Insults and acceptance: being trans in rural France - video
Valerie Montchalin found out who her friends were when she transitioned to being a transgender woman in her village high in the Massif Central of central France.
Some turned their backs on the 52-year-old builder. And she was not invited to the village get-together. Everybody knows everybody and everything about them in Saint-Victor-Malescours, a village of 700 souls surrounded by wooded hills. Montchalin kept her secret for decades.
She knew she was different "when I was six or seven... without being able to put a word on it. But if I had told my mother that I didn't feel right in my body, I would have got a good slap," she told AFP. Her family were afraid of "what people would say".
So, growing up, "I did what was expected of me," she said. She became a builder, married at 22 and had two children. As a man, she was "gruff, pretty macho -- the opposite of what I really was," Montchalin admitted. But she was "suffering" inside, the discomfort particularly acute in men's clothes shops or when she looked into a mirror at the barbers.
Finally, at age 48, she came out to her wife and children. Since then, Montchalin has moved to the nearest city, Saint-Etienne, where she is receiving hormone therapy. She has let her hair grow and regularly goes to the beautician.
