Dear Susan,

How nice to find your online magazine.

I wonder if there are any other men out there who were not dressed and made to behave as a girl as a punishment, but because, their mother wanting another girl, they were brought up as one?

My mother was thrilled when she gave birth to my sister Maria, but by the time I came along her life had been made a misery by my father's awful rages and drinking. He had left her as soon as he learned I was on the way, and so I have never known him, only that my mother was so hurt by his behaviour that when she learned she had given birth to a boy she simply refused to acknowlege me as such.

For my first five years I was raised as a girl, and knew no better. I was christened Kimberly Maria as my mother knew that this name would be taken as a girl's name though shortened to Kim, which could just about be acceptable as a boy's name when I grew up to leave home. As for my middle name, she reasoned that as a devout Catholic nobody would think anything of it, seeing it as a sign of piety.

I was always dressed as a little girl and learned, naturally, to play with dolls, have dolls' tea parties, and skip rope with my sister, and never mixed with boys until I went to school aged five. Then I was sent as a day-girl to a small private school, and often had lessons with the girls. Only as I began to reach the age when nature could no longer allow my mother's deception to go undetected was I told of my sex at birth, and how disappointed my mother had been. I was puzzled and bewildered, but I felt no anger or shame. I was after all, by then a girl. Only as I grew past a certain age did I understand that there were things that Mother was unable to change.

Of course I was deeply embarrassed by my voice breaking and by the beginnings of facial hair, but I learned to cover this by close shaving and use of makeup. I could never have stood the pain of electrolysis. But what of my future?

I had grown up very closely with the daughter of my mother's best friend. Rosemary and I were inseparable, and when her mother explained to her about me she burst into tears, not on her own account but on mine. We became closer still and shared everything, and, you guessed it, we eventually married.

Of course when I left school I couldn't earn a living as a girl but I went on wearing all the pretty underclothes I had been brought up to think of as natural, and whenever not at work wore dresses and skirts, and went about as Rosemary's closest friend. I will admit that I had a short burst of rebellion when I was seventeen and felt the strangeness of my position but Rosemary and my mother soon brought me through that by simply having me leave work (I was employed in a department store), and wait on my mother at home wearing my usual dresses, skirts, and blouses.

I now work for myself and my dear wife, and have done for the past two years and so it was decided that I should wear dresses and skirts again. We live in a rural area and this causes no problem. The way I was raised meant I could never escape my girlishness, and of course I would never want to, though I am hardly a girl now having just celebrated my fiftieth birthday.  My mother is still hale and hearty at ninety, and never seems to remember her deception, but does only use my middle name, which Rosemary has started doing more now that we have our own small holding.

I know this is hardly a story of 'discipline' but it does show how important a child's first five years are, and just how strong a mother's will can be when she wishes to impose it to lasting effect.
Yours faithfully,

Kim Maria

That is two letters in this issue about being brought up as a girl, and both with happy endings I am glad to say. You make an interesting point about Roman Catholics - boys might take the name of Christ's Mother (or in theory any female saint) as a Confirmation name (am I right?) Anyway, in Aberdeen there was a boy when I was just about to enter my teens named Terence Mary. To us it was yet more evidence of what a very odd thing Roman Catholicism was (these were days when there was much more heat between Roman Catholics and protestants than there was between the Scotch and the English).
Susan