Beaumont Society

I remember the day as if it was yesterday. It was the 16th of March 2015, my husband was at snooker when my lovely 22-year-old son came into the room and said he had something to tell me. Wringing his hands, turmoil on his face, talking under his breath and clearly upset, he told me ‘I want to be a woman, I’m a woman inside and I have to do something to change the rest of my life’.

Michael Dillon was assigned female at birth and was named Laura by her parents, but had always felt uncomfortable in women’s clothes. He knew that he was not a woman and preferred to wear clothes designed for men. At university – as Laura, of course - she excelled at rowing and was the president of the Oxford University Women’s Boat Club. While a student – long before stories of gender reassignment surgeries appeared in the media - she wondered about the possibilities of hormone therapy, and researched what was known about it at the time.

Writing ‘Embracing the enigmatic truth behind my child’s happiness,’ has been an incredibly personal journey, as it is about my thoughts and feelings about my transgender son James and our relationship. It has been like trying to unravel a misshapen ball of knotted string. One of those annoying misshapen balls of string, that takes up a lot of room in a drawer that keeps getting things caught in it and should be thrown away, but it never does, because it will just take a ‘few minutes’ to sort out. But we all know that unravelling a tangled ball of string is going to require patience, determination and a lot of thinking through. As one bit of string is unravelled another tangled mess appears, with one knot leading to three or four other knots that seem to spring from nowhere. Undoing them seems impossible, but as with all puzzles there is always a solution.

Along with being curious about our history, one of the most common questions we’re asked is “Why are you called the Beaumont Society – are you named after someone?”