Just Julia: The Story of an Extraordinary Woman is a raw, unflinching memoir that expands far beyond the earlier book George and Julia and offers one of the most complex autobiographical accounts of a transgender life published in Britain. Written by Julia Grant, it tells a story that is not shaped as a neat narrative of triumph, but as a brutally honest record of survival, failure, resilience, and uneasy self knowledge. The book is both deeply personal and historically significant, documenting not only Julia’s life but also the hostile and often negligent systems that shaped the experiences of transsexual women in late twentieth century Britain.
Julia Grant was born George Roberts in Fleetwood, Lancashire, in 1954, into a childhood marked by neglect, violence, and instability. The book begins by confronting this early trauma without sentimentality. Grant describes growing up as the eldest of eight children in a household dominated by alcoholism, cruelty, and fear. Her mother struggled with addiction and repeated suicide attempts, while her father was violent and abusive, including acts of sexual violence directed at Julia when she was still a child. Responsibility arrived early, as Julia often cared for her younger siblings while receiving little care herself. Periods spent in children’s homes and the absence of any stable sense of safety shaped her emotional development in lasting ways. As a teenager she drifted into prostitution, an experience she later understood as a desperate search for affection rather than money, using her earnings on sweets rather than survival. This painful beginning sets the emotional tone for the rest of the book, where identity, worth, and belonging are constant struggles rather than abstract ideas.
The memoir follows her early adult life through crime, instability, and repeated prison sentences, experiences that are neither glamorised nor excused. Grant writes candidly about how alienation from her own body and identity fed into destructive behaviour. Living in a male body felt unbearable, yet she lacked the language, support, or medical framework to understand herself fully. By the time she moved to London in the 1970s, following a failed marriage, she had already lived several lives defined by survival rather than choice. She worked as a catering manager and performed as a drag queen, initially seeing drag as a possible outlet. However, as she explains in Just Julia, drag only highlighted the deeper truth that she was not a gay man performing femininity, but a woman who wanted to live as herself.
A significant portion of the book focuses on her interactions with the NHS gender identity clinic at Charing Cross Hospital and its psychiatrist, John Randell. Grant’s portrayal of this process is devastating. She recounts being subjected to rigid stereotypes about femininity, patronising attitudes, and power dynamics that left her feeling humiliated and desperate. The requirement to live full time as a woman before receiving treatment placed her under intense scrutiny, both socially and medically. The BBC filmed all her consultations, an extraordinary intrusion that exposed not only her vulnerability but also the authority and arrogance of the system itself. Despite tabloid hostility and public ridicule, Julia persisted, driven by a determination to become the woman she believed herself to be.
Her decision to pursue surgery outside the NHS becomes one of the book’s most tragic turning points. After being denied support for full genital surgery, she arranged breast implants privately, angering her NHS psychiatrist and effectively closing the door to further institutional help. Eventually, she found a sympathetic private surgeon willing to operate. The immediate aftermath of the surgery was euphoric, but this hope collapsed weeks later when severe complications arose. Grant describes collapsing from internal bleeding and being taken unconscious to hospital, where doctors unaware of her history treated her as a woman suffering a miscarriage. The damage to her surgery left her unable to have sex and deeply ashamed, cutting her off from both medical support and intimacy. This period, which forms the emotional heart of Just Julia, reveals the devastating consequences of inadequate aftercare and secrecy forced upon trans patients by stigma.
The breakdown of her relationship with Amir, a refugee who had accepted her as a woman, compounds this sense of loss. Unable to explain the physical reasons for their sexual difficulties, Julia withdrew, and the relationship eventually ended. What follows is a period of despair that she later described as the lowest point of her life. It is here that Just Julia diverges most clearly from the earlier narrative presented in George and Julia. The book refuses the comforting arc of transition as resolution and instead shows how transition, when mishandled by institutions and compounded by trauma, can leave someone more isolated than before.
Yet the memoir is not only about loss. Julia Grant also documents her resilience and creativity. After leaving Britain for Amsterdam, she found space to rebuild herself and later returned to the stage in a cabaret act titled The Bitch is Back. This performance was defiant, self-aware, and laced with dark humour, reclaiming control over a story that had often been taken out of her hands. Her theatrical career, which once seemed full of promise and then collapsed, became a tool for survival rather than fame.
The final sections of the book are shadowed by illness. Diagnosed with bowel cancer and later kidney failure, Grant returned to Britain and dedicated her remaining energy to improving trans healthcare. She participated in NHS discussions, mentored others, and remained outspoken until the end. Her death in January 2019 marked the loss of a figure who had shaped public understanding of trans lives for decades, often at great personal cost.
Just Julia is not an easy book to read, nor does it offer simple inspiration. It is extraordinary precisely because it resists simplification. Julia Grant does not present herself as a symbol or a success story, but as a flawed, wounded, determined human being navigating systems that were often hostile or indifferent. In doing so, she leaves behind a record that is uncomfortable, compassionate, and essential, a testament to the complexity of trans lives and the price paid by those who were visible before the world was ready to see them.
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Photos via wordsandpictures2016
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