Linda (00:10)
Hello everyone and welcome to The Spectrum We have a guest today who is going to talk about her transition. Her name is Maria.

Maria’s path is a little bit different than mine. You transitioned at the age of fifty-eight only what three or four years ago?

Maria (00:27)
Nearly three years ago now.

Linda (00:28)
You spent a good chunk of your life, you told me, thinking that you were a cross-dresser and that you weren’t someone who needed to pursue transition and that this was just some aspect of your personality that you needed to explore. w

Maria (00:41)
Yeah.

Linda (00:44)
Why did that change?

Maria (00:47)
Well, I mean in terms of the change, I mean spent 58 years as a guy and I actually also got married through that period and I got divorced in 2023 which is when I started living on my own.

I found myself thinking what was it I could do to make myself happy inside? in that sense you can see that prior to that if I was ever happy it was never from the inside, it was always from the outside. Apart from those moments when I was dressing, and I did spend two or three years visiting friends and clubbing back in the late 90s just before I got married.

When I was asking myself that question of how can I truly be happy inside, the one thought, the only thought I ever had was maybe I should try seeing if Maria was the answer. Because I’d never previously ever really been happy at all. I’d just spent my whole previous life depressed. So that realization that Maria was worth giving a go, and it was literally like that, let’s give Maria a go, was kind of how I thought of it. Just to see what happened.

it was pretty instantaneous. I started dressing fully on the 1st of September 2023 after a month of sort of hybrid dressing between the mix of male and female clothes. Within the first day or two it was pretty obvious to me. I was just suddenly happy. All of the doubts I’d had, all of the concern I’d had about other people’s views, thoughts, what they might do all that kind of stuff just disappeared.

It’s quite miraculous to think back of how it was I was just suddenly free. and from there there’s been no question at all that actually is the right path for me. It took me a heck of a long time to find it but I got there in the end so that’s good.

Linda (02:29)
You said you had this long path to find it. Let’s talk about that path a little bit.

When did you first realize that you were different?

Maria (02:38)
I was always different in the sense that I always had this need to wear women’s clothes and I could never understand it. I never had that thought that I was a woman. I know a lot of people do but also lot of people don’t. I never had the feeling that I was trapped in the wrong body or those types of expressions.

It was just a need to wear women’s clothes and I can remember wearing them as far back as I can remember. And, actually my mother before she died she said actually the first time she ever come across me wearing my sister’s clothes because I’m the youngest of four was at the age of four which is before I can even remember anything. So I’ve always had this need to wear women’s clothes at different points in my life. I’ve not been able to for different reasons or

I’ve had to not wear women’s clothes for some reason or another and despite that there was always something lurking in my life that said I had to do something but yeah to answer the question in brief it goes back to the age of four it’s basically ever since I was alive.

Linda (03:41)
In comparing your path to my path, the earliness of the recognition is very similar. We just attributed it to different things. And that seems to be two fairly common paths that people end up going down. and in your case you spent a lot of time thinking that you were just a man who had to do these things for whatever reason, that it was some part of your personality, only later to discover that maybe that wasn’t such an accurate description. So talk about a little bit about your adult life. You said that you presented to the world as a man for most of that time but then would have little moments where you would get to present as a woman. What what was the difference between your personality or your experience of the world in those two states?

Maria (04:30)
Before I got married, which is the point at which I entirely stopped dressing for a period of time, there was a brief window of two or three years prior to that, which was the only period I was ever living alone. And prior to that I was always house sharing or living with the family. So during the whole of my house shared family life, I was always hiding in the bedroom, dressing in secret, never going out in public, permanently paranoid about the responses of the entire universe to what I was doing, thinking I was weird, thinking I was alone, that kind of usual kind of stuff. That went on to the age of 36, 37 when I first then moved into, no, 32, 33, when I first moved into a house on my own and it was then that it really took off. Prior to that there was never any makeup, never any wigs, all that kind of stuff, just very simply a few clothes that I hid in a suitcase.

When I started living on my own, I started dressing fully. So I started buying an awful lot of clothes. I actually had a make-up lesson at Mac, which was fabulous. I started to buy wigs and experiment with wigs. I started having clothes made for me. And through that whole time, that three-year period being on my own eventually I got to the point where I would spend entire evenings and weekends dressed as Maria but never going anywhere. And at the end of one Saturday I literally just said to myself, am I really going to get all this scrubbed off and go to bed and just be my old self again?

Or am going to do something else? And I basically, I just went clubbing on my own into London, which had a few trans night clubs at the time, still does. And the first time I went out, I was entirely alone. I was entirely scared again of what everyone else would do. But it was my first experience of life, of living like that. And obviously there was a thrill. There was all kinds of feelings of, you know, this is naughty, this is secret, what if the world would know about it?

But eventually I went on to start going clubbing, developing friendships with people who – their own individual experiences may have been slightly different to mine but we were all different together if you like and that was fabulous. The change in my character – I was still myself but I became, well I didn’t become more outgoing. I was just more confident, more assured of myself, my fundamental nature didn’t change and that assuredness was only ever present, that happiness was only ever present when I was dressed like that. And when I say I looked back and I thought, when was I ever happy before, at the point at which I then transitioned a few years ago, those were the kind of memories that I was thinking of, because they were the only times when I had happiness from the inside, as opposed to people I knew or things I’d done or whatever.

So, that was the change in my personality. Well, I’m stumbling a bit, how you go. Sorry.

Linda (07:34)
No, no, n that’s fine. so you how long did that period of your life last? Because you said at some point you got married, right?

Maria (07:42)
Yeah, sure. mean, I was… I’d only ever go to scene places, you know, I was never out in public public as such. But I did once go to a weekend in Manchester, to the village in Manchester, which is quite famous in England as a friendly place to go. And this was around 2000, I guess it was. And I got verbally abused by a couple of guys, just very light, very low level abuse, just saying, we’ve got these trans people over there.

And I was so afraid back then that that was enough to send me crashing. So immediately I gave everything up, gave my clothes away, gave my friends up, everything like that and said okay that’s it, that proves I can’t live as Maria so I’ll just go straight, I’ll just go normal if you like. It was at that point I gave everything up and within 12 months more or less. I’d met my wife We got married 18, 20 months later. She knew I had been a trans person of some description before our meeting She was clear that to her it was never gonna work if I was still trans in any way shape or form.

I said to her, “look, it’s okay, I know I don’t need that” because this is my brave face trying to put all that behind me and live safely if you like. So that’s how the marriage started, we actually got married in 2002 I think it was, so yeah, and from that point I didn’t dress until the very end of the marriage.

Linda (09:13)
And how long was that?

Maria (09:15)
The marriage lasted 20, 21 years. I didn’t dress during that period until the very end. But I did have things that I did which kept me in touch with my old life. And that should have been a clue to me that it was something that wasn’t just a habit. It was something I couldn’t give up. did keep secretly some old photographs from my days with friends.

And I also would occasionally chat to girls online, trans girls, just to kind of keep in touch with my old self, my old world, which should have been a clue for me that actually it was more important than just to have it. But nonetheless, for 21 years I basically didn’t dress.

Linda (09:59)
At this point in your life, you’re married to a woman trying to convince yourself that you are just a normal man with this unusual past

Maria (10:11)
Yes, absolutely.

Linda (10:13)
and finding that you can’t quite let go of that part of you.

At some point you moved from the UK to France, right?

Maria (10:22)
Yeah.

Linda (10:24)
What took you from one place to the other?

Maria (10:28)
Well it was the marriage, for better or worse.

I take marriage seriously like most of us do. The marriage was having a few issues, my ex-wife was having a few issues. The marriage generally was struggling and had been for some time. She had three children from a previous marriage, one of whom has lived in France for many years. One day I came home from work and out of the blue she said, “I need to go and live in France,” because it would help her with this issue or that issue or whatever she said. Having got over the shock because this had never been discussed before and despite my reservations about the fact that actually to me that was tantamount to running away from problems as opposed to trying to fix them nonetheless to try to save the marriage and it was literally trying to save the marriage. I made it happen. We came to France, we bought a house in 2018. We moved permanently in 2020. I continued to work from France as a consultant. It was literally to try to save the marriage. Obviously that didn’t work but that was the sole reason for doing it was to save the marriage.

Linda (11:39)
I don’t wanna get into, all the personal details, but the reason your marriage ended didn’t have to do with all the things going on inside of you, at least not directly. It was other things that caused the marriage to end that then made you feel free to think about pursuing transition or at least figuring out who you were.

Maria (12:01)
Yeah, I think also it was a, I’d always lacked a degree of confidence. I’d never loved myself as an individual prior to the marriage and through the whole marriage she took advantage of that which ultimately was why the marriage had to end. But it only came to an end when I started to develop internal confidence about myself and effectively that… conflict between her control of me because she did used to control me and my emerging confidence isn’t as an individual in my own right that just could never work in a relationship and so I literally woke up one day and said “I’m sorry, I cannot live with you for the rest of my life. It’s just making me so unhappy” and partly because we’d had so many troubles for so many years prior to that she just said okay. I mean I’m not going say the divorce was easy but she accepted that we needed to part which was probably the best thing in the whole divorce that she did.

Linda (13:01)
I imagine for many people, at the end of a marriage, even if it was troubled for a good chunk of the time, that’s gotta be a pretty emotionally traumatic thing.

Maria (13:10)
Yes.

Linda (13:12)
When that happened to you, what led you to suddenly start thinking that maybe Maria wasn’t just some aspect of you, but was really the true you?

Maria (13:25)
To be honest I didn’t know that until I started living as Maria I think as I touched on earlier. I literally started living as Maria to see if it would work, to see if I could be happy like that because I’d never been happy up until that point. I realized looking back I’ve been depressed for my entire life up until I transitioned even before the issues with the marriage and even before the marriage. And it was literally, if you like, I took a punt on it because, you know, it was an educated punt, realizing that my only internal happiness I’d ever had before was when I was Maria for that brief two, three year window when I was living alone.

I just thought I’ll give it a go because I had nothing to lose, I was living on my own. I had nothing to worry about in my own personal life. It was just me, I had no family to worry about. I had brothers and sisters but that’s another matter. So I never had a lightbulb moment prior to transition that said I am a woman.

The light bulb went on, the moment I started living as Maria that said, is right for you, this is just perfect, this is the way to happiness.

Linda (14:37)
So if I were to rephrase what you said to make sure I’m understanding right, you went into this thinking, I’m just gonna see if this works because this felt right in the past. I don’t know where it’s going, but I’m gonna try this. And you found out that this felt right to you. And that you okay.

Maria (14:54)
Absolutely, yeah, totally spot on, absolutely.

Linda (14:59)
So how did you go from that to truly thinking of yourself as being a transgender person who was going to pursue a full social and perhaps medical transition?

Maria (15:11)
Yeah, well I mean having historically always been paranoid about people’s reactions and what they would think. I did spend that month of August 23 hybrid dressing, doing a mix of male and female clothes, just to see what reactions would be. And in the main, there was either no reaction or positive reaction. And for someone who’d spent their whole life paranoid about people’s reactions and responses, that was a revelation to me. I started to really understand that people generally only think about themselves and their own lives and considering other people like a trans person walking down the street even if they notice it they tend not to do anything about it and that was a massive revelation for me and so in September that’s where I went full-time 24-7 and it just worked. It just was something I tried literally just to see if it would work and it just did. Instantly I had an inner happiness. I lost the fears that I’d had my entire life, my fears about the people, my fears of what people would think. I used to say I had a prison in my own head because I used to tell myself no I can’t do this I can’t do that I can’t do the other and instantly that prison just disappeared and as much as it’s lovely to be a woman and it’s wonderful to have the hair and the clothes and that kind of stuff you know they’re kind of just paraphernalia in a way.

The freedom to live my own personal life my own way with inner happiness which came straight away the moment I changed that freedom told me it was the right thing for me. If you can suddenly shed all of your concerns and problems and become joyful from within it tells you that the way you living is the way you should be living. And it told me the opposite which was the way I’ve previously been living was never right for me which — it just all made sense.

Linda (17:10)
You went from being this very closed off person who didn’t really participate in the world, it sounds like, to someone who was really fully there and participating in your own life. Is that the way you feel?

Maria (17:25)
Totally, I think I mentioned that my wife had three children and their nickname for me was Man With Few Words because I was so closed off to the outside world. I was so closed to any kind of conversation. I never thought I had value to add. I never thought I was worthy of anything. I thought I was a good person, I thought I had a good heart but I didn’t think I was worthy of anything because I never loved myself.

And pretty much immediately all of those shackles, that closed offness whatever the right word is — that withdrawn nature which I used to have, it just disappeared overnight. It’s still incredible to me to think of how that change happened. It just came from living true. So now I have good friends. I have people who care about me. I have friends and neighbours who — I’ve just recently had sex reassignment surgery and before I met my fiancee who I live with now one of those friends said they would take me in after my reassignment surgery which is incredible as an offer for someone who is mostly a stranger to do and it touches on a lot of different things. It touches on how they see me as a human being. It touches on the honesty they see in me in living my life life the way I do and it’s something that would never have happened before being in my old life. Nobody cared about me at all apart from my family perhaps, literally no one else cared for me. To suddenly go from there to people willing to take you in for the heavy work of post reassignment surgery, it just demonstrates that shift in the person I used to be or the behavioral patterns I used to exhibit to how I am now.

Linda (19:07)
You had moved to France because of your marriage, but you remained there even afterwards. What led you to stay in France?

Maria (19:16)
Frankly having got myself established with a life in France, I was consulting working from France before. I didn’t see why I should or would want to move back to England. At a practical level, I gave the vast majority of everything we owned to my ex-wife to make sure she was okay because that’s what you do when you take marriage seriously.

But also on top of that there’s a couple of other factors, one is that it just touched on I’ve just I’ve been engaged now to a French lady. I’ve been engaged to her, Stephanie, for a year and a half now so we’re gonna get married next year. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to move back to England and be marrying a French woman. There’s also the transition side of things. Hhaving socially transitioned like a duck to water back in September ’23 the medical system in France and the support it gives transgender people to medically transition if that’s what they want to do is utterly incredible. And so if I were to go back to England, I’m afraid the health system in England for transgender people is terrible and getting worse. So it made no sense on so many levels for me to even think about going back to England. Yeah, it was never a thought in my head to go back to England.

Linda (20:30)
It sounds like a place that you moved to because someone else wanted to be there has truly become home for you.

Maria (20:37)
Yeah, it’s remarkable. I came here to save my marriage and instead I saved myself. It’s such a true – it’s almost a cliché for some perhaps, but it’s extraordinarily true of my I couldn’t have had this life if we’d stayed in England, that’s for sure. Especially given the nature of the healthcare system in the UK at the moment.

Linda (20:58)
What sorts of challenges have you faced in your transition? I know you said you’re a tall person, so how has that affected you?

Maria (21:07)
I’m 6ft 4 and I carry a few pounds, shall we say. So I will never ever ever blend in. I will always be visible. There’ve obviously been some emotional challenges as I’ve gone through transition but on the being obviously a transgender person I am of the view that I will always very obviously be transgender just because of my size. It’s funny that a friend once said, I’m not sure I was grateful for him saying this, but he once said that when I’m sat down I look like a woman, but when I stand up that’s when you see that I wasn’t always this way if you like. He didn’t put it quite like that. And that’s just a fact of my life. So I will always be noticeable.

I think it’s a two-edged sword. I can’t say I’ve never wished sometimes that… Yeah, there are times when I thought, wouldn’t it be great to pass? Yeah, maybe it would be, but nonetheless, the fact that I’m always so obviously transgender, visible, whatever, means I have to absolutely own who I am.

So I have to do everything I do with conviction which includes not giving a damn what other people think about me.

And I think that gives me a benefit in a kind of roundabout kind of way But there have been moments where people have laughed at me, people have stared at me, people have joked at me. Children always stare at me. That’s children. They do that. Adults continuing to stare – they should know better, they really should know better. But that happens all the time. Frankly though. I try not to see that when that happens.

It’s kind of part of self-defense and part of women’s self-defense because women have a tough time in general to not look at people, to not engage with people unless they want to, unless they know them. Stephanie on the other hand, she sees it all the time, people talking behind my back in restaurants and whatever. So in a way Stephanie has a harder time than I do because she sees more of the ripples that I cause as I wade through the water if you like.

So it’s been a little bit tough but fortunately not too difficult. Staring and laughing is the worst issue I’ve experienced in France. And if that’s as bad as it’s ever going to get then frankly I’ve got it better than so many other people that actually it’s almost no problem at all.

Linda (23:28)
It sounds like you’ve gone from not having many people in your life to having a pretty full life. Do you still have any contact with people from your past, family or friends?

Maria (23:39)
Family, yes, I’m the youngest of four children. So having totally lost contact with them because of my ex-wife for many years, at the end of 2023 I went back to England and reconnected with everybody.

It was really interesting, the difference in the relationships that we used to have which I would say were childlike sibling relationships to having an adult relationship with them which was the first time that ever happened and some of the comments they made about how I used to be withdrawn in my old life versus this confident person they suddenly saw. Actually some of their comments like that convinced my psychiatrist to sign me up as transgender which gave me access to hormones and surgery and all the rest of it. So I’m still in touch with my family and very close with some of them. My parents have both died but I did see my mother before she died as Maria and I’m sure there were things that she couldn’t understand but she could understand I was happy and that was a lot that mattered to her which was great. Other friends, I’ve got one or two friends at a distance from the old days and I was actually talking to one yesterday who helped me work through some of the post surgery complications I’ve had. So yeah I’ve got some contact and I am close to my family and family’s been entirely fine with my change.

Linda (24:59)
You said that you never really experienced that kind of dysphoria feeling where you were an outsider in your own body, yet you chose to pursue medical transition. What was your motivation for that?

Maria (25:15)
Yeah, I mean, looking back, I realized I did have dysphoria, but it wasn’t the physical kind. It was the emotional kind. Emotionally, I was kind of like an emotional zombie in my old life. I just didn’t exist. I facilitated other people’s happiness, but never had any of my own. I was kind of a stranger to my own life. That emotional dysphoria is recognized as a form of dysphoria now.

I never knew it, I wish I had, and that’s entirely gone now. But the physical change, I was living as Maria and I did at the start of that first week of transition think, you what do I think about surgery and I’ve actually kept kind of a diary about my thoughts and what I’ve worked through

Looking back I read that within the first week I was sure that surgical transition would be right for me. And my thinking, it’s kind of a very logical thought process I’ve gone through to get there, which is I’m happy to live my life as I am because it’s the only life in which I’m happy and confident and joyful.

I’m living that life as a woman, not because I’m pretending to be a woman, but because I am a woman. And it’s my brain that’s telling me that, and there’s a lot of research that says actually transgender people, like a transgender woman as I am, will tend to have a brain that’s more of a woman’s brain than a male’s brain.

And therefore my brain which is quite logical – I’m an accountant by trade and logically, I was struggling a little with living with a body that was one way but a mind and a lifestyle if you like there was another way you know the male body versus the female life and that contradiction started to introduce a degree of stress into my life and a contradiction if you like and to resolve that contradiction I thought it would be logical to do what I could physically to change myself, physically to align my body with the life of the person that I live as. So it’s kind of a very logical process as opposed to an emotional one but it all made perfect sense to me I know our motivations would all be different but that was my rationale for doing it was to get my body in line with my brain. which is the thing that tells me that this is the life that’s right for me, this is the life I have to lead.

Linda (27:41)
Thank you. That’s really interesting to hear from a different perspective. You said exactly the same things but from a different path.

As somebody else who’s very analytical, that’s interesting to hear.

This has been a fantastic conversation and before we end it, I wanted to give you a chance. If there was something that we didn’t talk about that you think is important to bring up, this is your chance.

Maria (28:08)
There are some people who deal with leaving their old lives behind easier than others. And it’s, to be fair, it’s taken me, despite how positive my new life is, it’s taken me a good couple of years, or up until very recently, to be able to be at peace with the fact that, as I used to express it to myself, I lived wrong for so many years. I lived as a guy, I lived someone else’s life for so many years.

I struggled to deal with that. And it can be something that causes us a lot of unhappiness. And for those who are watching and listening, it’s worth trying to consider how you’re going to resolve the old and the new and put the two together. Because fundamentally, although my expression of who I am has changed, to a degree my personality has changed with me becoming more confident.

I am essentially the same person and so finding a way to reconcile those two things and put them together as the one person that I now am has become an important part of my life to resolve that whole trouble. So for those who are watching and listening, if you’re struggling, it’s worth trying to realize that whilst that external image and the style and the manner you conduct yourself is very different,

it’s fundamentally the same person. I never used to love myself. I’ve learned to love who I used to be as much as I love who I am now and finding a way to love the person you used to be as much as you may have struggled with it, this is so important because it means that you can go on with a greater confidence. I’m more confident because I’ve reconciled the two. If you can see that you’re not a fundamentally different person you’re the same person just happier if you can make that leap then it will help to put you right for the rest of your life.

Linda (30:08)
Thank you so much, Maria. This has been a terrific conversation.

The primary purpose of this channel is to show that LGBTQ+ people are people, to humanize our experience and to do something like Maria’s done and to share the details of her life with us is an important thing and it’s a thing that makes one vulnerable. So be nice to Maria. We’re happy to answer questions that are coming from a place of wanting to understand.

If you’re someone that wants to share your story from any part of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, I’d be happy to help you share that. And if you need to do that anonymously, we can do that as well. So thank you, everybody, and until next time, take care. Thank you, Maria. And take care, everyone.

Maria (30:55)
Thank you. Thank you. Cheers now. Bye.