The story so far… Robert Peep came from a farming family but chose the Army and then the SAS. in preference to that career. On leaving the army he found himself rootless and ended up working as a bouncer for local clubs. He was good at it! As part of this work he became involved with the local LGBT community. This, along with seeing a therapist, led in some unexpected directions. One of which was him returning to the farm to become a shepherd. The other was less predictable. He decided that he wanted to become a woman. Or, more accurately, to become the woman he had always thought himself to be. 

So it was that during his 30’s Robert Peep slowly morphed into a woman. She was a striking sight. One does not see many women of 6’ 3” and 13 stone. (Robert put himself on a grueling weight loss regime to come down from 15 stone to a mere 13 stone.) Life was not always easy for her. But she was used to it. 5 years in the SAS taught one a great deal about survival techniques. Whether the enemy were a group of terrorists, the deserts of Iraq or a group of men in the pub making fun of Bo as she sat in the pub with her friends. (This only ever happened once. Bo may now have changed gender but she still knew an alarming array of techniques to “encourage good behaviour”.)

“So”, you may say, “this is all very interesting. But what does it have to do with the nursery rhyme?” 

I’ll try and explain it in simple terms. 

The rhyme runs thus:

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep

And doesn’t know where to find them.

Leave them alone and they’ll come home

Bringing their tails behind them.

We need to go to cockney rhyming slang initially. (Or cockney slang as borrowed by the LGBT community.) Thus, sheep give us lamb chops. “Chops” rhymes with “Drops”. A reference to the testicles that are lost when a man becomes a woman. After years of looking down at them, they are no longer there. They are “lost”.

 The second part of the verse plays with the different meaning of “tail”.  The Free Dictionary gives its meaning thus:

“Someone with whom to engage in sexual activity; a potential sexual partner. Usually said of a woman. …Typically said by men to refer to such activity with women, as in “God, I haven’t had a piece of tail in weeks!’” 

In this case it is an oblique way of saying to a man who has transitioned. “You will adjust to your changed shape ‘down there’”.

So we have the full history of how Robert Peep became Little Bo Peep. Changed from an SAS hard man into a woman and of how the LGBT community gave a new meaning to an old rhyme. Who knows what its next incarnation might be?