Metro Weekly

World’s highest ranking transgender military officer: Words can’t express gender dysphoria

“On my 56th birthday, I simply gave up the struggle. I made a decision that if I was alive on my 57th birthday, it would be as me.”

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–Cate McGregor, Director of Research and Analysis in the Office of the Chief of the Royal Australian Air Force and the most senior transgender military officer in the world, at a speech in Canberra, Australia, Buzzfeed reports.

McGregor spoke about her gender dysphoria, as well as the struggle she felt presenting as male during her career.

“I functioned as a male until a few weeks after my 56th birthday,” she said. “I choose the term ‘functioned’ advisedly, because my relationship to my birth gender was fraught from a very young age.”

“I suffered from [gender dysphoria] acutely and consciously at intervals over the course of my entire life. I now believe my entire life was spent repressing and compensating for my gender variance,” McGregor contined.

She added that: “Grammar fails to express what gender dysphoria feels like,” noting that she’d contemplated suicide before she came out and had battled with “…alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, while I pursued external success to quell an inner yearning.”

Image Credit: Cate McGregor / Twitter

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