This time it was with a TV escort, terms strictly agreed, a makeover only. I visited Katie a couple of times, I liked her, we drank a lot of wine together, but the look was not quite right, it was tarty, had "Transvestite" written all over it, somehow this was not what I was looking for. I then took myself off to the Boudoir, a dressing agency run by a lovely woman called Jodie Lynn. My brief to her was "Make me up as if we were going to lunch together". She did, and when the hair went on and I sat staring at a mature, well groomed, dressed down female I knew that was it, I looked "normal". It was a light going on inside my head. Now, at long last, I was "the right way round". I needed a name, I had resurreected Jennifer from those dreams of 40 years ago and the style of wig sat on my head was called Jennifer so I had no choice.
Jennifer needed a life. I could not go out in public so I invented a biography, a cover story, and went into a couple of internet chatrooms as "Jenni - TS". First they were Transvestite chatrooms but I found these too sleazy and tarty, Jenni had to be "normal". I ended up joining one for the alternative communities, those into sub-Dom lifestyles, Goth and bohemian, odd fetishes etc. I soon became very accepted and started to make a lot of online friends. Then disaster nearly struck. Some wanted to meet Jenni and caught offguard one night I slipped up and invited a couple over for dinner. I had never "dressed" before or put make-up on, I had to scurry over to Katies, beg, steal and borrow whatever I could, but it worked and the dinner evening went well. Now Jenni was a step away from coming out and another month, May , it happened, those same friends took Jenni to a once a month fetish fair and for the first time in her life she was out, taken as someone perfectly normal, and meeting a lot of people she had made friends with online.
Suddenly it was all getting serious. A fantasy had become a lifestyle. Over the next few months the lifestyle grew, I was asked to host a "munch", a meeting of friends, in a pub, and as hostess something came over me, a feeling of being totally, wonderfully free. I had found me, the inner me, not the me living an unnatural gender role and a life cloudeed by anguish. This frightened me to death, I became committed to restoring myself back to normal, putting Jenni in her box, removing her from my life. It was welcome to hell.
Over the next few months I was torn apart mentally. I was bereft without Jenni in my life, was grieving for Her, but the memory of how she had nearly taken over my life stayed strong, I was not going to descend into such a sleazy, unnatural activity again. I grew more and more depressed, more and more agitated, The year ended and a new year begain with no respite from the inner turmoil, the internal agony of a mind in such conlict. My marriage was almost over, the slightest upset would cause me to slam out of the house and storm off to my flat in London leaving my wife hurt and angry and bewildered. If I couldn't be Jenni I could at least be where She called home. The agitation and depression pushed me to breaking point. three times I had to resist the urge to destroy myself with every ounce of mental strength I had left, on one occasion forcing myself to a 40 minute walk home in torrential rain as the urge to throw myself on the rails at Hammersmith underground station had been so strong.
I sought help, by a circuitous route ended up talking to a Trauma psychiatrist who had identified I was suffering from a form of post traumatic Stress disorder, an accumulation of unrelieved stress going back to the illness that had forced me to stop work 15 years earlier. We talked about the internal agitation that prevented me from ever relaxing, that caused so much stress to build up unrelieved. Durin this period Jenni returned. In April my mind could take no more and Jenni had to come out of her box, little did I know it then, an action that almost certainly saved my life. In May I returned with friends to the same fetish fair where a year previously I had come out. Again I was hit with that feeling of total inner peace, calm and contentment, a freedom from the nagging internal agitation I had lived with for the whole of my life.
By June the beginning of the end of this most traumatic period of my life was in sight. There was one more explosive bout of suicidal depression as I tried again to rid myself of this "sleazy" activity, for a time I was held by the police who were debating whether to have me sectioned into a mental hospital for my own safety or release me to the custody of my wife and secretary who had together dashed from somerset to London that evening. A couple of weeks earlier the Trauma Psychiatrist I was seeing had identified Gender Dysphoria as the underlying cause of the corrosive internal agitation. He had ofered a referral to Charing Cross hospital where there is a specialist Gender Identity Clinic but I had refused to accept the diagnosis, refused to accept the referral and had instead referred myself to an independent psychotherapist who I was due to see in July.
On the 1st of July I told my wife about Jenni and how she was now me. I told her about the referral to Charing Cross hospital, my refusal and how I was seeing privately a Gender specialist in two weeks time, what Gender Dysphoria was, how it is caused and how it was allowed to resurface 18 months ago. There was no turning back. Emergence was over, transition was to start and for the first time in my life I was about to find out the true meaning of that word "happiness".
Forward to "Diagnosis - how I was diagnosed"
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