I didn’t know what trans was when I was younger. You just knew that something is wrong.

When I was around four or five, my mum gave me a yellow a-line skirt with a big lacy petticoat underneath. It was much too big for me, but my mum went into the kitchen and got safety pins to pin it around me. It had tiny bluebells on and I used to love to dance in it. Looking back, this was the fifties, it must have been pretty revolutionary because the norm of that era was conversion therapy. The parents of one trans woman I know sat her in an old tin bath, poured cold water and ice over her and then forced her to drink a concoction that made her vomit while forcing her to look in a mirror.

Fortunately, my parents were not like that. When I was six or seven, I started stealing my sister’s clothes and stuffed them under the floorboards. I was playing netball with the girls at playtime in primary school. After school, I used to go to my grandparents with my sister. I was good at reading, and used to read The Sunday People and The News of the World and saw how they exposed gay MPs. I could also read the agony aunts column where people wrote in for advice. Letters from women saying they had caught their husbands in bras and panties and they didn’t know what to do, appeared regularly.

When I was in secondary school, I did attempt to play football and cricket, but I wasn’t good. I loved rounders and talking to the girls. I asked them what they thought I should do after we left school, and they told me I would make a fantastic hairdresser. I went to Southampton technical college, but didn’t enjoy it much as the other girls were really bitchy. After college I continued worked on the technical side, going into salons and showing them the new products. I ended up working for a global company and did quite well.

At twenty I met and married my wife. She accepted I was different and even let me dress female with her. She didn’t mind. I was always lucky to pass as a man or a woman and not have any trouble. My legs and feet have always been womanly, and I never grew an Adam’s apple. I have always wondered if there was a degree of intersex in me. We had three children. My wife used to operate a cross-dressing agency under the alias Marie; men could go shopping with her and dress as women, and she would do their make-up and hair. I wasn’t involved in that business; she continued it for several years. We were married for 27 years, but in 1998 I heard her on the phone with her new partner. Within four days, she was gone. I lost my marriage and my best friend. I was a single parent for a year and a half. I remarried, gained two more stepchildren, and then adopted another. I also changed careers. I have worked with pregnant women for close to forty years, mainly researching sudden infant death syndrome. I worked as a consultant with a major UK organisation and two charities. My consultancy led me to working with celebrities during their pregnancy. I could tell you some stories, but I am not going to!

I started my transition when I was fifty-eight. My second wife and daughter came with me to complete my last hospital surgery in 2019. I am very aware of people asking what is a woman. Gender-critical people are pushing it into the media. But they focus on the biology. Another way to look at it is to understand what we mean when ask what is a parent? There are biological parents, but not all parents are biological. Parents can be step-parents, adoptive parents, but we still consider them parents. I think we need to use a similar analogy for transgender men and women. They may not have all the correct plumbing, but it doesn’t stop who they are.