WHEN a female nurse called Margaret
Castle became a male nurse called Mark O'Brien,
he was suddenly expected to lift heavier
weights, like dead bodies and brain trauma
cases.
"It was funny because I'm not any stronger
now as a man than I was as a woman - I've always
been very powerful," he says nodding to his
beefy shoulders and arms. "but as a woman the
rules were different".
Mark O'Brien might not be any stronger, but
he's much gentler as a man than he ever was as a
woman when his rage of being trapped in the
wrong body had him itching for a fight.
If you said something he (or strictly
speaking, she) didn't like, you could have ended
up wearing a plate glass window. "Now", says
Mark, "I can have a couple of drinks and not get
nasty".
Better still, he can stop at a couple of
drinks and not do what he attempted at the age
of 16 - drink himself blotto into an attempt to
forget he felt like a man who had breasts and
periods.
"Being drunk was the only way I could accept
myself," he says, crumbing cake as we talk at a
railway restaurant. "I knew there was something
different about me from the age of nine. I
didn't look like a girl, I didn't like girls'
games. I liked football and cars. When I
developed breasts at puberty I was horrified. I
liked women but I didn't want to be one."
Being drunk was also the only thing that
helped Margaret cope with a sexual relationship
with a man. At 21, trying to make a go of being
female, she got her first boyfriend. It didn't
work. Worse still, she became pregnant, and
suffered two nervous breakdowns and attempted
suicide three times.
Trying to persuade her to accept her gender,
experts tried everything from shock treatment to
glib advice like, "You'll be OK once the right
man comes along."
Margaret felt like cutting her throat and one
day she did just that. Meeting Mark now it's
hard to imagine someone so cheerful and positive
being so desperate. But the long thin scar is
there under his collar to prove it.
Under his shirt are more scars. These are
from the mastectomy he had six years ago, when
to his huge relief, he could stand up, look down
and see….nothing. He was happy to see the
last of his periods too - the result of
treatment with hormones.
Long before hormone therapy and surgery,
Margaret Castle had been dressing and living as
a man and using the name Mark. But every month,
menstruation reminded her she was still a woman
and was the trigger for one of her suicide
attempts.
Mark, now 44, says his life changed from the
moment he got a letter giving him the go-ahead
for the surgery. It felt, he says happily, as if
he'd been locked up for 25 years and someone had
handed him the key. He's had peace of mind ever
since, and has built a quiet life in suburban
Sydney, content with his cat and his dog and the
neighbours and friends who accept him.
Like most female to male transsexuals, Mark
went no further than mastectomy and
hysterectomy. But when we met he'd just made the
decision to have his genitals changed to include
an artificial phallus.
"I've put it off long enough," he says.
Physically, I'm neither one thing nor the other.
When I go to the beach the top of me looks male
and bottom half doesn't. It might take three
operations, it might take five. I've been
through a lot of pain and there's more to come.
But in the long run, I'll be what I always
should have been."
