ANDREW is 20 years old. With his
Custard tattoo, cute girlfriend and penchant for
indie rock, he's an archetypal example of male
youth culture. The only things separating him
from his laddish peers are the testosterone
injections, the homemade super boob tube and the
fact he spent most of his life as Jane.
Not much at all, really.
After a traumatic adolescence in a country
town in regional Victoria, Andrew is about to
return to school to do his HSC with the new
identity he has spent a lifetime fighting to
achieve. His courage is extraordinary. Using the
boys' toilets still involves a panic attack and
he hasn't even decided how to pack his lunchbox.
Should he opt for the budget option of a rolled
up sock or splash out on The Bulge, a
Pack-n-Play, a Mr Softie or a Dutch Phallus
prosthesis (only $550 with balls and $350
without)?
The dilemmas of the fashion conscious
female-to-male transgender are endless.
But anything's better than being trapped in a
small town where everyone wants to know why
little Jane had to go and chop off her beautiful
long curly hair. Andrew remembers his youth as a
profoundly lonely experience.
He grew up in a community where being a man
meant shearing a sheep before breakfast,
chain-skolling VBs and being called Bazza. The
answer to all feminine emotional disturbances
was a soothing cup of beef tea and a bit of a
lie down. "My family were living in the 1950s,"
he says. "My father had the haircut to prove
it."
Andrew has a photograph of himself as a
bridesmaid at a debutante ball, looking the
picture of lacy girlishness. But even then,
wearing a dress felt like dressing in drag. He'd
look in the mirror and be shocked to see a girl
and not a boy. He'd write stories at school from
a male point of view without even realising it.
"The teacher said I should get a male to read it
to see if it was in the correct voice," he says.
"She said I should include more female
characters."
Jane told her family GP she was attracted to
other girls and the doctor gave her a blood test
to see if she was gay. (The diagnosis was no.)
Jane told the social worker at the hospital she
was a boy trapped in a girl's body and the
social worker said after a bit of a rest it
would all blow over. Jane was hospitalised in a
mental institution after attempting suicide via
hanging, overdose, electrocution and wrist
slitting and was drugged to the eyeballs.
"Mind you," says Andrew, "when all you are
thinking about all day is trying to kill
yourself, then it's better not to think about
anything at all." Asked about his life goals at
the time, he says: "To keep on living for
another year." Andrew dropped out of high school
shortly after beginning Year 12. His mother's
response to the boy thing was: "Nonsense. I saw
you wearing a dress yesterday."
He then spent a year packing eggs in a
poultry farm before moving to Melbourne to start
hormone treatment. "I'd started to get my head
around what was happening, that I was in the
wrong body," he says. "I wanted to make a new
start, away from people who had known me all my
life."
Andrew spent the first six months of his life
in Melbourne experimenting. He adopted a
non-gender-specific nickname, chatted on the
internet as Charles Bigglesworth and also began
pen-pal relationships as a he with
masculine-looking photographs to back up the new
and improved pronoun. "One of the big downsides
was not having enough money to buy decent men's
clothing," he says. "I was still wearing
hand-me-downs from my sister, dad's cast-offs
and stuff my mum got at Target." Andrew has now
been receiving testosterone injections for
3½ months.
His voice has broken, his jaw is becoming
more geometric and he has started shaving. He's
also spending a fortune on anti-pimple
medications to deal with Adolescent Acne Take
Two. (It's no more glamorous second time
around.) Goals for 2001 include: get HSC, shop
around for doctor to perform a double
mastectomy, grow sideburns, weigh up pros and
cons of "gender realignment surgery", learn to
urinate vertically and start looking like cross
between Tim Rogers from You Am I, Bobby
Gillespie from Primal Scream and anyone
from Supergrass.
How hard can it be?
Andrew has dealt with plenty of crap from
people who labour under the misbelief that
changing one's gender is a spur-of-the-moment
decision. ("Mmm, I've had the lip piercing, the
wacky blue hair and the Celtic armband tattoo .
. . I know! I'll get my tits chopped off and
have a phallus constructed out of the skin from
my forearm!") But he's also had extraordinary
support from his mother (who's slowly getting
used to the change), his bisexual girlfriend,
Rachel, and from his "mother-in-law".
Funniest quote from Rachel's mum in recent
history: "Poor old Andrew, he's got his period."
Andrew also recommends the Transgender
Liberation and Care support group and
websites such as A Woman's Guide to How to
Pee Standing Up and Adventures in
Boyland, which offers amusing and
informative tips on issues such as grooming,
etiquette and where to buy elevated shoes.
The young man-about-town who hopes one day to
become a psychologist is now happier than he's
ever been before. But he knows his life will
never be easy.
A 1994 survey into transgender lifestyles by
the University of NSW found that a third of
respondents had been raped, with one in eight
reporting pack rape. Forty-four per cent
reported depression and more than one-third had
attempted suicide. Queensland police's lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender liaison unit has
said transgender people are society's most
discriminated against. In Tasmania - surprise,
surprise - it is still illegal for men to dress
as women between sunset and sunrise.
Hilary Swank's superb performance in Boys
Don't Cry (a true story about a girl
attempting to reinvent herself as a boy in
redneck America) drew sympathetic attention to
the issue but, on the whole, people such as
Andrew are even more marginalised than their
male-to-female counterparts.
A search on News Limited's library system
revealed a handful of stories about chaps who
become chicks, but virtually nothing on the vice
versa. As a person who knows and accepts Andrew
as something other than the sum of his parts,
this is a plea for tolerance. It can be
difficult to treat people as people before skin
colour, gender and sexual preferences, but the
alternatives (as illustrated in the horrific
conclusion to Boys Don't Cry) are not an
option.
also see — Rachael's
Interview
— Emma Tom, Australia
Used with permission.
