TRANSGENDER DANIELLE ‘ON BECOMING THE WOMAN SHE WAS ALWAYS MEANT TO BE’
38-year-old shares story for Transgender Awareness Week to try and help others
DANIELLE Hughes loves live music, sci-fi and cooking.
She’s got an impressive collection of dresses and has perfected her eye liner flicks. She works hard, she’s a good friend and she loves her family.
She’s just like many other 38-yearold women – except that she was born male.
It hasn’t been an easy journey for Danielle, who grew up as Darren in Silverdale with parents Bill and Sue, and younger siblings Katie and Matt.
As a youngster she didn’t know what it meant to be transgender – “I just always knew that I should have been a girl,” she says – and didn’t have any role models who had transitioned.
Even today, she has still never knowingly met another transgender person in real life.
Danielle, who lives in Shelton, has decided to tell her story during Transgender Awareness Week to help others who may feel as she did – alone, wrong, out of place and disgusting.
Despite a happy childhood with her family, she was bullied at school. She hardly had any friends – although one girl, Danielle, was kind to her and inspired her choice of name.
Puberty was particularly tough, as she saw the girls going through the changes she so badly wanted while she shot up in height and developed as a man, and she left school at 15 to start working, eventually combining her love of art and graphic design with a career in screen-printing.
In her late teens she was able to start finding out more about her feelings thanks to the internet, but she was still in denial – and actively tried to be ‘more of a man’.
“I started searching online, things like transsexual and cross-dressing, but that still wasn’t me,” she says. “Those terms were sexualising it and fetishising it, and it’s not a fetish. It’s not a sexual thing. It’s just that I should be a girl.
“I was still hiding my feelings and bought a Stoke City season ticket because that is what a man would do. I hated football at first and although I did get into it, I didn’t feel comfortable with the culture.”
Danielle began buying women’s clothing online and wearing them in her bedroom at her parents’ house, saying: “It just felt right.”
Watching Youtubers who had transitioned and joining online forums helped Danielle reach the point where she thought she had accepted her feelings, and in 2012 she made an appointment with her GP. After that appointment – where she was referred to Harplands Hospital for psychiatric assessment – she wrote to her family to tell them.
“My mum just gave me a hug and said it was going to be OK,” says Danielle. “It meant everything to me. My dad cried. He didn’t want to talk about it but he tried to be supportive.”
But things still weren’t easy. Her family were struggling with her news and her appointment at Harplands was difficult.
She had also racked up £30,000 of debt in a vicious cycle of buying women’s clothes, feeling guilty, throwing them away and then buying them again.
“It felt like too much and I started hiding away again,” she says. “I told my family I wasn’t going to do it. I had made life even harder.”
In a further effort to become ‘more manly’, unhappy Danielle began going out for massive breakfasts and huge steaks. Her weight ballooned to 27 stone and in 2015 she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
She hit rock bottom in 2019 after her father died and she began to realise that she had to change her life. She was referred to the gender identity clinic in Nottingham by her GP and was given an appointment date – for January 2023.
Unable to cope with the wait, Danielle, who became debt-free in January 2020, decided to look at private options and contacted online transgender clinic Gendergp.
She didn’t want tell her family yet as she was due to be best man at her brother’s wedding in September 2020, and decided to move into her own flat – just three weeks before lockdown hit.
But the pandemic proved to be a blessing in disguise as she was furloughed from work.
With nowhere to go besides the supermarket and a daily walk, she began living as Danielle at home.
“I felt right, just normal,” she says. “I had never felt normal before. Because I was living as myself at home it became harder to go out to the supermarket as the old me.
“I started slowly. At first I just put some clear nail varnish on to go for a walk. Then I tried a bit of mascara, and a bit of eye liner.
“I bought a women’s hoodie – you couldn’t tell it was a women’s one, but I knew – and I went out with nail varnish and eye liner. I thought everyone would be calling me a freak, but no one noticed.”
Her confidence growing, Danielle dressed as herself complete with wig and full make up for a video appointment with Gendergp – and then decided to take the plunge and go outside.
“I went out onto my balcony and there were people walking past,” she says. “I stood there for about two hours trying to build up the courage to go out.
“Then my neighbour appeared and smiled at me. That was it – I walked along the canal for a few minutes. It was the most overwhelming and freeing feeling. After spending my whole life locked away I had found myself.”
Huge obstacles like going to the supermarket proved completely uneventful, and when the news came that her brother’s wedding had been postponed, she emailed her family to tell them again that she was transitioning.
She said: “My mum told me later that she was worried about my safety and my happiness. But she can see that I am happy and it’s just normal to her now that I am Danielle.”
Her boss was also supportive – he and another colleague witnessed her deed poll to change her name – and Danielle returned to work for the first time as herself last year.
She has found people in Stokeon-trent to be very accepting of her as a trans woman – and she has only experienced abuse once.
Her challenges aren’t over yet – she is likely to have to wait years for the gender reassignment surgery on the NHS and has a crowdfunding page in the hope of affording private treatment.
Danielle, who has regular laser treatments to remove hair on her face and chest, has found acceptance as a woman in a Facebook group for fans of the clothing brand Popsy, and has been a model for the company’s dresses.
She has received many supportive messages and said: “I never had this growing up and that’s why it’s important to share my story.
“I want to show we are normal people wanting to live our lives.
“By sharing my story maybe I can help someone who feels as I did.
“Even if I just help one person, it will be worth doing.”