January 2010.
Height: 5ft 7ins
Weight: 11 stone 5lbs
Chest: 34 inches
Hair: Straight and brown. Chin length. Receding at the temples
Shoe size: 7
Dress size: 12
Eye colour: Brown
OK, I may not have been born with the body of Kiera Knightly, but I certainly wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger either.
Being transgender I have always been acutely aware and insecure about how I look. Great legs, nice eyes, slim figure…but a MASSIVE forehead! Jesus, I hated looking at it! How many women do you know with a great big “M” shaped hairline? M stands for man.
It had to go.
So the first thing I did was splash out £6,000 of my redundancy money on a hair transplant. In Belgium. I was hoping that Brussels sprouts.
A lovely doctor who looked very much like Val Kilmer used a black marker pen to draw the flow of a female hairline on my forehead. Copying it from a nurse he beckoned into the room, who was asked to raise her fringe.
He then cut a six-inch strip of scalp from the back of my head while I was under local anaesthetic.
While I felt no pain, I wondered why I could hear someone in the operating room ripping corrugated cardboard.
Then I realised the sound was perfectly synchronised to each tug of my scalp.
My head was stitched and stapled back together. 3,700 follicles from the removed strip of skin were separated, and individually planted at the front.
A process which took eight hours.
Seven months later, my new hairline had grown in nicely.
The biggest temples in the world were once again in India and Egypt, rather than on my forehead.
You would have thought that my male friends would have spotted something following my surgery when I was in Jonathan mode. At this point in time, our usual Friday-night-with-the-lads were still very much part of my routine.
Nope. Not a mention.
Even if I had a giant white bandage like Mr Bump wrapped around my head I doubt they would have noticed. Typical.
Clearly there’s a gene which makes men blind not only to hair-dos, but hair in general.
While my new follicles took root, I worked as Jonathan around the country as a freelance journalist. For radio stations and newspapers. Picking up occasional shifts wherever I could.
The long hours on the road were a bit of a strain – but it was time I tried to use constructively. Singing along to Girls Aloud and Kylie Minogue songs on my car’s CD player.
It made my throat sore. And scared people at traffic lights.
Gradually though, after months of warbling I could finally move my voice into a reasonable approximation of a female range.
I began a course of Intense Pulsed Light therapy on my face. Ouch. Talk about pain! A nurse zapped the hair follicles on my chin, cheeks and neck with a laser straight out of the Goldfinger film. It’s a bit like having a rubber band snapped against your face a trillion times.
By the end of each session I looked as if you have been lying in the hot sun while caked in cooking oil.
Within a few months the admittedly very little hair on my chin and lip had raised the white flag and surrended. Being burnt by a laser was clearly too much for them, so they stopped peeking through my skin. I was now smoother than a Luther Vandross song.
I had always looked fairly androgynous. A slight lean to the left on the gender see-saw and I could appear male. A lean to the right, female.
This treatment though definitely nudged me more in the direction I wanted to go.
Time for the next step.
The internet is a wonderful thing.
Registering with a sympathetic GP in a different town I confessed all about my gender identity problems. She sent me a letter saying I was now being treated for gender dysphoria, which I passed on to the passport office along with a DIY Deed poll showing I had changed my name, and the application went through.
I now had a passport in the name of Joanne, complete with an “F” in the box used to denote sex.
I began applying for a job in earnest.
That's not a town called Earnest. Just an adjective.
Within a few weeks I was invited to an interview with the NHS, who had a vacancy for a press officer.
I splashed out on a smart skirt, jacket and blouse, and walked into the interview room, pulse racing.
It seemed to go well.
The questions and exercises were all pretty straight forward given my background in journalism, but best of all, there was no flicker on the panel’s faces that they were quizzing anyone other than a woman called Joanne.
When you are trans you become acutely aware if you have been ‘read’ or not. When it happens, confidence drains away and you feel incredibly vulnerable. A punctured balloon.
My early ventures into the world as the real me during my teenage years were always racked with tension. If I felt a single person had rumbled the truth, I would flee the scene as quickly as possible, embarrassed, and usually on the verge of tears.
Fortunately It had only happened a couple of times to me during those first tentative ventures over the gender fence, but it was a possibility that I was constantly aware of.
On the day of the interview I knew in my bones that hadn’t happened.
Twenty-four hours later I got a call congratulating me on my success.
Wow. Getting that job meant so much to me. I could have jumped through the ceiling with joy.
And of course if I had, any injuries sustained would be treated by a nearby doctor or paramedic.
The pay was well below what I earned in television, but you can’t have everything.
I looked at it this way. I'd changed channels for half the salary, but I was twice as happy.
