“A transsexual who doesn’t drink doing International Women’s Day at the Drinks Association, what could go wrong?” asked Catherine McGregor, the keynote speaker at the Drinks Association’s event on Tuesday, 8 March, a very rainy Sydney day when 350 people from the drinks industry gathered in person for the first time in two years.
This was no “high-powered TED talk”, rather Ms McGregor said she was honoured to speak, and we were grateful to listen to her, cocooned and captivated as she talked through her life experiences, while storms lashed the coast of Sydney. But what was going on outside only became apparent to most of us after her presentation. While she was speaking, we were transfixed.
As Embrace Difference Council Chair Sandra Gibbs observed after the 45 minute presentation: “Every set of eyes has been fixed on you. You could hear a pin drop. And I don’t say that often about the drinks industry; usually there’s a bit of a rabble, a few drinks had. But it was silent.”
Ms McGregor’s road has been a one less travelled; a journey with no roadmap. She quoted from one of her favourite poets, Robert Frost’s famous, The Road Less Travelled:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry could not travel both…
…and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Ms McGregor’s presentation explored change, joyful encounters with the unexpected, spirituality and suffering. For Ms McGregor, to live without taking the road less travelled, to not have taken that step into the dark – with all the suffering that stemmed from it - was akin to not living at all.
Transitioning cost Ms McGregor her marriage and hurt the woman that she still very much loves. But it was a lifesaving procedure - to continue to live with gender dysmorphia would only have caused her greater self-harm than she had already endured.
It also meant that she became an object of the media attention.
“When I transitioned, I did not seek out the limelight. In fact, I’d been living as a woman for about ten months before the media got a hold of it. It never leaked out of the army for which I am incredibly grateful,” she said.
However, when she stepped into the public eye and commenced her career as a broadcaster, she became a target at the forefront of the culture wars. An experience that she describes as ‘bruising’.
“I’d been in the media before as a participant on the media side. Not as an object,” she said.
The hormonal shift that she went through while transitioning played out in weird and wonderful ways and the doctors did not always get it right.
“I was on a rollercoaster of losses, grief, all kinds of things but my hormones were adjusting all over the shop and so my mood varied,” she said.
At one stage, she had been over-prescribed progesterone - the number one driver of post-natal depression. But two years later, covering the cricket in the UK, when a devoted cricket follower and cab driver, Ashish, asked her if she had ever been married to a famous cricketer, Ms McGregor said, “Going from living full time living as a man two years before that to being mistaken for the world’s oldest WAG, without being too flippant, what I will say on International Women’s Day is that oestrogen does do some very remarkable things.”
Ms McGregor made clear that she does not identify as a woman; saying that her lived experience is overwhelmingly male, but her life experience is inspiring. It is a call to live truthfully. And that for all the costs associated with that, an honest life of integrity is the only way she could live.
To change takes courage and Ms McGregor is change personified. And we, as a society, are also poised on the brink of great change as a society, particularly in relation gender balance and politics.
Ms McGregor said: “Ladies, gentlemen, There’s great change in Australian society at the moment. All for the better. There’s a generation of young women who’ve drawn attention to issues that need drawing attention to. The world’s changing.
“We’re in an era when women’s voices are being heard and I think that’s going to ultimately lead to meaningful and worthwhile change in Australian society. Every human being - male, female, trans - is entitled to feel safe and I know that’s platitudinous but it’s the truth. And I think we are on an interesting journey as a nation. And I think for some of the older women and some of the men who have daughters, the world will be a better place as we move forward in a very important respect.”
In her presentation, Ms McGregor also paid tribute to Shane Warne who had died on the Sunday, acknowledged the terror of the events unfolding in Ukraine, re-counting the vortex of war crimes and suggesting that she still cannot see a day coming when the SAS will have anything like equal representation of women and men even. She said this even as she discussed the broadening of diversity in the military workforce as the combat space becomes a cyber-domain operated by individuals at the end of the numeracy STEM spectrum whose physical strength is irrelevant.
Life is changing in all sorts of ways and the isolation of the pandemic has brought new focus to what counts in life.
She said: “We have passed through something and had time to ask ourselves what matters in life? What has it been worth?
“What I’ve found is that we can live with a lot less than we thought we can. Whether it’s a triple shot espresso, fingernail jobs….But I really have realized that stripped to its essentials, with isolation and without so many stimulations that we took for granted before 22 March 2020, that ‘luminous pause’ called life is ultimately about the people closest to us; the people with whom we have meaningful relationships; the people we love.”
But while she is here, there are things to do and she continues her work with a particular focus advocating for veterans’ affairs.
She said, “No suffering or deprivation is meaningless. I genuinely believe this. It keeps me getting out of bed in the morning and believing that while I have a pulse, I have a purpose.”
How fortunate, then, we were to have her to share her wisdom with us on International Women’s Day. To inspire us, to challenge our notions of gender identity and, ultimately, to challenge us to accept change, be that on a personal or collective level, and to walk bravely and gracefully through it, as confronting and frightening as that may sometimes be.