This won’t be everyone’s story. But for some of us, the cost of being transgender is immense — not just emotionally, physically, and mentally, but financially too.

I gave up a career that once earned me over £55,000 a year. Nearly 25 years ago, I walked away from a senior management role where I was respected for turning around broken teams and delivering results others thought impossible. I didn’t leave because I wasn’t good at what I did. I left because I was drowning — tormented by unrelenting dysphoria, drinking over 100 units of alcohol a week, smoking 20–40 cigarettes a day, and quietly breaking apart inside.

The drive alone, 88 miles each way was enough to grind a person down. But add to that the collapse of a sticking-plaster marriage, the devastation of losing a baby, and the soul-deep battle of living in the wrong skin with no language, no pathway, no permission… I cracked.

The culture back then offered no space for trans people, not in the corporate world, not in the everyday world. Even though I worked in a predominantly female business, the idea of broaching my truth felt impossible. So I lived a double life. A tortured one. Until I couldn’t anymore.

I remember the day it all finally broke. A business trip to Atlanta. A hurricane — Katrina — bearing down. We were on the last flight out, flying through it. People were being sick into bags. I was shouting “we are all going to die”, drunk on whisky, and somehow, at peace with it. I’d made contact with the edge, and in that terrifying, swirling chaos, something inside me gave way. The dysphoria had won.

After that flight, I walked away from it all. I gave up the money, the title, the career. And I’ve spent every year since trying to claw together enough to survive — selling my soul in scraps, hiding in the margins. I make a living now, just. But I remember the days of plenty. I remember what it felt like to have doors open, to be seen, to have options. And I also remember what it cost to be trans in a world that didn’t, and still often doesn’t, want to see us.

They say I’m unemployable now. Perhaps too much truth, too much history, too visible, too complicated or maybe they are simply all nimby’s (Not In My Back Yard). Maybe they’re right. But I still work, I graft, I create, I write. I keep going.

Sometimes I wonder what might have been if I’d been born as the man I once prayed I could be. Or if I’d been born into a world that could have accepted the transgender woman I am. Would I have built an empire? Would I have danced in the light instead of hiding in the shadows?

But I also know this: I’m still here. I survived. And that, in itself, is a kind of success.

The true cost of being transgender is invisible to most. But to those of us who’ve paid it, in silence, in scars, in lost time and dreams deferred — it is very, very real.

And yet, we still crack on with the hope that one day we will rise again, if only a little bit more so we can breath freely