Yes another age 3 to 5 one... can't put an exact age on it, for obvious reasons, but I know that I first "came out" to my mother in a Clarkes shoe shop in Kensington High Street of all places and that it was well before I started school.
The trouble is I was a very determined little person back then and despite my parents best efforts at containment, efforts which were hampered when my father died of cancer, it seemed that once I had decided that that was what I was going to be there was nothing they could do to prevent me from making my feelings known to anyone who would listen.
Early battle grounds were red girls shoes, longish hair, a kilt as part of my school uniform, and a party frock! Amazingly I won on all occacions.
Unlike most children of the time I thus grew up very "out" and ended being taken to an array of child psychologists one of whom fortunately decided that it was "just a phase" and that the best thing my mother could do would be to play along and make it "our little joke!" Because that way, she said, my mother, who was by then an only parent, would have a good strong emotional bond with me.
I think it also helped that my mother was a BBC radio producer who specialised in medical programmes and therefore had heard about this strange phenomenon of gender dysphoria. She had even inteviewed April Ashley!
Upshot was by the time my mother remarried I was at one of the most advanced and avante garde boarding schools in the country where I was being allowed to grow up openly "in between" genders, and my step father, who was not quite so sympathetic, felt it unwise to interfere. Thus the only hassle I had to face was the occasional sarcastic comment from him.
