IT is just over a decade since Abi Austen, who was then living as paratrooper Ian Hamilton, had what she now describes as a breakdown. She had spent two years on tour in Afghanistan, serving with the US Army, at one point as an officer of the parachute regiment. But though her Army career was on track, living as a man was becoming increasingly unmanageable.

“It was getting more and more difficult to weigh up who I was against society’s expectations” explains the Scot from her home in Liverpool, where she is based.

“A roadside bomb went off right outside our camp while I was standing at the gates. Three were killed and two soldiers badly wounded. I just couldn’t do it any more. I had a kind of breakdown; that is the only way I could describe it.”

She was medivacked back to the UK where she made a realisation. “I had been being who people wanted me to be for so long and now I had to be happy for me.” A year later counsellors diagnosed gender dysphoria and from that point she began to prepare for surgical intervention. Since then, Austen has had breast augmentation, facial reconstruction and finally full gender re-assignment in early 2008, becoming the subject of a Channel 4 documentary.

Her conservative Christian family disowned her and she felt deeply alone. “It was pretty traumatic,” she said. “I lost everything; my family, my job, any respect people had for me. I had abuse on the streets, I got assaulted, I lost my home, my savings, everything.”

But she clung on, and hasn’t looked back, campaigning for acceptance in the British Army and changing attitudes. She’s served as a community cop in Glasgow’s Drumchapel and worked as a NATO consultant in Afghanistan – an experience she wrote about in Lord Robert’s Valet.

Most recently she’s been campaigning for trans rights in the US, taking on the Bathroom Bill, a law that is gaining traction in America’s southern states that aims to force transgender people to use public restrooms based on the gender they at birth.

Just a week before this month’s US elections, Channel 4 screened My Trans American Road Trip which sees her travel to North Carolina where the bill was passed in May.

With Trump now in power, Austen is ever more fearful about the bigotry she saw during her trip. “I read about the Bathroom Bill and thought it very reminiscent of the troubles that I had when I first came out in the British Army,” she said.

“But I hadn’t realised the depth of hatred and bile that was being expressed to towards the trans community in the United States... What we are really facing is a re-run of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

“The rise of the far right movement, and the people who have clung to that, are those who are desperately searching for an answer and are looking back in the same way as a lot of Brexiteers are, to a time that no longer exists. It’s a sort of halcyon Eisenhower era of mom and pop and apple pie.”

The experience has deeply affected her. She’s stayed in touch with campaigners and continued to raise awareness of their struggles, speaking at Liverpool’s Transgender Day of Remembrance event last week. While she returned to “a fabulously liberal” UK city, the transgender women she met while filming are “living and breathing [discrimination] every day”.

Growing up in a small Aberdeenshire town where the word trans did not exist, Austen once thought her need to become a woman was “evil”. “I can vividly remember watching David Bowie on Top of the Pops and my father switching it off and saying ‘we’ll not have any of that filth in our house’,” she says.

“So that’s when I joined the Army. I thought I could become a paratrooper and do this whole kill or cure myself thing. Which of course was not ever a solution.”

Her solution was transition, first to Jan Hamilton who successfully took a physical assessment for Strathclyde police just three months after reconstructive surgery. She later changed her name to Abi Austen.

Over the last decade there have been incredible advances for trans people in the UK, she says, from equal marriage to increased acceptance from a range of institutions, not least the Army. In September a transgender soldier became the first woman to fight on the front line.

But since Brexit, Austen has grown increasingly concerned about the effect right wing forces may have on these hard-won freedoms. She is particularly troubled by Prime Minister Theresa May’s attack on EU equalities legislation which, she says, offers important protection to the trans community. Homophobic crime is up 147 per cent. Trans people – along with migrants and refugees – are the new bogeymen, she claims. Though she voted no in the referendum, she would now vote for an independent Scotland as part of Europe.

“The storm clouds are gathering,” she says. “Across the whole issue of gender rights you see a general rolling back of what appeared to be a move towards gay equality in the UK.”

Typically, the only answer that she can see is to speak up more. She has aspirations of standing as politician, and has written a book about her story, due for release next year. “We have to put down a line to say this is fundamentally wrong,” she said. “I and the rest of the trans community have as much right to love, liberty and happiness as anyone else.”