A trans man who grew up in the 1970s spent decades trying to be the woman the world expected, through marriage, engineering, and two breakdowns, before finally transitioning. His depression lifted when the conflict lifted. This is his story, shared with Helen's website, in his own words.
Someone sent me his story through this website, and I have been thinking about it ever since. I have changed the details that could identify him: the places, the timing, some of the specifics of his working life. What I have not changed is the truth of it, because the truth of it is the whole point.
He asked me to share it. Here it is.
The boy who read C.S. Lewis
He grew up in the 1970s, the eldest child in a household that took faith seriously and took books even more seriously. No television until they were teenagers. Radio Four on in the background. His father teaching him to read before he started school, sitting beside him with a finger under the words. By six, he was working his way through C.S. Lewis. He describes it matter-of-factly, but I find myself picturing a small person in a quiet room, very much in their own world, already slightly set apart from things.
He was odd, he says. A loner, or just happiest in his own company. The distinction matters to him. He wasn't lonely. He just didn't quite fit the shape that was being made for him.
The families from church were close enough to be called brothers, and for a while that was simple and good. Playing together, building things, the ordinary physical freedom of childhood. He loved it. Then puberty arrived, as it does, and changed everything, and the boys he had run alongside suddenly lived in a different world from the one he was being pushed into. He noticed the women in the old newspapers he used under his Airfix models, and understood something about himself that his religion had no kind language for. Good Christian girls were not supposed to feel what he was feeling.
He wore boys' clothes when he could. He felt right with his hair cut short. And when someone mistook him for a boy, he felt something he didn't have a word for yet: a warm, specific, quiet rightness. He filed it away.
The psychiatrist who told him he was unwell
He got a scholarship to an excellent school, the kind of place that pushed its girls hard, and he was good: joint top of his year, science-minded, already thinking about engineering. He also started writing stories. Some of them were about his life as a Victorian man. He found those easier to write than anything else.
He told his mother how he was feeling. She listened, and they went to the doctor together, which was brave of both of them in the 1980s, when nobody had a map for this. What followed was family therapy and then a child psychiatrist, and he refused to go. There was nothing wrong with him, he said. After some persuasion, he agreed to see a male psychiatrist instead, and they had fortnightly conversations for three years.
I want to be careful here, because the person who saw him was almost certainly doing what they understood to be helpful. But what he took away from those years of sessions was this: every time he felt more like a boy, that feeling was a symptom. It was something to be managed, moderated, treated. When his psychiatrist persuaded him to explore his feminine side, he agreed, and in exchange he was released from the appointments. He walked out of that consulting room understanding, quite clearly, that the cost of feeling like himself was being considered unwell.
He suppressed what he felt. He tried to like feminine things. He got on with it.
The engineering degree, the marriage, the role that never quite fitted
University suited him. Practical problems with practical solutions, the satisfaction of building something that worked. He found he could manage himself there: some days felt more like a man, other days he could express something more feminine, and for a while gender fluidity gave him enough room to breathe. It wasn't the truth, but it was liveable.
He met a man he trusted enough to tell some of what he felt. His parents were pleased. Marriage felt like the right thing to do, the expected thing, the way to settle into a Christian life and stop being so unusual. They married. He worked full time to support the household while his husband studied, which meant leaving his own degree unfinished. That loss sits quietly in the account he gives, not dramatised, just there.
When they discovered they couldn't conceive, he felt relief. He is honest about that. The idea of being pregnant had always frightened him and was bound up with his dysphoria in ways he couldn't easily separate from each other. He was later diagnosed with endometriosis, and the diagnosis made him feel a kind of bitter anger at having spent so long pursuing a female life when his body had been registering its own protest all along.
Engineering workplaces in those years were not kind to women, and he encountered sexual harassment that he was expected to absorb quietly. Complaining meant becoming unwelcome, so he moved on, then moved on again, eventually taking work far enough away that he stayed away during the week. The closeness with his husband thinned. He was on his own with feelings he had been told, more than once, were a form of illness.
He had a nervous breakdown. He was prescribed fluoxetine. He asked for a separation and started trying to work out what he actually needed to do.
A long run in the hills
He ran away. Literally: he took work in the Far East, kept moving, cycled and ran as much as he could. I think I understand that impulse. When the inside of your head is too loud, forward momentum can feel like the only available answer.
Then one day, running in the hills, something became clear to him. He had been trying to outrun a feeling that was not going anywhere. The sense of being more man than woman was not a phase, not an illness, not something that therapy or medication or distance could resolve. It was simply who he was. And the only way forward was to stop running from it and start living in it.
He also understood something else that morning, which he puts plainly in what he sent me: transition is not about changing chromosomes. It is about becoming comfortable with who you are. He had spent years telling himself that transition was pointless because he couldn't change his biology. Out there in the hills, he stopped believing that. Chromosomes are not identity. They never were.
He came home.
The return, the GP, the surgery, the slow grind of work
He told his parents. They said they had been expecting this for quite some time. I find that sentence both funny and heartbreaking in equal measure. The people closest to him had seen it clearly for years. All that suppression, all those broken-down years, and the people who loved him had simply been waiting.
He changed his name by deed poll and asked his GP for a referral. The GP refused, telling him the NHS didn't offer gender support. He knew that was wrong, so he tried again, found another route, and paid privately for an assessment and a prescription for testosterone. He arranged private surgery for a double mastectomy. His current GP agreed to shared care with an endocrinology service, so at least the monitoring was in place.
He told his managers at work. They were supportive, or seemed to be. After a few months, things shifted in ways that are easy to deny individually and unmistakable in aggregate: his judgement was questioned more, his progress stalled, the respect in the room thinned. He moved jobs. The same thing happened again. A few years on, another breakdown. The fluoxetine was disrupting his sleep badly enough that he couldn't function. He left engineering for good.
That part of his story is simply a loss. He was good at it. He loved the puzzles of it. He should have been able to stay.
What he has now
He manages his depression through routine and mindfulness. He describes it as a separate issue from his gender dysphoria, and this is the line in his account that has stayed with me longest: all the conflict and dichotomy I felt has all gone now that I am seen as a man.
Not cured. Not fixed. The depression is still there, and it needs managing. But it is no longer powered by the fundamental, daily, bone-deep contradiction of being someone he was not. That particular fuel is gone. He is, at last, himself.
What I want to say about his story
When I read accounts like this one, I feel something complicated: enormous admiration for the person who lived through it, and a steady, clear anger at how much harder it was than it needed to be.
He was six years old, reading stories about worlds where the rules were different. He was a teenager writing Victorian fiction about the man he already knew himself to be. He was a young adult whose psychiatrist taught him, with the best of intentions, to treat his own sense of self as a symptom. Every one of those moments was a place where things could have gone differently. Where the right information, or the right language, or the right doctor could have changed the trajectory of an entire life.
I am not saying his life is a tragedy. He would not say that either. He has found himself, and he is clear about who he is, and the noise inside has finally quietened. But he spent decades paying a cost that nobody should have had to pay, and the system that was supposed to help him was the thing that told him he was sick.
Trans healthcare in the 1980s and 1990s was not designed to help people like him. In many ways, the systems around it were designed to make it as difficult as possible. The gatekeeping, the assessment requirements, the years of waiting, the expectation that you would prove yourself ill enough and stable enough and determined enough before anything was offered: all of that took a toll that shows up in exactly the kind of account he has sent me. Two breakdowns. A marriage that wasn't quite right. A career ended not by incompetence but by discrimination. Decades of fluoxetine managing a depression that was, at its root, the cost of a life lived in the wrong register.
Things are better now than they were. They are also, in some specific and concrete ways, worse. Access to puberty blockers in the UK has been severely restricted. NHS waiting lists run to years. The political climate has made it harder, not easier, for young trans people to get care when they need it. I say this not to be bleak but because the story he sent me is partly a story about what happens when access to care is denied or delayed, and we are actively repeating that mistake with a new generation.
The boy who read C.S. Lewis knew who he was at six. He should not have had to wait until middle age to live it.
Share your own story
He sent me this story because he wanted other people to know they are not alone. That is the only reason anybody ever sends me these accounts, and it is the best reason I can think of. If reading his story has made you think of your own, I would be glad to hear it.
You can share your story here: helenwebberley.com/share-your-story. Your account will be treated with the same care as his: nothing that could identify you will be published, and nothing will go anywhere without your knowledge. What you share stays between us unless you choose otherwise.
These stories matter. They always have. The more of them we tell, the harder it becomes for anyone to pretend this is rare, or unusual, or something to be afraid of. It is simply what some human lives look like, and those lives deserve to be seen.
If there is a story that you would like to share or hear about, just let Sammy know.
Written by Dr Helen Webberley, Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP.
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