I was born Lawrence Gareth Birley in meols, wirral on January 21st 1980 at 20:30. My parents are a pair of ex hippies, now one is a photographer who sells professional travel and developing nations to international press and media, I work for her company. My dad was a scientist and academic working at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He was pretty workdriven and I don't have memories of him from my early years except being told to keep quiet. He wouldn't ever be a fun, cool dad who knew how to do families, or would teach the kids to kick a ball around.It wasn't long after I was born that people realised I couldn't do things that other babies could. I don't really wanna depress you but this is my history. So they sent me to Alderhey Childrens Hospital c/o Dr Rosenbloom for a childhood of pricking, examining, testing and being poorly. At the time I was hard of hearing, a late developer and had learning difficulties.When I was five, after going through a special needs centre, my parents fought for me not to get sectioned into special education school (yep i would call special ed. schools sectioning.) The council weren't happy about placing me mainstream and the local school had pokers up their bottoms so I went to one in the next town five miles away. I soon found I was making friends with a lot of girls and being really popular. By six I had a group of mostly female friends who I was hanging around with all the time, I had been moved up a grade and earned the school endeavour award that I kept throughout my primary school years. I had my first proper girlfriend, Chloe Lanford, and we spent every minute out of school at each others houses. By the time I was seven she sadly hadly to leave for New Zealand. Seven was bit magical because I had ballet classes after school, my parents were a little too hot on extracurriculur but it was one extra thing that I deeply enjoyed. It lasted until the old school Ma'am said boys can't dance. When I was 11 I went to secondary school, and I looked at the time like a six year old. This was happy for me because all the big girls made a fuss of me, aaand the teachers put a stop to that. Why? I was enjoying it!I got referred to a puberty doctor to look at my body wasn't growing like other kids and they found out a few things. I got started on growth hormone injections at 12. When I was 13 I joined the local am dram group for panta season. That was pretty fun, I love acting and they gave me good parts to start with.I need to skip ahead again to my 15th birthday. I was performing in Humpty Dumpty as the lead leprechaun and it was the last night. Next morning, and here comes the heavy part, I was rushed into intensive care coughing up blood and put on life support. I lost 1 month of my childhood there. It turned out that from birth I had a deficient immune system, and I now had chronic itp and pneumonia. I remember waking up and seeing over 100 get well cards around my bed, impossible to believe I was such a popular boy. I came out to celebrating crowds and dedicated friends and family helped me raise over £1000 pounds for Alderhey ICU. My life though wouldn't be so happy and joyful, I had lost my smile and seen the pain of the world.A year later, after getting several GCSEs I left home, I'd begged for this all my childhood. I was sent to a residential HE College in Coventry, Hereward. The staff there were friendly, the students were a mix. I learnt many of my life lessons while studying there and met some of the most corrupt people I would ever choose to find. The worst of which was Rebecca Dutneall, grateful her voice doesn' haunt my thoughts anymore as I believe her to be unadulterated evil. She who spread the lies and slander around everyone, who played bitter twisted games and fucked up the heads of people who might have loved her did the worst thing of all, worse than all the secondary school bullies, when she made a false claim that my flatmate in my 3rd year raped her. I didn't discover the truth until a year later and I hope she rots in Hell for it. I have no sympathy, no love or compassion for her now. Many people see my empathy but she will not.While I was at college I started to play around with make up. I had always had a thing for pretty clothes and being girly but it had never really occured to me that such a thing was okay. One lunchbreak a classmate, Zoe Hopkins, painted my nails pink for me. It started a craze that had all the boys in college going around with painted nails and caused the staff just a little alarm. It was then that I felt popular again.At 20, in my last year at college, I lost my virginity to another unpleasant person, Katherine Williams. She controlled me, she pushed me and eventually against my protests made me make love to her. She had pushed all my friends away and I did not feel there was another choice. She was not all bad though. She brought out the repressed baby in me who had vanished when my mum started working again and I was two or three years old. She loved and cared for it and we played a lot of doctor and nurse, house, fairies and angels games. I guess she was not all bad, just not my intellectual match.At 20 I left Hereward and started at Liverpool Hope college. By now I was desperately confused about my identity and wanted more than anything to be a girl. I looked at dresses online and dreamed, lusted that it might be wearing them. Then near the end of summer term I started to go around University in the evening in drag clothes that I brought myself. I went to a bar in Liverpool by myself dressed up and had met a girl, I can remember that my mum asked over the phone next day whether I was sure it wasn't another boy in disguise! OUCH!The fun ended when I went drinking in drag surrounded by class mates and they had to get me out of a fight. The problem was I looked a little too real and boys didn't like it. I dont blame the classmates for being concerned, and I was hauled into the tutors office for a meeting where he begged me not to continue dressing until after I had left university. Well, I kept to that.A year after I had left University in 2003 with a BA Hons. in Creative and Performing Arts I had moved to Kingston Upon Thames and to what I hoped was a new life. I began looking at dresses again and brought a pretty pink dress from HB Enterprises. For a while I wore it privately before I started wanting to go out in it and went to meet other fetish people dressed up in it. It's biggest moment was its last major one in January 2005 when it came to San Francisco with me for my birthday. I was loved, I went out to the TrannyShack after a talk with another ts at the lgbt community centre, and got pulled up on stage to be Dr FrankNFurter. The holiday got even better when I went dress shopping at Macy's and came out with a white dress that had a pink ribbon around its waist from Betsy Johnson, four inch heels, tights, panties and my first ever bra. That was the best birthday I ever spent.Two years later, almost, I have been living as a woman for two years. My name is now Bethany Lauren Birley. I attend sexual reassignment therapy at the Claybrook Centre Charing Cross and am taking hormones (now have a nice pair of 40b's.) The best thing anyone ever told me was when my mum said "I always wanted a girl." I am the Princess Bethany, a trooper in life and a survivor of its problems, I have seen darkness and light. Now you have read this plese contact me on cherrytap if you wish to be friends. I am not seeking people who can not speak much english, or who will bug all the time. I want some nice friends and Internet family to surround me and accept me like my biological family do, little beth as well as the bigger.