Rebound

My story is nothing new, like most girls who used to be boys I knew from an early age that I was different to all my school friends. My dad was a thug of a man, who enjoyed the physical battle of the rugby pitch as much as the post match booze up, but I took after the mother who died giving birth to me. Oh tried to be the sort of little boy my dad wanted, but being small and lightly built I was never going to captain England in the six nations, or be the strapping chip off the old block he wanted. He was very much a man's man, while I from about as far back as I can remember I used to go to sleep at night wishing I would wake up next morning as a girl!

Puberty was for me a very unpleasant happening. While all my friends became inordinately excited by girls I was finding myself fantasising about boys! They say your school years are the best in your life, but that was not my experience, because for me it was hell. Looking back at those years now all I can recall is having the shit kicked out of me, but somehow I survived and even managed to leave with a few qualifications to my name! Confused and twisted up about being clearly male, yet feeling like I should have been a girl I shocked everybody and did what my dad wanted and joined the Para's! I felt sure that if anything could cure me of my feminine urges it was the Army. No longer would I fantasise being a pretty girl in the arms of her boyfriend, the Para's would make me a man!

Basic training was putting it simply hell, but like school I survived it and when I got my red beret and stitched my jump wings on my uniform for the first time in my life I felt proud of myself. I spent five good years in the Para's, but even after seeing combat in Afghanistan and Iraq army life did nothing to dent my child dreams of femininity or my conflicted gender and sexuality issues. Completing my enlistment as a platoon sergeant, I left the military for a university degree course paid for by her majesty.

I liked University life although after the forces it was a very different lifestyle, and it did not take long for student life to tell on my body.