So, to try to tell my whole story would be incredibly hard, and I’m an author, to find that task hard is something that doesn’t sit well within me at all.

I’m a 45 year old transgender person (assigned male at birth, now on hormones to transition to female).

From the age of 3 until I turned 11 I was abused in some of the most horrific ways you could possibly imagine.

My father started the sexual abuse, but it was my mother who knew about it and did nothing to stop it, often encouraging it and involved in her own sick and twisted way.

For years, she would beat and humiliate me over what my father and many others were doing to me, often telling me that it was my fault, I deserved it etc.

I thought all throughout childhood (and still to this day that it was my fault).

For two weeks of every month I was driven out to a hotel in the middle of nowhere by my father, where I would  be instructed to stay and do what I was told.

People would come - some men, some women, sometimes even couples. They would do whatever they liked to me, while my father was often in the same room (or in the bathroom), or sometimes in a room next door.

The things which were done to me were vile, inhuman acts on a child, but I endured these for many years, simply because I couldn’t do anything about it.

The abuse (sexual) stopped when I turned 11 and threatened to tell a school counsellor. Had I known it was gonna be that easy to stop it, I would’ve done her many years prior to that point.

My mother did continue to abuse me though, often so physically that I’d be kept home from school because of the marks, cuts and bruises that she’d left.

Throughout adolescence I developed a very strange ritual of becoming incredibly clingy to whoever was close to me in my life, and then losing them. It was terrible, but along with this and various suicidal attempts, I was destined to become always a product of my parents and nothing more really.

The way that I see what has happened to me is that I am essentially a broken person. Yes there’s counselling to sit there and talk about it all, pills to dope you up to the eyeballs so that you can’t feel anything anymore, but nothing ever worked for me.

I entered a new relationship last year, my final one, with an amazing woman who I’m truly in love with, perhaps for the first time ever, and as we venture into different avenues of this relationship, I’m constantly plagued by the torturous memories of some of the things that happened to me when I was younger.

I apologise after sex, every single fucking time, and I don’t know, I find oral sex (receiving) almost vomit inducing, and I always feel ashamed and filthy when I enjoy anything that we do, even though I know it’s beautiful and safe and consensual.

I’ve only very barely even scratched the surface of my story, but I wanted to share with someone, in the hope that people may either help, or it may perhaps help them.

Someone may find something that they relate to in my story, that might be just enough to get them through the day.

I hope this reaches someone, Somehow out there.