via Twitter, even before I transitioned. Some even expressed surprise because they’d assumed I was a woman anyway. The floodgates had been prised open.

Next I came out to my doctor, I couldn’t even find the words to say who I was or what I wanted. But I managed to get my message across despite that.

Then I told my boss, and it helped that she was a woman. It was spontaneous, I was supposed to be talking to her about something else entirely. But she was extremely supportive in getting me through my transition. It was still a full year before I was to transition and I didn’t even have a plan at that point; I was working from instinct. Coming out gradually got easier – my work colleagues only had to tell a few people and the grapevine did the rest; I felt more secure in myself knowing it had gone so well in the past. It became a habit.

Then my sister. Another accident; this time on Facebook. She phoned me up to find out if it was true.

She became my best ally in telling my parents. I stopped feeling so alone. I never imagined I’d have other people on my side. I’d never been closer to my sister than I have since coming out. And I found out that Stella was the name my mum had in mind for me if I’d been declared female at birth.

Since transitioning all my paranoia, fears and secrets went away. I knew who I was, I was being honest, and everyone else knew too. I could stop pretending. It was a tremendous relief! And it wasn’t taking up my brain space all the time.

Now I feel I am making up for lost time. I try not to think about the 30 years I wasted and instead think about the future.

Whatever happens every day, I never have to think that I’m not living my life, or that I’m the wrong person. And that makes a huge difference.

And now I’m in love. I’ve met my soul mate, a straight man, who I may well have been friends with anyway in the scheme of things, but the intimacy we have now would never have happened if I’d never plucked up the courage to start telling people that I am transgender.