Transsexual woman Catherine McGregor interviewed on Mental As Anyone podcast
Trans writer and long-time military officer Catherine McGregor is finally comfortable in her own body after years of fighting. But there’s one thing she won’t put up with, she told the Mental As Anyone podcast.
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Catherine McGregor does not want to be a poster child for any agenda.
The assertion has been met with backlash from both extremes of politics keen to capitalise on her profile as a male-to-female transsexual.
“My bottom line on this is, I’ve never claimed to be a woman, so gender-criticals back away, you don’t have to tear into me about this,” McGregor said in a wide-ranging interview on the Mental As Anyone podcast.
“I transitioned genders to function in the female gender, hopefully with a degree of social acceptance in that role, to express who I felt I was. They want me to be a mascot for their movement. I won’t do it because, one, they’re causing terrible damage to some vulnerable people and if they want to call me a man, and because I think it’s opaque, I’ve transitioned to being what I consider a transsexual or a trans woman, I’m not claiming to be a woman in the biological sense. I live in this role to survive. But if you want to call me, he and him, you are dead to me. I will not deal with you, there is no ground upon which we can have even a polite discourse.”
It has been 12 years since McGregor, 68, transitioned after decades of military service as Malcolm.
She has also been a successful cricket commentator over many decades and written books about the sport.
Her transition prompted commentary from all sides with McGregor more comfortable in the background than as a public figure, despite her life and story being the subject of critically acclaimed Sydney Theatre Company production, Still Point Turning: The Catherine McGregor Story, starring Heather Mitchell.
“The slogan trans women are women, and all those who are proponents of that, good luck to them if that works for you, great, (but) I have always considered myself a male to female transsexual, and so that then led to me being cancelled as well, and I’ve seen what’s written about me,” McGregor explained.
“(They’ve said) I’m heteronormative, I’m a crumb maiden for conservatives and all I’ve tried to do is be absolutely honest about what was my life in the end. I’ve had gender reassignment surgery. I’ve taken oestrogen, I’ve done all the things to transform to the extent that I could, and the dysphoria abated. To people who just choose to socially identify, if you want to do that, great, declare that you’re female, you’re female identifying, declare you’re non-binary, it’s great. That wasn’t my story, it wasn’t how I lived to survive. To survive a parlous state of suicidal ideation, I needed to express the female gender and it did dissipate the dysphoria.”
McGregor however noted the increased levels of hate and backlash against trans people was disturbing and has reached out to Equality Australia to offer her voice.
One of the key arguments, stemming from the US, has been for trans people to use the bathrooms of their birth sex.
“That is not about women’s safety. It’s about humiliation and showing who is the boss,” McGregor said. “Apartheid was not about drinking fountains. If they want to bring that agenda to Australia, then I will happily sign up to the fight and that is a hill I would happily die on.”
McGregor’s Mental As Anyone interview is raw, honest and impassioned as she detailed her struggles with prescription drugs and alcohol, gender dysphoria and mental health battles.
“I chose to transition genders to survive because the dysphoria that I was suffering nearly killed me. But I’ve just found through experience that if you disagree with any part of the identity that’s projected onto you, then you’re evil. And I just got terribly … I got savaged by that. I was dumped from all the boards of the charities I was on, and so be it … but in the end, I was just being authentic about who I was. And given that that community purports to say that authenticity is the most vital thing, and you’ve got to accept a person’s identity, they weren’t prepared to take me as the whole package.”
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* A new episode of Mental As Anyone drops each Tuesday morning.
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