The incredible irony of the successful trans woman - how age of transition affects your perspective.

Today I read a piece about Catherine McGregor in the Guardian. Cate is, by all accounts, a stupendously successful trans woman. She's a recipient of the Order of Australia, Group Captain in the Royal Australian Air-Force. While working for the Australian Army she was director of the Land Warfare Studies Centre, and since then has been strategic advisor and speech writer for the chief of the Australian Defence Services.

Cate rubs shoulders with politicians, industry heads and other assorted bigwigs. She's done numerous television and radio interviews, written a book on cricket, and she's responsible for the famous "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" speech by Chief of the Australian Army David Morrison on sexism within the forces.

Wow. such great stuff. She's clearly an amazing woman and a role model for trans people everywhere.

One could be forgiven for reading this stuff and concluding that life is indeed roses for trans people. I mean if a trans woman can make it to the upper echelons of the ADF, things can't be that bad...

Except. Cate transitioned in 2013, at the age of 55. Cate made it to director of the Land Warfare Studies Centre pre-transition. She was awarded the Order of Australia pre-transition. She did, well, most everything, pre-transition. Since transition she's mainly been notable as being Australia's highest ranking trans person. Her role has changed dramatically to a PR one.

So yes, she's successful, indeed incredibly successful. But only because she hid her transsexuality. She's successful in spite of her transsexuality.

Many years ago, I read a throw-away line from someone on an internet forum: "Early transitioners face discrimination before transition, and assimilate afterwards. It's the opposite for late transitioners." This rang really true for me. As a child, and most especially as a teen, I really copped it from all angles because of my complete inability to hide my gender identity. My parents, classmates, teachers... It reached something of a crescendo around transition, where I spent a year or so being visibly trans, then faded away as I assimilated. I think the converse happens for people who are able to cope as teens. They get by, are even stratospherically successful like Cate. But the consequences of this success are that they'll have much more difficulty assimilating post-transition. They'll often be visibly trans the rest of their lives, or simply have so much baggage from before transition that they can't get past.

These days, it's the late transitioners that get all the attention. You could be forgiven for thinking that trans people were one big awkward monolithic group. Of course that's not my experience. From where I sit we all come at this from very different directions, with different goals, different assets, different liabilities, and different outcomes. It's just that this one group, through a combination of weight of numbers, visibility, continuing angst, money, and relative privilege, get all the airplay and dominate the discourse.

I subscribed to a new internet TV streaming service recently, because they had a series that I'd been hearing about all over the place, Transparent. It's the story of a 64 year old transitioner, and the struggles both she and her family face as she goes into the world as a woman. Heartwarming stuff, I'm sure, but where I was looking for kinship I found nothing.

Of course my perspective comes not just from transitioning in my twenties. I carry an enormous chip on my shoulder as a member of generation X as well. I don't have a lot of respect for the boomers, a generation that I feel has had everything handed to them on a plate. Cheap housing, free university education, medicare, you name it. I'm from a generation that's had to fight (and pay) for the scraps. Doubly so when you're young and trans.

The perspective from the other side of the fence though appears to be very different. Where I see two very different groups, late transitioners speak of "spectrums". They see us as all the same, with the same needs and the same challenges.

The modern language bears this out, most specifically the rise of the word "transgender" over the last twenty years or so. When I was young, there were fairly distinct groups of people, and the divisions between who was what were based almost entirely on self identification. Transsexuals had a specific grouping, with our unhealthy dependence on the medical industry. Cross dressers had very different needs, and only occasionally crossed the fence and realised they were transsexual. Drag queens were a whole other animal. Likeable but very much gay guys. Nobody had ever heard of transgender.

Then along comes this new word, which the bureaucrats and doctors love, because it makes it possible to lump all the freaks into one easy subset, and suddenly my GP is calling me "transgendered". This is not a word I've ever used to describe myself. Late transitioners though appear to have latched on hard to this new word. I guess it gives them a means to reconcile their crossdressing past with their transsexual future. It breaks the rigidity of transsexual and allows for quite a lot of slipperiness.

I wouldn't be so annoyed except that there's now a concerted effort to erase the word transsexual from the vocabulary. Again, the late transitioners are sucking all the air from the room. We're told, somewhat ironically, that transsexual is pathologising, that it's vocabulary that's been pushed onto transsexual people by the medical community. From where I sit, that's exactly the case for transgender.

I guess for me, the key distinction is on how you identify. If your core gender identity is female (for someone assigned male at birth), well then you're transsexual. If it isn't, you're not. It doesn't matter what surgeries you have or haven't had, what shape your genitals are, or what sex those you love are. What matters is simply how you identify, honestly, deep down inside.

As for Cate, I admit I'm a little jealous of her success. But then I'm sad for her, too, for her missed opportunities. I'm sad she had to lie to everyone for so very long.