"No girl is a prostitute. We all get into it for some reason. All do it because they are running away from something. We don't just wake up and go, 'I want to go hooking today.'"

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman

Radio Times Interview

Jun 05, 1999

When the last series of Paddington Green ended, viewers were left desperate to know what became of transsexual prostitute Jackie. ALISON GRAHAM finds out for herself as the docu-soap returns

Jackie McAuliffe is mildly amused and considerably puzzled that her appearances in the BBC1 docu-soap Paddington Green, set in west London, have generated their own harmless little urban myth. Word is that she has signed with a major record label to record an album of classical piano music. Everyone who mentions this is very sure about it, and even specifies the record company. "Someone else said that to me - it's not true. My agent put me in a studio to see what I could do, but that's about it."

It stands as a measure of Jackie McAuliffe's place in the television viewing public's consciousness that she needs to hire an agent at all, and that she inspires such myths. But then an average of seven million people watched Jackie's gin-fuelled, unhappy life as a transsexual prostitute who escaped grim normality by playing Bach on the piano, and her painful efforts to realise her need to become a woman.

Jackie, who was once a man called Jason, became a prostitute to help pay for the associated operations after she underwent a full "gender reassignment", or "sex-change" as it was once brutally known. She is nearly 30 and has spent the past ten years undergoing harrowing surgery.

She was last seen on the programme in bandages as a result of one of the final pieces of the jigsaw, when she underwent cosmetic surgery last summer to give her a more feminine nose. In the first episode of the new series of Paddington Green, the bandages come off. Jackie is surprised and touched to know that Radio Times readers wrote in fury that they were Ieft not knowing how she felt about the outcome and how it looked.

"I think that's why the series was so successful," she says. "At the end of the day I'm just the same as everybody else. People probably can't relate to my specific problems, but there is common ground people can relate to, maybe through fear, or having a job they don't want to do, or having a dream and sticking to it, and dealing with their pasts."

Jackie is small, slight and initially wary. She smokes heavily and makes delicate fluting gestures with her hands to make a point, while giving off an air of tough self-reliance. Nearly a year on she is no longer a prostitute and has moved out of the Paddington Green flat we see in the series, the one where she used to "entertain" punters when she wasn't on her beat in Sussex Gardens. For her, prostitution was a means to an end. From the age of eight Jason knew there was something wrong, though of course he didn't know what. "I'd think, 'Those are boys and those are girls. I'm supposed to be one of them, but it doesn't feel right. I'm not supposed to be one of them, but it feels right."'

When Jason reached secondary school, many things became, painfully, much clearer. "I realised what it was - it was awful." Jason's sense of separateness did not pass unnoticed among his peers, particularly the boys, who regularly beat him up. "I thought 'This isn't right, they shouldn't be hitting me.'" Jason knew nothing of "gender reassignment" and assumed he was condemned to a life of lonely apartness. "I thought that this was it, for life. It's not the sort of thing you can go home to your family and talk about. [Jason was part of a foster family in Hertfordshire. He was born in the East End of London.] And you certainly can't bring it up in the classroom. I thought I was the only person in the world to have this problem."

Mercifully, Jason received psychiatric help and was referred to the gender reassignment Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He began hormone treatment at the age of 20 and had the NHS operation at 25. Of course,that wasn't the end of the road by a longway. "There is still the psychological pressure. I, still have to deal with that, and what I have been through and who I am and where I want to go. It's not like, 'Jackie was Jason and he's had the operation and now he's a she and she can waltz off into the sunset and it's all nice.'"

The decision to become a prostitute came when Jackie was 26, after years spent drifting, doing this and that. "I hadn't applied myself a school or college because I was in torment. I didn't have a career. I'd had the operation but I wasn't complete, physically." Jackie needed supplementary operations, such as breast augmentation, which she had to pay for herself. She needed money quickly and regularly. "The most pragmatic way was to sell my body. I don't think I've come to terms with the fact that I was a prostitute. No girl is a prostitute. We all get into it for some reason. All the do it because they are running away from something. We don't just wake up and go, 'I want to go hooking today."' She has given up, but, she concedes, this has left its own, particular problems. "I don't think I've come to terms yet with the fact that I have been a prostitute and I've slept with a lot of men."

It might be prurient to ask, but did her customers know she used to be a man? "Some of them might have done, as I was pretty flat chested, but it wasn't something that they made an issue of." Jackie has a strong northern accent, but this is something she has acquired as part of her camouflage. "When I started working as a prostitute and lived in Paddington a lot of people had northern accents. I wanted to fit in more easily, because working as a prostitute was hard." She never had a pimp. In a notoriously dangerous, and sometimes deadly, profession, the girls looked after themselves. The police, too, kept an eye on Jackie, though this did not mean she was ignored. She was breaking the law so she was arrested, and there were court appearances and fines.

The second Paddington Green series watches as Jackie fights hard to shake off her past life as a prostitute. It took her about nine months to break free. How does she feel now? "Cheated, in a way. Most women don't have to go through what I've gone through - they've been women from birth. Most women don't have to sell themselves to create themselves."

Jackie is coy when asked about her current plans and her plans for the future. She wouldn't mind "getting into television", but she doesn't know what as. "Researching and directing looks quite interesting." What she is determined not to do is sell the soul she has fought so hard to keep. She doesn't want to get sucked into the docu-soap vortex and that curious kind of fame that attaches to certain docu-soap stars.

"People who are in docu-soaps, the ones who are most in the public eye, start to lose what they really are. I don't want that; I'm not going to lose my identity. At the end of the day I'm still Jackie and I'm happy to be Jackie."

She is wary of relationships. "I don't think I need a man in my life. I'm not saying 'never' but I have a lot to sort out. And I'd question the man for doing it. I'd think, 'Are you after me, or are you after a hooker?' I'm not too bothered; it's not the be-all and end-all. Half the people I know who are in relationships are damn miserable anyway. It's not as if I'll miss out on much, is it?"