Valerie Montchalin found out who her friends were when she transitioned to being a transgender woman in her village high in the Massif Central of central France.

Some turned their backs on the 52-year-old builder. And she was not invited to the village get-together.

Everybody knows everybody -- and everything about them -- in Saint-Victor-Malescours, a village of 700 souls surrounded by wooded hills.

Montchalin kept her secret for decades. She knew she was different "when I was six or seven... without being able to put a word on it. But if I had told my mother that I didn't feel right in my body, I would have got a good slap," she told AFP.

Her family were afraid of "what people would say".

So, growing up, "I did what was expected of me," she said. She became a builder, married at 22 and had two children. As a man, she was "gruff, pretty macho -- the opposite of what I really was," Montchalin admitted.

But she was "suffering" inside, the discomfort particularly acute in men's clothes shops or when she looked into a mirror at the barbers. Finally, at age 48, she came out to her wife and children.

Since then, Montchalin has moved to the nearest city, Saint-Etienne, where she is receiving hormone therapy. She has let her hair grow and regularly goes to the beautician. "I am quite coquettish."

Her workers were initially quite "shocked", but now they greet her with a kiss on the cheek.

Her transition was not a dramatic "flag-waving one", she says -- a feeling echoed by six other transgender people from rural areas who talked to AFP.

All told how they learned to deal with the isolation and odd looks and of having to travel for hours for medical attention. Being........

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