Finally, what I’d known in my heart for years, my head now knew. As a little boy, he was kind and thoughtful and loved having girls as friends, but there was often crying at night and sheer terror every time school holidays ended. I tried to understand what was going on but couldn’t get through.

I always asked how he was or if he was happy, but my little boy was always ‘fine’. Now, it all clicked, and I felt unbelievably sad and guilty that I had not recognised what my son was going through. I realised my wonderful son was going to be taking hormones and changing gender, and I managed to ask if he was going to be dressing up as a girl, a stupid question, but I was at a loss to understand everything.

He said yes and I panicked inside, picturing him in a skirt and being laughed at and even beaten up. He said he wanted to be ‘elegant’, and I cried, knowing this was to begin a journey that would change all our lives.

Over the coming days, I cried a lot when no one was looking, finding quiet places at work to bawl my eyes out; after all, there was nobody who would understand this, and I wasn’t stable enough to even broach it with my closest friends.

This was an incredibly lonely time, and I didn’t have anyone close to me who had gone through this, and I didn’t even understand what gender dysphoria was. I got some words I could look up, like ‘transgender’ and ‘male to female transition’, and I explored the internet. Big, big mistake…

The internet was full of hateful stories about transgender people, suicides, murders in the US, graphic images of surgery and the hell a transgender person had to face. This was not what I wanted, and I needed to believe that there was something positive out there, so I did what I’m good at – I researched properly.

I started with the NHS Website and found Ruth, a young pretty woman who revealed her own story of transition from male to female. I knew my future daughter could do this, and I had to be there for her. I found more common sense, honest websites with contacts that could help me and my path was set.

I contacted GIRES (Gender Identity Research and Education Society) and talked to a wonderful man called Bernard Reed, whose own daughter had suffered horrendously during her own transition. He and his wife Terry have crusaded tirelessly ever since to get fairness, support and understanding for the transgender community, and he became my mentor and my hero.

He talked to me about being strong and reading all the information and research GIRES had to offer, and most importantly, he taught me to see a future, a bright future, for my daughter, in which we would share coffees and talk about hair and make-up. Although my mind was finding it difficult to see ahead, I started to see a goal we could aim towards and I told myself, ‘I can do this,’ and my child could become the woman she always should have been.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My counsellor also told me about the Beaumont Society who do great work with trans people and their partners. I talked to the President, and she told me about the website and the events they ran even though their age group was somewhat older than my daughter’s, they welcomed our membership with open arms, something I will always be grateful for, and I’ll come to that later.

A lovely lady at the Gender Trust told me about FFLAG and Sparkle. Grimsby Pride was also coming up in September. This was one hell of a learning curve, but I was getting there. I also joined a Facebook page but felt vulnerable with my details out there, preferring to meet two parents with children my daughter’s age, as many parents already had Mermaids as their support, and our over-20s age group was sadly lacking.

So my daughter continued her journey, wanting to be called Hannah, being feminine at home and androgynous when out and about. It was a strain keeping up the pretence, and we could see that it was very difficult for Hannah to be seen as someone she didn’t want to be.

She so wanted to be female, and we had many tears worrying about what to do next.

We suffered the trauma of job hunting – do I interview male or female? Do I transition before or after? Will there be prejudice against a transgender person? She eventually decided to take time out and volunteer at a local nature reserve to build her confidence.

Although she was dressing masculinely, she enjoyed the work and made friends. We started to go out more as Hannah grew more confident, taking a trip to York McArthur Glen with me at Christmas. Hannah in her new skinny jeans and boots, was easily 6ft tall, and with me being 5ft 2in tall, we must have made quite the couple. Scared as I was for Hannah, we coped pretty well and experienced no pointing fingers or being ‘called out’, which I thought, in my worried mind, we would encounter. We felt triumphant driving home that day and ready for the next phase in Hannah’s remarkable journey.

Hannah had sent all her forms off to be considered by a Gender Identity Clinic, and nine months after that conversation in March she was told there was at least a three-year waiting list to even see a consultant. This was extremely distressing for Hannah, seeing her features change and living with a reflection she detested and those quiet times she sat in her bedroom were constantly worrying and too much for us to bear.

If we were to go private, it was not going to be cheap and if the GP would not do shared care, we would have to pay for the hormones and the blood tests, too – it was a big decision and one I realised many parents in this position couldn’t do, living with the prospect of their young ones considering suicide to take them out of this agony. I was lucky enough to have a good job and the means to do it, and we decided that for Hannah’s sake and ours, we should go down the private route.

The visit to the private Gender Clinic in London followed soon after and, as the appointments were set up to get her towards prescribing hormones, we knew we had to allow Hannah to emerge properly and we had to be prepared. I purchased a great book called ‘Trading Places, When Our Son became A Daughter’ by an American mum called Jane Baker. This book was so inspiring, not only covering the process she and her daughter went through but providing common sense facts too.

 

 

 

 

Finally, and only because I was worried about them accepting that their grandson of 23 years was to be their granddaughter, we told my husband’s mum and dad (my dad had dementia and really didn’t recognise many people, so it was just someone new who came each week).

They were shocked and asked lots of questions but said they loved their grandchild and would work really hard to say ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ and call her Hannah. I cried with relief on the way home, promising to get them a new photograph to replace their male photo.

A couple of weeks later, after my new photograph of Hannah was hung on the wall, Grandma and Grand-dad invited their friends in to wait for them as they put their coats on for the Sunday trip to the pub – something they had never done before.

They asked who the girl was in the photograph, and Grandma replied, ‘That’s my granddaughter’. ‘But you haven’t got a granddaughter,’ they replied, and Grandma said, ‘I have now.’ How amazing is that? I could have cheered! I couldn’t have got a better response to Hannah’s evolution; even in their 80s, they showed people how it should be done. 

 Hannah had her own Red Letter Day when she needed to tell the Nature Reserve where she volunteered that she was Hannah, and the day she left for work, I was terrified. This could be the worst or best day of her life.

Her employees were amazing, were supportive of her transition and would accommodate anything she needed. She was elated when she came home, like a new person, which she was in a way, finally being able to tell someone who she really was. The next day, Hannah, dressed to kill, well maybe to pond-dip, went to work as her true self and this encounter was to mould Hannah’s future steps in her journey.

Now Hannah was on hormones and beginning her new life. She changed all her documents, and we finally did clothes shopping that wasn’t in Charity Shops or online. Shop assistants were really friendly and wanted to share Hannah’s story. We also had that coffee and talked about hair and make-up exactly as Bernard from GIRES said we would. We had come a long way and still had more hurdles to jump, but we were in a good place.

Now, her journey changed direction. Hannah had arrived, and she decided she would be an advocate for transgender people. She wrote and got replies from charities who wanted to know more about transgender issues and how they could be better at understanding their needs. With Lincolnshire NHS Social Care students, she has made a difference to their curriculum in how to deal with transgender people in care and has spoken at their conference. With charities like Homestart, Barnardo’s, MIND and Yorkshire MESMAC, she influenced their policies and training. She still works with Stonewall in schools to make sure policies are not just pieces of paper and she now works for a wonderful organisation in Yorkshire that supports vulnerable people and regularly talks on local radio in support of transgender people.

As parents, we are so proud of our daughter, and I have the opportunity to help parents of young people as individual as ours to get them through what can be a very difficult and lonely time and to work with Hannah to provide helpful and useful contacts for their child to make through their own media platforms.