I remember, when I was in Year Eight, a group of boys took it upon themselves to come into the toilet when I was having a pee and one said, ""You should be in the girls' toilet." And another said, "Oh, no. In between."

I also remember, the following year, when a guy asked me if I liked Cliff Richard and he said he did, another guy snickered and said, "You may not know this, but he is a homosexual." I already had to suppress the fact that I liked George Michael, so this was another person I had to pretend I didn't like.

Looking back on my life,, in some ways I was mature for my age at 13, in some ways I wasn't, but if I could have a conversation with my 13 year old self and those kids, I would say, "If he likes George Michael, and George Michael is gay, so what? It doesn't mean that if he likes a gay man as a performer, that he is gay, too."

I was subjected to old school socialisation by my mother, who, when I was going to start high school, whispered to me in a harsh undertone, "Don't you dare talk about wanting to do Home Economics unless you want to have an operation to be a girl." I didn't want to do woodwork or metalwork. One of the problems at high school was that it insisted that students had to have "a balanced program," so we had to do at least one practical art and at least one fine art. Someone like me would have done better to have done Japanese, two social sciences and maybe German or Chinese, as well.