CHAPTER 9
What to say to that one? I stared at Sally, and she just smiled gently.

“Whoever you are, there s nothing here that can harm you. I am not asking to speak to some other person. I am not saying you have what people wrongly call schizophrenia. I just know that you are also someone else that you have spent your life pretending does not exist. So please let me speak to him”

I flinched slightly and Sally’s eyes widened, just a tiny bit.

“Her, then”

She sighed.

“You’re certainly not giving this girl an easy life, are you?”

Little Voice spoke up.

“I never had a girl’s life, easy or not”

At which we realised how clever Sally’s cheeky little joke had been. And stopped being plural. Sally stuck out her hand.

“Hello, I am Sally Flint. And you are?”

“M……Melanie Stevens”

“Nice to meet you, Melanie. Now, it’s time for me to shut up, while you tell me how you are getting on.”

We ran well over our time that day.

It got easier, each time, and I realised that we had indeed ceased our internal dialogue. I had a number of those silly fridge magnets, and one of them read “Sshhh. The voices in my head are arguing and I’m trying to listen”, and finally I was in the conversation.

I read somewhere that one aspect of PTSD is the feeling of detachment from the world, and I wondered if that was how I had internalised, or externalised, or whatever, the girl in me. Sally had cleared away a lot of crap with some simple questions. Two of our meetings were devoted to nothing more than my childhood, as she worked out, or let me work out, why I had not stayed on and gone further with my schooling. That nagging feeling that I was wasting my time, that I would never succeed, coupled with my father’s definition of a man as either a real one or a skiver.

Books, studies, they were for puffs, and our family didn’t have puffs. They were so unpufflike that I signed up for the hardest force in the world, and George went off as a pro boxer and then took over a motorcycle dealership. All definitely non-P. I hadn’t stood a chance of doing anything else, certainly not anything that did not include testosterone.. Well, Dad, I am about as unreal a man as you could ever imagine. I had a really good idea of how he would take the news.

That was another train crash in my thoughts. There are moments of epiphany, of enlightenment, when your eyes really are opened to a new world. With me, they seem to come with words attached. All the years of talking to LV have made me vocalise everything; some people remember feelings, tastes, smells, but for me it’s always been words. Words bring the memories, words deliver the knowledge.

That particular revelation was that I seemed to have made my decision without realising it: I was going to leave Mike behind and spread Mel’s wings. Fuck me.

That is Sally’s skill with me, she asks the questions that let me see the answers that are already there. I had another moment of realisation when I very clearly thought “Pity she’s not gay…”

Slow down, Mel. It would be a good idea to actually be physically female before starting to look for a woman that likes other women.

Do you see how this went? I entered the Doc’s surgery as a broken bootneck, a big man having a breakdown. I’m going to Sally’s place each time now as a woman with issues, and it is so very much better.

That is where I am now. I don’t want to jump the gun, because there is still a lot to tell, but I have to make some thing clear, things that Sally helped me to understand.

PTSD is a monster. It never goes away, it isn’t some dragon that can be slain, it is like herpes, it persists. It usually gets worse with time, not better. Sally did nothing to spare me that little titbit; she told me that if I wanted to go where she thought I did, I would do it fully informed and with eyes wide open.

You don’t recover from it, you develop coping strategies. Sometimes they work, sometimes…..

I had an easier life from then on. The nights were still the same, the same dreams, the same faces, but the days–the days were so much better. I had decided my course of action, and like a good little girl I had a reward to work for, something outside the pain. I realised why Doc Whittaker had called her a friend and not a colleague, and knew that I had turned the corner. Two people had entered my life, and both were sweethearts beyond compare.

Sally was very naughty. A year after we had first met, she had me stand, and with a tape measure took my sizes.

“What exactly are you doing, Sal?”

“You need to know a couple of small things, Mel. Firstly, you are a very big….woman, and your tee shirt rides up when you lift your arms, when you pull your coat on.”

“And?”

“Pink suits you, but you might want to keep your belt fastened above your knickers”
Oh shit.

“So why the tape measure?”

“I am just preparing for when you decide you want to go that bit further. There is no way you will be able to go into some clothes shop and buy something in your size, and even less chance if you don’t know the size in the first place…”

You should see now why I love that woman, and why I said she changed my life.

Now, you will laugh. As a Marine I was always sewing. Seams would pop, things would rip, so I was always using my housewife for running repairs. I went into a shop, bold as brass, and bought some curtains, an acceptably masculine deed. Two weeks of frustration later and I had two drawstring skirts. My hair was long enough by then, to say the least, and some adaptations to a dress shirt made a quite feminine blouse, and with a pair of unisex sandals I felt quite the girl at home.

I really didn’t see the point of a bra when I had nothing to put in it. I was just happy to finally be making some sort of statement, even if only to myself. And two years into the visits to Sal I was given an appointment with an endocrinologist.

I was by now spreading my wings in the world of employment. The more Sally has helped me to see how I despise myself, how my father warped me, the more I feel confident to push forward with a career. At the moment, I am the area manager running security in the whole shopping centre, a hell of a step up from a bouncer. But again I am ahead of myself. I am sorry about this, but the excitement and relief, the joy of the whole process just has me gushing. I will try and slow down.

By 2006 I was ticking along nicely. Sally had spoken to the Ministry of Defence on my behalf, giving them her diagnosis of massive PTSD and securing me a boost in my pension that I started spending on hair removal, and my pusher was giving me the hard stuff.

I look into the mirror now, and I can see the changes that stuff has done, and I am in no doubts and have no illusions that I will ever look anything like a genetic girl, but it is my face and my life, and one thing I have learnt from Sally is to play the hand I have and not pine for another. But back to the story….

Like so many girls before me, and so many to come, the hormones did very little to boost my top shelf prospects, and a couple of years later, with a wardrobe slowly, thanks to Sally, filling with Mel clothes, she and I got together to set a date. We had a plan; I would speak to my management and make the appropriate announcement, a deed poll would be sworn, and after a hospital visit and the bulk of my annual holiday entitlement I would be back at work as an official and less flat Melanie Lee Stevens.

This was where it all went a bit ratshit. I rang my parents to tell them the news, and to be honest I don’t really feel the need to replay that conversation here. Suffice it to say that none of the family approved, and I was instructed that I was never to contact them again and forthwith to fuck off you puff. I could tell you how hard that was to deal with, but some scars never do heal. I had two visitors in hospital, and the other was Doc Whittaker.

Home was the next trial. Pound Hill is no intellectual Bohemia, but a hard-edged working class suburb, and the first time I hung my new clothes out to dry I got a couple of questioning looks from my neighbours. When they saw my new chest, some of them stopped talking to me. Unfortunately, too many of the others didn’t and it got nasty. I sorted it, but it was never more than an armed truce. They knew what I had been, and it diminished to nuisance stuff. I could live with that. Mel is living with that.

I came out one morning, and there it was, in bright pink paint, next to the door of my flat. I live in a small block, one of several, each of four flats with associated mini-garden, and I am on the first floor. The graffito read “PEEDO”

Hormones do all sorts of things to you besides the desired outcome, and I spent a couple of hours in private tears before Mike took charge. I wrote and printed the letter to the Crawley Observer:

To whom it may concern
I must correct a number of things here, the first of which is your spelling, which I have corrected for you. Your children are far more at risk from your own driving than from any notional paedophiles in the area, and as I am a lesbian and not a “peedo” I suggest that you worry more about your wives and sisters ending up in my flat than your children.
Yours Faithfully
Melanie Stevens
(Ms)

Two tins of spray paint later, and I had corrected the spelling by my door, then drawn a big red line through the word. In blue, I added the word “DYKE”

Yes, big brave Melanie, who spent another few hours in tears indoors from a mixture of hormones and PTSD afterwards. But, if you let the hyenas see fear, my big game hunting friends (of whom I have none) tell me, they will close in tighter.

Fuck them all. This is finally my life, lived my way.