Kay Kirkman’s journey towards becoming oneself is inseparable from an entire lifetime. For more than six decades, Kay lived within a life shaped by expectations and responsibilities. She built a career in mental health nursing, became a husband, father and grandfather, and spent forty years married to Julia, the woman she loved. Yet alongside that life was another truth, one Kay had carried since childhood and had never quite been able to silence. It was only after Julia’s death that the walls Kay had built around that hidden part of herself began to come down. Grief, strangely enough, became a doorway. What followed was not a simple story of finally “coming out,” but a deeply human process of questioning, remembering, grieving, accepting and, ultimately, learning how to live as the woman who had always been there.
Kay has now captured that journey in her memoir, Becoming Kay: A Story of Identity, Loss, Courage and Self-Discovery, published in August 2026. It is a book about much more than transition. It is about marriage and parenthood, ageing and identity, mental health, prejudice and acceptance. It is also about the people who remain important to us even when life changes beyond recognition. What I particularly love about Kay's story is that it challenges one of the most damaging assumptions surrounding transition, the idea that there is an age by which we must have figured ourselves out. Kay reminds us that sometimes the road to ourselves is extraordinarily long, and that arriving late does not make the destination any less beautiful. There is also something wonderfully warm about the way Kay approaches her story. Alongside the difficult moments, there is humour, honesty and an appreciation for the absurdities of life. She doesn't present herself as someone who suddenly became a completely different person. She presents herself as someone who finally stopped hiding a part of the person she had always been.
Monika: Kay, I have to begin with your memoir. The title, Becoming Kay, says so much, because it sounds as though this wasn't simply about choosing a new name or beginning transition, but about finally becoming the person you had been carrying inside you for most of your life. When you look back now, when do you think you first knew that something about your identity was different?
Kay: From early childhood I had the sense that I felt awkward, out of place somehow. The things I was interested in, what I wanted to do and say, I only saw these reflected in the girls. The boys, their interests and behaviour, felt strange to me. Before I reached my teens I was frequently wishing I could be a girl to behave and express myself in a way that felt more natural for me.
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| "From early childhood I had the sense that I felt awkward, out of place somehow." |
Monika: You lived for many years as a husband, father and grandfather, while also building a career in mental health nursing. Those are enormous responsibilities, and I imagine they left very little room for exploring something as deeply personal as gender identity. Did you become particularly good at putting that part of yourself into a box and carrying on with life?
Kay: Oh, Yes! I always thought I would have made a good spy! I learned to compartmentalise my life. Presenting as male but constantly longing just to shed that skin. I had to conform, I knew that. It was the society and the times I grew up in. Any display of what I considered my true nature would have opened me up to criticism and ridicule.
Monika: You were also married to Julia for forty years. I find that part of your story particularly moving because transition is often presented as an individual journey, while in reality our lives are deeply connected to the people we love. What did Julia mean to you, and how do you think your relationship shaped the person you eventually became?
Kay: Meeting Julia saved me from chaos. My life had no focus before her. I knew what I dreamt of being but that was socially unacceptable. I was 19 when we met. The world then, my world, had no space for a trans gender person. Being with Julia I learned about love, commitment and that I could place other people before my needs
Monika: Julia's death seems to have been a turning point in your life. Sometimes the most painful events somehow remove the barriers that kept us from confronting ourselves. Did losing Julia give you the freedom to finally ask yourself questions you had been avoiding for decades?
Kay: Julia’s death made me confront the truth about myself and everything I had hidden. Were my dreams about being a woman merely a fantasy, or were they the truth about myself? After 60 years it took therapy to help me understand who I really was.
Julia’s death gave me the freedom to do this, but that was never without a feeling of guilt.
Monika: There is something almost paradoxical about that. You had spent so much of your life protecting the life you had built, and yet grief eventually made it possible to build another one. Was there a particular moment when you thought, “I can't keep hiding anymore”?
Kay: There was, and I mention this in my memoir. There was an occasion when I was trying to console my elder daughter in her grief and I could not do it. I realised I could no longer function, care for my family, and remain half a person. Only by becoming Kay could I give them all of myself.
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| "My name and life now is not a denial of the past, it is my future" |
Kay: I have gone through a roster of names over the years. Usually adopting the name of a woman I admired for some reason. I had settled on being Antonia just prior to coming out. I liked the androgynous quality being called Toni carried. My daughters hated it. They suggested Kay. The initial letter of my original given name. I like my name now for that reason. My name and life now is not a denial of the past, it is my future, based on my past, but headed in a completely new direction.
Monika: When you finally came out, how did your family react? I'm especially curious about your children and grandchildren. Did you worry about losing the relationships you had spent a lifetime building?
Kay: My children have accepted me almost completely. All in their 40s now, I think they knew me well enough to see I was not quite like the other dads. They were not particularly surprised by my admission of being transgender. We are currently trying to find a way to introduce me fully into my grandchildren’s lives. I do not want to upset them with a sudden upheaval. Both my granddaughters have seen pictures of Kay and know that with my adult friends and at my voluntary work I present as female.
Monika: Did your mother ever have the opportunity to know you as her daughter? And when you think about her now, do you see any connection between the two of you, perhaps in your appearance, mannerisms, personality or even the way you approach life?
Kay: My mother died when I was 18. She was aware that I thought that I should be a girl, but could never accept it. I am very unlike her in appearance and personality. All I seem to have inherited from her is a tendency towards anxiety.
Monika: Do you remember the first transgender woman you met in person? I remember how powerful it was for me to discover that other women had walked this road before me. Did meeting other trans women help you realise that the life you imagined might actually be possible?
Kay: I remember very well, and she is still my friend. I was in awe of her. Living her life as herself in the public eye. She was an inspiration and very much a mentor to me at the start of our friendship. Until meeting her I think I possible still thought living as the gender that felt true to me was a pipe dream.
Monika: Was there also a particular trans woman you saw on television, read about or encountered somewhere who made you think, “That's me”? Sometimes one person can provide a mirror when we desperately need one.
Kay: Reading Jan Morris’s memoir, Conundrum, in my very late teens was a game changer for me. Was this really possible? To become who you believed you were, and live that life? That book saved me from my persistent troubling thought that I was a freak of nature.
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| "Nursing seemed to come quite naturally to me and suited my caring nature." |
Monika: Your professional background in mental health nursing adds another fascinating dimension to your story. You spent your career caring for other people's mental wellbeing while carrying such a significant secret of your own. Did your professional experience ever help you understand yourself, or did being a mental health professional sometimes make it harder because you were so good at analysing and managing things?
Kay: Nursing seemed to come quite naturally to me and suited my caring nature and the desire I had always had to contribute, to do some good and help people. I never spent a lot of time analysing myself. I never considered being transgender a mental illness. In 30 years as an inpatient nurse, a community nurse, not once did I encounter a patient whose primary diagnosis was being transgender. Trans people did use mental health services but their conditions were the same as everyone else. Being transgender complicated their lives, it caused depression, anxiety, substance misuse, but illness did not cause their gender issues. I always felt a greater degree of empathy for trans patients, but shamefully I feel now, never had the courage to share with them.
Monika: Many transgender women describe coming out as a mixture of enormous relief and enormous fear. What was the hardest part of finally becoming Kay, and was there anything you expected to be difficult that turned out to be surprisingly easy?
Kay: The major difficulty I anticipated, and feared, was telling my children. And it turned out to be straightforward and simple. Because they made it so. They had already decided that they understood what my dilemma was and had made a decision to wait and allow me to reach a point where I could tell them freely. In the end it needed a nudge from my eldest daughter to push me over the edge and confess.
Monika: For many of us, there is a period after coming out when everything feels wonderfully new. I remember my own transition euphoria. Suddenly there were dresses, shoes, makeup, experimenting with everything, and I felt as though I had to make up for all the years that had been taken from me. Did you have a similar “I am finally allowed to do this!” phase?
Kay: Definitely! Hair was my thing. The most obvious difference between Kay and the previous version of me is the hair. Having been a slave to testosterone for 60 years I am naturally a little short of head hair. So wigs were an immediate purchase for me. As realistic and natural looking as I could find. Which meant expense. Undeterred by cost I went a little hair-brained. My ‘Girls’, the wigs, now number in double figures.
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| "I always just wanted to appear to be a ‘normal’ woman of my own age." |
Monika: And what about femininity itself? Did you ever feel pressure to meet a particular ideal of what a woman should look like or behave like? I know I spent quite a lot of time trying to look like the women around me before eventually realising that I didn't have to become somebody else's idea of a woman.
Kay: I always just wanted to appear to be a ‘normal’ woman of my own age. At first this was stressful as I checked and double checked for any telltale signs of masculinity. It was a while before the truth dawned on me. I’m a transwoman. If I’m comfortable with how I look, everyone else has to get on with that. I’m not trying to trick anyone or convince them I was born a biological female. I am a trans woman and proud of that.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Kay Kirkman.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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