Jamie Wallis has become the first MP to come out as transgender, by revealing he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria from his very young age but he wanted to show “how important it is to be yourself”.

In his  statement posted hours after Boris Johnson reportedly joked about  transgender community, the Bridgend MP said he had “never lived my truth” but would try to start by “telling everyone” about his identity.

Wallis stated that he had been raped last year, and that he had been blackmailed not long after becoming part of House of Commons

This statement was given for its bravery by Johnson and opposition party leaders in the Commons. “I had no intention of ever sharing this with you,” Wallis wrote in a post on his website published early on Wednesday morning. “I always imagined I would leave politics well before I ever said this out loud.”

Wallis, who quoted he would continue to use he/him pronouns, there had been a “close call” where his transgender identity had nearly been made public in April 2020 by his blackmailer who sent photographs to family members.

The blackmailer demanded £50,000 from him to keep quiet, Wallis said, but when the police got involved, the perpetrator pleaded guilty and blackmailer was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison.

“For a while it seemed as though I would be able to get on with things and move on,” Wallis wrote. “Being an MP and hiding something like this was always going to be tough, but I arrogantly assumed I was up for it. Well, I’m not.”

In September 2021, Wallis said he “hooked up” with a person he met online, and declined sex on the basis the other person would not use a condom.

Wallis told: “He chose to rape me.”

“I have not been myself since this incident and I don’t think I will ever recover,” he said. “It is not something you ever forget, and it is not something you ever move on from.

“Since then things have really taken a tumble. I am not OK.”

Wallis told he crashed a car a few months later and said he fled the scene “because I was terrified”. He added that he had PTSD and so he had “no idea what I was doing except I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of fear”.

While talking about the dinner, which Johnson hosted at a hotel in Westminster on Tuesday night, Wallis said he had been “reminded of the incredible support those you work with can provide”.

“Also, I was reminded how important it is to be yourself. I have never lived my truth and I’m not sure how. Perhaps it starts with telling everyone.”

At dinner, Johnson reportedly began an address to Tory MPs by trying to joke about the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s defence that some people with male genitalia could still be treated as Trans women, if that was the gender they identified with.