CATE MCGREGOR:
Happy in her skin at last
Meeting Cate McGregor, the first thing you notice is her gentle bygone era elegance. Cate is tall with beauty salon grooming and a chic dress sense. Behind the tailored exterior, there’s a tentative ‘I can’t believe I’m here’ vulnerability, but then the whip smart intellect kicks in and this extraordinary, courageous, deep-thinking former Group Captain in the Royal Australian Air Force cannot help but take centre stage and shine.
It’s five years since Cate first spoke to The Weekly. It was a pivotal interview in the early days of her gender transition from Malcolm, decorated army officer, married man, cricket commentator and political adviser, to Catherine, the trans woman she says she was always “meant to be”.
To come out from the shadows of a lifetime in the wrong body in the pages of Australia’s most iconic women’s magazine was the stuff of dreams for Cate. “It helped me to feel that my claim to function socially as a woman was not totally insane.” But, sadly, it also heralded the start of a traumatic journey which took Cate to the verge of suicide, wrecked the most important relationship in her life and saw her beloved connection with the world
of international competition cricket evaporate. “I suspect I appeared happier and better adjusted than I was, but I think I probably was in full-on survival mode. A lot of the reality sank in years later. With hindsight I should have let my transition settle more before I went public, both in terms of the physiology of it and having more grasp of what I was going through,” says Cate who admits that while the story gave her confidence, it also sparked a backlash she hadn’t foreseen.
“The fact is, I was pretty traumatised. There was a lot of public abuse and vitriol directed through social media and there was also plenty of fame and adulation suddenly thrust on me and I had no road map for that. I’d gone from having a fairly normal anonymous life doing my work in the military and happily married, to being relatively well known fairly quickly and despite the fact that I had a certain amount of experience at surviving and being able to express myself, there was an awful lot of grief.”
Cate had spent her whole life fighting an inner turmoil that unpicked the very heart of her being. Externally she was a super fit, high-functioning member of the armed forces, publicly admired and successful. But internally she was falling apart and felt compelled to embark on the most cataclysmic journey of her life even though she knew it was likely to crush everything she held dear.
“I had got to a point with the [gender] dysphoria that I couldn’t have lived any other way, but there have been substantial losses.” The most distressing was the collapse of her marriage.
“I moved from a home that I shared with a wife whom I loved into a single bedroom apartment,” Cate explains in quiet, measured tones, trying not to give in to the emotion that engulfs her every time she talks about her ex-wife.
In 1995 Cate – then Malcolm – met Tritia. They wed in 2001. It was a
“I moved from a home that I shared with a wife whom I loved.”
blissful union which for a while papered over the cracks of what was later diagnosed as classic gender dysphoria. The marriage was the first and most painful casualty of Cate’s new identity.
Tritia had no idea what the man she had married was going through. “It was the last thing she expected. She had no inkling,” says Cate. “There was nothing effeminate about me. I wasn’t a cross-dresser and I didn’t have secret wardrobes. I’d experimented with my gender younger, a long time before I met her, and walked away from the process back in the ’80s. I thought, it’s not an option, I can’t do this, you’ve just got to get on with it.”
Looking back, Cate can see that her embrace of a macho world, as a crack soldier, an accomplished sportsman and a political dynamo, was part of her way of eclipsing her femininity. But in November 2011, suffering from acute depression and anxiety, Cate’s feelings of being trapped in the wrong body took hold with what she describes as “an incredible intensity”.
“I thought, I’ve been here before and this will probably blow over so don’t alarm Tritia or say anything about it. But I was in dire straits. I’d lost weight and I wasn’t sleeping. She [Tritia] knew that something was deeply wrong and, in her mind, thought that I was probably grappling with some kind of repressed memory.”
When Cate revealed what was really going on the response was just as she had feared. “Tritia was shocked, bereft, hurt and bewildered. It’s still the hardest conversation I’ve ever had,” Cate recalls. “She couldn’t abide being close to the transition process. She felt the loss herself and was dealing with that as best she could. She wanted to be alone and I moved out.”
Tritia appears many times in our conversation. Theirs is obviously a deep and unquenchable bond, a meeting of souls that Cate says she will never find with anyone else. “We’ve stayed in touch and she has never been hostile. There were moments when we had issues. She felt betrayal and loss, as she’s entitled to, but we took years to divorce because neither of us ever wanted to drive the other one out of their life. Both of us were conscious that we were trying to keep something alive between us and each of us had arrived at a decision that we didn’t want never to have the other person in their life,” explains Cate.
“We settled the property stuff in the first year or two but we only divorced in late 2016, four years on. There’s separation and loss involved in that but we’re still close and I try to respect her privacy. The fact is, I wouldn’t have survived this had we been in an incredibly adversarial relationship. I think it would have been one extra burden that might have made the difference. I might not have been able to go on.”
Becoming Cate
Cate’s journey to womanhood has been long and tortured and to the brutish critics who rail against transgender people – and there are many, particularly in the Christian Lobby, who continually harass Cate – she is at pains to point out that no one would actively choose this life. There’s no question it would have been far easier for Cate to have stayed as Malcolm, but in all likelihood, she wouldn’t be here today if she had.
“I had two slender thread moments, one nearly 30 years ago when a phone rang when I was about to hang myself – I actually had a noose round my neck. That was a sliding door moment … I also thought about dying in Adelaide during the Test match in 2012 after Australia Day, when it was announced that I’d been awarded the Order of Australia.” Cate – then Malcolm – was covering the match in her job as a cricket commentator, a role she later lost in the maelstrom of becoming Cate.
“I thought, this should be the proudest day in my life and I’m riven
“This is who I am, it’s who I’m meant to be.”
with conflict and deeply distressed. I couldn’t see a way forward and I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. There were two things that intervened – one was some cricket friends who didn’t know there was anything wrong but insisted I come to dinner. And then I met Rahul Dravid [a former captain of India’s cricket team] and we had this happenstance meeting that was extremely influential. I went home and flushed the pills away.”
The process of transitioning gender is strictly regulated and takes years. “In my first year and a bit, once the psychs concluded that I didn’t have any other indicated conditions – I wasn’t schizoid, I wasn’t bipolar, I wasn’t hallucinating, it wasn’t a dissociative disorder, it was a pretty textbook case of gender dysphoria – I started oestrogen treatment which feminises the body.
“The thing that people don’t talk about very much, and it can sound insensitive to born women is the hormonal process. Injecting huge amounts of hormones into someone who’s assigned male at birth and they look male; you go through an adjustment period and you’re quite hormonal at periods. I had no idea why I was so emotional and it took a while for that to even out. The endocrinologists don’t prepare you for that. They’re very conscious of heightened risk of breast cancer and blood clotting. They manage you physiologically very well, but you’re not on the path to womanhood the way a teenage girl is; no one’s saying, you’re off your trolley, this’ll pass and you’re in a bad mood. I had no guidance for that stuff and muddled through.
“I took oral oestrogen and I had implants in my buttocks. Transition, I guess, is an appropriate term. You don’t create someone overnight. And especially having gone through male puberty and reached the state of development I had, it was like turning around the Titanic. It couldn’t happen fast enough for me once I embarked on it, but I was very fit and I was lean and my body adapted well.”
The transition was tough and at times Cate admits she buckled. “I was medicated for depression and anxiety and I’ve had a history of alcohol abuse a long time ago. I haven’t had a drink for nearly 30 years. But I got habituated on sedatives for a while and had trouble stopping them, including around surgery time. I put them down but coming off sedation can be quite challenging, too.”
To her delight, Cate began to develop a bust and buttocks, her shape softened and she saw a light at the end of the tunnel. “It felt really wonderful, deeply gratifying and I was very fortunate that it seemed to work reasonably well.”
For the first time in her life Cate felt that her external body matched her internal self. “You hear the Christian Lobby and others going on about sex change regret and they wheel out incredibly isolated instances. I know thousands of trans people now and the incidence of trans regret, gender reassignment regret or sex change regret, is infinitesimal compared with those who are fulfilled and happy.
“In my case, I just think, this is who I am, it’s who I’m meant to be. I think it’s abundantly clear and people who knew me, people who see me now, can see I’m more fulfilled and more centred and more present than I ever was. They can see the essential rightness in this.”
The next step was gender reassignment surgery. “It took a while to make up my mind. It’s a big decision. It’s major surgery. You’re out for about six hours. I had anxiety about it. I thought, you can die under major surgery in your 60s. Why would you have elective surgery at that age? But in the end I knew I was ready, that there was a sense of completeness accompanying it and that happened.”
In many ways Cate wishes she’d had the courage to do this years ago but then she wouldn’t have met Tritia.
“The only countervailing thing is that I met the love of my life and married her and I can’t imagine life without her, so that was a great gift and it offsets that sense of loss. I think there was an inevitability about our meeting and being as close as we were. But when the dysphoria came back, one of the reasons I was so suicidal was I felt my time had come and gone. I thought,
I’m going to die without doing this.” Lovers and haters Cate’s transition is now complete and at 63 she feels she’s arrived. A few months ago she received a deeply poignant letter from fellow trans woman Amanda Taylor, who had read Cate’s story in The Weekly when she was sent it by a concerned friend. Amanda was contemplating suicide and says the story saved her life. “The impact was instantly so profound it was life changing,” Amanda tells me. “Catherine and my stories had so many similarities, but there were some distinct differences: Catherine had forged ahead and acted on her gender dysphoria (and come out the other side with respect and dignity) where I was defeated and ready to give in.” The two have now met and Amanda credits Catherine with turning her life around.
Cate is used to getting letters – some from fans but also hate mail. The haters largely choose the cowardly anonymity of social media to voice their bile. “My impulse control is poor and I shouldn’t have got dragged into the fights I got into on social media with a lot of these idiots,” confesses Cate. “Their behaviour is appalling but it doesn’t mean I have to respond and I no longer do. I’m happy living my life as I am and they can rant and rave and call me a man and use my male name as much as they like; but I’m winning.”
For Amanda, Cate is a role model, but not everyone in the trans community agrees. “There’s a lot of hostility directed towards me from the trans and queer communities. I’m too big for my boots, I’m too grand, I’m too privileged, all this stuff,” says Cate.
Cate’s sexuality has remained the same despite several amorous admirers. “I get guys hitting on me all the time. I’m puzzled by the phenomenon, to be honest, I’m staggered by it. I think probably from what I’ve read and anecdotally I don’t know that many people’s sexual orientation changes with their gender and I’m not into men.”
And in any case Cate is not looking for love. “I’m not open to it. I’m single and I’ve met the love of my life and I’ve been richly blessed. I have no claim on her and if she were to meet someone else I would still feel bereft
but I know that’s a possibility. I wish her well, obviously, I want the very best for her no matter what it is but I’ve got no curiosity about having someone in my life. We’re still close. We live in the same city and we share a lot. We look out for one another still and that matters deeply to me and it’s been a very significant part of helping me survive what’s gone on.”
Another regret was losing her job as a cricket writer. It happened when she was at the height of her transition. “When the [TV network] cricket rights and all the realignment happened I missed out, for whatever reason, and that has left an emotional gap in my life. I picked up a bat when I was five, I played my first umpired cricket match in 1966 at the age of ten, and the game’s been there as this huge component, either watching or playing, for 50-odd years. To be let go without explanation or context, it hurt.”
But Cate is a survivor “and I’m still here” she says. “I do have an inner life, a belief in God and a higher power and I pray and I meditate and I endure, I think. Challenges are part of our life. Pain has a transformative spiritual purpose. I really believe that. So even at the darkest times I’ve tried to cling on.
“I probably was clinging on to the cricket as it was the last thing that linked Malcolm to Catherine, the last thing that really has been present from my childhood to today, a spinal column through my life. I’ve chosen to believe that losing my cricket role has happened for a reason. It’s such an enormous honour to be part of the national game at that level but if I believe in a God with a plan for my life, it’s almost as though that rug was pulled to focus me firmly on the more meaningful aspects of my life, that maybe it’s time to put the bat and ball away.”
For many, Cate is brave and inspirational but that’s not how she sees it. “I don’t think I had to be particularly brave to do what I did. I had to be selfish in the end. I had to decide that I would either live or die on these terms and that involved hurting people who were close to me. Most of the people I harmed have forgiven me but I’ve never forgiven myself.”
Cate is talking not only about Tritia, but about her family. “I certainly hurt my sister’s feelings deeply. And my nephews and nieces who had a huge pedestal on which I was placed. I think there was a deep sense of loss around the family. My older sister has been a real rock. She was a former Catholic nun and she’s been incredibly supportive. But my brother died after I transitioned and I never met him after transition. He found it incomprehensible. He couldn’t address me by my female name.”
Tritia has seen the change in Cate and it has helped her understand. “She says, there is a calmness in me. She told me ‘I knew you were tortured but I thought it was a creative thing and the writing and the high intellect was part of it, but I can see now, you were always wrestling with life’.”
When Cate looks in the mirror today she says, “I see the best version of me. It just feels so natural. I am comfortable in my skin. I really am.”
And for these autumn years ahead Cate has big plans. She was honoured to become an ambassador for ‘Flesh After Fifty’, a campaign for body image for women over 50. “I’m also trying to requalify as a lawyer. I’ve embarked on legal careers more than once,” she explains. “It seems like a really late life thing but there’s no reason why later I couldn’t go to the bar as a mature age barrister,” she quips. Indeed, Cate is excited to reveal that a week after we go to press, she will be taking up a legal role with a new employer.
A week after our interview Cate was persuaded by her great mate, radio’s Alan Jones, to be the star guest at Anzac Day celebrations in his home town of Acland, Queensland. “It was the most beautiful experience,” Cate tells me afterwards. “It reminded me of my childhood in Toowoomba and that I have a real affinity for this sort of life. People were saying ‘why don’t you come back and live here?’ And do you know what? I just might.”