On a warm summer day in 1966, when I was a five-year-old boy, I was chatting with two girls in the playground at school. At least five inches shorter than me, they were pretty, fair, had long blond hair, and were wearing colourful dresses. One of the girls said to me: “You’re really tall, and have big hands.” For the first time the thought hit me: I didn’t want to be tall and have big hands. “I want to look like you,” I thought. I knew then that I wanted to grow up to be a woman. But in the 1960s we didn’t talk about stuff like that, so I bottled it for years, notwithstanding the pangs of jealousy I would get when I saw girls wearing skirts and feminine sandals, and plaiting each other’s hair.

Fast forward 18 years and I was having a drink with a girlfriend in the pub. She said, “There’s something different about you, compared to other men.” “You wanna know why?” I asked. “It’s because I want to be a woman.” That was the first time I’d ever said it out loud. The fact that someone knew, and didn’t react negatively, was a huge release.

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Very soon after that, I started wearing makeup. I then moved on to plucking my eyebrows and wearing eyeliner. Within a few years I was wearing makeup all the time and my clothes were becoming increasingly feminine. Between my long hair, makeup and clothes, people often took me for a woman. When I got a bit older I started worrying about hair loss – which runs in my family – making me age into an older man. Having spent far too many years of my life trapped in a man’s body already, I was keen to avoid this. I therefore completed my transition with a combination of hormone replacement therapies. I now live as a woman, and it feels normal.

Unfortunately for me, not everyone else thinks it’s normal. One night in the late 1990s I was at a Christmas do in the Palace of Westminster, where my dad used to work as an electrical engineer. I was having a good time, dancing and chatting to a couple of women at the event. One bloke butted his way into the conversation and started having a go at me, saying, “You’re nothing but a poof.” I made clear I didn’t want to talk to him, to which he responded by punching me square in the forehead. Similarly, I’ve had beer poured on my face, been harassed in the pub, and shouted at on the street. These are simply the realities of being a transgender woman in Britain.

I say that I suffered similar abuse at work, that I was discriminated against by co-workers and my employer. My ex-employer denies that, but also asserts that I don’t even have a right to complain about any problems I had in an employment tribunal. Despite the fact that I worked only for it, under its direction, consistently worked full days from Monday to Saturday, and was in no sense whatsoever running my own business, it says I was not an employee or a worker. And to be protected against discrimination in the workplace, you have to be one or the other.

My union, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, which has taken on and beaten some of the biggest exploiters in the so-called “gig economy”, advises me that I was misclassified by my employer and am indeed covered by discrimination law. But for many of the non-unionised colleagues in my industry, the fact that the government does next to nothing to enforce employment law gives free rein to courier and private-hire companies to allow rampant discrimination at work. I say the treatment I was subjected to is bad enough. But to now have to go to a tribunal to prove that I have a legal right not to be treated badly at work throws salt on the wounds.

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Contrary to the stale debates about flexibility versus the extra delivery costs of giving couriers the minimum wage and holidays, dignity is not something to which a price tag can be attached. We need the government to enforce employment law in a serious way, so employers know that if they allow bullying and discrimination, there will be consequences. Discrimination against transgender people is bad enough in society as it is, we shouldn’t also have to face it at work.