Joanna

Back when I was a closeted tranny, I discovered a website called Joanna's Diary, run by a t*girl called Joanna Nicholls. She was an "out" transvestite who seemed to be having a lot of fun, but I don't remember particularly envying her. In my mind there was no point feeling envy for something I could never achieve. I'd never be confident enough to dress in public like she did, let alone have a website to talk about it. And I'd never ever look as good as she did in a frock! In my mind, she was just one of the almost-fictional trannies that you saw online but didn't seem to have any existence in my reality.

My God, that sounds pathetic!

I was doing my own highly-closeted website thing, it was kind of a pictorial Fictionmania using captioned photos of real girls. Quite popular among the kind of trannies that visit Fictionmania. My god... that sounds pathetic! It was through working on that site that I got to know Joanna via email, and it was through chatting with her (and a couple of other online trannies) that the seed of an idea was planted. The idea that I too could be the kind of tranny they were.

I joined a group called the UK Angels that Jo ran with another T*Girl called Kim. Through that I gained the confidence to go to the Boudoir for a makeover and later a night out at Transmission... where I met Jo in person for the first time. I've met her a load of times since.

And the rest is history. Thinking back it seems pretty stupid that I placed people like Joanna on a pedestal, and thought that I'd never be able to do what they did. The reason why I make this point is that nowadays I get loads of emails from closeted trannies asking for advice, for whom it's a huge step just to email another tranny. So if I can make people see that I was just like them once, I guess that's a good thing.

The cue for all this rambling is that Joanna has copied my idea (shush Siobhan!) and set up a weblog. Seems that every other tranny has one these days, but seeing as Jo was a bit of a pioneer of UK tranny websites anyway, it's hardly like she's bandwagon-jumping.