After living in fear for so long, coming out had been hugely liberating, but I gradually forgot that as I addressed the many challenges it raised. Once I realised that I could progress through the medical pathway more easily than I'd thought, and after I'd ensured that my relationships with family, friends and colleagues would not break down, I began to consider what possibilities transitioning might open up for me.

During my teenage years in the closet, I had a complex relationship with the drag queens I saw on TV. The trashy British acts alienated me, with their clichéd caricatures of femininity: my gender issues felt serious, and the mockery these performers invited didn't seem too helpful. I liked the more self-respecting Americans, though: I never wanted to be exactly like the more 'fabulous' drag artists (such as RuPaul), but I admired their conviction that you shouldn't let your detractors stop you from being yourself, and the panache with which they expressed it.

As I delved deeper into transgender subculture, I found the performance artists in spaces such as Club Wotever thoroughly inspirational. One of my favourite discoveries was 'post-drag', which aimed to inject contemporary queer politics into this tired old trope (this piece about Stonewall by Michael Twaits is my favourite), but the ones I liked most were those whose acts centred around their own experiences. Their honest, humorous stories, with their colourful style and good-natured audience rapport, helped me find the resolve to accept and announce my transsexual status.

Shortly before beginning my transition, I'd made friends with some of these performers, particularly Jet Moon, whose headline act with the Queer Belgrade collective at Transfabulous 2008 had so impressed me. When Jet told me that she wanted to arrange a show featuring people new to the stage, I jumped at the chance. As a youth, I'd always wanted to perform, but playing male roles (as I did a few times) never felt right; I never wanted to do 'drag' either, as I knew this would sell my identity short. More confident in my gender after a year living as female, I was happy to be involved – and excited about how I might share my journey.

Jet and I co-wrote a script about my youthful struggles with social pressure to be 'masculine', and particularly my identification with footballer Justin Fashanu, before and after he died. This formed part of Jet Moon's Speakeasy, a collection of stories written with queer and transgendered people about how they realised themselves.

The Arcola Theatre audience, containing plenty with similar biographies, were entirely onside (Jet had no trouble getting them to sing Happy Birthday to her). They loved Natacha's piece on the complexities of being a non-transitioning transgender woman, as well as Iris's story of moving across Europe, her Arabic heritage disdained in Belgrade and her Serbian parentage attracting scorn elsewhere. Jason Elvis Barker's comic monologue on being a pregnant man following the Thomas Beatie furore and Greg Renegado's story about growing up queer on a Dublin estate were also well received. (His learning to masturbate from a Mary Whitehouse text in his local library was my personal highlight.)

Following Jet's piece about being "raised by drag queens", I knew I'd be preaching to the converted. After months of being heckled on the street (and occasionally online), this prompted no existential crisis (unusually for me): for once, I was more worried about losing people by discussing football than gender. Once I'd got cheers for juggling a Jabulani in a skirt and heels (OK, wedges), even when I shanked it at the fire exit (England's finest couldn't control that thing, so what hope did I have?), I realised that I could communicate more freely than ever, without the restraints subtly imposed by the everyday stares and occasional taunts.

Underlying some of those stares and taunts is the assumption that my gender itself is a "performance": that is, false (or less real than other people's). Well, it is largely performative, as it is for everyone: my style and mannerisms develop in relation to my personality, changing over time, and I enjoy the creative potential inherent in this. Perhaps I'm more aware of this process because I felt barred from realising it as I wished for so long – like many transgendered people over the years, I turned to the stage, allowing me to explore it entirely on my own terms.

This needs the right foundation, though: my pre-transitional ambitions to perform (or achieve low-level sartorial elegance in my daily life) failed because my sex never felt secure. In hindsight, his scuppered my absurd undergraduate dream of becoming avant-garde in every walk of life, which was really a manifestation of the gulf between my body and my mind, and my repression of my transsexual impulse. (Its main consequence was that nobody came to my parties for fear of the playlist. Still, people have done worse after reading too much Nietzsche.)

With the resolution of my fundamental body issues in hand, toying with gendered objects and concepts became much easier: not only empowering in its own right, it meant that finally, I'd found a community to which I wanted to belong. All this before I'd even got my hormone prescription …