I must congratulate you on your wonderful magazine. I don't know whether my story might be of interest to you, but I think it could act as a note of caution to any who consider what has been erroneously described as gender reassignment surgery. This was once my most cherished goal, and if I may tell my story I should like to tell how I was diverted from it to a much less dangerous and drastic way of living.

I was born the last of three children to parents who were deeply unsuited, and who divorced when I was four years old. My brother is 14 years older, and my sister 11 years older than I. This meant I almost felt as though I grew up like an only child, rather spoiled. However I did spend a great deal of my early years under my sister’s influence who, with her friends, became my sole playmates. I began my schooling late, at about five-and-a half due to illness, and to my horror found that I was expected to sit with, and behave like, the boys.

I really hadn’t foreseen this. It wasn’t that I felt myself to be a girl. I don’t remember thinking of myself in any way other than ‘the same as my sister’, whom I worshipped. I cannot recall ever wearing dresses as a little boy, but I did wear the same pretty pants as my sister, with matching vests and liberty bodices, and with cotton stockings in the winter. These were hand-me-downs from my sister. I was also christened with a distinctively ambiguous name, which, while it is common for boys and men in places such as Korea, was thought girlish in England.

However I do not recall suffering any shame or embarrassment about either my underwear or my name, nor indeed my girlish interests, until these were made the subject of derision at school. But even then, while hating the teasing and blows I received I did not ever learn to hate the facts that caused them until I was 10.  Just once I complained to my mother that I wanted to wear boys' pants and proper boys' school shirts as I was being teased even more. My mother simply dismissed the idea, and told me that there wasn’t enough money for such expenditure when my sister’s blouses and undies, and even her pyjamas and nighties, were perfectly good to pass on to me. I do recall feeling rather crushed at the finality with which she told me this but, brought up as I had been I could, believe it or not, see the logic of it. The teasing about my clothes passed as I got older, and I was considered an oddity, often called a cissy, and kept out of the games and intrigues of my peers. But in secondary school I had made a number of friends among the girls and so wasn’t concerned a bit.

I left school to take a job in retail men’s wear when I was fifteen, and in the first couple of months of earning my own wage, two-thirds of which I gave to my mother, I thought I should buy some men’s pants and vests. But how I hated them! They felt uncomfortable and over-thick and bunched up. It was an experiment I tried for about two months before giving up. My mother hadn’t said a word during this spell until I returned to wearing the nice cotton vests and panties I had always known. Then she remarked that she had noticed my experiment and believed it would end just as it did. And it was then that she suggested I might, however, like to buy undies more suitable to my age, and shortly gave me a present of six pairs of nylon panties and three silk camisoles, just waist length, for my birthday. I was enthralled! I can honestly say that I thereafter wore nothing but girls' undies, including stockings with suspenders in the summer, and tights in the winter, under my men’s clothes.

By the time I was seventeen or eighteen I had begun to buy dresses for myself to wear around the house. I knew, of course, that this marked me out as hopelessly effeminate but I was of small build ( I am still only 5’4” and 9 stone) and had long hair, and I liked both how I felt and how I looked. My sister, who was married, learning of this, renewed her interest in me and passed on any clothes she no longer wore, and so I spent my days at work in suits and my evening in dresses or skirts. I did not start courting until I was 19, and I felt dreadfully shy. But I don’t think this was to do with my ‘hobby’ as my mother referred to it, though I was afraid that, all girls not being like my sister, I would be mocked if my girlfriends discovered my secret. It seems pertinent to say that my love of the feminine, my pretty undies, and my evenings spent wearing dresses kept me in a state of virginity until I married at the age of 35.

And this is the centre of my tale. By my late 20s I wanted so desperately to wear women’s clothes all the time that I had seen doctors and been referred to consultants and was in the first year of preparing for the so-called gender reassignment. But fate stepped in when I met Jane, my wife. She is a nurse and at that time worked in the hospital I attended. She was six years younger than I was, very pretty and vivacious, and one day asked me if I would like to go to the cinema with her. I was amazed! I even thought she was offering out of pity. But we kept the date and soon followed it with many others. Yet I was re-training at secretarial college, having electrolysis, and had changed my name, for while the original was feminine enough I wanted something which was completely unambiguous.

Jane accepted me completely but one evening she asked why I was apparently pursuing hormone treatment and surgery. Well I had thought I would have to I supposed, because I loved being a woman so much. And then Jane said the words that changed my life. “But you will never be a woman. You are more like a girl. And no operation on earth will rid you of your memories and past as a man”.

Then Jane pointed out that I was already passing as a woman. My build, my hair, and so on. As a result of years of electrolysis, my complete lack of facial hair was entirely convincing. Only my voice needed attention. Jane took on the habit of going ‘deaf ’ whenever I failed to speak in a lighter, very slightly raised tone, and with perfect diction. Just this experience made me daily more demure.

“The surgery is complicated and unsatisfactory”, she told me, “and we see many that are made ill by the hormones or have terrible complications following surgery. If you were just to live as you are I would love to stay your friend. I love who you are already”, Jane told me.

We were married in a registry office in front of two of our friends a year later and I wore a lovely white summer dress and Jane wore a pretty blue one. Both were full skirted and had fairly full petticoats. I was afraid of news of our plan leaking out so Jane had booked the time and taken care of the arrangements. When we both arrived at the registry office the registrar could do nothing but go ahead with the ceremony having seen my birth certificate, and satisfied himself that I was the male even if not, as is usually understood, a man.

That was 14 years ago. I have never used hormones, nor did I have any surgery. I wear the prostheses that I would wear if I were unfortunate enough to have been a woman who had undergone a radical mastectomy. We live as sisters, but our close circle of friends know that in status I am the younger, the girl - even at the age of fifty! It is a perfect relationship, and probably very rare. I defer to Jane naturally and she sees to it that I know if I have let the housework or washing, which I do, get on top of me.

As soon as we were married, and after I had told her all of my life story, she suggested that I would like to truly feel like a little sister some of the time, and to this end I wear complete school uniform whenever Jane tells me to, such as I would have done when at school. I wear the green skirt, crisp white blouse and school tie, the heavy bottle-green blazer and of course the heavy cotton knickers that I wore to school in any case. But I confess it feels delicious and ever so slightly embarrassing.  There are variations on this, and different clothes to suit Jane’s whims and we have a very satisfactory life together - in every way. And without having had any surgery or medical treatment of any kind, I work part-time in a large supermarket on the checkouts. And as far as I know nobody suspects that I haven’t always been the woman I appear to be. But if anyone were to say otherwise I would admit the fact that I am not all I seem, for I have no shame. Yet Jane would say, “ No! you are not taken as a woman, only a girl!” And of course I would have to agree.

That is my story, and it may not be suitable for your excellent magazine, but perhaps you may use a little of it to prove that love and common sense is far wiser and kinder than modern medicine. I am sure that the latter, and the world of psychiatrists and psychologists, would find all sorts of ‘pathology’ in our beautiful relationship but to me what they, I’m sure, would have allowed by way of surgery and hormones is far more unhealthy.
Most sincerely and respectfully,
 
Caitlin

Thank you for your letter, which makes some points that have not been made before in PDM. Certainly you should not have had this surgery, because you are not transsexual at all from the sound of things. It can be approprieate in some cases, but very, very few.

You are very lucky to be married to someone who fully understands you, as a nurse working in such a field would. I think you are being a bit unfair to the world of medicine - remember that you were the one pursuing the path of surgery and hormones and so on. At the time it would have seemed that there was no alternative. I do believe that any psychiatrist would consider your current happy marriage (which could not have been foreseen at the time) as much healthier, and a much better alternative, than surgical modification.
Susan