I’ve wished I was born a girl since puberty (at which point everything just seemed to go the wrong way). I remember the excitement of ‘Sex Education’ in high school and learning about periods, breasts and babies. It simply didn’t click during the first few lessons that I was a boy and non of those wonderful things would happen to me.

I remember walking between classes and it hitting me like a sledge hammer - I wont have periods, I have the wrong bits. I broke my heart in the toilets and was late for my next class, sobbed most of that night wishing I had never been born and it’s stuck with me ever since.

It’s not like I hadn’t known I was a boy, I suppose I just expected things to work out in the end. Maybe it would drop off, maybe I would wake up one morning in the right body, I knew you “changed” during puberty. Maybe I took the meaning of the word change to far. All I know is that my physical gender wasn’t an issue till I found out it wasn’t what I knew at heart.

My teenage years were a living hell. I found the company of few girls better than many of my male friends, I grew my hair long, my waistline curved in where a womans does and my breasts did bud for a short time. I looked and felt different and was almost always alone or excluded.

I used to get beaten up for my appearance, a couple of the rougher groups of lads would make my life hell at every opportunity, and a couple of boys made sure I left the encounter stained with my own blood and in a mess.

In the end I was scared to leave the house, going to the village centre was out of the question and when I ever did go out, I adjusted my routes to be sure I wouldn’t bump into them - it didn’t always work. The resulting depression would see me standing at the top of the stairs willing myself to dive down them in the hope I would break my neck and die. Fear of failure stopped me.

It only ended when the worst bully was pratting around on a bridge over the railway lines, slipped and fell on the power lines, then fell again to the track. He lived, electrocuted, frazzled, badly burnt and broken, but alive. Safe to say I’ve been a firm believer in Karma ever since.