On one hand it seemed as though we were always moving on, just when I was really settling in and starting to consider myself at home. On the other, I think it gave me an very international view of the world. By the time I was 20, I was very well travelled and had a curious accent, part American and part Australian, but one that was not really acceptable in either country.

I settled down in the UK and am now married. My SO knows all about my crossdressing and is very understanding. I am working at cultivating my English accent and my girly voice.

Having been a crossdresser since I was very young, I decided that I needed more involvement in the transgender community so in late 1998 I started Trannyweb with an idea for running vacations for transvestites and crossdressers. That quickly fell through because of a serious lack of customers. At that time, everyone thought that as soon as you put up a web site, there would be millions of people looking at it and beating a path to your door. Er, wrong! In six months we had exactly zero customers and only one enquiry.

Having learned quite a bit about the web, the hard way, I dropped the vacations idea but as the website had been paid for, for a year and I still had six months left, I decided to make a links page with pointers to tranny resources around the web.

After discovering just how many thousands of crossdresser, transexual, transvestite and transgender related resources and websites there are, I installed some search engine software to index them. As far as I know, our search engine, which is affectionately called Mabel, is the largest collection of tranny related links in the galaxy, with over 31000 transgender related pages indexed so far!

The search engine really started bringing in the traffic so I needed to find other things for the girls to do while they were on the site. Next came the message boards and then the chat room and other bells and whistles. Some of the software was shareware or freeware and none of the programs talked to each other.

Some were very memory and processor hungry, gobbling up the server's resources and slowing everything down. It was all a bit of a mess that had evolved over time rather than having been planned properly from the start.

I brought a non-tranny programming friend onboard early in 2003 and with the help of some brilliant programmers in Canada, we built a new Trannyweb which was different to the old incarnation in one very important way. All of the separate programs that make up the suite have been written to work together. They share information and have been specifically designed to be used by a community.

This one development really has put Trannyweb onto a new level.

Money has always been a problem as we constantly have to invest in new software and new kit. To help make ends meet, a little while ago we opened our shop - TrannyStuff, which is aimed specifically at crossdressers, transexuals, transvestites and the transgender community in general. At TrannyStuff you can buy a variety of goods that us girls need, like Trannyweb T-Shirts, Mousemats and Coffee Mugs, books on transgender subjects, downloadable tranny e-books, and so on. And with every purchase you'll also be helping the cause!

We already run a few Trannyweb Girly Nights Out in Washington DC and in London and Manchester, England. In future we would like to bring Trannyweb out of the PC (or Mac or whatever) and into the streets, with more events around the world, so that more of us special girls can have even more fun!

Hugs,

Katie :)