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 No Man’s Land
The Story of a Man
who Became a Woman

by Paula Grieg

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Published by Maverick House, Unit 19, Dunboyne Business Park,
Dunboyne, Co. Meath, Ireland.
Maverick House Asia, Level 41, United Centre, 323 Silom Road,
Bangrak, Bangkok 10500, Thailand.

www.maverickhouse.com
email: info@maverickhouse.com

ISBN: 978-1-905379-28-6
Copyright for text © 2007 Paula Grieg.
Copyright for typesetting, editing, layout, design © Maverick House.

54321

The paper used in this book comes from wood pulp of managed forests.
For every tree felled at least one tree is planted, thereby renewing
natural resources.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means without written permission from the publisher, except by a
reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review
written for insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
 ‘ Take, oh t ake m e a s I a m ,
S um m on out wh a t I s h al l b e .
Set you r seal up o n my h e ar t ,
A nd l ive i n m e. ’

- Jo hn B el l
 NOTE

Paula Grieg is writing under a false name to protect

the privacy of her family, whose lives have already
been adversely affected as a result of her Gender
Dysphoria. All names, places and place names are
false. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is
purely coincidental.
 A C K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

With gratitude to my three beloved children, of whom I

am immensely proud. They had to share so much of my
burden and did so as best they could.
Thanks to my ex-wife, who will always have a special
place in my heart; to my friends who stood by me when
others walked away—you know who you are.
To my friend, Sr X, a kind and spiritual former
colleague whom I will sorely miss and from whom I learned
humility.
To all who made even a small contribution during my
journey of self-discovery; thank you.
My gratitude is also extended to all at Maverick House
who have supported me, and particularly to Lisa Coen, my
editor, who patiently persevered with me and helped to
shape my manuscript into the book it is now.
Finally I must acknowledge that writing truthfully about
my past may cause some unintended pain to those who
shared much of my life, but a memoir is either truthful or it
is no longer a memoir, and my life never was a fairytale; the
truth is the truth even if it is at times uncomfortable.
 D E D I C AT I O N

This book is dedicated to all the trans-women and men

whose lives were diminished by prejudice, and it is
written in the hope that children born today with Gender
Dysphoria will have an easier passage through life in a more
enlightened age.
 F O R E WO R D

M
y name is Paula Grieg. I have three children and
no stretch-marks. Therein lies the story of my
life; a life of inner conflicts and contradictions.
My early life, childhood and adolescence were spent
in Germany, a country to which I am now bound only by
memories, since almost all my family there have vanished.
I first became aware of my gender ambiguity before I
reluctantly left Germany for a new life in Ireland, though
at the time I had no clear idea what this meant or where it
would lead.
In Ireland I fell in love, married and started a family;
raising those same dearly loved three children. My career
took off and I built an existence. Those who looked on
might have thought I had it all, but everything I built always
stood on shaky foundations, because at the very heart of it I
was not who I seemed to be.
Progressively I realised that I needed to acknowledge
my true self or I would never find peace within myself.
But that personal inner peace came at a high price—the

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 NO MAN’S LAND

disintegration of family, the loss of friends, home, career

and status, and once more, emigration.
Both my career and my thirst for knowledge of other
places and other people have led me through five continents
and more than 50 countries. They have given me a broad
and tolerant outlook on diversity in every sense, while my
life in two genders has given me unusual personal insights
available to few. But it is also true that the more I travelled,
the more I have become displaced and lost all sense of
home.
This book is the telling of an unusual story. Writing it
helped me to make sense of my life and I hope it will reduce
barriers by helping others to understand the challenges
faced by transsexuals and to realise that transsexuals can
and do lead normal lives.
I remain hopeful that there is another chapter to be
written, entitled, ‘The Leaving of No-Man’s-Land,’ where,
through finding love once more, I will also find that elusive
sense of home and belonging, and can then look back at my
life with a new perspective.

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P A RT 1
GERMANY
 CHAPTER 1

R O OT S

E
urope as we know it today has been shaped by many
wars and conquests. Over the centuries empires
were built and lost by armies of the mostly poor
for the benefit of the feudal few. One particularly dark
and bloody period of European history became known as
the 30-Year War. Rather than a continuous war, it was a
period of many skirmishes, a trial of strength between the
old establishment supporting the Pope and Holy Roman
Empire on one side and the forces of the Reformation
led by King Gustav-Adolph of Sweden on the other side.
When the guns finally fell silent in 1648 with the signing
of the Treaty of Westphalia, much of medieval Europe lay
in ruins, ravaged by the twin scourges of war and bubonic
plague, then commonly known as the Black Death.
When the wars finally ended, many of the ordinary foot
soldiers and mercenaries who had fought on both sides
found themselves displaced far from their homelands; too
poor, too sick or too weary to return to their homes from
where they had set out many years before. My paternal
ancestor was such a soldier, a low ranking officer of the

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 NO MAN’S LAND

Swedish army who settled in the benign climate of the

Moselle Valley in the Palatinate region of south-west
Germany. Today Rhineland-Palatinate is one of the
Länder, which make up the Federal German Republic, but
in the 17th century what is today’s Germany was then a
mosaic of many rival principalities. Still today my family
name, which was Germanised from its original Swedish, is
popular in the Moselle Valley.
My father spent many years of tedious and elaborate
research to trace his roots. Sadly, all his work and
accumulated documentation went up in smoke, lost in the
ruins of his parent’s home during one of two major Allied
bombing raids on the city of my birth, on 30 May and on
25 June, 1943.
My maternal ancestors on the other hand were from the
Rhineland. Looking at copies of old certificates of births,
deaths, christenings and marriages passed on to me by an
aunt who recently died at the age of 82, one can find among
them vintners, farmers, reed-thatchers and members of
other trades, who have long vanished. Among a nation
whose people are often seen as rather dour, people from
the Rhineland are generally known as fun loving and jovial,
and especially at carnival time, they know how to enjoy
themselves. It is with a mixture of historical curiosity and
a considerable amount of unease that I look at these old
documents, which had to be procured by my maternal
grandparents to prove their Aryan descent—a sinister
sign of the time. Each document is a copy of the original
certificate going back to as far as the mid-19th century, but
now emblazoned with the insignia of the spread-winged
eagle atop the swastika.

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 R O OT S

These are my roots: paternal descendants of Protestant

Scandinavian war emigrants, with rural Catholic stock on
the maternal side. The cold north on the one hand and the
warm climate of the Rhine Valley on the other; Protestant
and Catholic, a bit of this and a bit of that.

17