My first relationship was with a girl. At the time, I told myself that it was alright to be with a girl; in fact, I was supposed to be with a girl, because inside I wasn't a girl. I never told her that, though.

During my teenage years, I convinced myself it would be okay if everyone thought I was a lesbian. It was preferable to the truth. I looked female and, if I was with a female, I could play the more masculine role in the relationship. And I did. It was only years later that I realised that I had been using women in that fashion. Guilty secret.

My first relationship with a man happened when I was nineteen and at university. I never told him I had been with women. He had long blond hair and he had a slim build. He was quite feminine-looking, although I didn't think, at the time, that had an influence on me. But maybe it did.

I was also attracted to a woman named Pippa at university. She was the girlfriend of one of Mike’s friends. A year into the relationship with Mike, I discovered they had been secretly seeing each other. I split with Mike. Pippa found out that I knew and she ended her relationships with both men. And then we got together. But it didn't last long. Eventually I returned to Mike, after seeing a few people in between. I told some of those people that I was bisexual and invariably that caused problems. Issues that made me regret disclosing that aspect of me, too. I was still with Mike when I met my husband.

Looking back, I can see that none of my relationships were especially healthy. I was never very good at them. And I can blame all kinds of things for that but I know it’s me. My opinion of my own body gets in the way. I can playact at things for a while and then it gets too much to bear and I stop pretending. That means the other person in the relationship stops getting the things they need from me. And for a lot of people that’s a rejection and invalidation.

It’s funny that I know I need my own validation but I'm very good at dishing out invalidation to others. That’s wrong and I understand that now. And I also know now that I could never have received the validation I needed because my persona is based on lies and deception, because I've never really been straight with anyone.

Sometimes I wonder whether my attraction to women is real. Sometimes I wonder if I've constructed it to give myself opportunities to act out my male-role fantasies. Sometimes I wonder, because I've always been attracted to the male form even though I threw myself into relationships with women first.

And sometimes I think about something else that scares me. If I think about the possibility (an extremely remote one, I know) of undergoing gender reassignment surgery, and if I ever received the male body that I always wanted, I would still be attracted to men, first and foremost. And what gay man would ever want me, when there’s a whole bunch of attractive, real gay men out there that they could have instead? I would still be a freak. I'm always going to be a freak, no matter what my body looks like.