The year was 2010 and I was in my fifth year as a teacher. I’d been told from the outset that not many people transition into teaching in later in life, but I’d though, ‘I raised three kids on my own, how hard can it be?’ What nobody told me – and I’ll admit I never bothered to ask – was that not all kids were polite, intelligent and interested in learning.

Nobody bothered telling me – though this I should have been able to figure out for myself – that maths and science are among the most hated subjects in school, and only weirdos like me actually like them.

I was four months into a maternity cover for an experienced teacher who actually preferred working with the tougher kids in the school, we’d just come back after the Easter break, typically one of the easier periods in the year because we’d all had two weeks off, which was enough time for staff to decompress fully and generally for the kids to get bored and actually want to be back at school (though they wouldn’t admit it.)

Except here I was in my second lesson of the day. I’d just had to stand in front of one particularly egregious little scrotal maggot – not a term I used for many of the kids I taught, I assure you – to prevent him ’going to the loo’, something we both knew to be school policy since this was when most of the graffiti appeared, when most staff were in their classrooms and there weren’t enough left to patrol for miscreants, and in response he’d called me one of my least favourite crudities (begins with c, sounds like grunt), and it was enough to push me over the edge.

A friend and former colleague of mine used to call such individuals Onanians, after the biblical tale of Onan who, when instructed to give his brother’s widow a son, deliberately ‘spilled his seed on the ground.’ His way of retaliating, you understand? Another crudity, begins with w, sounds like anchor.

Anyway lasts straws and camels backs and all that, after the lesson I went to my line manager and explained that I didn’t feel able to fulfil my contract. He asked if I could work two weeks’ notice to give the school a chance to find a replacement and I told him I wouldn’t make any promises. I then headed off for an appointment with my doctor who promptly signed me off for two weeks with stress, telling me, ‘You’re not going back to that place.’

So ended my relatively short lived sortie into the no-man’s-land that is secondary school education. So also began a relatively prolonged and costly – in financial terms at least – period of unemployment in which I recovered from fairly extreme stress and tried to figure out the rest of my life.

It wasn’t just work that needed sorting either. I’ve probably become something of a bore with this in some of my recent writing, but here it comes one more time. I was born in the early sixties at a time when it was still illegal to be gay in our country, and the word gender didn’t appear in the everyday lexicon of most individuals, and certainly not with the prefix of trans. Pretty much the only time you’d see a bloke in a dress was at the pantomime or in a comedy film or TV show. In consequence, pretty much the general opinion of such behaviour fell into two camps: it was either disgusting or ridiculous.

Being one of those blokes in a dress, that left me nowhere to go. I felt I had no real choice but to hide that aspect of me away. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it for fear of their response (neither derision nor disdain an attractive prospect.)

I made my way through my first decade and a half in lonely bewilderment, the first indication that I might not be alone coming from trailers for the film The Christine Jorgensen Story. I desperately wanted to see it, but how does a preteen explain to his parents that he wants to see a film about a man turning himself into a woman?

I’m not sure I would have gained much from watching it in any case. The issues were a little complex for my young brain.

Anyway, add in a dose of religious guilt in my late teens and twenties (Deuteronomy chapter twenty two, verse five – ‘A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.’ Not, I have since discovered, the most accurate translation of the original text) and you have a recipe for one of the most mixed up and repressed messes of a psyche going.

The mid-nineties offered me a glimmer of light in the darkness. My wife had recently died and I had three children in single figures to care for, so no freedom to go out in the evening (I’m not sure I would have anyway; I’ve never been that sociable) plus I had dial in access to that new fangled (new to the UK in any case) marvel of the modern world, the Interweb.

Browsing about in the relative anonymity of my bedroom, searching a little tentatively at first, I stumbled across such websites as Sapphire’s Place and discovered the Aladdin’s cave of forbidden treasures that is transgender fiction.

I’ve always loved stories. Reading, writing, it didn’t matter. Here was a way of expressing one’s self or of experiencing another person’s thoughts and feelings. I read science fiction and fantasy from a young age as a way of escaping my life, and with the mixed-up confusion in my brain I desperately needed to escape it, and regularly.

I wasn’t alone! Well actually, I already knew that. Occasional stories would appear on the front pages of the tabloids of decorated SAS soldiers who’d undergone ‘the unkindest cut of all’, except I wouldn’t have minded being that courageous. The difference was those stories were isolated and remote, here on the Interweb was a community of sorts. Still isolated, but with a common point of contact and a common passion.

I suppose I was alone in a very real physical sense, still stuck in my solitary existence – being a single mum or dad is horribly lonely. Mums have it a little better because they generally have the time and make the effort to build a community and help each other, or at least they appear to. Blokes don’t have the same thing, not even remotely. There’s a degree of independence expected of blokes which would be undermined if they went around showing that they cared for each other, so conversation centres on football and politics and anything that keeps them at arms length from anything personal, anything that would involve exposing vulnerabilities.

Even women seem to carry those same expectations, or at the very least expect enough of a difference to keep their distance. I remember going to a seminar for single parents at a Christian retreat once. I ended up as the only male in a room full of angry women. Definite feelings of bug under a microscope with a rapidly approaching future involving the underside of someone’s sensible shoe. Even when it became apparent that I wasn’t like the arsehole who’d left them holding the baby (literally) the best they seemed able to offer me was to make me their mascot – sort of honorary membership of their little community. I suspect if they’d ever found out how much I was like them on the inside, they’d have dropped me like a steaming turd they’d been tricked into picking up.

Loneliness isn’t being on your own so much as feeling isolated, and you never feel so isolated as when you’re aware of how different you are from the people around you.

So Sapphire’s Place gave me a feeling of belonging. Even if I’d never meet or even communicate with any of the other people who visited the site, here was still a place where I could touch the minds of people who thought and felt like me. Here were flights of fancy that took me into worlds and situations where I could genuinely inhabit the lives of the protagonists, imagine myself going through the same struggles and reaching the same goals, see me finding my own happily ever afters. It was enough... for a while.

As we stepped across into the new millennium without the predicted apocalypse resulting from all those badly written programs, I started revisiting my passion for writing. At school I’d written short stories for my own pleasure (entirely so since I never showed them to anyone.) I came across a website entitled faithwriters.com that ran a competition every fortnight to write a short article on a randomly chosen topic. The articles were evaluated by the people who ran the site and comments were invited from other members. I fell into the habit of giving as much as receiving and over the several months I was a part of the site, I sharpened my writing tools and girded my loins with the encouragement I received, and stepped back into my world.

I don’t recall how I came across Big Closet, but in it I found more of the community I was looking for. It took me months before I found the courage to post my own first comment, scared off by some ridiculous paranoia that someone would trace it back to the real me and expose me to the world. I went through a number of noms-de-plume before settling on Maeryn Lamonte.

That one pleased me for so many reasons. My research suggested Celtic roots – there are other ideas out there now which didn’t exist when I was rummaging through the aether and which I don’t particularly trust – and I’ve always loved the Fae association with Gaelic and Celtic cultures. Primarily a girls name It was apparently rarely gifted to a boy (in the same way one assumes, as Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper.) It derives from the name Mary, which in turn comes from Mara, a name given by Naomi in the Book of Ruth to herself to indicate how bitter she was about how her life turned out. Accompanied by the surname which sounds vaguely like lament (although it comes closer to meaning the mountain) you could read the name as being a bitter lament, which describes much of my life in regards to my nature. Probably my favourite reason for choosing it, and somewhat went into the contrived nature of choosing the surname, is that it forms a pleasing anagram. I’ll leave you to figure out of what. One small clue, the answer comprises four words.

Anyway, Maeryn Lamonte came into existence in 2010 primarily as a member of Big Closet Top Shelf. She now has a Gmail address and a website all of her own (metamorph.org.uk) which lags a little behind submissions to BCTS as I don’t have the time to maintain it. She started off by posting comments to other writers, but then in July of that year, a couple of months after I walked away from a career in teaching, she started to write.

It was a big step for me. I’d spent so many years, decades even, refusing to acknowledge her. So much time feeling guilty about that part of me that made me unacceptable to my peers. Letting her speak to me and write her words was a step towards acceptance. In July 2010 I wrote and posted Way into Wonderland, then just a couple of days later The Last of Magic. Stanman was the first person to post a comment. I do miss you Stanman, may your light shine forever.

A month later I managed to get myself in a small amount of trouble with the elves for dumping all seven chapters of Summerswitch on the site in one load. However, no regrets. That story has brought me so many comments over the years and still they keep coming occasionally.

I was hooked. There was that sense of connection and community I had been mussing all my life. Kudos are great and it really takes no time at all to offer a thumbs up at the end of a story, but the comments were what I lived for. The number of times people have said how much they relate has grown in me a sense of belonging. I started writing as a means of exploring that secret aspect of myself, of learning about the girl inside me. The feedback I’ve received over the years has helped me embrace her as a part of me (I actually like her now that I've got to know her) and to realise that I am not alone in this, nor do I feel lonely thanks to the great many comments and private messages I’ve received from some of you. My very deep and heartfelt thanks to you all for your many kind and gentle words over the years, and to the elves for all their hard work in maintaining the site. It really is an oasis in the desert. I’ll leave you with a response I made to a comment posted to one of those early stories:

Please don’t ever underestimate the capacity for even a short comment to encourage an author.