This is the story of a business venture and of a life.

I class myself as transgendered, though I know this term can cause much confusion. To me it means that on a psychological, emotion and behavioural aspect I straddle the murky waters between what is accepted as male and female. I have a male body, but I spend a significant amount of my time dressed as a woman. I suppose this makes me a transvestite, if we're going to attach labels to things.

I know I'm not truly female, but I do regard myself as an emulation of a woman. Not a parody.

Up to a couple of months ago I worked in a shop catering to the TG community, but I wasn't satisfied with the levels of service we were able to offer. Scratching away on the breadline, scraping money in from sex toys and pornography. I wanted to be able to offer a wider range of quality products so that the clientele could make a real choice. Though a large part of the job involved offering advice and support I wished we could make more of a difference: taking a man with gender dysphoria and helping him as far along the path as she wanted to go.

One of our regular customers, Kelly, had become my friend and I found that we shared the same ambition. We knew that simply catering to the TG market would be difficult economically, and we started to look for other niche markets that would complement our goals.

And so Autonomy and Engendered@Autonomy were born.

We have the concept, we have some of the products, we have a half written business plan. We have a huge amount of work to do.

Over the next few months the story will unfold as we head for either shopkeeping success or destitution.