Chapter 7: Skelmersdale
When my first job ended and when I say “ended,” I mean just before they fired me over the eyebrow incident, my ecstasy habit, and a general attitude to punctuality best described as Mediterranean, I packed up and moved back home to Skelmersdale.
Back to the furnace.
When I arrived, it was clear I wasn’t exactly welcome. I was the first in my family to get a degree, and the general expectation, this was the early 90s, remember, was that I’d be on the board of IBM by now, not some jobless waster dragging his sorry arse back into his teenage bedroom. A bedroom that now looked more like a removal’s depot, stuffed wall-to-wall with washing machines, crates, and leftover detritus from my Nottingham flat.
The tension was thick enough to spread on toast. My younger brother and sister were still living at home. My mother barely tolerated me. I still had some of the clothes I’d kept from my Nottingham days, though I think I’d purged most of them in yet another one of my periodic declarations to be “done with all that.” But the dressing resumed. I was back stealing clothes from my mother, just like I had as a child.
The bonus this time was that, thanks to all the ecstasy I’d been taking, I was now thin as a rake. So thin, in fact, that I could fit into my teenage sister’s dresses. She didn’t have many, but they fit, and that was all I needed. My new hiding spot was a pillowcase, stuffed deep into the back of the wardrobe like contraband.
But some things never change.
One Monday, I came home, opened the wardrobe, and it was empty.
Gone.
Again.
She’d found it. Again.
Same silence. Same shame.
Shortly after, I moved out or maybe moved before I was thrown out. Hard to tell.
I found a flat around the corner. Cheap, bare, just enough. I buried myself in code. It was 1994, maybe ’95, and I’d found the Internet. I knew, even then, that it was going to change the world, and I was convinced I could make money from it.
But I also slipped fast and deep back into my girl-world.
The 36-hour ecstasy binges were back, now with a vengeance. My flat conveniently came with its own drug dealer in the flat above me, a huge, colossal, obese man who sat there on his throne in this squalid little flat like Jabba the Hutt, surrounded by all manner of low-life.
Within five minutes, I could restock if I ever ran out. This was dangerous. I’d spend entire weekends vanishing, two, sometimes three days on ecstasy, spinning, dreaming, disappearing. Then days more in a marijuana fog, trying to land back in my body.
Sometimes, in the middle of a high, I’d convince myself I really was a woman. The light would hit my face in just the right way and it would feel true. I lived for those split-second moments.
So, nothing had really changed from Nottingham, except there was one difference this time, I was starting to become sick of keeping this to myself. I wanted to tell someone. I think I was getting to a point where I just needed to unload.
At some point, I honestly can’t remember exactly when. I confided in a friend of mine, Alan Black. He was a medical student at the time. We’d met during one of those boxed-up nights at Wigan Pier, both of us cranked off our heads on ecstasy.
I don’t remember how or when in the subsequent years the subject came up. But I told him.
And here’s the twist: I looked him up recently. He’s now a transgender care doctor in Australia.
How’s that for a twist of fate?
But through all of it, the drugs, the guilt, the secrecy, something was shifting. Not externally, but inside.
The pain was getting louder. Heavier. More constant. I knew, knew deeply, bitterly, I could never be a woman.
Not really.
Not with this receding hair.
Not in the world of the 1990s.
At the worst point, something terrible happened.
I convinced myself there might be a way to stop being a man by… removing a “part” of the problem. Two parts, actually.
So I tried.
The pain was immediate and blinding, and I stopped just in time.
But it scared me.
To this day, I don’t know how close I came to doing permanent damage.
Later, I’d have three children.
Until the first one was conceived, I always carried that fear that maybe I’d crossed a line I couldn’t uncross.
I was alive, but barely.
The tide was turning against Stevie. The pain was awful — knowing I could never be a real woman, watching everything fall apart, my slow descent into drug hell and physical abuse. This was not a fun time in my life. I was so ashamed of myself.
“I’m a filthy, balding, crossdressing little drug addict,” I thought.