A small part of this chapter.....

St Augustine may have tried to control by will power every movement of his body but I had no wish to be a Canute trying to hold back a tide rising to reclaim her own. My body was her own domain and my mind conspired with her. To remain living as a male now seemed like attempting to build a tide-proof sand castle but to do otherwise was a leap into darkness. My difficulties were compounded because I knew no other like me and had only had instincts to guide me. They seemingly told me that to become free, to become myself, I had to desert what society told me of myself. This was one of the most important lessons of my life. The outcome of this leap made me realise our instincts are our natural divinely given guides.

My diary entry of early March 1974 recorded: "I started going again but this time as Jenny. It was like walking through a looking glass going out for the first time by myself as a woman...-. I was wolf whistled and chatted up - I certainly did pass as a woman." Life was immediately retextured, totally different, exciting, good, I quickly found I was accepted in everyday life for whom I said I was, whom I felt I was.

This easy public act was very different from the time when I secretly walked dressed as a girl in our garden when I was 14 but it felt as if it made legitimate that earlier experience. I was beginning to understand my childhood and why it was so plagued by painful asthma. Everything was starting to fall into place.

My first tentative experiments in 1974 began to open my eyes to the realities of female life. The first time I walked alone back home as a woman. I realised I had become vulnerable in a way I had never experienced before. Maybe my makeup was a little overdone that day? Maybe I moved wrong? But on Nicholson Street in Melbourne two car drivers stopped to ask me the way. They chatted me up and a truck driver gave me the wolf whistle. The end result was I quickly deserted the main street to walk via back streets and was not molested further. At first I had been pleased at being accepted as female. But I found it suddenly offensive to be treated as if a commodity on display.

It was important for me to find some counselling for I had no family or tribal elders with any knowledge of such matters. I was lucky the idea that such conditions are best treated by electric shock therapy had been abandoned. I have since come across many a horror story of people thus tortured to "cure" them of this natural if rare condition. There remains however still a presumption that a transsexual is in some way "ill". Doctors in the know nowadays call it "Gender Identity Disorder (GID)" - for it is a disorder resolved through helping the body match the gender of the brain - thus creating "order". Once this is resolved, once one has changed gender roles, then hopefully one is cured of GID and is no longer a "transsexual".

My psychiatrist, a Dr Bakewell, after many months of assessing me, told us both that we would be playing games not to accept that I had a female gender identity. She told Jackie that I was not a transvestite; that rather I was a person who had been landed somehow with a female gender identity. She told us both that I had to recognise that I was basically female at the deepest psychological level and that I had to re-order my life to accept this as my reality.

Jackie was also seeing an old and dear Jungian psychologist friend who saw me too. He actively encouraged us both to stay together for, he said, it was evident that we still loved each other. He told her that what I was going through was constitutional and couldn't be changed. My diary of June 1975 recorded that, after we had a rough few days, we "went away together. It took us just one and a half days to realise that we both just wanted to stay with each other - that we both just wanted each other to be free. We had a really free time together - a new getting to know each other." Jackie now put aside her doubts and had decided to tell me that I could jump the gender barrier without fear of breaking up our family, that we would continue to look after our children together no matter. This freed me. I loved her for this. For the fear she too was taking on. For us both it was a leap into the dark.

We knew our young children (then but 1 and 2 years old) would need above all else to experience our love for them as constant and honest. We thought this would best be done if we tried to stay together as they grew up - and answered their future questions honestly. We would explain to them that there are many kinds of people in our rich world including those with bodies that had both male and female aspects and who were brought up in the wrong gender. This would later lead to many an entertaining discussion that started: "Jani, when you were a girl inside but living as a boy, did you..." Our young children seemed to regard this as an undisturbing but very interesting fact of life.

Taking this pill was the most earth shattering decision of my life. Up to this point the turmoil in my life had caused both Jackie and I incredible difficulties and enormous pain and many a time I thought I just could not go through with it. But that was like the turmoil of my adolescence when I oscillated from wanting to be a girl to despising myself for even thinking of it.. Then as now I was bucking against my own nature - as I was to learn. Again and again Jackie assured me again we would stay together as a family and that she believed I had to be myself. She said this was my own personal decision and I had to make it without fear.

I took the first oestrogen pill fearfully and excitedly on the 1st August 1975. It was much later that I realised the significance of this day. August 1st is one of the four great festivals of the ancient Celtic year. It is the festival when was celebrated the death of the corn that we might live - part of the great wheel of life. This celebration was often mythically portrayed as the death that plants suffer that we might live, or of a "Corn Kin"g. So I made the crucial act that would kill the male social me on the day when the King died to bring us life. All this seems to have been utterly and somewhat weirdly appropriate.

As for the pill that I took,.... It was a hormone extracted from the urine of pregnant mares. Nowadays I think of this as highly appropriate. The white mare was a symbol of the Goddess among my ancestors. Today she still runs the chalk hills of England with her image carved giant-sized into the turf.

In taking a mare's urine, I was not on a path unique to modern technology but taking a very ancient medicine seemingly once made by witches. In the first century BC the poet Ovid wrote from Tomis, a Black Sea Grecian colony near to the Scythians of the steppes who had a reputation for honouring gender-changers. "She's a witch, mutters magical cantrips, can make rivers run uphill, knows the best aphrodisiacs - when to use herbal brews or the whirring bull-roarer, how to extract that stuff from the mare on heat." Amores 1, verse 8. He also wrote in his poem "On Women's Facial Treatments": "Put no faith in herbals and potions, adjure the deadly stuff distilled by a mare in heat."

Thus I was midwifed by a wise craft (for what else is good psycho-therapy), using the urine of the fertile mare. The Goddess has not finished creating me. In a work of self transformation, I had to help create my own body, surely a divine work. Our bodies really do matter, are not to be despised. I was not content to be just a female soul or mind, I was born to share a body with my soul that could give me my full natural sexuality. There are those who believe that nature can be cropped and chopped but deplore as unnatural the desire of the transsexual to meddle with the shape of her or his body and call it a mutilation. But for me, when it is done in conformity with the soul, it is a wondrous act of alchemy. Through it the soul, a sleeping beauty, is transformed and awakened by a kiss of love. But at that time I still had to learn this. There were many times in the years before me when I thought otherwise.

The immediate effect of the hormones was that I became immediately vastly more relaxed. Inside I was exultant. At last I felt in my deepest instinctual self that the dichotomy between my body and my mind was resolved. For the very first time in my life I felt whole - and good. My soul was at home in my body. I was one. Both Jackie and I came off tranquillisers. Some weeks later she told me that it was obviously the best thing that had happened to me, that I was like a cat with a pail of cream and that she much preferred the new relaxed me. I truly felt less uptight. Only now did I fully realise what I had been forcing myself to do in "pretending" to be a male. Now I knew I had much less need to prove myself.

There was one jarring shock. Three weeks later Dr Bakewell had second thoughts. She wrote to say that she was going to stop prescribing the hormones for she was concerned about its impact on our family. Jackie went to see her to assure her that we were OK and after this the treatment was continued.

I later recorded in my diary the quick effects of oestrogen on me: "I have now been taking oestrogen for some 5 weeks. The effects have been remarkable. Jackie has said that I've become much more relaxed, not scared of emotion, human even. We are getting on far better with each other, freer together. I've become a far better person, easier to live together, less on the defensive. Judging on these factors , it seems I should keep on taking it. We are not going to worry about the future - just grow into it.."

"The physical effects so far are:

3 days after starting with hormones the right nipple itched all day;

4 days - the left nipple did the same - then about 6 days both breasts itched

By 3 weeks - a general softening of the skin became noticeable - on the back especially

By 4 weeks , dresses start to fit me better in front because of my changing contours (although the change is subtle)

By 5 weeks. .Although my figure change is so far not noticeable if I am wearing loose clothes. My face is noticeably fuller. In all the changes have been astonishingly rapid. I may well have to cut the dosage to a maintenance dose (for last 3 days took pills just twice daily)" I have since learnt that in my case this change was unusually fast and effective.' One of the doctors [well used to dealing with transsexuals} remarked with surprise on this and said he wished they had tested my chromosomes - they might explain my very unusually easy and dramatic change.

It seemed to me that somewhere in my brain, in a room controlling cell replacement and shaping, a controller had sat up with astonished surprise when the sensors in front of her recorded the arrival of much more oestrogen in my blood than she had been accustomed to see and had exclaimed: "About bloody time too! We've been waiting since she was 12 for this." She had then promptly dumped into the rubbish bin the tattered blueprints on her desk and pulled out from a shelf a set of fairly unused female blueprints, dusted them off enthusiastically, and set to work to change all the mechanism's within my body that were accessible to her. It also seemed to me that this path was easier because in subtle ways my body was already prepared for the oestrogen's arrival.

My diary recorded more of my thoughts and observations ...

The most surprising elements for me were both the totality of the change and the utterly unexpected sexual awakening. Every part of my body became wonderfully erotically sensitive as, at long last, I began to become alive sexually. Suddenly I started to notice men as attractive! I presume it was much the same for me as it is for most girls at puberty. This was not a necessary development. Some of my later friends who transitioned, found afterwards that they were lesbian. My path was unfolding. I was not strong enough to see where I was going, but I was rejoicing in waking up, rejoicing in the wonderful sensual kiss of the Gods, of having skin that was at last alive all over .(I cannot speak for men - as I never was fully one, but my own experience is that men's skin is only sensitive erotically in limited areas - while a woman's skin is erotic everywhere.)

I also most unexpectedly found myself experiencing surfing the lunar cycles within my body, experiencing regular monthly very low times that were always followed by a magical lift. These were at first disconcerting. I had to adjust to being a lunar animal, to being much more part of the tides of the earth. I worried at first about these depressions that came and went. (However I did not bleed for my internal female organs had atrophied before birth.)

I found being a female with a male was an entirely different thing, as new to me as it would be to any pubescent girl. I must confess I enjoyed feeling protected and cared for. My whole body tingled, and still does I confess, when a man in a caring gesture puts his arm behind me. It meant more to me at first than it would to many woman for it also meant something I had long craved, acceptance as a woman.

I also found myself much more vulnerable to strangely predatory males - a beast that was as alien to me as to any woman. I thought I would have understood them better - but eventually concluded I had never been truly within their skin because of my always female brain. Trustworthy males were usually not around when I would have liked protection - and wanting protection was also a very new feeling. But I had absolutely no intention of welcoming vulnerability in order to have men protect me. No, I was determined to be a woman that could stand on her own feet - and enjoy male company.

I might have been born with a female brain, but I certainly had not been socialised to accept the female lot. I had no intention of taking a minor role to men but I had an awful lot to learn. Above all else I had to quickly learn to keep males at bay. I had found to my sudden alarm that the eye contact with males was now dangerous for it often was seen as a come-on signal. I had to learn eye control. My eyes had not to meet male eyes. I learnt that eye control was done by females, not by males. A man in our society is free to simply look.

I knew women that could look a male straight in the eye, laugh, flirt, enjoy life - and keep the males at a distance. The flamingo dancers of Spain embodied this for me. I saw them as expressing dignity and strength. I set them as my role model - but, until I was more sure of myself, I could not follow their example but had to learn how to avoid entanglements.

....Jackie and I discovered we were happy living together in effectively a same sex marriage. (Another problem for the church!) Clearly it was a gigantic change in her life. I do not know how she adjusted - nor how much pain she went through in order to keep us together as a family. But at that time my gender role change was much less of a problem to us than we had previously imagined. We still loved each other. We expressed this love. We carried on sleeping together but as two women. My new attraction to men added a bisexual element that we shared - although for Jackie this was only with me. Outside our relationship she was as far as I knew strictly heterosexual. There were perhaps certain compromises here. Jackie and I had some high times sexually, many delightful times, but I was sure this was more due to our spiritual and emotional bond than to her innate desires. We just had to learn to listen closer to each other so we knew when the other wanted to be alone - or to seek male company.

So I had come to another step on my path downwards from a peak of prestigious status. I had left the clerical elite and now lost the privileges of malehood. At that time I thought that I was about to wreck my job prospects as well as to face ridicule, embarrassment and lost credibility - not just because I would be seen as a woman, but because of being seen as a freakish woman. I knew that I would also be embracing other risks. I would face legal discrimination and, if by chance arrested, being put in a male prison to face nearly certain sexual harassment and perhaps rape. This was not a distant threat . Within months I would be endangering myself by taking part in an armed occupation of a major mining camp on Aboriginal lands.

As for my vocation to the priesthood, in the eyes of the Catholic Church and in my own eyes I had dedicated myself to the priesthood of my Creator forever. For me this had not changed. I had accepted the call from the God within. I had been consecrated to the priesthood. Now I would be outwardly the priestess I had always been within - and thus become perforce in yet another way a small stumbling block for the Catholic Church's male dominated sacred realms. I was travelling far from the days when men called me Father.