'I'm happy for the two of us'

Now, he is ready to tell the world ther's another side to him - and she's called Fiona. Nick Morrison reports.

IT was Christmas and Paul was back home in Ireland with his family. They were in the living room - his parents, sisters, nephews and nieces - sitting in that relaxed contentment you only ever get at Christmas. Breaking the agreeable silence, his nine-year-old niece turned to him and said: "Uncle Paul, are you a girl in a boy's body?"

For a moment, it's safe to say Paul was lost for words. As were his parents, both in their 70s. Finally he managed to recover the power of speech, if not quite his composure.

"I said 'No'. I lied. I said 'No, I'm not.' When I told her, she had the same look she had when she said she believed in Santa Claus. She didn't really, but she knew if she said she didn't she wouldn't get any presents."

Paul MacCarthy is a neatly turned out, gentle-seeming man of 41. He has spent most of his working life as an accountant, and has a quiet, industrious look about him. His hair is cropped short and his eyebrows seem unusually thin, but otherwise there is nothing out of the ordinary.

But the clues are there in his second-floor modern flat in North Shields. On one armchair are a pile of neatly folded clothes: a pink jumper, a flower-patterned blouse. On a side table is a shallow straw basket, containing a selection of lipsticks, nail varnishes and moisturising creams. Paul lives alone.

From the age of about ten or 11, Paul has enjoyed dressing in women's clothes. After a while, he started wearing make-up as well. Until recently, this was known to only a handful of people, mainly other cross-dressers, with his friends and his family kept in the dark. Last year, he decided to tell his family. Not surprisingly, once his announcement started to sink in, there were a lot of questions.

He was brought up in a staunchly Catholic family in Waterford, in the south-east of Ireland. He can't remember when he first had the urge to wear his sister's clothes.

"It was maybe a school play or something, where boys dressed as girls. I was never one of the girls, but I thought 'I would like to do that', but I didn't know why. When I did it, it just seemed better, I was more at ease with myself.

'I never felt that I was in the wrong body, that I needed to be a woman all the time. There was just this conflict in my mind about what I was doing," he says. In his teens, Paul took on an extra subject at school, which gave him an excuse to stay in on Sunday afternoons while the rest of his family went out. But instead of his schoolwork, he would take the opportunity to dress up.

When he left school, he trained as a chartered accountant and, on his 22nd birthday, decided he wanted to travel, and left Ireland to work in South Africa.

"The cross-dressing side took a back seat for a few years. I threw myself into my work and, although it was there in the back of my mind, there was no opportunity to get my hands on a dress."

But when he was in his late 20s, the urge proved too strong to suppress any further. He saw an advert in the paper for a dominatrix. Lisa offered bondage and sado-masochism, but Paul was only interested in the cross-dressing side. When he dressed as a woman in Lisa's home, it was the first time he had ever worn women's clothes in front of another person.

This inspired him to join a group for cross-dressers, start buying women's clothes for himself, find a helpful wig shop, and then find another dominatrix when Lisa moved. And it was this second dominatrix who encourage Paul to make his first public appearance as a woman, in a restaurant.

"We just walked in, there was no problem with the staff, and we went and sat in the corner. It was extremely nerve-wracking - I never ate a thing. At the end, we walked out and went past a table of about 22 people. I remember hearing someone say 'That looks like a man'. It was the fact they said 'That looks like a man' as opposed to 'That is a man'. That didn't feel too bad." It seems curious to take comfort from what many of us would construe to be an insult, but Paul seems genuinely pleased at the remark.

Paul left South Africa in 1995 and spent the next seven years working in other parts of Africa, occasionally indulging his desire to cross-dress, but often suppressing it.

"Periodically I would take all the clothes I had and throw them away. Even though I found people like the dominatrix, who made it easier for me, there were times when I said 'I will have no more to do with this. I will just be a normal, happy male, go to the pub and have a drink with the males," he says, referring to 'males' as though they are somehow separate.

But last year, he came to live in the UK and make his home in the North-East, and this decision has proved something of a watershed. He started to go out on Newcastle's gay scene with other cross-dressers, at first getting changed in pub toilets but then feeling bold enough to get taxis, and the Metro, dressed as a woman, and it's clearly been a liberating experience. He recounts with glee the time a group of 'girls' walked across Times Square, to the jaw-dropping astonishment of the party of salesmen drinking in a nearby bar. He has also walked out for the first time during the day, and now has set up a website for cross-dressers to buy clothes, shoes and make-up. He also told his parents.

"I was beating around the bush, thinking how to bring the subject up, and in the end I screwed it up badly. I just told them, they were shocked and we had a row." Since then, they have come round to the idea, although he's always 'Paul' when he goes to visit.

When he dresses as a woman he's Fiona, a name he chose about ten years ago, and the two sit alongside each other, with distinct personalities. He says he has never actually wanted to become a woman, so maybe his answer to his niece's question was correct, in a way.

'If I were born a woman I would be quite happy, but I would not go out of my way to do it. I would not change the body. The two are living in the same body quite comfortably. They are mixed up together - sometimes one is the dominant side - but it is not a complete personality change. As Paul, I will drink Guinness or whiskey, as Fiona I will drink Bacardi Breezers. As both, I drink wine.

"The voice is the most difficult. I try to speak in a higher voice as Fiona, but there are also the subtleties of language: the sentence structure of females tends to be different."

He says he feels equally at home dressing as Paul and as Fiona, although the latter tends to take a little planning. "I can set aside days for Fiona, when I can have a nice, sweet-smelling bath before going to bed, sleep in a nightie, and get up in the morning and be Fiona during the day. It gets a bit messy chopping and changing.

"But I can sit here in a pair of trousers and feel relaxed, or I can put on a dress and feel very relaxed. I just feel more comfortable in a dress. I like the whole process of getting everything matching and co-ordinated and going out."

He has started to tell some of his friends from his days in Africa, and says many of them seem to accept it, although they never discuss it in any depth. Would he rather they did talk about it? "I would, actually," he says sadly.

He says he would like to start a family, although he recognises that finding a woman who accepts his need to dress as a woman will be difficult. He has told girlfriends in the past, but the relationships never lasted and he's aware that his cross-dressing may have been a factor.

Paul knows that he gets a lot of stares when he's out in public, but says they don't bother him, and in any case he's too busy looking at the pavement to make sure he doesn't get his heels caught, although this may be a convenient way of av oiding the curious and the hostile alike.

But whatever the reaction, going out in public is a hurdle he knows he needs to face. He's come a long way in the last 12 months, and he isn't about to go back now. Agreeing to be interviewed is just another step.

"The more people know about it, the more people are at home with it and the more they can discuss it, so when it does appear it is not really a big problem." This sounds all very laudable - but it may be that there is some way to go yet, although at least Paul is doing his bit.

* Paul's website is www.Phoenixlace.co.uk