I was taken from my mother at fourteen days old and the fracture of that moment has shaped every day of my life since. I grew up loved, but never whole — always wondering who I might have been if I’d stayed in her arms, always walking with a psychological limp from a wound inflicted before I had words. Forced adoption didn’t just change my life; it split it. And fifty‑plus years on, I’m still trying to understand the person I became and the person I never got the chance to be.

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Before I start, I want to make this plain. I am a child who was taken from their mother at 14 days old, placed in foster care for 2 months, handed to strangers at 3 months, and debated about for a further 8 months. I was 11 months old when the Roman Catholic Adoption Society, supported by the UK Government, changed my life forever. I was born in the last quarter of 1969, when the practice of coercing mothers to give up their babies was the norm and supported by the state.

More than 50 years after this horrific trauma happened — against my will and against the will of a woman who struggled over the final decision for months — the question is still: who am I really?

It is true I was brought up by a couple who loved me. They loved a baby who had been traumatised at 14 days old. They loved the child they had chosen. They looked after me and brought me up in a family I had no option but to call my own. I loved them back and still love them. I loved my grandparents, and although they are gone, I still love them to this day.

BUT — and here’s the big but — who am I really?

I keep returning to this question because when your life is forcibly changed like mine was, no matter what you think or do or achieve, you always ask: who would I have been if I had been left in the arms of my mother on that day? Who would I have been if I had been brought up with my elder brother? And would my other three younger brothers ever have been born at all? I was the second of five brothers — not the first, not the fifth. The second.

I ask today: would I have been transgender? Would I have had the attachment style I have now, the one that has caused me so much pain and anguish? Would I have felt like I fitted in more? Would I have felt more at home being left with my mother than I have ever felt in my late 50s? The answer, I’m sure, is that I would have been much different to the person I have grown to be.

Baby trauma is well documented and proven to be a major contributing factor in the lives of people who suffered trauma as infants. But I feel a trauma such as this doesn’t ever heal. It impacts every day of your life from the moment it happens to the moment you die. You never stop asking: who am I really? What would my life have been like? And why, oh why, do I never feel complete?

I could go on and on about how I feel and how deep the mental wounds have been over the years, but for now I think you get the idea.

I have heard people say, “But this was believed to be best practice at the time. You had a good upbringing, decent parents, you never got into trouble, you went to a good school — what’s the issue?” They add, “Not all adopted people feel the way you feel.” It’s odd — just as cis people don’t fully understand transgender issues, adoptees are rarely understood by anyone other than other adoptees. I ask anyone who has grown up with the same mum and dad all their lives: what would you think and feel if you found out they were never really your parents, and biologically you don’t fit in? No — you can’t really imagine it, can you?

At times I’ve heard it said that I’m looking at my life like the film Sliding Doors: who would I have been if X or Y hadn’t happened? I get it. I really do. But that’s about what would have happened if you’d taken one job instead of another, dated someone else, not had kids, whatever. The person at the centre of those moments is still the person who was born to live the life they were meant to live. I wasn’t born to be an adoptee. My mother had no real reason to give me up — other than the state deeming her unfit because of morals and decisions she had made. Not because she was a drug addict, mentally unwell, or disabled in any way. She made decisions that made her life harder, yes, but she never truly chose to give me away. There’s a difference. Sliding Doors is about adults with capacity. I was a baby made to be alone.

Some therapists have tried long and hard to help me with anxiety, fear of loss, fear of abandonment — and failed. They’ve said, “You need to try harder. It’s PTSD. It’s complex PTSD alongside the other trauma you’ve suffered.” I smile now because I know it won’t ever go away. The loss at the start of my life has framed me in more ways than I can measure. I could go on and on: the tiny moments, the massive voids, the sense — the knowing — that I am tuned to the wrong frequency. That I neither fit with my birth mother, my blood siblings, nor my adopted family and adopted sibling. From the moment I was taken — kidnapped by the state — I was broken for good, never to be repaired, never to feel whole again.

Even after finding my birth mother and hearing her story, even that didn’t heal things. Even her story didn’t provide enough of a salve to begin the healing. Even the warmth of her hug, the knowing in her eyes, the connection that was instant yet distant, real yet unusual — even that was fractured. Forced fractured. Because the reason she gave for letting me go — the regret she lived with, the torment of never being able to trace me, never getting updates, the pain she still feels knowing she made the wrong decision because she was persuaded — even all of that doesn’t make it easier. It makes it harder.

The mothers of forced adoption suffered. They suffered a lot. But — and this is a but I offer only to provide context to an adoptee’s suffering — the mothers were someone whole before the fracture. They had a point of reference to return to. I lost a baby full‑term and perfect but stillborn. I know how much that hurts. But you had personhood before, and yes, the pain never goes, but the healing has a place to begin.

For the adoptee, the gap, the fissure, the hole — the hurt has no place to start. Other than an innate knowing that someone kept you safe enough for at least nine months, that you were born healthy — and then the crack. That void. That hurt. It has no frame to heal against. It is forever fractured.

So who am I really?

All I can say is: I am me. I am the person who writes these words. I have history and experiences, and yes, I have a fracture at the start of my life. I will always, and forever, walk with a psychological limp because of the psychological knee‑capping. I am, if nothing else, a baby now grown who forcibly had their life changed forever because society said so. I am a child of the forced‑adoption scandal — a child who came from the policy now called “a stain on our history.”

In that one speech on 2 July 2026 in the UK Parliament, read by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the UK began to understand what it means to have a stain on its history. Yet those not impacted will never know what it feels like to have a piece of your life’s jigsaw permanently destroyed — and the jigsaw itself changed forever.

I always had a sense of how my life should have felt. But for all my life, and for the rest of it too, I know I will forever feel like I’ve been walking in someone else’s shoes, on the wrong feet. Yes, I adapted. But the damage is clear.