A transgender man has described how supportive his grandmother was when he first came out to her when he was 11.
Gavin Cueto and his 83-year-old nan Elaine have appeared in a video, recalling together the night he came into her bedroom to confide in her.
“I’d been to skittles [bowling], come home, Gavin was staying the night and I’d had half a lager so I was tired and I was about to go to bed,” Elaine says in the video.
“Gavin came in wanting to talk to me. He said, ‘nan, I’ve got something to tell you. I want to be a boy’.
“I said, ‘Wouldn’t we all?’ We’d all like to be a man, because they’ve got a better life than us.
“It made sense in a way. We knew there was something wrong, so it was nice then to know what it was so that we could help.”
Cueto says he first learned about gender dysphoria after watching a character on Hollyoaks dealing with the same issues as he was.
“I’d never heard of it before, so watching a character on telly juggling the same emotions as me was illuminating,” he says.
Cueto said it felt “so wrong” when he started getting periods at the age of 14.
“I was horrified and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Then I started to grow breasts, so I did everything I could to disguise them by wearing baggy clothes."
While he knew his grandmother didn’t fully understand what it meant to be transgender, he knew that she would never judge him.
“She was so supportive, and told me that if this was something I wanted to do, then I had to go and do it,” says Cueto.
The now 20-year-old works with a charity called Fixers, helping people who experience gender dysphoria.
