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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