The X Factor star opened up during a discussion about 9-year-old Joseph Hughes, who has been diagnosed with 'gender confusion'.
Speaking as a guest panelist, Sam admitted to Ruth Langsford, Nadia Sawalha and Jane Moore that she could relate to Joseph, explaining:
“This happened to me when I was younger.
"I wanted to play football when I was young, I had long hair, and there was a boy’s football team and they said ‘you can’t play because you’re a girl’.
"They said ‘the only way you can play for us is if you cut all your hair off’, so I went home and got a pair of scissors and cut my hair off.
"I had curtains and I went out as a boy. I used to climb trees and I didn’t want to do anything girlie. I did this for a long time.
"I played [football] for two years and they didn’t know, no one knew I was a boy.”
Speaking about how she avoided being discovered in the changing rooms, she added:
“I had to wait until everybody had gone and then I had to go in and get changed afterwards. I was top scorer for the club!”
Asked whether the mother-of-three would have considered gender reassignment at that age, she said:
“If somebody had said to me at nine, ‘you have an opportunity to be a boy’, that state of mind I was in, I would have said ‘yeah, go on’.
"It was nothing to do with sexuality, it was nothing to do with fancying girls or anything like that, it was just that I wanted to dress like a boy.
"I know so many people that were tomboys, I just didn’t want to be a girl. It was a phase for me, it was a phase. I hadn’t gone through puberty until I was sixteen, seventeen."
Speaking about Joseph Hughes- who is set to return to school as a female- the 37-year-old added:
"I didn’t start forming until then, so this boy that is nine years old, it might be going on for a long time, his mother is respecting that but my concern is when he starts to hit puberty, things will change, his mindset will change, kids have phases.”