"My mind drifted back to the winter of 1968 at St Marks Primary School in Jersey. The Railway Children dramatisation had recently been screened and was very much the talk of my class. One day a teacher walked around the room asking, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' The usual answers flowed: doctor, nurse, pilot, astronaut, scientist and then suddenly it was my turn. 'I want to be Jenny Agutter'. The teacher smiled a little quizzically and then announced, 'Julian likes trains, he wants to be a train driver', before quickly moving on to the next eager child. But it wasn't like that; it was something altogether different, something of which I had no understanding, yet something that nonetheless was there. Jenny Agutter, there in my mind all those years ago and here again now in my hospital room, as I anticipated the most momentous event in my life."
This is one person's journey of reassignment. It spares no blushes while taking the reader through highs and lows in a narrative that tells it from the heart. It will make you smile, it may make you cry but in the end you will be left with an insight into the life of someone who is willing to share her experience as she became Kirsty Jayne Crow.
