Catherine McGregor (the world's highest ranking trans. mil. officer) coming out story.

[marylander1940]

Catherine McGregor transitioned from male to female in 2012.

 

 

Australian military officer Catherine McGregor, considered the most prominent transgender woman in Australia, functioned as a male until just after her 56th birthday, she shared in a speech at a National Press Club event in Canberra, Australia this week.

 

“I choose the term ‘functioned’ advisedly, because my relationship to my birth gender was fraught from a very young age,” McGregor, who is a Group Captain in the RAAF Reserve, said during her speech, reported Buzzfeed.

 

For people who are transgender, there is a difference between that person’s physical gender and the gender he or she actually identifies with. Gender dysphoria is a diagnosis included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and “for a person to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, there must be a marked difference between the individual’s expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her, and it must continue for at least six months.”

 

More:https://www.yahoo.com/health/catherine-mcgregor-the-worlds-highest-ranking-115864304057.html

[mike carey]

Brilliant woman, and it was a great speech at the Press Club (the link to it in the Buzzfeed article may be geo-blocked outside Australia). She wrote the Chief of Army's speech (that went viral on youtube) telling [men in] the Australian Army that women were a vital part in the Army's combat effectiveness, and that if they didn't like they could get out. I was amused by one thing she said in her Press Club speech, that she had been more nervous telling the Chief of Army that she was going to transfer to the Air Force than she had been telling him of her transition to female.

[mike carey]

Cate has now done an interview with the Star Observer on her unexpected rise as a role model for trans* people. I'm amazed and delighted that she has had the unequivocal support of the heads of the Australian Army and Air Force.

http://www.starobserver.com.au/news/local-news/cate-mcgregor-on-her-transition-being-a-role-model-and-tony-abbott/135086