"I'd like to write a book because people could identify, not necessarily with my problem, but with the emotions. They may not know what it's like to be a transsexual prostitute, but they will know about fear. Everybody knows about fear."

One woman's liberation

Guardian Unlimited interview

By Kathryn Flett, January 31, 1999

TV made Jackie a star. But Paddington Green's transsexual prostitute has already moved on

Thanks to the compulsively watchable BBC docusoap, Paddington Green, Jackie McAuliffe has become Britain's most famous transsexual prostitute - though this is, admittedly, quite a small niche. The London Evening Standard reported last week that Paddington's notorious Sussex Gardens has been attracting what local police sergeant Kevin Griffin archly describes as 'a lot of sightseers.' But Jackie's fans should note that the vice squad are currently filming the street and taking note of car registrations. And, anyway, Jackie is no longer to be found posed in front of the Sussex Gardens street sign in such a way that all you can read is the '...sex'.

Jackie's new agent, Dave Warwick (whose No 1 client is the squeaky clean Carol Smillie), says this kind of tabloid infamy is attracting invitations to appear on the sort of shows 'where they say, "we want to have all these trannies in sequins singing while Jackie plays the piano".' Warwick sighs. 'Jackie does play the piano. But they're not really getting it, are they?'

They're not really getting it because, as anyone who has watched the show will know, 28-year-old Jackie is not a bespangled, feather boa-wearing Priscilla, Queen of The Desert. She is about as far from the transsexual stereotype as it is possible to be. Chain-smoking, curled up on a sofa, Jackie in the flesh is an extraordinarily slight, pale, slip of a girl, wearing black leggings, a stripey cardigan and plimsolls. She has a messy auburn bob, chapped lips and no makeup, apart from a smear of what might be last night's mascara. With her enviable cheekbones, delicate hands, cosmetically rearranged nose and neat little silicone breasts, she makes a very good Jackie and must, therefore, have made a pretty lousy Jason. It is impossible to relate to her as anything other than a girl.

Until he was five, Jason, the third of four sons, lived with his mum and dad in a basement flat in London. 'I used to share a bed with my two older brothers and when I heard the screaming and shouting and violence, we all clung together. It was frightening on the one hand and secure on the other - it was normal because I didn't have anything to compare it to.'

Jackie delivers this in the unemotional, staccato sentences that adult children of violent homes often use when describing their pasts. She runs through the details swiftly, matter-of-factly, as if it were her CV. Which perhaps it is. 'My dad was a carpenter. You didn't mess with him because he was a strong, stern man. But you could also get around him because he was Dad. When you're young, you think that although your dad might not be a brilliant dad, he is also brilliant just because he's your dad.'

She peers into the distance. 'I remember Dad's chair and his pipe. He did drink, but from all the information I have about him, he was also quite a loner.' And her mother? 'I don't remember my mum much. I remember her hairstyle. I remember her voice and her screaming. It's odd, but I can't remember my dad's speaking voice, only his shouting. I just think of them as being my two gods. But they didn't look after us and they weren't good parents.'

When he was five, Jason and his next oldest brother were put in a children's home. The youngest brother, aged 'about three', was fostered elsewhere. 'Apparently both my parents just walked out. My oldest brother stayed in London, I don't know where. Maybe with my mum. For a while my mum and dad came back for access visits.'

But after a while, Jason's parents stopped visiting and he and his older brother were found a foster home in Hertfordshire. A couple of years later, Jason discovered his mother was pregnant and had another family: 'I couldn't understand why she'd done that.'

'I didn't get on with my foster dad. He and my foster mum were both head teachers. He was mathematical and she was very arty, literate and very clever - the warmer of the two. I called them Mum and Dad. When I realised that my real family had done a runner, this was my new family, so they were Mummy and Daddy.' She shrugs. Pauses.

'I think if I hadn't had this problem as well, I would probably have grown with them and still be in contact with them now. I'd have probably gone to university, but I didn't have that chance because there was this other thing.' So while Jason worked hard at school, played piano and violin and tried to convince himself that the security of a middle-class life with good foster parents was going to be enough, it was also - because of 'the other thing' - becoming apparent that it was never going to be enough. It is inconceivably difficult for most of us to imagine how adolescence must have been for a skinny loner of a boy who felt, not that he was gay, but, powerfully and instinctively, that he was really meant to be a girl.

'As I started to get to eight or nine I realised that boys were different from girls and that I was being pushed into the boy's world just because I had the same body as them.'

Jackie struggles to elucidate. 'It's like a jigsaw. You're trying to build up the picture except when I made my jigsaw, there was no picture. It's very difficult for other people to understand why you might feel like a woman, because it's bigger than anything and it takes over your life and the loneliness and isolation were horrid.'

Jason left home when he was 17 and went to college to do A-levels in English, history and geography. But he didn't finish the course because, by now, he knew about the possibility of having a sex change ('Gender reassignment. That's the nice term'). 'When I was 20 I finally went to the gender identity clinic - it takes ages to get an appointment - and I soon realised hormone pills weren't going to change my appearance the way I wanted it - I wasn't going to get boobs. But for five years - three years on the waiting list and then two living as woman - I was becoming more comfortable and I was very methodical, learning about things, in stages.'

In 1995, Jason became Jackie, but not quite enough of a Jackie for her liking, so prostitution was conceived as a rather pragmatic means to an end, to pay for more surgery to complete the transformation. 'I'd had a couple of jobs and I was good at them, but I started planning the prostitution for months before the operation because, although the operation itself was on the NHS, the way I looked at it, most 25-year-olds are halfway up the career ladder, but because everything in my life had been focused on my gender, I wasn't. I wanted the money.'

Even though Jackie embarked on prostitution on 'the very bottom rung of the ladder, working in Seven Sisters!', there were no pimps, or drugs, or obvious exploitation by anyone other than Jackie herself. 'I was naive. I thought I'd just take the money and shut down. I mean, how could it affect me? It wasn't as if the man was breaking my heart. He was paying me! I didn't speak to the other girls, I just started extracting information from the punters. Like, where were the best places to work? What were the rates? Then I moved to Bayswater and at first I felt I was in control.' And how long did that feeling last? Jackie fidgets and laughs. 'Not long! At first I also felt in control of these men. The sex didn't come into it. I was taking the piss out of them, really. You see, the thing that people used to bully me for at school was being too feminine, but now I could get paid for being extra-feminine! I could use my physical power as a woman to overpower them!'

Didn't she ever get scared that it could easily turn the other way around? 'Yes, but what I learnt was that when men stop thinking' - she points at her head - 'and start thinking' - she points between her legs - 'you're OK. And I also learnt to play dumb, even though as soon as you've walked out of the hotel with £200, you're not dumb any more.'

But before the BBC turned up at her hairdresser's looking for interesting characters for a pilot series, Jackie knew she had to get out of prostitution. And yet the money was addictive. 'I thought, "You're losing it. You've earned money and saved a bit, but you're meant to be living". I think when it starts to harden you, you've got to get out.'

And, thanks to a combination of TV and tenacity, she quit prostitution three months ago. 'When Paddington Green came along it was no surprise to me that here was something bigger than prostitution. It's as if I'm going through stages of my life where I'm trying to convince myself I've got over fear.'

But there are still some things she is afraid of. 'Relationships. I'd need the closeness, but I'd also need the distance.' There is a pause. 'I'm a bit like a stone. When I say I'd need somebody, I think I just mean I'd like to need somebody because I know too much about men. Men tell a hell of a lot of lies.' But she is sure she is going to be OK, because bright, articulate Jackie, the pianist and violinist, who was once a Jason, who could have gone to university but became a prostitute in order to buy her breasts and her nose instead, the Jackie we can watch on TV (and is, therefore, a product of our times as much as a product of her own will) relishes the challenge of getting over fear. Does she look on this media-driven moment in her life as another notch in her belt, or as some kind of means to an end?

'I'm objective. The pain I've felt, I'm turning it around. I'd like to write a book because people could identify, not necessarily with my problem, but with the emotions. They may not know what it's like to be a transsexual prostitute, but they will know about fear. Everybody knows about fear.'

Paddington Green continues on BBC1 on Mondays and Tuesdays at 9.30pm