At fifteen, I remember sitting in the garden with my best friend and asking him, completely seriously, “Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have boobs and a vagina?” “No,” he said. I remember being genuinely surprised. I thought all boys wondered about that?
For years, I rationalised everything. From the outside, my adult life eventually looked incredibly successful. I built a career in technology, had a beautiful home, a wife and daughter, travelled, earned good money and enjoyed luxuries I
once could never have imagined. Yet something was missing.
Chapter 3: Navigating The Waves
Meeting my wife, Lucy, was transformational. For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt completely safe and loved, and that safety gave me room to start examining who I actually was. In November 2021, at around three in the morning, I woke her up. “I like wearing women’s clothes,” I told her. At first, I thought perhaps it was a fetish. Then I decided I was probably a cross-dresser. Lucy asked whether I would ever transition. “Absolutely not.”
About two weeks later, I realised I needed to transition. I wasn’t lying to her. I was discovering the answer in real time. At first, everything happened behind closed curtains. Lucy bought me makeup. I bought clothes and wigs. I remember being terrified somebody might notice I was wearing nail polish and somehow know. Then one day Lucy did my hair, makeup and clothes and told me not to look in the mirror until she had finished.
Chapter 4: Finding My True Self
Over the following months, however, I changed profoundly. My nervous system seemed to calm down. The unexplained anxiety I had carried since puberty began disappearing. Physically, transition was much harder because progress wasn’t linear. One week I would look more feminine and feel incredible; the next I would swear I looked more masculine again.
Transition is less like climbing a staircase and more like watching the stock market. The overall direction might be upwards, but there are some horrible crashes along the way. Coming out was similarly exhausting. For almost two years, it felt as though I was constantly coming out to somebody new while also carrying everybody else’s reaction.
My siblings rejected me. My parents struggled enormously with my transition. Yet other people surprised me. When I told my CEO, he told me that if a customer ever had a problem with my
transition, he would rather lose the customer than lose me. I had feared transition would destroy my career. Instead, my career continued to grow.
My daughter gave me perhaps the greatest strength of all. She simply accepts that I am a woman. If somebody uses the wrong name or pronoun, she corrects them immediately. She has never needed a complicated explanation.
One of the most important moments of my transition came after breast augmentation. I had expected to look down afterwards and experience overwhelming gender euphoria. Instead, I looked at myself and thought: “That looks normal.” That normality meant more to me than euphoria ever could. It wasn’t novelty. It wasn’t excitement. It was alignment.
In May 2026, two years after that frightening night in Rhodes, Lucy, my daughter and I returned to exactly the same hotel. We took a photograph in the same place where we had taken one in 2024.
Two years earlier, I believed transition might destroy my entire world.
Now I was simply standing there as myself. Around October 2025, being transgender stopped dominating my thoughts. There wasn’t a dramatic moment. One day it simply became a small part of a much bigger life.
Today, I am a wife. A mum. A leader in the technology industry. A friend. A woman walking down the street with a million things to do. I still have parts of my transition ahead of me. I continue electrolysis and hope to have bottom surgery. But I no longer feel as though my real life is waiting somewhere beyond transition.
Chapter 5: Words For The Next Generation
She has also built an app for people going through gender transition, it’s used by hundreds of people monthly to support them through their transition, help with medication reminders, plan their surgeries, track their timeline, create photos of themselves etc.
This is called
Gender Journey
