CHAPTER 2
This is where the Michael Caine moment kicks in, the “My name is…” followed by “not a lot of people know that…” Well, the second part is obviously true, so I should address the first.

My name is Sarah Marie Powell, though you will probably have gathered that I was given a different name at birth. That one was Samuel Michael etc, and as Mr Micklewhite famously says, “not a lot of people know that”, at least not over here.

I was born in Hwlffordd, 40 years ago, and my father was apparently overjoyed to be offered the prospect of someone to train to kick, run and tackle. I was north of The Line, so grew up speaking what is patronisingly called the Language of Heaven, and having to work hard at the other one. All in all very, very Welsh, but I disappointed him deeply. I could go into the long story of my feelings, and the conflicts, and the school beatings, but it is all so dreary that I can’t see you getting anything out of it. I can, however, remember specific stages. The first is a surprisingly clear memory from my childhood, the day when, having already passed the stage of understanding that “All humanity divides into two parts”, I had misread which side of the division I fell on.

It’s funny, going to school. There is one lesson that corporal punishment really helps you learn, and that is how to hide in plain sight. A few slaps from Dad for being too soft, a few more from the ‘other’ boys for being a nancy boy, it all helps the learning process. The trouble is that it doesn’t teach you how to be, but how not to be. I knew what I was, what I am, but I had to keep it tied up and gagged in a back room.

Elaine was my only help back then. I read now of suicides, of health ruined by self-medication, of people damaged beyond recovery, and I bless whatever it was that gave me my sister. She knew me, and although she never, ever seemed to accept who I was she at least tolerated it. No, she did not dress me up, or take me out, or make me her girlfriend; in fact, she once threatened to castrate me if I ever went near her stuff.

It was at least a minute before she realised what had been so funny.

When you live at the arse end of nowhere, when a trip to Ireland is seen as exotic beyond words, you don’t tend to have experienced and friendly shrinks to lead you through life’s horrors. This was what made me treasure my big sister: she listened. She never, ever agreed, but she listened, and she gave me a plan.

It is hard to explain to younger people how fundamentally different the world was only twenty or thirty years ago. No internet, no experience of difference (at least, not knowingly), and as a result not a lot of tolerance. Perhaps things might have been different in the Big City, like Swansea, but certainly not in a shitty little one-jetty ferry port. Elaine’s plan was fundamentally simple and, even without hindsight, blindingly obvious.

Leave. Leave without fanfare, leave under false pretences, but leave. I was 15 when we started to put things together, and I was impressed with how devious she was.

“Sam, I have tried to talk sense into you for years, but you are never listening. I have nightmares about you, dead somewhere for something stupid, and I love you too much for that.”

“So what do I do? Just stay like this?”

“Na, you will already be planning getting all womanised, I’ve given up on that, but what I thought is that it might be safer if you actually learnt something about it before you went buggering your body up.

“Look, you’re too thick to be a doctor, isn’t it?”

“Thank you very much, sister dear. And your arse does look big in that”

“No, listen, Sam, what you are after is drugs, right? So you need to get a job where you can get at drugs, na?”

I really don’t know what she thought it involved, in her parochial small town mind, but she suggested I get a job at the chemist’s and the necessary adjusting drugs would be sitting there on the shelf just waiting to be appropriated for my teenaged use. It was a really, really stupid idea, but in the end it was pure genius. I started to focus on my studies a bit more, enough to get me a place at Aberystwyth doing pharma, and that was the start of my new life.

Oh, how that sounds so, so easy. Grow up, go to college, come right out as transgendered, everyone is lovely and fluffy, they all transitioned happily ever after. What utter crap.

I suppose I had visions of that sort of thing when I went up there, but life is very quick to show you what it is really about. I had drifted into a very solitary way of life, alternating long rides on my bicycle to keep me fit without bulking my top half up, and longer runs on my little 200cc single to let my mind wander without my father’s constant nagging. Aber was far enough away to allow me independence but close enough to allow my possessive mother the illusion that I was just around the corner.

So I rode out one day in September 1988 to Traeth Mawr on my old Raleigh and watched the sun go down behind the Bishop and Clerks, wondering whether I actually had the guts to go through with what I planned, and replying to myself with another question, did I have the guts to keep living a lie?

That was the dilemma, to carry on as a ‘man’ who wasn’t, or to try and become a woman who ‘wasn’t’

College would give me a fresh start, and the more liberal attitudes of an arty University might make it easier to cease pretending. There was another reason, too, and that was the obsession familiar to all teenagers: sex. I have, over the years, read a lot of accounts from or about girls supposedly like me, and they all gloss over one thing, that should be obvious to anyone with half a brain, but apparently isn’t. So here it is:

I am a woman. Full stop, end of story, piss off if you don’t like it. I have known that fact since I was old enough to know when my nappy needed changing. I am also straight, heterosexual, not gay, boring, pick your own term. I was, however, inhabiting the body of a teenaged boy. I was flooded with hormones screaming “I NEED TO FUCK AND I NEED TO FUCK NOW!!!!” so when you add those two together, confused is a word that doesn’t even begin to describe it. I needed to do something with someone, and that something was an activity I was simply not constructed for, and the majority of those my body ached for would have hospitalised me if they ever suspected.

I had times of such utter frustration I just wanted to wade into the Irish Sea and start swimming west until I got too tired to carry on. Elaine was there for me then. She never understood, she never agreed, but she cared, and she loved and she kept me safe. That was why my decision about college was so hard: no Elaine. No big sis to care for me, but I had to take that first step into the water.

So, that October I arrived on my little 200 behind Dad’s car, and unloaded my bike, my books and the clothes he had never seen me pack. I waved him goodbye after removing the helmet and releasing the hair that he claimed was too long, and once in my little cell of a room I stood for an hour trembling before unpacking. No, it isn’t what I may have led readers to suspect, it wasn’t a suitcase full of skirts and underwear, but of a mix of things Elaine had helped me with. I couldn’t dredge up the courage to come straight out, so I had a collection of stuff that would pass as being at the least androgynous. Pastels, soft textures, no flies, if I couldn’t tell people directly who I was it would have to be a case of letting them make assumptions.

That evening was my first test. I took a book and wandered down to the refectory, in a sea of strangers that included a whole mass of freshers, and after loading my tray found myself a seat on a bench that was far enough away from the busier part of the hall to allow me to read as I ate.

“Hi, these seats taken?”

It was a pair of girls, one a brunette well over four feet tall (as she later described herself) and the other a stocky blonde.

“No, I’ve just got here, so I’m on my own”

“Cool! We’re new too, I’m Becky, and this is Joanna, we went to the same school, so it’s better than being complete strangers and…”

Becky could talk, and talk, but it was a delight to hear someone so full of life when I was so comprehensively crapping myself. Joanna got a few words in while Becky rambled, and then she simply put her hand out across the shorter girl’s mouth.

“Pause, sweetheart.”

I noticed Becky kiss her hand, and shut up. So, that was the score. Joanna continued,

“Perhaps now she’s on pause you could introduce yourself. Please be quick, I don’t know how long I can hold her”

“I’m Sa–r, I‘m here to do Pharmacy. From just down the coast”

“Pleased to meet you, Sarah, or is it Sara? We are from Malvern, and I am doing Maths and the short thick one is doing English”

Becky interjected, for the first but not last time, “ I will have you know I am well over four feet tall!”

I couldn’t help it, and started to laugh, and Joanna said, very quietly,

“So, when did you decide you were a girl?”

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And that was the start of college life, and I owe those two a debt beyond possibility of repayment. They weren’t typical of the rest of the student body, and certainly not of the faculty, but they stood by me, behind me, and on a couple of hairy occasions in front of me. They dragged me along to the GLBT group, or the LGBT group as they renamed it, to which I replied “TLGB?”, and with the group’s help, and the friendship of two lovely girls I blossomed into a sort of half-life as ‘that odd thing that wants to be a woman’

That was my protection, I suppose. I wasn’t gay, so the homophobes couldn’t get a focus. I wasn’t attempting to dress up, so the girls couldn’t complain I was trying to trap the lads they were after, and the straight lads couldn’t mutter that I was offering things I couldn’t deliver. With their support, I widened my dress sense, literally, for they had me in dresses every so often, and I was as happy as it is possible for someone like me to be. I had to tone it down when I went home, but with the promise of another term of freedom ahead I could ignore my father, amuse my sister, and survive till life returned.

Then, one day near Christmas of my third year, while Joanna was driving home for the holidays, a foreign lorry driver forgot which side of the road to drive on, and I was alone again.