3 minute read
I’VE WAITED ALL MY LIFE TO BE A WOMAN
I’VE WAITED
ALL MY LIFE TO BE A WOMAN
Berni Astley has lived for 73 years as a woman in a man’s body. As she prepares for gender surgery, the NHS activity coordinator talks exclusively to Jackie Rankin about heartache, stigma and enduring love.
Berni was four when she discovered she wasn’t a girl. “My mum would bath me and my older sister together. I asked my sister ‘where’s your willy? She said ’girls don’t have willies’. I said ‘well ‘I’ve got one’ and she said, ‘that’s because you’re a boy’.
I was devastated – I thought I was a girl.” The challenges mounted as Berni’s overbearing instinct to be who she was in her head and heart led to conflict and humiliation. She’d dress in her sister’s clothes and play in fields near her home just to have fleeting moments of truth. Her mother, embarrassed, would drag her home, once lifting Berni’s skirt in public to prove she had male genitalia. At school she’d be bullied by boys and punished harshly for sneaking into the girls’ playground where she felt she belonged.
Berni’s dad was loving but unable to accept his son’s situation. “I knew he loved me, but he’d take me to football matches and encourage me to box, he wanted to make me a man.” On her 16th birthday Berni decided to come out, “I wore a dress to my party. My mum screamed and called my dad home from work. He told me to stop or leave home and be disowned. In that moment I decided to live a lie.”
Berni married a friend of her sister. “I loved her from the moment I met her, she accepted me for who I was, and we became best friends.”
They couple had four children. Berni continued to cross dress in private, but the pressure of secrecy was too much, and her mental health deteriorated. In 1996 she was admitted to hospital, only to face stigma from the people she thought would help her.”
“Doctors constantly told me I was gay, I needed to pull myself together and decide what I wanted. I said I wanted to live as a woman, but no one would help me.”
Twelve years later Berni confided in her beloved only daughter about transition treatment “She was fantastic, she understood and supported me to tell my wife and sons.”
She weeps as she recalls her family’s reaction. “My wife understood but said she couldn’t live with me as a woman. My youngest son said ‘you were the perfect dad to me – now you won’t be my dad’. I said “I’ll always be your dad.”
The pain deepened when Berni’s daughter died of cancer. “I couldn’t visit her when her friends were there, I was heartbroken, but I knew going to her funeral would upset my family, so I went to a place where we’d go for picnics.” Berni began hormone treatment and has lived as a woman since 2018. She suffered a major setback after her hormone treatment was halted when she became involved with mental health services. “They said I didn’t have mental capacity,” she said. “I was struggling with stress caused by my daughter’s deteriorating health and years of battling for gender identity treatment. I was just angry and frustrated.”
On her last admission staff granted her request for a bed on a female ward. This and art therapy sessions played a major role in her recovery. She became a volunteer and is now ward activity coordinator. “They saw who I was and helped me. Art is my passion and I’m helping other patients have the same experience,” she says.
Berni is now in the care of CMAGIC, Mersey Care’s transgender service and will undergo transition surgery this summer. “I’m so happy” she says. “I feel like a weight I’ve been carrying for 30 years has been lifted from my shoulders,”
She and her wife are as close as ever. “We go shopping and on holidays. After 48 years she’s still my best friend.”
I was devastated – I thought I was a girl.
CMAGIC is a gender dysphoria service provided by Mersey Care and Cheshire and Merseyside Adult Gender Collaborative offering tailored support options, assessment for and diagnosis of gender incongruence, hormone therapy referrals to voice therapy, hair removal, psychological therapy and referral to surgical providers. For more information visit: merseycare.nhs.uk
