On this day 15 years ago, the most important event of my life took place: I underwent gender confirmation surgery.

As I woke from the surgery I felt an immense sense of relief that, at long last, my body became as closely aligned with my gender identity, as best as medical techniques allowed. And in every respect imaginable since 11 November 1999, my quality of life has been immeasurably better than the “bad old days.”

As a child, I embraced several coping mechanisms to temporarily divert my attentions away from the haunting, seemingly never‑ending question pervading my mind: “why wasn’t I born a girl?” These mechanisms included pastimes, such as astronomy and computing, affording me an introverted solace from an often bullying, judgmental world growing up in Ipswich, Queensland.

In some senses I was a precocious child, with a passion for observing planetary occults and variable stars, and maintaining, for a short time, a national computer club for Dick Smith VZ200 computer users. But my parents did struggle with the “strange boy” – as my primary school record, cruelly read out in class by my year 7 teacher, would describe me – they were responsible for rearing.

They admirably cared for my material needs, and obligingly plied me with books, computer hardware, software, and telescopes. But my father in particular went to great lengths to ensure my behaviour conformed with a male stereotype, at least as he saw it.



That entailed pulling me away from my beloved books and making me tinker under car bonnets, always causing me great distress. The “gender policing” often went to ridiculous lengths, including critiques of my hand waving and feet positioning on floors as being “girl‑like.”

My mother seemed less prescriptive in controlling my conduct, or at least was more subtle with her approach. But I still recall that anguish I felt when she told me, about the age of 10, that I could no longer enjoy playtime with the other girls in my neighbourhood.

The author and her grandfather. Photograph: Mikayla Novak

Contrasting the conformist siege mentality I felt at home was the love and care extended to me by my paternal grandfather, a post‑war Serbian immigrant who worked as a psychiatrist at an Ipswich mental institution, and who was prominent in the soccer refereeing community.



By no means did I ever feel I could be my true female self under his wing, but he never failed during his lifetime to show a great and genuine concern for my welfare. Crucially, he conveyed to me the fundamental importance of educational achievement and instilled in me an intense, if not maniacal, passion for studying.

Formal learning became pivotal as my childhood interests waned, becoming the new expediency to take my mind off my inner conflict. Intellectual capacity remained my indispensable friend through university, leading me to a first class honours degree in economics, but those years, and the ones which immediately followed, proved traumatic.

Courtesy of a Channel 7 current affairs program, which profiled a Sydney‑based transwoman, I came to fully recognise my own similar situation but, still living at home and knowing the prevailing culture of disapproval toward transgender people, I sought to outright deny my deep‑seated gender dysphoria.

But those efforts would come to nought, and my life plumbed to further depths of misery during my first year of workforce experience as a Queensland Treasury graduate in 1995. I became bulimic, and harboured ever‑darkening thoughts of suicide.

By mid‑1996, after an interstate move to Canberra on a study scholarship, falling in and out of a relationship with a woman I considered my soul mate, and subsequently giving up on studying, I reached my own tipping point. I surrendered to the reality of what I had always known about myself: I was a woman configured with the wrong body.

My last public act in the wrong gender just so happened to be attendance at the second “Liberty and Society” weekend student outreach group in Sydney, organised by The Centre for Independent Studies think tank. I remember the weekend well, meeting liberty‑minded people I still know today, but recalling the immense sadness of my ex‑girlfriend’s departure, and feeling overwhelmed about addressing my own identity.

After that weekend, I went to work on gender transitioning.

Mikayla Novak in 2003. Photograph: Mikayla Novak

I sought out friends in the Canberra and Sydney transgender communities, found appropriate medical specialists, commenced hormonal replacement therapy, left my then‑shared housing arrangement, and lost all my friends who couldn’t comprehend what I was going through.



Returning to Brisbane in Christmas 1996 I came out to my parents and siblings, but their responses were unsurprisingly negative by nature. Not long after, I poured my heart out to my paternal grandparents, and their acceptance, even if a little cautionary, floored me by contrast.

Having already commenced hormonal therapy, I shortly thereafter secured a graduate position within the ACT public service and, six months later, transitioned in the workplace.

I underwent two psychiatric evaluations, in which I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria but, otherwise, sane and highly functional, and sifted through the various gender confirmation surgery options available to me. Peter Widdowson, a plastic surgeon from New Zealand living and working on the Gold Coast, became my preferred choice, but the expensive surgery presented itself as a headache.

Whilst I was able, with some difficulty, to scrounge up sufficient funds for an initial deposit, it was my paternal grandfather who agreed to finance the remaining surgical costs as a loan.



My own circumstances were as fortuitous as they were unique, but looking back over these past 15 years it appears that life for most transgender people is getting better, albeit at an uncomfortably glacial pace.



The Sydney‑based Gender Centre provided invaluable information to me during my transition, for which I am forever grateful. But, since then, more transgender people have taken up the benefits of freedom of association with gusto, with new groups, such as Melbourne’s Ygender and Canberra’s A Gender Agenda, coming to the fore. And thanks to the great emancipator that is the Internet, which was not so widely available during my transitioning period, gender‑diverse people can find medical services and social support groups at the touch of a keystroke.

Also greatly encouraging are those anecdotal stories of parents actively seeking constructive help for their transgender children, rather than the conforming punishment approach I suffered in my youth.

Regrettably, there still remain the outpourings of transphobic loathing, ridicule, and even hate, including in our daily newspapers.

Whilst my own gender transition has long come and gone, salacious newspaper headlines describing murdered transwomen as “ladyboys” and snarky online opinion pieces disputing the gender of post‑transition women, still hits a raw nerve.



Why?



Because actions are informed by ideas, formalised through words. Written negative sentiments towards transgender people has something of a chilling effect upon the preparedness of gender‑questioning people to seek comfort and fulfilment in their own lives.



I thankfully transitioned fairly early, but still wasted at least a good five years fearing the reactions of my parents, relatives, friends, and perfect strangers concerning a gender transition I wished to undertake. Even worse, some people take transgender abuse and ridicule as license to wage unconscionable violence against transwomen, transmen, and other gender‑diverse people.

The world is becoming a better place that the scourges of racism, sexism, and homophobia are receding, and countering discrimination on the grounds of gender identity would also, I think, do wonders for everyone.



People with gender identity issues would more freely and safely ask questions of themselves and, if they so choose, seek out medical and other services sooner, rather than later. Parents, like my much‑loved and long suffering father, would no longer feel so obliged to vet the actions of children, lest they deviate from some binary gender conventions.

And with a better sense of understanding, cisgender people mightn’t feel such a pressing need to castigate transgender people for the sake of protecting the “honour” of some perceived traditional social order.



My friend, and Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, Tim Wilson recently called upon Australians to engage in respectful conversations about the position of transgender people in our society.



It is a great calling and, to that end, I publicly volunteer my personal story.



This is who I am. I have now lived as a woman for the great bulk of my adult life, have worked in interesting and even influential jobs, and have experienced wonderful relationships with other women as their equal. Even my gross nominal income has increased dramatically, at least tenfold, since mid‑1996 when I was alone, unemployed, of female mind stuck in a male body I despised..



I am a woman who completed a gender transition, and my surgery not only allowed my life to flourish, it quite simply saved it.

Mikayla Novak is an economist based in Melbourne. The views expressed here are her own