Stumbled across Steph's life story (in his own words) on the Translucent website. It makes for grim reading. It's like Trans Widow Bingo, Unreliable AGP Narrator Edition.
https://translucent.org.uk/steph-richards-uk-my-trans-woman-story
Steph Richards Trans Woman – My Story
I’m Steph Richards….we are all different …we all have a story.
I am publishing mine online so you, the reader, can get an idea of what it is like to have been born trans, “in the wrong body.”
We start as we mean to go on: confusingly. For some reason, there are air quotes around "in the wrong body". He's not quoting anyone, and he supposedly believes in gendered brains, so why is this in quotation marks?
People air-quote like this to mock something, or to indicate a supposition other people hold, that they themselves don't agree with. Unintentional slip, or a joke at the expense of the reader? I leave it up to you to decide.
I was born in 1952 when food rationing was still in existence. I lived with my parents and my older sister in an old, cold, four-roomed cottage deep in the English countryside. We did not have a car, bathroom, or even an inside toilet, so bath time was on a Friday night by the living room fire in a long tin bath.
Going to the loo meant a trip down the garden to a galvanised iron shed. Inside was a toilet seat secured to a wooden frame with a metal bucket underneath, which my father would regularly empty into holes dug into the surrounding farmland- and, of course, there was the stench. My father was a land worker, my mother a part-time cleaner for the local gentry (posh people), and without question, we were poor.
This was a common childhood in 1950s Britain. You'll notice he doesn't say that, though. There's also special fixation on the outdoor toilet, which would have been considered completely unremarkable at the time.
I think the purpose of this story is to prime us to feel sorry for the young Steph, because he was poor? Mum's ration book and the reek of the bog scarred him for life. Or something.
Or maybe it's to hint at other fetishes. Who knows? Either way, this toilet is apparently the main thing Steph remembers from his childhood, and is described in more lavish detail than his actual parents. Make of that what you will.
One of my first memories, probably at the age of four or five, was asking my mother for a dancing skirt, and she kindly obliged with one of my sister’s old skirts. It was a typical fifties cotton flared skirt, primrose yellow with blue and white flowers. Being seven years younger than my sister, it was way too big, so my mum would secure it around my waist with a safety pin. It was too long, but this added to the twirling sensation and fun I had dancing to fifties songs on the wireless (radio).
The skirt - like the outhouse before it - once again gets a more loving description than his own mother. But anyway, apparently this moment of fun planted the seeds of a lifelong fetish. Poor mum. If only she'd known.
By the age of seven, my dad had built an extension to our home. We now had a bathroom, and I no longer had to share a bedroom with my parents.
Again with the bathroom, for some reason.
My sister got promoted to the newly built bedroom, and finally, I got my own bedroom. This was very convenient because my sister’s first bedroom had very loose and broken floorboards, meaning I had a hiding place for all the clothes I had started stealing from her. At night, I would remove her clothes from under the floorboards, try them on, and fantasise that I was going to grow into a beautiful young woman.
I remember always staring at my sister’s blue Girl Guides uniform. I was desperate to wear it, but I knew I could not get away with wearing or stealing it.
That AGP Bingo card is filling up fast. Perving on teenage sister? Stealing from teenage sister? Cross-dressing in her clothes?
You'll also notice he dresses up in them "at night". And that we aren't told what this hidden stash under the floorboards contained. This is odd, given the previous detailed description of the skirt. It's almost like he doesn't want to draw attention to what the items he stole from his sister actually were. I wonder why that might be?
Later he describes perving at her in her Girl Guides uniform, which I'm sure didn't make her uncomfortable at all.
At the age of ten, I remember being carried from the netball court by my school’s headmistress after being accidentally kneed in the stomach while jumping for the ball. I wanted to play in the netball team but could not because I was a ‘boy’.
We suddenly jump to this rather confusingly-worded anecdote. Was he "accidentally kneed in the stomach while jumping for the ball"? How did he manage that?
Raise your hand if you suspect he actually pushed his way into the all-girls team and received a kick in the balls.
You'll notice there's no mention of how the girls felt about all this. But reading between the lines, it looks like the headmistress dragged him out of there and laid down the law. Well done her.
Looking back, I was fortunate that my parents understood my gender issues from day one. Most parents in those days would have certainly tried to beat it out of their kids or seek medical help, eventually possibly resulting in electric shock treatment, which was commonplace in my younger days.
Did they "understand [his] gender issues"? That's extrapolating quite a lot from "my parents didn't beat or electrocute me".
We're not given any more information on what they supposedly "understood".
I was left alone at our home for the first time when I was about twelve, possibly thirteen – I don’t recall where my parents and sister went, but I do recall where I went; I walked through the village, wearing my sister’s clothes.
Did anyone see him skin-walking his sister through the village? How did people react? How did his parents and sister react? We're not told.
Again, this is a confusing anecdote. Are we supposed to think no-one in this small village knew it was him? That they assumed this thirteen year old boy was his twenty year old sister? Notice he doesn't bother to add on any details about how he felt or why he did this. He censors himself, and I think we can all guess why. He doesn't describe any of his encounters with others while in womanface, I suspect because it wasn't about the validation of being seen as a woman. It was about the thrill of not being seen. The erotic charge of disguising himself as a woman and getting away with it.
You may also be wondering why he waited until his parents left him alone to do this, if they were so supportive from "day one". And why he was still stealing his sister's clothes instead of getting his own. Something doesn't quite add up, does it?
But anyway, we close here on Steph's childhood. To be continued in adulthood . . .