Chapter One

This is the story of how I married a man who turned out to be a woman but still lived happily ever after. It isn’t a story I expected to be telling, and sometimes I look around me and wonder at the strange normality of it all. Sometimes I look around me and wonder what the hell just happened. I didn’t always believe that it would turn out how it has, but I hoped. This is the story of how I found out what was possible, if two people really loved each other. This is a love story.

I was born in 1962 in London, one of twin girls with an older brother of nearly two. In 1964 we were joined by my younger sister. My parents were creative and intelligent, but their lives had been blighted by an illness that hit my father a year after they married. Brain injured, paralysed and epileptic he was not an easy man to live with. That last sentence was a massive understatement, but you get the idea I”m sure.

We children were all born after the cataclysm of Dad’s illness. I wandered off to teacher training college at 18, because some teacher told me I should and I couldn’t think of a good answer. I met my first husband as he was in his final year at Cambridge. He was everything my father wasn’t, quiet and logical, so I decided this was love and stuck to him like a limpet. Not one of my best decisions. I think he married me because I, or maybe his parents, told him to, and he couldn’t think of a good answer. It was not a happy marriage, but two beautiful children came out of it, my son in 1989 and my daughter in 1993, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. In 1999 everything that could happen, happened. My older brother died when his motorcycle collided with a car on the M40, Rob, then 10, was finally diagnosed as autistic and my marriage ended, to rousing cries of “About time too” from all who loved me. 1999 was not a good year, I call it ‘the year of vodka’. Turns out vodka doesn’t resolve anything, and there was a day when I was on my way to my daughter Ellie’s school, that I considered driving into a lamp-post, thus, in my mind, simplifying everything. A split second later it occurred to me that if I felt that miserable it really was time to change things. So I did.

It was scary moving out of the family home with no certain future. The flat the children and I went into was in a bit of a state. The previous owners had sealed up every source of outside air in an attempt to keep warm. It hadn’t worked, except the sealing up part, which was triumphant. The place was damp and rotting. I guess that’s why I could afford it. Luckily for me by simply opening the windows and removing the wallpaper from the air bricks ( bless their determination), all signs of damp miraculously disappeared and I was left with a rather sweet home. I battled with the local authority to get funding for my son’s education. That meant residential placements - schools specially focused on children like him. They were not in London. The one I found was just outside Southampton, an hour and a half’s drive away. Expensive stuff and not the sort of thing any council can afford to hand out without being sure it’s the right thing. Still, it is painful that in order to get help for your child, you must constantly admit what they can’t do, why they are not normal and what a nightmare each day is. It goes against the grain. Like all mothers my default setting is boasting and pride. I thought when he was diagnosed, that I would be given a helpful pamphlet, ‘How to raise your autistic child’ and a list of useful phone numbers and addresses of schools. Ha Ha. For anyone else with a disabled child reading this, all together now - Ha.

Eventually though, everyone involved bit the bullet and I sewed labels into his socks and shirts and trousers. Of all the hurts involved in arriving on this planet with a disability, like a spaceman in a faulty spacesuit, it was his having to live with labels in his socks that made me cry. I took him to the residential school. I had been warned that long drawn out goodbyes did not help the difficulty of the situation, and I was to bring him to the house group, say a brisk goodbye and go. You have to understand that up to this point I had been my son’s liaison with the world. His speech was hard to understand and he was very nervous of strangers, new situations and change. I knew all the things he couldn’t handle, and how to handle them. Going to a residential school was a huge step for him. As I hugged him goodbye and told him it would be fine he whispered in my ear, “I can’t do this”. Every maternal instinct screamed, get him out of here, don’t abandon him, save him. But I knew if I really wanted to save him, from a life that only functioned through me, this was the only way. I left. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. Ever.

I still believe, however that it was the right thing. Life began to find an equilibrium. During term time, while he was away, I could work. I started a business called ‘The Piano Lady’. I taught in schools, I ran choirs, I ran toddler music groups and worked with disabled children, including two groups of autistic children. On the last day of each term I would drive down to Southampton and collect him. The holidays,were a full time occupation, with no tea-breaks, very little sleep and definitely no going out. On the last day of the holidays, I would drive him back to Southampton, get home at about ten at night and then back to work the next day. It was rather unremitting, but I was able to support myself and my children. We bought furniture and plants for the garden. I felt pretty damn proud of myself.

I had been single for about three years and was, I liked to think, a self-sufficient free standing adult. I kept all my bills in a small wicker box called the picnic basket of destiny. When I felt brave enough I would open it and deal with the grown up things inside, like insurance documents, bank statements and special needs assessments.

It made me very happy that my kids were safe, my bills were paid and I was no longer married. I got to be me all the time. I can remember the power of that realisation. I think I had spent a lot of time trying to be what others expected of me, and I did it so successfully that I got lost somewhere. What I wanted, what might make me happy, these things were not only a mystery to me, I wasn’t even thinking about them. On the first night I moved into the maisonette with my children I sat on the damp and smelly shag pile carpet, I had no furniture at that point. I had tacked a sheet over the window and I had very little money in the bank. It was wonderful. No matter how difficult things were it would be me dealing with them, as me. When I had time to think of it, I was lonely, but mostly I was way to busy to think of it.

Then, one evening, a friend came round with a bottle of wine to watch a movie, her husband, she said, would join us later. When my son was at home this was my version of going out. We quickly got into a discussion about how lonely I must be. I explained that I was self-sufficient, free-standing, and had a picnic basket of destiny. I had no need of a man, and unless one was going to turn up in my living room, I had precious little chance of meeting one.

The doorbell rang, on cue, as I finished this hymn to feminine independence. It was her husband, and he’d brought a friend. I had actually met this friend a couple of times before. Once at their house, when we had all set the world to rights over tea and biscuits, and once when he turned up with her at a Salsa club. His father was French and his mother Spanish - it was a good mix. His name was Anthony and he was lovely, but he had never called so I assumed that was that.

Salsa dancing, I should mention, had been the once a week night out with my sister and a friend that kept me going. It was where I remembered what fun was, and how much I missed it. Like a long fused bomb it ticked away inside my marriage, not belonging to my married life but standing in direct contrast, highlighting everything that was wrong and missing. Fun, I eventually decided, should not be an optional extra. I think I also reached that conclusion about love. When I had to explain to my children that mummy and daddy were not going to be together anymore, I told them this: “There are some things you want, like chocolate and bicycles, and if you can’t have them, you’ll still be o.k. There are other things that you need, and you can’t choose to live without them, like air and water and love.” Not an optional extra.

Anyway, back to the movie night. There I stood letting them in at the front door. Friend’s husband came in first saying, “I’ve brought Anthony, I hope you don’t mind.” Then Anthony walked in. Well no, he stood in the doorway and I stood there and the universe shifted. It just did. It was as though he’d come home. We completely recognised each other. Technically it wasn’t love at first sight, because I had already seen him on two separate occasions, but it was sudden and instant, so in my mind it qualifies. I know this sounds overly romantic. I am willing to admit that no orchestras played, and local wildlife remained stoically un-melodic. Nonetheless, we both experienced something very profound and after it everything was different.

He never left. We took up our life together as if it were the most natural thing in the world. To wait any longer would have been ridiculous. At the end of the working day he came home - our home. Two weeks later he proposed. I’ve no idea what took him so long. I had never been proposed to before. I had been involved in negotiations of ‘isn’t it time you asked me to marry you’ which is not the same. This was the fantasy. Completely surprised but utterly sure. Lovely. Suddenly my life went from I am woman I am strong, to fairy tale. Instead of kindly pitying the hard slog of my life, people expressed wonder at my luck. I was engaged to a gorgeous fun and kind man who was seven years my junior. Classic tall dark and handsome.

Ellie seemed to find a bond with him immediately. He talked to her in a way that said he respected what she had to say. What she thought mattered. It wasn’t an act to ‘win her round’ it was sincere and I think she sensed it. He was endlessly willing to help with homework and play sock football with her. We went on a day trip to Legoland. I knew we were getting a bit carried away with the sweets and souvenirs, but I hadn’t been able to give my kids any of these things and suddenly it was all possible. It also meant I could look after my son while Anthony prevented Ellie from being left out. A lot of her childhood had been dictated to by her brother’s needs. If he couldn’t handle it, she couldn’t do it. Parks, swings, swimming pools, crowds. She missed out on a lot. Even more amazingly, my son began to form a trust with Anthony that meant sometimes, I could focus on Ellie. Anthony took his role as step-father to an autistic child very seriously. He came to all the meetings, found out as much as he could about autism and would jump down the throat of anyone who suggested that all that was needed was a firm hand to make all the problems disappear. I think my boy very quickly sensed that this was someone who was going to be there for him, to fight his corner and listen to what he had to say.

Anthony also had an encyclopedic knowledge of graphic novels (which I imagined were comics, but apparently not) and rock music. This proved a real winner, because my son was fascinated by these things, and I hadn’t the first idea. I like jazz. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Who the bass guitarist is in Iron Maiden? Sorry, not the faintest idea. Unlike me, Anthony could engage in conversations about best albums and gigs for hours at a time. Or the ‘Sandman’ series. Don’t ask. I’m told it’s very good.

He was learning how to be a parent at speed. Of course every now and then he’d make some rookie error. For instance, when passing under a low bridge at Legoland with a nine year old girl on your shoulders - duck. She got a bump on her head, nothing worse, but poor Anthony was mortified. She, once she’d got over the surprise of being walked into a bridge, thought it was hilarious, particularly Anthony’s horror at his own stupidity. He promised not to spoil her, but he couldn’t help himself. If he saw something cool and interesting that he thought she’d like, he just had to get it. Having spent a good few years wondering if there were enough coins down the back of the sofa to buy half a dozen eggs, I was happy to go along with his generosity. Suddenly life was just better.

One of the things that was a lot better was sex. To be fair it didn’t have much to live up to so far, but even so there was an instant freedom between us, a sureness that either of us could express themselves without fear and would find acceptance. Anthony told me very early on that he got a big turn on from wearing women’s underwear. Not anything I’d experienced before, but it worked for us and was happily embraced. Passionate, spontaneous and loving, why had I ever settled for less than this? He had a name for this feminine part of himself. It didn’t suit him, or indeed her, I told him I would call her Vicky. Victoria is my middle name and as we were two halves of the same soul, it seemed right.

Anthony was also infertile, it had been a great source of sadness to him initially. In his mid twenties he had gone to the doctor to assess his fertility after a relationship he had been in for several years ended. He had begun to question why there had never been so much as a false alarm over the years. The discovery that his sperm were all dead or deformed must have come as a shock to such a young man, but he saw no alternative but to accept his situation. He had come to terms with it long before we met. Though it may sound selfish, Anthony’s infertility was a bonus to me, freeing me as it did from the worry of accidentally becoming pregnant.

At first my family were anxious that this was all too sudden and they were relieved that we intended to wait two years before actually marrying. We had all been through a great deal as a family, and we were very protective of each other. My father had eventually had to be sectioned to the Maudsley in South London, when the medication designed to control his epilepsy began to make him quite quite mad. We all had to go elsewhere, immediately. I remember walking away from the house with a carrier bag containing a nighty and a toothbrush. I was 19 and not entirely ready for the adult world. The housing association then decided we weren’t ‘making use’ of the family home and took it away dumping anything we couldn’t organize to remove within a week into a skip. Leaving home is not something any of us got to do, it sort of left us. It didn’t make for very stable choices in our twenties, (see page 1: earlier decision to marry wrong person), though it did make us all excellent at de-cluttering. More importantly it made us a very tight knit and protective family. We looked out for each other.

The two years came and went and we were still blissfully happy, devoted to each other and to both children. All the hardness went out of life. If I had to face something challenging - usually more funding battles for special needs provision, Anthony was there. Calm, loving and helpful. I found myself having doors opened for me, shopping carried. Every day began and ended with ‘I love you’. Vicky was always there, but always private. We had a lot of fun, all the time. This, I decided, was how life was meant to be.

Looking back on those early days, I was already concerned about how dominant the feminine part of Anthony’s personality might prove to be, but I believed it to be an aspect of who he was, a private bedroom aspect, not all of him. He was certainly kinder than any man I had ever known. There was a side of him that seemed in touch with a gentler nurturing gender, but he was also a determined provider and protector. My anxieties about this other person, this female identity that lurked in the secret background of our life, finally found words. I was determined that it couldn’t ever be allowed to take over our family.

One day not long after the proposal I ended up asking Anthony for a guarantee that Vicky would never ‘come out of the bedroom’ because I needed a husband and my children needed a dad. Anthony said ‘of course I understand’. I was hugely relieved and we left it at that. In retrospect, with the glorious advantage of hindsight and a much much greater understanding of the transgender experience, that was an impossible promise for Anthony to make, and an impossible promise for him to refuse to make. He promised it, I believe, because he desperately wanted to be able to live this life with no more complications to be faced. No coming out, no rejection and no surgery. He would suppress his feminine self and all would be well.

Logically it was the easiest path to take. Anthony didn’t want to find himself somewhere in the middle of the gender spectrum, he, like the rest of us, expected to be just a boy or just a girl. The feeling that he was a girl had been contradicted by everyone around him ever since he could express the idea and he had tried to conform to that. Everyone around him confirmed he was he. When he looked in the mirror, there was a he. He had fallen in love with me and we were the happiest of families. Surely that must mean he was a perfectly normal heterosexual man. Why couldn’t this be the truth? And yet and yet.

I was blissfully unaware of all these inner torments. For me, he was clearly a man and he loved me. I was happy. My sister had been worried that I must have presented the less nutty version of myself, until she met Anthony and saw we were both as quirky as each other. Everyone could see how happy we were, how secure the children felt and how right this was. We were a golden couple, ideally matched. An infertile man who had finally found himself with a ready made family against all expectation, and a single mother who had suddenly found love and care when she really had given up on the idea. How lucky were we? Smugness may not be a very noble sentiment, but I allowed myself odd moments of thinking, ‘well, this IS going better than expected’.

We were married on the 18th of June 2005 at the Church of the English Martyrs in Streatham. We had - good Lord - seven bridesmaids and my twin sister as matron of honour. Trumpets and flowers, Salsa bands and dinner for a lot of people. It was all very wonderful and we had had a great deal of fun planning it. Ellie even wore a miniature version of my dress. All our friends came and all my family, except my son, because a wedding is the gathering together of all the things that would have phased him at that time - crowds, noise and and me not focussing my attention exclusively on him. Although Anthony’s father had died in 2002 and most of his family lived in Canada and couldn’t come, his mother and her cousin were there and the church was full.

The party that followed was everything we hoped for. It was a beautiful day. Our first dance was to a classic spanish love song, ‘Besame’ it means ‘kiss me’.

Besame, besame mucho

Como si fuera esta la noche

La ultima vez

Besame, besame mucho

Que tengo miedo a perderte

Perderte despues

Kiss me, Kiss me so much

As though tonight might be

The last time

Kiss me kiss me so much

Because I’m afraid of loosing you

Afterwards.

Everything was perfect. We both felt rescued from half lives. Where before relationships had been fraught and stressful, ours was relaxed and happy. I had no thought in my head of how meaningful the words of that song would become to me as our lives unfolded.

It lasted for about four years before something began to change. It was a subtle something, and it had nothing to do with how much we loved each other. That, through everything, has never been an issue. How we felt about each other on that first night, standing in the doorway and knowing that everything had changed, that is the truth of our love. Honestly, undying love can be a bit of a nuisance at times. Something else had changed. Anthony seemed to be carrying a heavier and heavier burden. Where once he had been relaxed and endlessly playful, now he seemed sadder and more stressed by daily life. Everything challenged him. He just stopped smiling. I couldn’t work out what had gone wrong, as far as I could see we were on exactly the same path we had started out on. Nothing had changed and yet everything was different. He was obviously dealing with something terribly painful. I needed to understand and I wanted to help, but most of all I wanted to make it go away.

We talked about his childhood and about his relationship with his father. We talked especially about his transvestite behaviour. He told me how he had gone out, years ago, in a dress to a tea shop and met a female friend. He told me how girlfriends in the past had rejected him when he had told them about his desire to dress as a female. He also began to talk about his belief that this was more than just a part of Anthony. This Vicky, this was who he really was. Anthony wanted to talk more and more about this ‘feminine’ part of his personality and his desire to express it. I remember saying to him that as far as I could understand it, he had a male body but a female brain. Something must have happened while he was developing in the womb, but the bottom line was, he had come out male. Very sad and everything, bad luck and all that, but there was no acceptable solution, or at least one that I felt ready to even contemplate. It was the often used description of transexuals as the ‘woman trapped in a man’s body’. Best place for her, I thought.

Although I was on the surface calmly discussing these things with him, in my head panic was rising. The news that he had once sat in a tea shop in a dress, shocked me. This was meant to be a sexual game, how had it expressed itself by sitting in a shop chatting about the weather and drinking tea? What was being described didn’t fit the explanation I had in my head. What was being described was going to change my world and I didn’t want my world to change, it had already changed once and it was perfect, it didn’t need further alterations. I convinced myself that everything would be fine as long as I could ‘control’ this part of him. Though between the two of us, I felt at ease with the feminine version of Anthony, it was, as far as I was concerned, still Anthony. What ever games we played he was a man so that meant I was a straight woman. Nothing to frighten the horses. I was adamant this was a private pleasure not for anyone else’s consumption, certainly not in front of the children. I told him we needed him to be him, that this female aspect was just going to have to keep itself under wraps. He had married me and become the children’s‘ step-dad, that was the deal and that’s what he must do. He agreed.

He agreed to something that he had no more power to control than I did, but I don’t think he really understood that any more than I did. These were the foundations of a great deal of unhappiness that we were going to have to deconstruct before we could make our way forward. I wish I had known then the absolute futility of trying to make someone be something they’re not, but I didn’t. That particular life lesson was just beginning.

There is a parallel here with my son’s diagnosis of autism. I knew, from a very early age, maybe a year, maybe less, that there was something different about my lovely boy. I worried and fretted about his development, his inability to hold his head up, or sit upright without tumbling over. His incredible sleeplessness, and his distress, his violent screaming distress, at all sorts of things, especially unexpected things, and choice. Health visitors and doctors reassured me he was ‘going through a phase’ and that he would ‘grow out of it’. In my heart of hearts I knew that whatever this was it was a permanent part of my lad and no amount of growing would take him magically out of it. But I so wanted to believe they were right. I ignored those nagging doubts and trusted it would get better. It got worse, of course, why wouldn’t it? He’s autistic, it’s not nits. There is no shampoo for this one. In retrospect I wish I had known earlier, had got him the right help earlier, maybe it would have spared him some of the awful suicidal depression he went through, and maybe not.

The parallel then, is that, deep down, I knew that what Anthony was telling me about himself, was not some temporary delusion and I was not, no matter how much he loved me, going to be able to make him not be this. That knowledge though, was deep deep down. It was a knot in the stomach, an unspoken, un-worded fear. Back in the main world, I wasn’t having it and I kidded myself I had been firm but fair. Vicky would stay under wraps. Problem solved.

To watch someone you love slip away from you is of course, heartbreaking, but not being able to talk to anyone about it is worse. I felt so miserable. I couldn’t see any way forward and yet I was too ashamed to talk to anyone. I didn’t want anyone to know that my beautiful handsome husband thought he was part female and fantasized about having breasts. I didn’t want to know it. If I’m being really really honest, and there seems little point in writing this if I’m not going to be honest, I didn’t find the idea of my lover having breasts repellent, it was just the idea of anybody else knowing that that was what was going on. What others would know about our relationship and our sex life and how they might judge it, seemed extremely important to me. I know that was hypocritical but the part of it that was worst in my mind, was the invasion of my privacy.

For some people privacy is a minor issue and for others it is a medium issue. For me it has always been THE issue. I’m not sure when I got so protective of my every thought. I could not have written this book five years ago, because I simply wouldn’t have been willing to share any of it. Not a word. Like a cast iron body suit, privacy, not sharing my feelings, my true feelings at any rate, had always been my survival mechanism. I was the worst, and the best person, to find myself in a situation that blew my absolute need for privacy out of the water. It was good for me and it needed to happen but it hurt. I clung to my privacy like a drowning man to a cast iron body suit, with nearly the same result.

So I didn’t share this huge fear. The awful knowledge that my whole life with Anthony was going to turn out to be a sham, that I was heading for another failed marriage and no one was going to know about it until it was too late. There wasn’t going to be any helpful advice. Who knew about this stuff? I invested a great deal of energy worrying about how stupid everyone would think I was for being so happy when the whole thing turned out to be a mistake. Surely, they would say, you must have known? How could you marry someone without understanding something so profoundly central to them? I didn’t envisage any compassion, only derision. My friends would be sad to know how little I expected of them. It is, of course, always about the self and the derision was self inflicted, nobody else was laughing. How could they? Nobody else knew.

Anthony and I had a conversation just before Christmas of 2008 in which it all came to a head. Anthony wanted to talk about Vicky, about the pleasure it gave him. It made me anxious because this ‘alternative’ person, as I saw her, seemed to be taking over every spare moment. I asked him the question I didn’t really want to know the answer to. Would he, actually, be happier as Vicky, as a woman? Did he not want to be my husband or my kids step-dad? These two things, I made it very clear to him, were mutually exclusive. Choose. He couldn’t answer. I was devastated, I wept, I shouted, I demanded, but I couldn’t bear what that silence meant. I knew something was happening that I wouldn’t be able to stop. It felt as though I was standing on the smooth snowy surface of an avalanche about to break free. Why would I think I could stop an avalanche? Understanding that it couldn’t be stopped took me a long time.

We got through Christmas without mentioning that conversation once. It was as though the thing I had asked for had happened. That unanswered question had never been. This was the perfect scenario, the way I had wanted it. everything as it had promised to be on our wedding day. But where before I had relaxed confidently into my reality, now I felt like it was the last dance on the Titanic. This wonderful happy perfect relationship had hit an iceberg and no one but us knew there was a problem. The question was not would it sink, the question was, had we got any lifeboats and would we all fit? We just stopped talking about it and I hoped it would go away.

Then, one night in January of 2009, lying in bed together, his arms wrapped tight around me as he always did, Anthony said “I can’t do this anymore”. I knew exactly what he meant but I desperately didn’t want to. I asked him “What?”, daring him to say the unsayable, but he said it anyway. “I can’t be Anthony, it’s not who I am. I’m a woman, this isn’t my right body. I look in the mirror and I see this male face and this male body and it’s not me”.

The shock froze me. The fear locked down. I calmly told Anthony that we needed to deal with this mental health problem. These thoughts were irrational, he was a man. “Look in the mirror for God’s sake. I understand you want to be a woman, but you’re not. If you make yourself look like a woman, I will leave. That will be the end. If you really love me, you won’t do this. If you really love me you won’t be this. End of discussion”. Certainly not the response Anthony needed but it was my trump card, my last ditch attempt to make this not be. Was I willing to blackmail him into living the rest of his life ‘wrong’ on the inside as long as it worked for me? Was this what it would mean to really love me? At that moment I was not thinking of Anthony’s needs at all. I was thinking of what I wanted to be the truth and what would be the simplest truth for my children. I was angry, so very angry, that he had even mentioned the possibility of exposing my children to anything other than unending happiness. I wasn’t thinking at all really, I was terrified.

The next morning we did all the normal things. We made breakfast, fed the cat and got Ellie into school as though everything was normal. As soon as we were alone though, the discussion started again. Anthony spoke of his need to express his true self, his feminine self. I was adamant that could not be allowed to happen. Maybe when Ellie had left home, got through university, maybe I might allow it, but not now. We talked about how long he had felt like this. That was a shock. It turned out his first experiences had been as a very small child, not understanding why he couldn’t dress like the other girls, or why he had to go into the boy’s line at infants school. He had secretly dressed all his life. As a tiny child he had put on his grandmother’s nighty and curled up next to her in bed. I don’t know if she found that alarming or sweet. I found it alarming. Again I was confronted with the idea that this was nothing to do with a sexual game, it had to be something at the very core of Anthony. I had misunderstood entirely.

When Anthony was 21 his father had found and read his diary in which he had described his belief that he should have been born female. His father confronted him and told him ‘stop this nonsense, you are a man, be a man’. In retrospect I see how similar my own reaction was, but at the time, though I was repelled by the cruelty of such a response, I saw no connection. His father had been cruel and selfish, I was just asking for what I had been promised. He was wrong, I was right.

I felt angry and self righteous. One of the things that made me most angry was that in the year before we had met, after his father had died, Anthony had looked on the internet for information about sex change operations. Why hadn’t he told me? His answer was quite simply that when we met he believed with not a little relief, that he couldn’t be a woman, because he loved me so much and really wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. He had dodged the bullet at the last moment. Meeting me meant he was just a man who liked stockings and all the rest could be packed away and never looked at again. It reminded me of a story I heard about Ghandi in his later life. He admitted to allowing his young female helpers to share his bed in order to ‘test his resolve to be celibate’. What, I wondered , happened if he failed? Anthony’s belief that he could suppress his feminine self I felt, had been quite a gamble to take with someone else’s future.

Unable to say what I wanted without crying or shouting, I wrote Anthony a letter. It explained that though I respected his desire to be a woman, he was not a woman. Furthermore, he was a 6’2” muscular and handsome man and would never be able to look like anything but a bad transvestite, opening himself and those with him to ridicule or worse. What did he think this would do to the children, was he seriously going to turn up to parents evening in heels and lipstick? Though I respected his belief that he was in some invisible sense, female, for all intents and purposes he was male. Tough, get on with it. He could not do this to us. I would not allow him to. I could not have made it plainer the utter lack of support I was offering, but, I said, I still loved him, completely...except for the female bit.

It is not a great letter, it does not cover me in glory. I expect if the transgendered community were giving out supportive family awards, this would not feature. I’m not proud of it and I wish I hadn’t written it, but I did. To be fair, over the next few months we both said some pretty awful things to each other.

Afraid as I was of the consequences of Anthony’s beliefs, I couldn’t help but feel compassion for the man, for the person that I loved. What must it be like to look in the mirror and see the wrong face, the wrong body, the wrong gender? How awful must it be to be rejected again and again, just because you say, ‘this is who I really am’? How scary must it be, how desperate must you be to risk loosing your partner, your step children, maybe even all your family and friends, just for admitting your truth? I was pulled violently between this compassion and the desire to keep Anthony unchanged. Within a single hour I would veer wildly between thinking I could accept this and live with Vicky and screaming in my head that I wanted my husband, my Anthony and nothing else. It was exhausting and though I wasn’t telling anybody that there was anything wrong, I think the strain began to show. There was no balance in our life anymore, everything was a day to day struggle, a mixture of intense and distressing arguments and housework, paying the bills, life. It was exhausting and miserable, for both of us.

At this very early stage telling no one else about these discussions was part of my strategy. I hoped that I would be able to guide him back to being my husband and no one would ever need to know anything about it. The one person I was talking to was God. I was raised an athiest but had, much as come to think of it, Anthony had described his experience, always been aware of something else that didn’t fit that view of the world. I made various exploratory forays into local churches through my teens and finally was baptized in my early twenties. My mother called me the ‘white sheep’ of the family, but respected my faith, even if it baffled her. So praying had always been a silent part of my adult life.

I found myself in church the next Sunday praying silently for guidance. ‘I don’t want a hint or a sign or some general sense of well-being’ I prayed, ‘I want actual guidance, just tell me what to do God, right now, right here’, not very polite but to the point. I heard the words in my head, ‘Love is the answer’. My voice but not from me. That’s how it felt. I knew it was true and it seemed the right piece of information, but a nagging part of me felt much like the recipients of the answer to the question of life the universe and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Forty-two. Great, wonderful, how do I use that information? How does knowing ‘Love is the answer’ help me decide what I should do next? Still, it is. I believe, the truth and I’ve kept that thought with me ever since.

I was determined to maintain the control. Every sign of slight femininity, his longer hair, shirts that looked too blouse like, I would jump on. We had agreed, I would tell him, you won’t do that. It has to be private. Nothing that a teenager could pick up on. Nothing. Most days the discussion became a full blown screaming argument. Anthony didn’t seem able to understand why I couldn’t simply accept who Vicky was. Anthony was just a mask, a cover, not the real person. This was who I had really fallen in love with. If I really loved him, I would love her. If I really loved him. That challenge flew back and forth between us again and again.

We quarrelled again about his hair. I told Anthony it was too long, the time had come to get it cut. Women have short hair too I reasoned, why couldn’t he be one of those women? Trouser wearing short haired. I might as well have added beard growing and manly. Anthony was distraught, he couldn’t see how such a request was accepting his truth or even trying to accept it. I went on though, determined that I was winning the argument. He looked ridiculous with long hair, and wanting to look like that was ridiculous, he was embarrassing his step-daughter and me. Finally I screamed at him that he was himself ridiculous and selfish and cruel. Anthony ran into the bathroom and I, determined to have the last word, followed him in. He had taken a pair of nail scissors from the bathroom cabinet and he began hacking away at his hair, tears streaming down his face. And I saw it, properly for the first time. At last I understood it. The real agony of this human being. This person that looked like a man, but was, really was at the deepest most important level, a woman. A woman who had spent forty years trying to suppress something that wasn’t his fault, no. That wasn’t her fault. I recognised the person I loved was in terrible trouble and all I had been thinking was, why is he doing this to me and why won’t he stop? I knew that I loved this person, that had never been in doubt, but what I hadn’t understood, what I hadn’t truly seen until this moment was that at some level at some degree, this person really was as female as me and if I really loved her I had to help her sort herself out.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to be transgendered. It is not imagining how I would feel if I wanted to be a man, it is imagining how I would feel if on the inside I was exactly myself as I am today but had a male body. A body that didn’t have anything to do with the real me. I’m female. Everyone who’s ever met me knows it, no one questions it. I don’t have to do anything to be recognised as female, it just happens. How would it be if everyone told me I was male, reacted to me as male and laughed at me if I suggested otherwise. How would that feel? I don’t know but I imagine you’d want the people who loved you to at least believe you. If they really loved you.

I wish I could tell you that I then became a caring and supportive partner and Vicky approached the rest of her journey to become her true self with generosity and compassion, but that really would be a fairytale.