By this point, I had been on hormones for a while, and you can see it beginning to happen. My body is changing. My face is starting to soften. I still have the cheap blonde wig on, and I am still entirely private. Nobody has seen this version of me. Nobody really knows she exists.

But I can see her.

The setting is almost absurdly revealing. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by the machinery of my old life: trading screens, code, a podcast microphone, a gym rack, weights, cables, monitors, all the equipment of the hyper-functional, hyper-controlled person I had built to survive. And there I am in the middle of it, in a white dress and tights, with little red shoes with bows on the front, trying to understand what I am looking at.

I was starting to get a little more polished by then, but only just. My face was still carrying a lot of the old bone structure. The wig was cheap. The makeup was still rough. I was nowhere near the woman people see now.

But I was so happy.

In this video, I am absolutely astonished by what I am seeing. I keep looking at myself as if I cannot quite believe that this is possible. At one point, I say, “I’m astonished. I’m absolutely astonished that I can look like this.” Then, a few seconds later, I just keep saying “wow,” because there is nothing more intelligent available to me at the time.

It is not glamorous confidence yet. It is not public confidence. It is not the finished version of anything.

It is the shock of recognition.

The feeling of looking at yourself and thinking:

Oh.
There she is.
Maybe this might actually work.

There is also something very funny about what happened next. After recording this first bit, I started making a whole series of imaginary coming out videos for people in my life.

Some were for people I loved.

Some were for people I absolutely did not love.

Those videos can never be shown to anyone, for obvious reasons, but they are very funny. Somewhere in the archive, there is a version of me in a white dress, privately rehearsing my coming out speeches to half the known world, including a few people who would not have received the gentle version.

The public part is this: the beginning.

The moment where I look down at myself, show off the shoes, laugh, swear, panic slightly about fake tan, realise I look okay, and then immediately decide that the next logical step is to start coming out to people who are not there.

That is transition too.

Not just the solemn parts. Not just the medical parts. Not just the devastating parts.

Sometimes it is a woman in a cheap wig, sitting between a trading desk and a gym rack, wearing tights, looking at herself on camera and saying:

Holy fuck.
I look all right.

There is a reason this video is called Driver 21.

That name ties back to something most people from my past would recognise, although they would never have known the details. When I came out, nobody had a clue. Nobody knew. I had been the most covert, sneaky, accomplished hider of what I was. I had been doing it for so many years that secrecy had become second nature.

As a child, I hid things in the attic under insulation. I hid things in jigsaw boxes. At university, when I lived with my girlfriend, I took apart kitchen cabinets so I could hide girl things inside them. I had systems. I had escape routes. I had cover stories. I had a whole private architecture of concealment.

When everything became digital, the hiding became digital too.

On my PC, I had written a little code file. If I clicked it, it would search for anything connected to me as a woman, images, videos, anything, and turn them into innocuous-looking Windows system files. Then I had another little file I could click to turn them all back again.

No one would ever have found them.

Even if I had died, no one would have known.

Driver 21 looked like a system file. If anyone had seen it, they would have walked straight past it.

But this particular file mattered.

I had only returned to seeing Stevie maybe six weeks earlier. I had a cheap blonde wig, terrible makeup, and I was mostly still wearing my man clothes. I think it was just a black jumper and my normal jeans.

But I was happy.

You can see it in the video. I am sitting in a chair, dancing. It took me a long time to get the courage to press record. I had never seen myself on video before. In fact, it had only been about eight days since I had ever seen a photograph of myself. I had never had the courage to take one, because I was terrified I would look terrible.

This was the first time I ever saw myself moving.

At the very end, I point at the camera and say:

“If I look horrific now, I’m going to be so depressed. I am so happy. I cannot say how happy I am.”

Then I press stop.

I have kept that video ever since. I have probably watched it five hundred times. I used to drive around with it playing on loop in the car. I was fascinated by her. By me. By the fact that she existed at all.

There is one more detail.

In the background of the video, there is a ladder in my office. That office was in a separate building from the house, and I used to keep girl things hidden in the attic above it. I had even removed the battery from the smoke alarm hatch and left the ladder there, so that if anybody ever asked why there was a ladder in the room, I could say it was for changing the smoke alarm battery.

That is how I lived.

A ridiculous, intricate, duplicitous, covert lie.

And then, for twenty-one seconds, I sat in a chair in a cheap blonde wig and terrible makeup, dancing because I was so happy I could barely contain it.

My first E.

Venus in Nottingham. A club so cool it was practically dripping with it, not my natural habitat at all. Later I’d gravitate to the harder places, the ones where the music was relentless and the crowd didn’t care what they looked like, but that night Venus was perfect. By the end of it I was up on the bar. There must have been twenty of us up there, but I knew if anyone was going to climb first, it would be me. And then the DJ dropped We Are Family. I’d never been able to dance before. Stiff, awkward, self-conscious. Suddenly I was moving like I’d been born for it, jigging my arse off, free in a way I’d never known. On the way home we sang it into the night. It still sounds like an anthem to me now.

From then on the pattern set in. Clubs, drugs, dancing. And always the ache. The ache I’d carried since childhood, only now sharper, more insistent. Ecstasy stripped away the noise and left the truth behind: I didn’t just want to be near the women, I wanted to be them.

I used to slip into the girls’ toilets and stay there for hours. Nobody cared. Everyone was boxed off their heads. I’d lean against the wall, breathing in the femininity, the chatter, the perfume, the way they flicked their hair in the mirror. I didn’t want to kiss them. I just wanted to be with them, to stand in that space and soak it up. Occasionally someone would ask, “What are you doing in here?” but mostly I was left alone. It felt like permission. Like stepping into the world I’d always wanted.

The nights stretched forever. The Dance Factory, Diggs and Whoosh on the decks, the music carrying us into the early hours. And then the after-parties. Flats crammed with bodies, the air thick with sweat and smoke, music blasting until Saturday night. That was Pez’s domain, he’d be on the decks, playing until the last stragglers gave in.

But often I wouldn’t go. I’d peel away, head back on my own. High as a fucking kite, buzzing with it, and that was when Stevie came out.

I’d drag a cheap pine-framed mirror into the living room and set it on a chair. Hours vanished like minutes. I’d shave everything beforehand, knowing if I tried once the ecstasy kicked in I’d cut myself to ribbons. The feel of jeans rasping against freshly shaved legs was horrible, but it was worth it for the illusion. I worried sometimes that maybe I was some kind of fetishist, staring at myself like that. But it wasn’t lust, it was hunger. I was building her.

The red dress became my second skin. A bodycon knit, below the knee, clinging in the right places once I’d strapped myself in. With the corset I’d hacked together from a Head sports bag and the little cleavage I could coax out of the glandular breasts I’d had since my twenties, it almost worked. I’d tweak and adjust endlessly. Could my waist be thinner? My hair better? Makeup sharper? Hours disappeared into this drug-fueled frenzy of becoming. Sometimes, on LSD, the illusion was so strong I lost track of myself. Was I a man who’d built a woman, or a woman trapped in a man’s body? For brief moments I forgot which I had started as. And then the mirror would betray me. A flash of jawline, an Adam’s apple, some angle of the face, and it all collapsed. Each time it broke me a little more.

Pez came round one night after leaving the club early. He knocked on my door, and if he had looked through the letterbox, he would have seen everything, dresses hanging, traces of Stevie everywhere. But he didn’t. I ran over, slammed it shut, held it down with my hand.
“Just fucking let me in, you dickhead,” he shouted.
But I wouldn’t. When he came out to me, he still brought it up. And I told him, “If you’d looked through that letterbox, you’d have found me out. And you, of all people, must know how that feels.”

Through it all, university was slipping away. My grades dropped from straight As to B-minuses. Enough to scrape a 2:1, but the momentum I’d built was ebbing away. I didn’t understand then how much the drugs were robbing me of focus, of motivation, of ambition. I only saw it later, looking back.

After graduation I started my first job. That was when the eyebrow incident happened. Four in the morning, high as a kite and convinced I’d had a stroke of genius, I decided my eyebrows were ruining the look. By dawn, most of them were gone. And I had work in a few hours.

Panic. I plastered up my face, painted on bruises, muttered something about being mugged. Any normal human being would have made a joke about their mates shaving their eyebrows off for a laugh. Not me. I came up with some elaborate, ridiculous, concocted story. Nobody believed me. But nobody asked either. Which was worse.

The drugs stripped me down to seventy kilos. A twig of a man. One morning, after a night at Renaissance in Mansfield, I tripped over my boots while wearing a too-thin pencil skirt I’d fashioned from a pillowcase, and smashed my face into the bathroom sink. Twenty-eight stitches. Another blow to the fantasy.

The cycle kept grinding on: work, dress, club, crash. Over and over until the joy thinned out. The highs weren’t worth the cost anymore. The girl felt further away each night. And the voice in my head was louder than the music now.

You can’t live like this. Kill it off. Be a fucking man.

I looked in the mirror one morning and thought: Where is this going?

No answer. Just the same thought circling like a vulture: maybe it’s time to throw it all away. Again.

After about eighteen months, Amanda and I were crumbling.

Not a big fight. No betrayal. Just the kind of slow-motion slide where you realise you’re sharing space, not a life.

Two years in, she left.

By that point, though, I’d done something I’d never done before — built momentum. Gone from being a straggler, constantly in trouble on my course, to actually top of the class. I’d learned that, when it came to projects, I could work twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours straight. Obsessive. It’s a streak that’s never left me. I’ve fallen asleep at my desk more times than I can count, even now, coding for days without stopping.

But before Amanda walked out for good, she caught me.

Really caught me.

She was meant to be in Leicester for the weekend with her friend Katrina. However, they changed their plans for some reason or other and decided to come back to Nottingham. She flung the door open, the pair of them stood there and looked at me.

“Hello, ladies?” I said. Not much else I could do, really.

It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been caught like that. And I should’ve been terrified. But I wasn’t. Maybe I wanted her gone, and this was the price to be paid.

She left not long after that. But she didn’t take everything.

She left her sewing machine.

And that, as it would turn out, was dangerous.

After Amanda, I somehow blagged my way into a swanky two-bedroom apartment. Proper little scam, too. Lied through my teeth, told the Victoria Flats management board I was a full-time worker now and not a student, handed over a bar pay slip like it proved anything. They bought it.

The bank even got so pleased with my “responsible” finances that, before I’d even graduated, the student adviser took me to lunch and offered me a loan. Unbelievable. I took it, of course. I furnished the flat like I was a young executive instead of a broke student — “Laura Ashley” naff 1980s sofa, stereo system, and houseplants I had no idea how to keep alive.

And for a while, I tried to stop dressing. Clean slate. Fresh start.

When I moved in, my legs were shaved smooth. I was hoping they’d grow back fast enough so I could wear shorts soon like a normal lad. I remember meticulously decorating that flat while R.E.M’s Greatest Hits played in the background. That album still takes me straight back to that time.

I felt calm. I felt like a grown-up. I felt middle class. I had nice things — and for a boy from Skelmersdale, that felt important.

I thought I’d buried Stevie again.

It didn’t last.

A couple of months in, my obsessive cross-dressing resumed. I’m not even sure what the trigger was.

But now I had full privacy and could escape for days into my fantasy world.

With no Amanda to share tights with, no bras or makeup to pinch — I had to start getting my own.

The shopping was terrifying. Buying shoes in size nine felt like standing on a stage holding a neon sign that screamed TRANNY. But I had a trick. I’d write myself a shopping list in wobbly handwriting, linger by the tights, scratch my head like a clueless boyfriend:

“Sorry, my girlfriend sent me in here — no idea what denier means.”

Same with makeup. Scribbled notes. Feigned confusion. Oscar-worthy performances.

And then the sewing started.

I taught myself the machine Amanda left behind. Got good, too. I started turning anything I could find into clothes — bed linen, old curtains. Nothing was safe. The pillowcase that used to be hers became a pencil skirt.

My crowning glory? A corset made from an old Head sports bag. The fabric was thick as armour, but I stitched panels, reused the zip, and when I pulled it tight, it actually worked. I had a snatched little waist. From a sports bag.

There wasn’t much in that flat that didn’t get gender-flipped and stitched into something I could wear.

My days ran like clockwork — code, project, fantasise, dress. Eat something. Repeat.

Meanwhile, Pez had thrown himself even deeper into club culture. He’d bought Technics decks, turned into a proper DJ — really good, too — and was living for ecstasy-fuelled raves. At the time, it was just his scene, not mine.

But sometime later — not immediately, but down the line — he told me something that floored me.

He was exactly like me.

Same secret. Same ache. Same years of silent shame.

We’d grown up in separate northern working-class towns, thinking we were alone — and all that time, we’d both been cross-dressing kids in hiding. Now here we were in our early twenties, still carrying it, still trying to work out what the hell to do with it.

It’s mad to think about now. All that time. All that closeness. And this invisible bond we couldn’t even name until later.

One night, he invited me out. Proper clubbing. My modus operandi used to be to attend the pub part of the evening and then go home and become Stevie.

But on this occasion, I said yes.

He handed me ecstasy. I said yes to that, too.

And that night, everything shifted.

I arrived at university. Correction: I arrived twice. I bailed on maths the first time around and had to reroute my life to try again. Thanks to the glorious Louise Ellman, then head of West Lancs District Council, I was somehow awarded a full maintenance grant again. This was in the days where fees were also paid. So, another free university course.

On my second-degree course, I found my “stride” pretty quickly, I started well but by month 3 I descended. I drank too much, spent way more than I had, and lived permanently overdrawn, I was worse than most students. In fact, my account was so overdrawn, I used to have to go and see the student banking advisor in the branch, and she would write a little yellow note that said I could have some more money. I would then present it to the cashier, who would glance up to check before handing over the little extra cash. It was quite funny; she used to make me justify what I was spending it on. But I was such a cheeky chappy I used to get away with it every single time with a smile and a wink.

Whole days were then spent in the pub “the Leo Sayer” (all dayer), drinking beer and ordering filet mignon, or some other dish that there was no way a student could afford. This was funded by handwritten cheques that “might” cash, and endless excursions to buy records and second-hand vintage clothes.

Although, I did work hard at first, too. Some of the early projects were genuinely impressive. But by the end of the first year, the head of the course sat me down and told me they were considering kicking me off. Three others were being turfed out. I was only spared because I’d shown such clear promise at the start.

By each term end I was living on dried pasta and tomato ketchup, after the glorious five-week pub binges had left me absolutely broke and unable to secure any more overdraft. So broke I was hitchhiking back to my mother’s house for holidays.

At the start of second year, I realised I needed to tether my ludicrous spending habits. I picked up a bar job four evenings a week. And I started to clean up my act. I pulled my finger out and began to achieve academically too. By the end of third year, I had the top grades on my course, which surprised the fuck out of all the nerds.

My crowning glory came in my third year: I designed a smart turbo trainer for bikes. This was the early 90s. You’d connect your bike to it and ride a virtual course, watching a little stickman move across a line representing terrain. I wrote all the code, built the electronic circuit boards, and did all the physical engineering myself. It was fucking brilliant, honestly. I demonstrated it in front of the entire course, and they were gobsmacked. One of the lecturers made a sarky joke about marking me down because it was so noisy. The rest of the class, tragically, thought he meant it. I got an A++. My project was way better than anything else. This set a pattern for my life, “go big or go home”. More grandiose ideas and bigger dreams.

The bar job was at the Royal Concert Hall and Theatre bar in Nottingham, not just a student dive, but a proper venue. Great job. We’d start at 6 p.m., serve a burst of drinks before the show, prep a few for the interval, maybe hang back for a trickle of post-show punters… and by 9:30 we were done. Out the side door, down the street, and off to the pub.

Once I was through the door, Peter “Pez” Johnson was through the door too. Peter was my soulmate, my twin. He was styled just like me but better looking. We were both cut from a different cloth to the rest of our course—black 501s, black jackets, like some gang from Grease. And Peter really did look like John Travolta. Together, we were inseparable.

Oh lord, did we get up to some terrible, terrible things in that bar. Things I probably can't discuss to this day for fear of being arrested. We’d have drinking races. We’d point to the optics, whiskey, gin, vodka, rum. Each take turns picking five different spirits, then go: one, two, three… and smash the lot down.

There was a guy called Clive who worked there too. Couldn’t roll a spliff to save his life. Constantly handed me the gear to do it for him. And I, of course, rolled him fake joints and stole the good stuff, smoked it myself later down the pub with Peter and Amanda.

Amanda worked at the same bar. That’s where I met her. She was a little older, already graduated. Studied fashion. One of the funniest girls I’d ever met. Sharp, quick, wicked sense of humour—she actually had her own catchphrases. But also, fragile. Very fragile about her appearance. She’d sit for hours sketching silhouettes of women, drawing clothes, stitching bits together, making outfits from scratch. Bleach-blonde hair, a pretty-ish face. But in my heart, if I’m being truthful, I didn’t find her as beautiful as my first girlfriend, Katy.

When I met Amanda in the bar, she was actually my second choice of bar staff. I’d already tried it on with another girl called Helen. I’d managed to get myself back to Helen’s house, and a little bit of a snog, when I spotted in the corner a massive pile of albums—all the same album—in boxes that had been sealed but opened. And I looked at the albums and said, “They’re all the same.” And she said, “Yes. My boyfriend—”

And then I sighed, “Oh God, you’ve a boyfriend.”

“Yes,” she said, “my boyfriend is the UK manager for an up-and-coming new band. They’re going to be massive.”

“Oh right,” I said. “What are they called?”

“Nirvana,” she said.

At the beginning of my second year at university, a new panic crept in. Subtle at first. A small change in the mirror. Then not so small.

My hairline was receding.

Not by much but enough that I knew. And this was 1989, long before bald men were sexy or shaven heads were normal. Bald meant loser. Bald meant desperation. Bald meant greasy comb-over men.

I wasn’t exactly at home in my own skin to begin with.

But bald and male?

That was a bridge too far.

It felt like another theft. Like the universe was removing options one strand at a time. I couldn’t name it then, but now I see it clearly: I wasn’t mourning the loss of hair, I was mourning the loss of feminine potential. That line at the front of my head was the line between possibility and despair.

Crossdressing… for that first year, and then the first three months of my second year, I held steady. I did not cross-dress at all. There'd been quite the gap. I hadn't really actively done that much of it in 3 or 4 years.

I thought maybe I’d outrun it again. I’d done it before with Katy, and now here I was, cohabiting with Amanda and living in the world.

Then came the catsuit.

She made it herself, sleek, black, very 1960s. I remember the exact texture. I remember the night she tried it on and twirled in front of the mirror, and my entire brain combusted.

It was over.

The flood came back, all at once. The urge. The ache. The Knowing. My resistance evaporated.

I didn’t just want to wear it. I wanted to disappear inside it. I just wanted to be a fucking girl.

And so normal service was resumed.

At that point, my hair was still longish on top. I’d tie it into a little man-bun ponytail. Thinning at the front, yes but I could cheat it with an Alice band. Still disguise the damage. Still hold onto the illusion.

But this wasn’t like before, when dressing was a little more sporadic, a kind of secret pressure valve. Now it was obsessive. Constant. I was wearing women’s clothes beneath my own during the day, stripping them off in a panic before she got home. I knew exactly which of Amanda’s items fit me. And I was meticulous. Careful not to damage anything.

We lived in a tiny flat, basically a bedsit. After a few months, I was getting braver at shopping. I remember pulling off the baseboards beneath the kitchen units and hiding newly purchased clothes and shoes there. A whole stash, tucked behind laminate and woodchip. I lived in constant fear that one of those boards would come loose.

The bedsit was directly above a shoe shop. And for some reason, God knows why, I actually went and bought shoes in there. Size 9. I have no idea why I didn’t go further afield. Maybe I wanted to get caught. Maybe I didn’t care anymore.

But more than anything I was doing, it was the thinking I couldn’t escape. The ache of it. The obsession. It consumed me not just the hiding, not just the dressing, but the unspoken truth underneath it. A truth I couldn’t name. A shape I didn’t recognise. The shape of me that didn’t fit.

Amanda used to buy Cosmopolitan magazine every month without fail. We had this giant pile of them under the coffee table. She wouldn’t miss an issue. This was the early ’90s, before the internet, before Reddit threads and YouTube channels, before anyone talked openly about any of this. The only knowledge I had of people like me came from the occasional TV documentary, which usually left me feeling more horrified than hopeful.

Then one day, I picked up one of Amanda’s Cosmos, and there it was a feature about three transgender women. I remember it like it was yesterday. The first story opened with a line that stayed with me for decades: “Jeremy was an unhappy woman. Then again, he was an unhappy man.” That line hit me like a punch to the chest. It was mocking, dismissive, designed to get a sneer out of the reader.

The third and final story ended on something even crueller. The journalist had just left the home of a woman in her sixties. As she got into a taxi, the driver asked, “Was that a man or a woman?” And the journalist closed the article with the words: “I don’t know. You tell me.”

That was the tone of the whole piece. Not empathy. Not curiosity. Just ridicule. It’s hard to describe how it made me feel. It was like a confirmation that this was a terrible thing. That these people were freaks. And that if I ever did this, I would be a freak too.

I think I knew, even then, what I was and what I secretly wanted and longed for. I just didn’t think I’d ever do anything about it. I thought I would eventually bury it.

I just thought I’d live out my life as an obsessive, unhappy cross-dresser

.

⚡ Lightning Rebirth — Read in order
Introduction | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 (coming soon)

The move to Skelmersdale didn’t just shift the geography, it shifted the family. Within months of arriving, my mum had two more children in quick succession. I was six and a half, no longer the centre of anything. The house filled with nappies and crying and clutter, and I faded into the corners.

The secret didn’t go away. It just got harder to manage.

Everything became about timing.

When is she going to head to the shops? That’s what I was waiting for. Because we had no car, my mum would walk to the Concourse most days, dragging one of those old two-wheel trolleys behind her and the two little ones in tow. And if I was lucky, she'd leave me home alone just long enough.

That was the pulse in my head most days… Steal. Dress. Hide. Panic. Repeat.

But I don’t want to pretend that’s all I was. I wasn’t some tragic kid skulking around in shame 24/7. I was also just… a kid. I taped music off the radio. I rode my BMX everywhere and fell off it just as often. I dislocated my shoulder 14 times before they finally operated on it when I was 16. The day I came out of hospital, with a drain yanked from my shoulder, was the same day as Live Aid. Those two things will always be linked in my head.

I built dens obsessively in every scrap of woodland and backyard I could find. The local kids used to call me Professor Bennett, because I was always rigging up homemade camping stoves out of Meccano and dragging my friends on elaborate overnight expeditions into each other’s gardens. I also built elaborate tree houses and go-karts with CB radios and chrome exhausts up the side. I was very good at making things. I wasn’t just a little trans girl in hiding. There was more to me than the secret.

Then came 1985.

I was sixteen. School was done. College was on the horizon. And that summer felt genuinely glorious. All my old school friends were still intact. We hadn’t scattered yet, hadn’t joined the army or drifted away into work. The rest, we were all heading to the same further education college come September, and for that brief window, it felt like nothing had changed.

We played football almost every day on the school field behind one of the nicer estates, then sat in circles drinking cheap cider in the evening we weren’t supposed to have. I remember Songs from the Big Chair and Wham playing on someone’s ghetto blaster. I remember Miami Vice on the telly. Teenage drunken parties and Now That’s What I Call Music 3. It was a pause in the timeline. I remember that summer with such deep affection.

By this time, male grooming had gone mainstream, thanks to 80s pop stars, and I leaned right into it. From an awkward, mop-haired, spotty kid, I suddenly became decent-looking. I’d say I jumped from a 6 to a solid 8. For once, I liked how I looked.

And the hair. God, the hair. This was mullet territory, and I had probably the greatest mullet ever to grace Skelmersdale. A hybrid of John Taylor from Duran Duran and Bono at his most resplendent. I’d spend hours each day prepping it. I once went into a hairdresser and asked them to straighten the back of my hair. They looked at me like I’d escaped from a clinic. I explained that I knew there was a technique, the reverse of a perm, using perm solution to pull the hair straight. I think they thought I was insane. But I took it all very seriously.

Later, when I was seventeen, I got a part-time job in the choc ice factory, which funded elaborate fashion pilgrimages into Liverpool. I’d come back from Topshop with lemon and pink cardigans, bat-winged leather jackets, boots I could tuck my corduroys into. I probably fancied myself as some kind of neo-romantic slash Miami Vice slash Bono clone. And to be fair, it kind of worked.

Years later, I found out a group of girls used to hide out behind my mum’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of me. They thought I looked like George Michael. Apparently, they were heartbroken when they found out I had a girlfriend.

And then I met her.

Even now, I can’t talk about Katy without softening a little. She was easily the cleverest girl in her year at school a straight A student back in the days when almost nobody got straight A’s. I was absolutely in love. Stupidly, wholly, breathlessly in love.

We saw each other often maybe four nights a week — either at her house or mine. But on certain occasions, we’d end up at those teenage house parties, the kind where no adults were around and you could get away with staying the night. Those nights were magic. I’d wake up beside her, my arm draped across her waist, like the world had finally done something right.

She was only 15, but she had this older self about her — especially what she wore under her clothes at those parties, which shocked me at the time. The full “Victoria’s Secret” look. Her parents must’ve been either oblivious, very progressive, or pretty naïve.

Later, during my A-levels, a friend of mine, Alan, whose girlfriend was good friends with Katy, gave me the whisper:

“She wants to have sex.”

I couldn’t believe it. Jesus.

So, we began. Awkward, early, primitive attempts at sex. I can’t remember how many times it happened. But I do remember the inner shift — the private part nobody could see. I often found my mind slipping, almost instinctively, into her position rather than mine. It wasn’t about control or conquest. The connection I felt was sharper, more electric, when I imagined being the one feeling rather than doing. That was the quiet pattern. And it would stay with me, unspoken, for years.

But there was no Stevie during this time.

My therapist says this is significant. It happened twice in my life: once with Katy and once with my future wife, Sarah. That I couldn’t bear the guilt of cross-dressing while trying to love a woman. That the internal contradiction tore something in me, so I chose to amputate a part of myself rather than risk contaminating the relationship.

There is another argument, one I’ve heard from people who believe in autogynephilia, that maybe, just maybe, I stopped because I was content loving a woman and therefore didn’t need to become one. But I don’t believe that. I really don’t. Because even in those times, I thought about it often. I just didn’t act on it. I buried it. That’s not contentment; that’s suppression.

I didn’t feel cured. I felt held hostage by my own shame. But in that hostage-taking, I also felt, briefly, connected to the world. I could be someone’s boyfriend. I looked good.

It wasn’t a distraction. It was real. I loved her.

But the other part of me, the quiet ‘girl’ under the jigsaw box lid, she didn’t die. She just watched.

Gender dysphoria never dies. It can go quiet, dormant, suppressed, buried under jobs and families and fear, but it never truly leaves you.

It waits

⚡ Lightning Rebirth — Read in order
Introduction | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 (coming soon)

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Skelmersdale was brand new. A postwar New Town with a shopping centre that gleamed and shimmered and echoed like the future.

It was the late ’70s, and everything seemed hotter, brighter, endless. That might just be memory, but those summers felt like they never ended.

The Concourse Shopping Centre had just opened. I went there almost every day, collecting helium balloons from whichever promotion or stall would give me one. My plan – and I was deadly serious about this – was to collect enough to tie together and float off the ground. I thought that was how hot-air balloons worked. This was going to be my grand escape.

I remember queues snaking around the cinema for Star Wars, then Superman, then Grease. The smell of popcorn. Plastic seats. Hot carpet.

Behind the school was a steep slope. In summer, the long grass would be flattened into shiny tracks as we slid down on pieces of cardboard. It was fast, it was rough, and it felt like flying.

I cycled for miles on my little red bike. By then, the stabilisers were off. I could go anywhere.

One of the few times my dad ever really did something for me, he took me to Wigan and bought me a Hornby train set. He even helped build the baseboard. I didn’t care much about the trains. What I loved was building the scenery – papier-mâché mountains, tiny buildings, painted roads and bridges. I think that’s where my love of architecture began. Not with grand ideas, but with tiny worlds I could control.

And of course, Blondie was in the charts. Some of the older girls dressed like Debbie Harry – short skirts, messy hair, confident eyes. That was the first time I ever felt real envy. Not attraction. Envy. Why couldn’t I dress like that? Why couldn’t I be like that?

Once we were settled in Skelmersdale, normal service was resumed.

If anything, I got better at it.

I knew what I wanted. I became more sophisticated in how I concealed things – more careful, more methodical. The cycle was already in place by then, and it always followed the same pattern.

A trigger. A spark. Something small – a pair of boots my mum brought home, a dress I couldn’t stop staring at, a model on the cover of Woman’s Weekly. Something that lit the fuse.

Then the pull.

It was never casual. Never playful. Once the urge hit, I went full tilt.

I’d start assembling the things I wanted to wear, always in two categories.

First, the safe stuff – the old ’70s pieces I knew she’d never wear again. I could steal those outright. Hide them. Make them mine.

Second, the riskier items – the ones she still wore. Those I had to borrow with military precision. I memorised how they were folded, noted which drawer they came from, tracked how often she used them. I’d take them, wear them, and put them back exactly as they were. No creases. No traces. No evidence.

It was a system. I was methodical.

I stored the permanent theft items – the ’70s things I knew she'd never wear again – in a giant jigsaw puzzle box. One of those big 3,000-piece ones my grandad used to give me. Nobody else touched them, so I thought it was safe. I also stashed a few pairs of tights in there. Ones I thought I might get away with – maybe they’d started to ladder slightly or looked like something she wouldn’t miss.

It was all calculated. Quiet. Controlled. Hidden in plain sight.

And for a while, it was.

Until it wasn’t.

One day after school, I opened the box and everything was gone. Whatever had been in there – old ’70s pieces, maybe some laddered tights, the odd skirt or slinky top I’d convinced myself she wouldn’t miss – it was all gone. Every last trace. No note. No comment. Just the echo of absence.

That was always the final stage of the cycle: discovery without confrontation. My mother never said a word. Not then. Not ever. But I knew. And she knew I knew.

The shame hit like a truck.

I’d swear it was over. I’d promise myself – no more sneaking, no more dressing, no more pretending. I meant it. Every time, I meant it.

And then, a few weeks later, I’d be back in the drawers. Back in the fabric. Back in the only place I ever felt like myself.

This was how it worked. Over and over. A private orbit of guilt and need. No exits. No language.

And underneath it all, something I couldn’t yet name: that strange, bittersweet ache when I looked at girls.

I knew I fancied them. That wasn’t in doubt. But it was different somehow. The boys at school talked about girls like they were targets – something to aim for, conquer, boast about. I just watched. In awe. They painted their faces. They walked like they meant it. They knew how to exist without apology.

I didn’t want to kiss them – well, maybe afterwards I realised I did, a little. But the truth is, the balance of those feelings was never even. It tipped heavily toward wanting to be them.

To have what they had. The licence. The softness. The shape.

That’s a strange thing to carry when you live in a place like Skelmersdale – a brutal, northern, working-class town where tenderness was in short supply, and difference even shorter. If anyone had caught so much as a whiff of what I was, my face would’ve been introduced to the pavement before I could say the word skirt.

Especially when your father’s already gone. My mum threw him out when I was nine. A couple of years later, he died in a fire.

I never saw him again.

By then, I’d already learned how to hide entire universes inside a jigsaw box.

But it wasn’t all cross-dressing and secrecy. I was still trying to be normal, whatever that meant. Still trying to figure out where I fit.

As the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, things changed. The music changed – Duran Duran, The Smiths, The Human League. I tried to grow my hair out like Phil Oakey. As long as I could get away with it, I let it grow.

I had little crushes, confusing ones.

In first year of secondary school, I liked a girl – can’t remember her name now – and at the end of the year we all went camping at Lake Coniston. School tents everywhere, rows of them pitched on the grass. Me and Paul Henshaw had our own fancy little tent, and we thought we were proper expedition leaders compared to everyone else. I remember buying a Curly Wurly and tossing it into the girl’s tent like it was a romantic gesture. She laughed. Told everyone. That echo came back all week. All term.

Then there was the girl I went on a date with in second year. I was maybe thirteen. We walked around town. I was too nervous to kiss her. I froze. And the next week at school, she told everyone I was pathetic. They all laughed. And laughed. And kept laughing, for what felt like months.

I knew I liked girls. That wasn’t the confusion. It was just never simple. Never straight. I didn’t want to be with them as much as I wanted to be like them. And somehow, both things were true. Always.

⚡ Lightning Rebirth — Read in order
Introduction | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

Until I was six, I lived in Liverpool. A small house with too many adults. Me, my mum, my dad, my nana (on his side), and his sister.

There was a girl next door Helen, I think. I must’ve been four, maybe five. Helen had long, tidy hair and wore a padded Alice band. I remember watching her with a kind of hunger I didn’t have words for. I didn’t want to kiss her. I just wanted what she had: the right to wear that Alice band like it was nothing.

At this stage I was an only child. And looking back, I always got the sense that me and my mum were a slightly more… delicate breed, shall we say, than the people around us. This was Liverpool in the 1970s, rows of red brick houses, makeshift Liverpool or Everton kits and everyone shouting from doorsteps. But we felt a bit separate. Not posh, exactly just a little more refined. The others always seemed louder, rougher, more rooted in something I never quite connected with.

I spent most of my time with my teddies. I was obsessed with them. There was a huge soft Humpty my mum had made she was brilliant at sewing, always making things from scratch. Then there was Big Ted and Little Ted. And a knitted thing that looked a bit like a Clanger. But my favourite by miles was Sue. Sue was a bear. And she had a full wardrobe: little dresses, hair bows, all hand-stitched by my mother. I adored her. Dressing Sue, carrying her around it was the purest happiness I knew.

But don’t get me wrong I wasn’t only into soft toys. I loved my Action Man. And I mean really loved him. I had the full Deep Sea Diver kit, a First World War kit, and bizarrely, and in hindsight somewhat disturbingly an SS officer’s uniform. They genuinely used to sell that. I had no idea what it meant. To me, it was just another outfit. Just this little figure and his jodhpurs. Strange, by today’s standards.

I also loved my bike. I absolutely loved my bike. I got my first one around this time, bright red, stabilisers, that sense of freedom. That’ll be a theme that runs for the rest of my life. Bikes and cycling.

I think even then, on some level, I knew something was slightly off. Not in a dramatic way. Just… quietly. A gentle sense of being out of step.

On the whole, though, I lived the normal life of a normal little boy. Or close enough. I do remember once taking all of my teddies to the park this must have been before I’d even started primary school and placing each one on a different swing. I thought it was perfect. But then a group of older boys turned up, laughing, and kicked them all off. "Puff" or words to that effect, one of them shouted. I didn’t even know what it meant.

However, the next part of my childhood is unambiguous. At least to me, this is where my cross-dressing started.

Each evening, after I was put to bed and read my stories, always Peter Pan, I’d wait. Just ten minutes. Then I’d sneak out, careful not to creak the floorboards, and slip into my parents’ bedroom. I knew exactly where everything was my mother’s clothes were like a coded map I’d learned by heart. She kept them all in an elongated 1970s teak-style dressing table slash chest of drawers. I recall there being four drawers. I could tell you exactly where every single item of clothing was stored, how they were folded, how to put them back, everything. I didn’t just rummage. I curated.

How many nights did I do this? I couldn’t tell you. Dozens? It felt endless.

Sometimes I got away with it.

Other times, I didn’t.

More than once, my mum pulled back the sheets and found me there. Fully dressed. Her clothes draped over this tiny body that didn’t match. I must have looked ridiculous, but it didn’t matter. Because in those moments, I felt right. And that was the start of a feeling that never really changed. A feeling that felt right, but without ever being able to say why. To this day, that’s still how I feel. Why does this need to be? I have no idea.

But God, the shame. Even as a child, I knew it was wrong not wrong in my bones, but wrong in theirs. I knew it made the grown-ups angry. I remember my parents losing it once because I’d been given a toy iron and an ironing board. They were convinced that was the reason I was behaving this way. As if some plastic ironing board had flipped a switch and turned me into a little pufter. As if I needed a toy for that.

Still, I kept doing it. I couldn’t not.

Looking back, I used to think my mum knew. She must have known what I was. She caught me not just once but several times during that period, and later too. Not in person always, but she definitely found the clothes. I took it as a given: she knew I was a cross-dresser or trans, even if we never said the words.

But then, much later, after I came out to her, I actually asked her. And to my surprise, she said, “No, I didn’t know you were.” She said she’d just assumed it might have been a phase. A very very long phase I thought!!!

That floored me. For all those years I’d carried around the weight of being known but not loved for it. Turns out, maybe I wasn’t even known.

Not long after this period, we left Liverpool. Moved to Skelmersdale a shimmering New Town about 14 miles inland, built on post-war dreams: open green spaces, modern homes, fresh starts. 50,000 Scousers dumped in the Lancashire countryside. And that’s exactly what it was meant to be for my family. A break. A chance to get away from my mother’s in-laws and give her a proper home for the first time in her life.

My dad, by then, was already displaying signs of serious instability. He drank. He gambled. He did unpredictable things. I think he had been hospitalised several times already. The psychiatrists were already circling.

So, this move was meant to be a reset for all of us.

And maybe it’s worth saying this now the name Stevie? That’s what I was called when I was little. Back in the days of Sue the bear and my mum’s dressing table. It’s what my family called me before the world got complicated. So, when the time came to choose, I went with that. It felt right. Familiar, but new. And let’s be honest it’s not that far from Steve, which makes things less jarring for people. Gives them a way to self-correct halfway through if they slip up. “How are you doing, Steve…”

Pause. Add an "e". There you go. Try again. Steve-e

⚡ Lightning Rebirth — Read in order

Introduction | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2