By Frances Mulcahy, MBBS (she/her)

Content Warning: sexual abuse, rape

I like women, and yes, ‘in that way’.

When I disclosed my gender state (amab, transgender woman) to my sailing friend Janelle she said ‘that explains a lot’.

She is a few years older than me and has known me through sailing since I was about eight years old. Her brother sailed with my sister for four of their teenage years, and was a groomsman at her wedding. Janelle’s first job was as a lab assistant at my high school. I was an academic geek, very low on the social status list at school and the fact that I could chat to the new, attractive, lab assistant and receive a beaming smile was a cause of great confusion for the alpha-adolescents.

Well, what did she mean, ‘that explains a lot?’

She explained that her observation of me with teenage females was that I was very different to the other adolescent, testosterone-driven humans. I wanted to know about the girls, I wanted to join their conversations. I wanted to understand what mattered to them. I took them seriously.

Janelle added that she wondered, ‘was I gay?’, and quickly dismissed that as she could tell I liked girls ‘that way’.

Now, reporting on my childhood for this story is tricky. I have reframed (not altered) many memories since becoming gender aware, but I feel I can relate an accurate history from memory pre-transition and separately comment on my updated understanding.

I have a sister 18 months younger than me. She did not mind me playing with her dolls, but had no interest in sharing the play (sibling rivalry stuff), but my cousins were a different matter. We moved to Brisbane when I was six and the cousins were mainly in Melbourne. We had plenty of school holiday driving trips south. I loved playing with my cousins, and I had a special social position. Everyone knew I was adopted, which was a two-edged sword. I was proper family (sort of) but I was allowed to be different, so when I played cards and board games or put on a play with my female cousins rather than play football it was, ‘that’s G-Frances, it’s a bit of a sissy’. Now, sissy was a harsh term of derision, but it was not used with much venom, and I did not mind too much. I could and did kick a ball and enjoyed it with the boys, and I took perverse pleasure in being asked why I was reading all those big kid books, and why I was a reading more than one a time? But, being a known sissy, I could be one of the girls. Pre-awareness, I framed these memories as me being a bright, geek-type human, not able to move out from a powerful narcissistic father’s shadow and content not to compete in the ‘boys own’ world. Post-transition, it is clear to me these were many of my ‘want to be a girl – I am a girl’ moments.

Aside; pre-transition, I had memories of a few ‘want to be a girl’ moments. I had framed them again as attempts to escape the ‘must be a real boy (my little man)’ pressure from my father. I enjoy them as real and literal now.

Moving on to adolescence, Janelle was quite right – I did engage with girls differently to my peers. I was, in the view of my peers, a socially hopeless geek. But not all was as it seemed to them. In grade 11 (I was 15 turning 16), native French speaking neighbours moved into our street and I became close to one daughter, Katharine, 12 months my junior. I managed adequate conversational French and I had full comprehension unless Mamma spoke quickly in regional dialect. Katharine had rapidly improving basic English. Katharine and I managed to discuss J.P. Satre and current Parisian Catholic politics. She came to several of my year 12 football games. My social standing went up. I had a pretty, shapely blonde with an accent on my arm, chatting away to me in French. She was religiously (literal use of word) non-sexual but after a year of friendship she allowed me to see her naked. While I had a stock standard adolescent physiologic response my profound memory was of absolute awe at her beauty. We did not sexually explore beyond our nudity.

Katharine moved interstate not long after and I was (teenage) heart broken.

In the later part of year 12, we had the ceremonial horror of school dances (in anticipation of the School Formal). I was, again, a geek without a girlfriend. At the practice horrors with a local Catholic girls’ school, I found the same clutch of girls sitting aside from the action each dance. I sat with them and chatted, and I was absolutely besotted with a girl who called herself Henry (with a Y, I asked). She was very smart, well read, bespectacled and to my eye very aesthetically pleasing. A very different kind of girl. We met after school often, occasionally just we two, more often with her little group of very pleasant, if somewhat masculine, girl-school fellows.

You can see what’s coming, can’t you? I sure didn’t. I asked Henry to the formal and she said no. I was surprised. She sorted a partner for me, her school dux, a nice socially awkward Catholic geek, just like me. Despite the knock back, I organised another after school get together. She was a no show and one of her friendship group appeared. She explained to me that Henry was very, very fond of me but suspected I did not understand that she preferred girls, and no, I had no idea, sheltered Catholic boy that I was, I could not spell lesbian. The friend told me not to be downcast – Henry never, ever put up with males and her friends were shocked she befriended me. She told her friends I was a good girlfriend despite being a male. The last comment that day from the friend was that Henry thought for a while I was gay, but changed her mind, as I looked at her breasts far too often.

I saw Henry a few times over the next few years at Uni, always arm in arm with a woman. We did exchange greetings but no more.

I had a complex, difficult, fraught relationship life as an adult. I sabotaged myself and I am ashamed to say I caused plenty of collateral damage. I had intermittent psychiatric care to try and unravel my self-loathing and self-harm (no cutting, no booze, no drugs but repeated sabotaging of my social stability). I had three obvious developmental handicaps, I was adopted with attachment difficulty, I had a narcissistic father who objectified me absolutely, and I had experienced sexual abuse from outside the family prior to school age. The abuse included a pack rape.

I discussed with my psychiatrist, at length, my sense that my sexual orientation was a significant part of my loathing. He disagreed and allocated my disordered relationship to self to my listed traumas.

So, in the early 1990s, I came to the position I would hold for many years. I was badly scarred and the best I could do was know about the scars and get on with life intermittently hating myself.

I had grown up in a culture where gays were invisible and the only view of men who might wear a dress was that they were perverts. By 1990, gays were visible, drag was an art form, but even to a well-read medico like me, gender incongruity was a rare thing, not to be seen in a life time of practice.

My world was forcibly cis-normative. It was not possible for me to conceive of others, let alone me being trans or non binary (non-binary was not even a term of language).

My world was forcibly heteronormative. I like girls that way so I must be a normal male.

I was stuck in the 90s zeitgeist.

It took a serious injury, a prolonged illness, a radical recovery, a whole new body consciousness, a vast amount of meditation, a shift in the cultural discussion of gender, and a gentle queer friend for the lightning bolt of reality to hit me.

And that is another story.

The moral of this story is that cis and heteronormative cultural structures are dangerous. The enforced narrow binary view can, and in my case did, screw a person over for 60 years. Listen to the little kids who know what they are. Let them play with ideas and form. Don’t rush them don’t crush them.

By the way, I have no self -loathing these days, I am aware of my serious flaws and my scars, and they do not define me. I wished I was little girl, I always was a girl and now everyone including me knows it.