I’m Catherine Douglas and just now I’m on my way home from a Hogmanay party with Alastair my husband. The party had been enjoyable for the most part. I’d been requested to sing a few favourite songs, but since none had abused me as free entertainment I’d sung a goodly number most with all joining in. It had been fun. It was the confrontation with Denise one of my sisters that had been the unpleasant part. It brought back a lot of not properly healed painful memories, though to be honest none have really mattered for years, so I must be more sensitive than I thought.

I’ll tell you the tale of Michael, or at least as much of it as I’m prepared to tell you.

Michael was beaten at least once a day from long before he went to school. He had five sisters and a brother who enjoyed getting him in to trouble with their father. Trouble with his father meant a beating. Michael was the youngest and his brother, Stephen, the eldest was a bully who enjoyed hurting him. Stephen was his father’s favourite in whose eyes he could do no wrong and his mother’s blue eyed boy too. With time the beatings from Stephen became fights, and Michael who just wanted to be left alone became a good if somewhat sneaky fighter. Stephen would hit him from behind, so Michael did the same but with a heavy piece of wood. Stephen, not a quick learner, finally learnt to leave him alone after Michael beat the hell out of him one night when Stephen was asleep in bed, but Michael still lived in terror of his father. It became so bad he slept with a knife under his pillow. One day he fought back and got a lucky one in on his dad who was then taken to hospital in an ambulance.

His mother knew either her husband or her younger son would kill the other some day. So she arranged for Michael to be sent away to a boarding school to get him away from his father and to get the problem away from her. She’d suspected as her husband aged and Michael grew bigger and stronger it was more likely she’d be a grieving widow than a woman whose son, a child she’d never cared for, had died. She made it clear to Michael he wasn’t welcome back, so he never went home again. In stead he hitch hiked and was constantly on the move during the school holidays. The bullying at school was almost as bad as at home, so after a while he ran away from school and dressed like a girl to avoid detection. In spite of having been accused of being a girl in disguise by his family and the boys at school for years it never occurred to any to be on the look out for a girl. Travelling as a girl had its problems, but being intelligent Michael soon learnt to recognise those who wished him ill and avoided them. He acquired an electric discharge self defence device from someone he met in Leeds, but never had to use it.

He didn’t care whether he hitched a ride to anywhere or he walked, after all he wasn’t going anywhere he was just going. When hungry he’d walk into eating places and offer to wash up for a meal. He was pleasant and worked willingly, and usually he was given some money as well as his meal. He slept wherever he could stay warm and dry and became adept at finding such places and places where he could wash and stay clean too. As his hair grew he became more like his vision of Ingrid, the girl he thought of himself as. During the summer she wore dresses when in the towns. She sang whilst walking, making up her songs as she sang. Becoming Ingrid and casting her troubles into song transferred Ingrid’s pain into the pain of the subjects of her songs. That catharsis gave her a sense of peace and an inner strength few her age could know. She had a lovely voice and enjoyed being a girl. She would sing her songs in towns, and usually earnt a goodly amount of money from passers by as a busker. Homeless and constantly moving, her life was better than it had ever been before.

Her luck changed when she asked for a meal in return for work at a middle of the road restaurant. Ingrid was not quite twelve, small and pretty. Margaret and Thomas who owned the place were a decent couple in their thirties and concerned as to why she had to work to eat at her age. For a reason that never became clear to her she told them of her life and they insisted she went home with them. She was exhausted after the hot bath and, too tired to remonstrate, she just put on the nightie Margaret provided afterwards. She was in a dream state as she ate supper and afterwards when she was taken to bed by Margaret who kissed her goodnight and said, “Good night, Sweetheart. Welcome home,” she felt safer than she’d ever felt before.

At breakfast Thomas explained she looked a lot like Catherine their daughter who had recently died and they were still mourning their loss. Margaret told her they were more than happy to accept her into their lives as a gift from God. She’d been dressed in a pinafore dress when they met, and Margaret had helped her to undress for her bath and had unpacked her bag which only contained girls’ clothes, even her jeans though plain were girls’ jeans, and a hairbrush. All of which matched what she’d told them concerning her previous existence. It took Ingrid little time to accept that it was all real and her new Mum and Dad were completely sincere in their love for her and they were fine concerning Michael being Ingrid. They discussed the situation and Ingrid was happy to become Catherine, not least for the protection it afforded since Michael had truly disappeared and was now impossible to find. Being Margaret’s and Thomas’ daughter Catherine would be a sanctuary till she was old enough to determine how her life should be for herself, and she needed their love to thrive and undo the hurt of her past.

Catherine had been two years older than Ingrid, and all of Catherine’s things remained Catherine’s things. Being Catherine made her and her parents happy and she loved the things she did with her mum, mother and daughter things. Her dad was kind but strict, but that was how, in Catherine’s opinion, a dad should be with his daughters just to protect them from folk who would hurt them. She knew it was part of her dad’s love for her and didn’t dream of not doing as she was told, for all she had to do was ask, and her parent’s would at least go part way to meet her.

Catherine’s mum took her to the doctors, and eventually she was on the road to fully transitioning with blockers and oestrogens, which unlike just being on the road at least had a destination, it was not just about the journey. Catherine had been enrolled at a small and understanding local private school and she went through puberty at the same time as most of the girls. Their rite of passage with their first proper bra was something they all blushed and giggled about, whilst at the same time it made them feel very grown up. Most of the girl’s hit menarche that year and it didn’t take long before the general view concerning Catherine’s lack of ‘the curse’ was “You lucky pig, Cathy. Big boobs and a bum that the boys can’t take their eyes off, and you don’t even feel like you’re dying every month.”

However, Catherine was still in love with the road which in darker days had been her only happiness. It was the only thing she did in direct disobedience to her parents’ instructions. However, when she took off during school holidays she now wore boys clothes for safety. The attraction was when hitch hiking she created her best songs and could practice them over and over again modifying and improving them with each iteration, often so intent on the song she walked and didn’t even try to hitch a lift. She’d never had, nor had she ever wanted, singing lessons, but she sang her own songs at every opportunity and at all kinds of venues for audiences of every description, and she still busked in shopping centres, but now for charities that looked after the homeless.

Long before leaving school she became a well known singer of a wide range of songs of many genres. She became wealthy, famous and well beloved in many parts of the world as a singer song writer with an appeal to many folk with widely differing tastes in music. She’d never given anything concerning Michael’s or Ingrid’s past away, only Catherine’s, though it eventually became known she was trans as a result of her charity work for others in the LGBT+ world. She had her SRS at eighteen after she left school before embarking on her career as a full time performer. At twenty-one, Catherine married Alastair, a gawky, awkward, but brilliant twenty-nine year old biologist working on DNA profiling whom she met when he damaged her car on a supermarket car park. They adopted four children, a sibling group of three boys and a girl, and her life became that of a happily married mum with a husband who, despite his inability to articulate his love, loved her more than life and a family who, despite her insistence that they owed her nothing other than love, were more than grateful for her taking them in.

Well I met Denise tonight. It appears she is a hard line, third wave feminist, a full time social worker and a left wing, part time do-gooder. She clearly didn’t recognise me and had a chip on her shoulder about my success. She made all kinds of accusatory assumptions about my privileged past as a child of a wealthy family who owned a chain of restaurantes, and said, despite my surgery, husband and children I’d never be a proper woman and I was a disgrace to the human race and should never have been allowed to adopt.

I told her, “Actually, my early life was far from one of privilege. I was born into a hellhole of a family, and our parents, you, Sonia, Fiona, Wendy, Yvette and Stephen made it worse. That’s why I left. I left to become me. It was your collective hate and abuse that turned me, and yes I was Michael once, into a successful singer song writer and inspired many of my best songs. I suppose I should be grateful, but I’m human, and I’m not. I suggest you back off and become a rational human being, or I’ll start talking about my past on chat shows and possibly even write songs about it. Then every one will know what hypocritical monsters you all are, and you can try being despised for a change. Goodnight.”

“You’re quiet, Catherine. Did something upset you at the party?”

“No, Love,” I replied. “I’m fine, Alastair. I’ve just got a few new songs running through my head. I’ll get some notes down on my laptop before I go to bed to make sure I don’t lose them, but don’t go to sleep, or if you do I’ll wake you because I have designs on your body.”

“Mm. That sounds nice. Perhaps it’s a good thing I don’t have to work tomorrow and the kids are at Mum’s because if we make a night of it I may be getting up late. I take it you’ll be off walking the fells for a few days to perfect the songs and I’ll need to make arrangements for the children?”

“No, Love. It will all keep till the children’s half term holidays. You’re taking the week off, so we’ll all go walking, and I’ll sing as we walk.”

“I’ll put a coffee on for us and I’ll wait with you while you write, after all I wouldn’t want to start without you.”

Though I say it myself ‘Hitch Hiking is Character Building’ the title song on the resulting album of the same name is one of the best songs I’ve ever written. Though ‘Coming out of Nowhere With no Regrets and Nothing Left Behind’, ‘Monsters Behind Closed Doors’ and ‘No Love - No Family’ are pretty good too. I wrote sixteen songs as a result of meeting Denise at that party, a few more than one usually finds on an album, but I insisted they were presented together as the collection they were. ‘Michael died a Million Times but I’ll Only do it Once’ is a favourite amongst trans folk and I have to agree it still moves me in ways I don’t fully understand.