A former Black Watch soldier was targeted by bigots and forced to flee her family home after she revealed her plans to become a woman.
Neville Pickering went on the run after two thugs came to his door and gave him 24 hours to get out of town.
Now, following a successful gender swap operation, the 47-year-old is living a new life in Perth as bus driver Anne Stewart.
And she says she has never been happier.
Anne, who is originally from Perthshire, described her transgender feelings as “like looking in the mirror and seeing a man, but knowing it is not a man looking back at you”.
Speaking to The Courier ahead of a BBC One documentary about her life, she said her world changed after suffering a stroke while living with her wife and son in Wales.
“The doctors said it must have been stress related. That’s when I told them about my feelings, that I had felt like a woman literally all of my life.”
Although she was only diagnosed with gender dysphoria a few years ago, Miss Stewart said she had strong transgender feelings as a pupil at Letham Primary and then St Columba’s RC High School.
“I was bullied a lot in school because of this,” she said. “I was more comfortable playing with girls than with boys. I didn’t know I was transgender at the time, but I remember I was very confused and I withdrew into myself. That’s why I would get picked on all the time.”
After leaving school, Anne joined the army partly in an effort to suppress her feminine feelings.
For 12 years she served in conflicts all over the world, including in Northern Ireland, Kenya, Canada and Germany. “No one had any idea,” she said.
Anne married in 1997 and left the army the following year after suffering knee problems. The couple, who have a teenage son, moved to rural Wales.
After her stroke, she began to think about her future.
“I thought about what the doctors said for about a year,” she said.
“Then one day I decided I just couldn’t live the way I was living anymore, I was living a lie basically. So I decided to come out as transgender.
“My family have been fully supportive throughout and so have my friends, my ex-colleagues from the army and my workmates.
“Since I moved to Perth, the general public has been great too,” she said. “But my family in Wales reacted very badly.
“I think Wales is still very much in the Dark Ages when it comes to being transgender.”
Anne said: “I was both mentally and physically abused in the village I was living in.
“One night, two guys came to my door and told me I had 24 hours to leave or I would never see daylight again. And that was just because I had come out as transgender.”
After hitting rock bottom and contemplating taking her own life, Anne moved back to Perthshire in 2011 and got a job with Stagecoach.
“Scotland is way better and much more accepting. I suppose it’s just the good nature of the Scots,” she said.
“And being transgender, I could not have asked for a better employer than Stagecoach. They have supported me throughout all of this. They have been phenomenal.”
After a three-year wait, and a course of hormone therapy, Anne finally got her operation. “I felt fantastic, it was the best feeling ever. It has just changed my whole life.
“Now I can plan for the future,” she said. “I want to continue where I am with Stagecoach and hopefully one day meet a fella and settle down.”
Anne is one of the subjects of Transexual Stories which airs on Monday night on BBC One Scotland at 10.35pm.