Following her own path

TRANSCRIPT

It’s only – the relationship with Katherine finally ended when we went on holiday together. We attended my niece’s wedding in Snowdonia and had a week after that on holiday; it was difficult, I was feeling awful, and eventually – one night, we, it was a silly argument over something and she said, ‘Right I’m going, I’m off’. I said, ‘You can’t, you’re in the middle of Snowdonia in the middle of the night’. She said, ‘I don’t care, I’ll find a way, I’m going’. So I’m calmed her down, and I said, ‘I’ll take you to the station in the morning’, so we probably both spent a sleepless night; we didn’t talk; had breakfast; I paid the bill; drove her to the station, and that’s the last time I ever saw her.

I went home and I knew, from that point onwards – well, no, I can’t, from that point onwards, something started, some dam broke inside me, that had been waiting to break for an awfully long time. And, I just decided that, so many things had gone wrong in my life, I’d caused so much harm to other people, I just blundered so clumsily in so many ways, and a lot of it I felt was trying to work out what God wanted from me, what other people wanted from me. So I decided, well, I’ll just do what I want now, follow my heart and see where it leads. So I went straight to Marks & Spencer without even going home. I was feeling quite understandably quite emotionally in turmoil, after that traumatic breaking up with Katherine, but I bought some clothes and… just – things just then happened of their own accord, and I just knew that it was only a matter of time before I fully transitioned.

So, y’know, I did it gradually – started spending more time as Pauline, started going to Leeds First Friday, making trans friends, some of whom were, I’ll use the word transsexual to mean people who’d transitioned, others were on the trans spectrum but were cross-dressers or at other points on that spectrum. I made friends with them.