Monique S is my pen name, legally I am Monika Magdalena Schenke. I was born in 1953 in Hamburg, Germany to a journalist father and Secretary mother as a boy.

 

Yes, I am a transwoman and a lesbian one at that. You might be surprised, that I am so outspoken with it, but if you had any idea what I had to go through in inner turmoil and childhood traumata, professional disappointments and discrimination, you might even get a glimpse at the reasons, why today I am so proud of what I have achieved for myself and who I have become.

 

I have had several jobs in my life, paramedic (during my obligatory service), bar person, delivery driver and finally cabinet and flight case maker in a company I had co founded at 25 with four partners while still male. What never left me during all that was the deep almost desperate desire to be the woman I new I was inside. When a dispute about company policy ended in legal procedures to get rid of me and even my girl-friend of 5 years betrayed me, I though I had reached the end of my tether, but some friends who remained, when I came out and the manager of the Scorpions, for whom I had re-designed a system “my” company had shown 1980 at the music fair in Frankfurt, kept me working and alive, so I started my transition. Very soon I had to find out, that the recent (1982) German law on Transgender (called Transsexuellen Gesetz) was there to make it as difficult as possible, to do it legally.

I felt like being classed as incompetent to make decisions for my future, I felt  treated as a child, but at 32 years of age and after I had run a very successful company for years. First they expected me to find work as a woman without being able to legally change my name, then I was to go through two years like that during which I might or might not become allowed to take female hormones. All I could do was to laugh in their faces at that, leave the country in 1986 and go to the UK, where the name change with the help of a Deed Poll was a breeze. That way I also escaped at least some of the radioactive clouds from Chernobyl.

 

Following that experience I and my then female partner became interested in the astrological system called “Münchner Rhytmenlehre”® by Wolfgang Döbereiner. It did not take long, until our efforts were rewarded. First of all I understood a lot more who I was and Why, but together my lady and I were a fabulous team reading charts. Living as a woman called Dhyan Magna with her we became sought after as astrologers and co-therapist for certain therapy groups.

 

After three years my lady began being interested in men again and we parted ways amicably, she to study alternative medicine (Heulpraktiker) with her man and I to continue as travelling astrologer on my own, spending more or less 10 years “on the road again”, giving readings in England, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In 1996 I finally decided to put down roots in Somerset/Devon on Exmoor. Seeing the social climate in what was until then the soil of my choice for life degenerate rapidly a friend and I decided to have a look at the other side of the channel. In 2000 she bought a not quite derelict Farmhouse in Brittany, where we lived together rebuilding it.

 

I did occasional work in electrics getting more and more interested in renewable energy while I built in natural granite, roofed the house in new slate, took care of the livestock and helped with the gardening. By 2015 my friend and I had pretty much developed in different directions and, since I didn’t find any work in electrics any more, I accepted the invitation of an old friend in the UK and found work there as Independent Quality Analyst for translations between German, English and sometimes French. With the decision fro Brexit take in 2016 I went back to Brittany, where I am still settled, after a couple of meagre years doing occasional electrical work again, only this time not only for British expats, but more and more for French, who were disappointed with their countrymen’s quality of work.