The author’s mother, somewhere in France, 1966.

It would be foolish to think that, in 1961, my mother understood that I was female in the most fundamental sense. It is unlikely that she ever completely understood this, and certainly not when I was four. But there was always something odd in the way she treated me, at least given the culture of that time: note my already long hair. A decade later, my father blamed my mother for what was ‘wrong’ with me, claiming that she’d always wanted a girl and that this was why she had raised me as she had, allowed me to be as I was, corrupted me. Perhaps he was right.

There was a precedent. Where my mother was odd, hyper-feminine, gentle, flexible, indulgent, and had wanted a daughter, her mother had also been odd, but opposite: masculine in appearance, harsh, strict, rigid, had wanted sons; a fact that she had impressed upon her three daughters. My grandmother was a strange, cruel woman; if, indeed, woman she was.

They were estranged, mother and daughter, and had been since my mother’s teen years. She rarely spoke of her mother, but did share a few, rather horrible stories; and a few of the facts were filled-in by my aunt, her sister, decades after their deaths. I never met my grandmother.

Evidently, grandmother had always worn trousers, and had done since she’d attended engineering school in the 1920s, where it was men-only and the dress code was suit-and-tie. She held to that dress code throughout her career as a civil engineer, she wore her hair very short, even for a man of her day, and certainly never a bit of makeup or jewellery. She had a pocket-watch.

This is not to say that grandmother was transmasculine — clothes do not make the man — and there is, of course, no way to know. If she was, then it seems odd that she married and had three children, but this is not conclusive either. And she would not be the first woman to cut her hair and wear a suit to pass in a man’s world. She secured for herself a university degree and a career in a time when this would not normally have been possible.

And she was very cruel to her children. She gave her daughters crew-cuts and sent them to school in overalls, in America’s South, during the 1940s. She reminded them constantly that they should’ve been boys, and horse-whipped them when they crossed her.

My mother escaped her mother by deliberately getting herself sent to boarding school at age 14, whereupon she learnt to sew, acquired dresses, and grew her hair out. It is little surprise then, that a mere decade later, I had long, strawberry-blonde hair to go with my green eyes, and two simple dresses, of plain white cloth, which she had sewn for me.

As I said, it was complicated.