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Visible male

FOR the first 25 years of my life, I lived a lie.

I’ve lost count how many times strangers assumed I was a boy. I understood myself to be a boy (I was nothing like my sisters who were both clearly girls). Protests by my mother, when strangers referred to me as “your little boy”, just seemed to be one of those inexplicable things along with many other confusing things in the world, to a five year old. I found this very strange. More than that, it felt wrong. So did the dresses, using the girl’s toilets and pronouns like ‘she’ and ‘her’. It was all wrong.

Until I was around five or so, I thought the way you could tell the boys from the girls was based on their haircut. My sisters had long hair in long plaits and they were often mistaken for each other. My hair was cut so short, it was shaved at the back. My sisters were confused one for the other and left to play together. I was ready to go fishing with my father at a moment’s notice. When we went off like this, he joked about ‘getting away from the girls’.

I grew up completely believing I was a boy in a family with two sisters. My parents treated me very differently to my sisters. Until the age of thirteen I had a natural and happy mateship with my father. He often bought me electronic kits, plastic models of cars and ships to construct and we often took off alone to fish. Once away from “Mum and girls” we could celebrate our freedom to be silly, crack rude jokes and feel unencumbered by their presence.

Around the age of thirteen I was deeply confused when both my father and my body seemed to conclude together in a dreadful betrayal. My body took on bizarre alien female characteristics. This was a terrible situation which caused me huge anxiety. Overnight, my father distanced from me. Shared secrets, silliness and fishing trips were gone.

The attention and apparent joy of my mother coloured everything with a horrible madness. What was happening? I must have missed something. There had to be some piece of information that everyone else had. It was a terrible horrifying joke at my expense.

I knew this was terribly wrong, but without any recognition of the terror I was feeling, I went silent. Growing up in a very religious family, I somehow knew it would be a very negative thing for me if they knew how I really felt. So I kept my thoughts to myself. Being religious people, they insisted on the truth in everything. Except when it came to me. That’s how I felt about it. I was a boy and if strangers to the family could see that, why couldn’t they?

Having already spent long hours bargaining everything my pre-teen mind could possibly offer, (to wake up one day with the ‘right’ body – please God, please!), and having had my childish offers fall on Almighty Deaf Ears so far, I knew my parents wouldn’t have anything better to suggest.

I read everything I could possibly find to help myself deal with this insane situation. In retrospect, I was profoundly depressed. Grief certainly characterised the next twelve years.

Denial – (maybe I wasn’t really a boy at all) – Anger (God, my parents, my own body) – Bargaining (deals to wake up with the boy body; or deals to be able to cope). At the end of it all, there was an overwhelming sense of depression and desperation.

Ultimately there was an acceptance of a sort. The sort of acceptance that comes out of the depths of despair and looks at the option of death very very calmly. At 22 years old, I moved over 2,000kms to a large city where no one knew me and I could literally disappear. I was a cipher in a big city – and it was comforting, known territory. I was already invisible.

The depression that had been with me since 12 or 13, soon intensified after this move. I made my peace with the Almighty (who was still apparently deaf). Then as usual, I made my plans in silence.

I cleared out my life – marriage, possessions, friends, as I set a date to end my life. It would be late June 1995. A co-worker’s suicide put things on hold. After seeing the effect his suicide had on my colleagues, I decided I would need to resign from work first. My plans were still firmly in place, only moved a few months further down the track.

I can’t remember the exact day I knew I’d found some answers. Sometime between June and November 1995, I learnt there were reasons for my inexplicable feelings. There were answers. I wasn’t the only man to feel like this and best of all, there was medical treatment. It wasn’t a cure – I wasn’t going to wake up a complete physical male, but there were many many things I could do to solve this awful situation I found myself in.

My healthcare team believed me, some of my friends said they weren’t surprised – and my life has been on the up and up ever since. It took me a little time to ‘change gears’ and consider my options, because I had abandoned all hope. I started to think about having a future.

After more than 12 years of waiting, hoping, wishing, praying, bargaining with an increasing sense of despair, it seemed to be all too easy. I went over the options again and again. It seemed to me to be an elegant solution. And what’s more, I could live! In fact, I could have a great life!

I gave myself nearly six months to think things through carefully. In early 1996, I started my solo trek to the puberty I needed to go through. These days, no one thinks twice about using the right pronouns. I don’t think twice about using the men’s loos. I’m approaching a balding middle age. Legally I’m male and there’s no question of anything different about me.

I’ve been able to correct an unfortunate error of birth. My body doesn’t betray me anymore. The years have gone by really fast and writing this nearly twelve years later, I’m a visible male. Visible to society, the community I live in – my workmates; strangers on the street – and the world.

I feel completely confident saying “when I was a little boy”. At last, I can speak the truth. I’m no longer concerned with ways to express myself. I’m not perplexed any more about the way I’m treated by the people around me. I don’t feel confused anymore when I look in the mirror or see myself in shopfront windows.

At last I’m real, and I’m alive.

A (2005). Visible Male. Torque, 5(1), 2-3.