STEPHANIE Booth has a life story that TV and film companies are queuing up to tell and get a slice of.
Nearly 25 years ago she gave up her wife, children, job and home to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
I spent a day with the glamorous 64-year-old hotelier at the Corwen home she shares with her husband David and I was struck by how the only thing on her mind is the beauty of picturesque North Wales.
Stephanie continuously puts herself out there, going above and beyond to generate income and interest in the area.
It would be very easy for her to slip away and try to blend into the background for the rest of her life, which she admits she did try to do after she underwent the sex-change operation.
“I think that is what I would have chosen given the chance, but the options for me doing that disappeared,” she explained.
“The chairman at my job wanted me to stay on after the operation. He was really supportive but after a colleague sold a story about me to a tabloid newspaper, the companies that were trying to ‘headhunt’ me suddenly didn’t want to know. You become the untouchable.”
Stephanie grew up in sleepy Harpenden, near St Albans, and admits she was an accidental ‘ladies’ magnet’ and was viewed as a bit of a Casanova when she was young.
“I got on very well with women and had lots of girlfriends and many people thought ‘Jesus Christ what’s going on here’, but when we all hit puberty, boys started asking strange things and I couldn’t identify with the way they viewed girls and I knew there was something different with me as they were so different in their attitudes.”
Stephanie describes it as the programming of the brain that had gone wrong and the easier way to combat it would have been to change the brain and not the body.
At school, Stephanie said she was good at English and spelling but the successful businesswoman failed her 11-plus.
“When I went to secondary school, I was good at physics and chemistry. I found maths baffling and then it all came into place in third form,” she said.
Its hard to picture Stephanie working in laboratories – which she went on to do in her professional career – with a personality and sense of humour so large.
Throughout our conversation, I thought she should have a permanent TV show with the amount of stories and anecdotes she reels off.
But in 1985, the world was about to become Stephanie’s stage as the then managing director of a FTSE 100 company underwent a sex change operation.
Her parents and most of her family disowned her. She was left bankrupt and in a women’s refuge.
Stephanie says she now has no connections to the place she grew up in.
“I took David down there once but there’s no close ties to the place. My parents are dead now. They didn’t have anything to do with us anyway. They were Jehovah Witnesses and I was unacceptable to God as a woman.
“That makes me pretty important though because there are seven billion people out there and God’s just worried about me,” smirks Stephanie.
On a holiday to Israel, she tried to form a bridge to her parents by taking pictures of places in the Bible.
She is still in contact with two cousins and the three of them call themselves the ,black sheep of the family’ because they have all been ousted from the family group.
Stephanie has three children from her marriage; one son works for her and will take over the business; her other son has disowned her, but her daughter is getting married in one of her hotels next year.
“The numbers have gone up since we said we would pay!” she laughs. The wife she left behind seems to have now become more distant.
“We were in touch with her for many years to help her financially, I always left it to the kids if they wanted to contact me... I wouldn’t contact them.” Looking back, Stephanie says she regrets that in the process of a selfish act she hurt a lot of people along the way.
“I would say to anybody who is thinking of doing this, it should be the last resort apart from suicide – and I nearly committed suicide as I couldn’t see myself as surviving and having any kind of life.
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have never stayed with the company. I would have just gone quietly away and started my own business, but I couldn’t. It was all over the newspapers.”
In today’s society, Stephanie said she thinks the situation would be handled differently in the workplace ,but back then there was no employment protection.
“If I were to go through what I did today, I think it would have been easier, but there’s still a lot of prejudice. Even on the news today, there is a gay policeman who has been beaten up.
“I didn’t think it would be as difficult to get a job but it proved impossible. I had to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
Six months passed, then Stephanie started Transformation, a business selling clothes to transvestites and transsexuals.
She had advertised for a business partner to help her out and along came her ‘money source’, David.
After a year working together, the two became an item and they were again under the media spotlight.
“We had never dealt with the press and we handled it badly. We hid away in the Lake District. The best thing to do would have been to go to the press association and kill the story,” she says.
This time however the glare was fixed on David as Stephanie said people couldn’t fathom his sexuality.
“We did a phone in on The Richard and Judy Show years ago and all the calls were to David as they wanted to know how he viewed me.”
When I arrived at their home, David greeted me with a strong handshake, made me a cup of tea and then left. He is a quiet and laid-back man who seems to add the calmness to Stephanie’s world.
“David is one of those people who has good going right through him. There are very few people who could handle me or the situation,” Stephanie says.
She describes him as the ‘moderator’ and her ‘risk taker’, because when she goes shopping ,it might not just be a bag she buys, she could end up with another hotel!
Stephanie says she finds men have more of a problem with her and remembers Derek Hatton, the controversial former deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, “went to pieces when he met me” and didn’t know how to handle the situation.
“It is men who have more problems with it as men are more insecure in their sexuality. But I reassured Derek I wouldn’t go near him if he was the last man on Earth! People define normal as themself and anyone like them,” she added.