A transgender awareness advocate from Witney has said she treads carefully around the current controversy surrounding the subject.

Chrissie Chevasutt said: “I know the issue of whether trans women are really women is currently hugely controversial. I tend to tiptoe through the middle and let people call me what they want.

“I’m male-bodied but I’m currently going through the gatekeeping process towards transitioning which takes two years so there’s an element of gender fluidity.”

She added that the lack of gender re-assignment clinics had left her “in limbo”.

 “I have heard of people waiting seven years for surgery,” she said. “I can’t afford to go private so I’m stuck in limbo. The NHS is broken and there is no political will to address the situation. I think the average waiting list has gone up from 300 to 3,000 people.”

She added: “I would say to people who think it is contagious or that children can catch it that this is exactly the same thing that happened when we stopped demonising people for being left-handed – lots of people have come out.”

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Ms Chevasutt, who was born in Oxfordshire and has lived here most of her life, suffered from severe dysmorphia and gender dysphoria as a child and attempted suicide.

She believes she used sport as a way to cope, cycle racing to national level.

She said: “The adrenaline and endorphins and the testosterone are highly addictive to a soul that is in pain.”

But following a serious accident in her early teens she was no longer able to compete and fell into “a pit of despair”.

She ran away to London where she stayed in squats and developed a drug problem before trying to escape to India.

She said: “I became addicted to opium and had a total physical and emotional breakdown to the extent I couldn’t write on the forms the British Embassy gave me to repatriate me.”

After returning home, she suffered agoraphobia and mental illness and “got religion for a few years” before suffering a second breakdown at the age of 55.

She said: “At the same time in 2014/15 Laverne Cox hit the cover of Time magazine and we also heard about Caitlyn Jenner.

“Transgender issues were a trending phenomenon and for the first time in my life I became familiar with the idea of transgender.

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“I didn’t know what it was at first but I instinctively knew that was what I was, and had been all my life."

In 2015 she began to present as a female and “it’s been a bumpy ride since then,” she admits.

Ms Chevasutt, who has been married to Pam, who she met at a Christian publishers, for 30 years, has now written a memoir Heaven Come Down which recounts her dramatic story.

She hopes it will help anyone who is suffering a crisis of sexual or gender identity and build bridges in places where the church and the transgender community have been divided.

But this week, while publicising it, she said she has received “horrific” online abuse.

The book, however, has received some advance praise.

Simon Ponsonby, Pastor of Theology at St Aldate’s Church, Oxford, said: “Chrissie’s book is powerful, uncomfortable but essential reading as the Church seeks to understand the trauma of gender dysphoria and welcome transgender persons."           

Heaven Come Down: The Story of a Transgender Disciple  is published by Darton, Longman and Todd.