Why I never came out to my mother

My mother, with whom I had a rather difficult relationship, died of breast cancer in the mid-1990s, aged 48. The cancer started when she was 39 so she lasted quite well considering… and this is the reason why I have had the extremely uncomfortable 'pleasure' of having early mammograms. I'm on the early screening programme, at least until I have top surgery. ;-)

I was around 17 when she was first diagnosed and her diagnosis threw our world upside down. At the time her husband had abandoned her, my elder brother was in the Army and my younger brother was about 4 years old, so I had to pick up a lot of the slack when she was in hospital having her mastectomy. I would drop my little brother off at nursery school in the morning, go to college, pick my brother up afterwards, and then walk us both down to the hospital to visit Mum before walking back home and cooking our evening meal. Then I'd have to see to my brother's ablutions before putting him to bed and starting over again the next day. All this whilst worrying myself sick about my poor mother, and trying to work myself through college. It was a tough grind.

My mother had suffered quite badly at the hands of her various husbands and they seemed to get progressively worse as she went through her life. The first husband, who she married in her teens, was not really suitable as carried on behaving like a single man even after they married. So she got sick & tired of him and whilst she was still married to him she met her second husband - my father - who was a colleague of her first husband. She separated from her first husband and shacked up with my Dad, and it was during this period that she gave birth to my elder brother - the son of my father - whilst still married to another man. A bit of a scandal for the 1960s, I'm sure you'll agree.

She then divorced her first husband and married my father, and after they had me they both decided to move from the UK to South Africa for a better quality of life. And it was indeed a far superior quality of life. We had a lovely home in an up-and-coming area, and my mother went back to work to save up for luxuries such as overseas holidays. Ah, those were the days! Days when you didn't need two incomes just to keep your heads above water!

Unfortunately my father was rather bored with their relationship so he had an affair with the office slut bike. My mother found out instantly (my father is pretty crap at subterfuge) and she kicked him out. After a painful divorce in which she tried to be 'the better man', she was left financially and emotionally devastated. She desperately searched around for a replacement husband to add that all-important second income which led to the worst decision of her life: she hooked up with a charming Scotsman who turned out to be a wifebeater and abuser who made our lives hell for seven years.

But he particularly liked making my life a living hell. I suffered relentless emotional abuse from him, and occasionally physical abuse too. He belittled and insulted me at every turn, telling me I was worthless, and the problem with that is that you eventually start to believe it. I'm convinced he did this because he could see that my brother and I are light-years ahead of him and his children in terms of intelligence and aptitude. He felt inadequate in our presence and so he did everything in his power to beat us down. My brother grew into a strapping young man who could give as good as he got, but my bloody hormones were determined that I would be a short girl who was powerless to fight back.

Unfortunately my mother was desperate for the income he would occasionally bring in (when he was sober enough to hold down a job for a few weeks), so she used to tell me to not argue back when my stepfather would verbally or physically abuse me. "Keep the peace", she'd say. "Don't wind him up".

What an awful lesson to teach your child. Don't speak out against your abuser. Keep quiet and take it because that's all you're good for. And worse than that: to try to "keep the peace" with her so-called husband, she would join in with him in attacking me. Her attacks were always verbal, but she would reinforce the negative messages he was giving me. Every. damn. day. For seven long (and important) years.

I've never understood why she allowed him to continue abusing all of us. Granted, I'm sure she was scared of him. After all, he was a mean drunk with a violent temper and a gun, so she had good cause to fear him. So why did she stay? Why did she sit back and allow her children (and herself) to be abused by this man for so many years? Why the hell did she actively collude with him in the emotional abuse of her children?

The stress of being verbally and physically abused by him for so long took its toll on me, and at the age of 14 I was hospitalised due to a nervous breakdown. I'd started to get panic attacks, thinking my heart was failing, and Mum eventually took me to a doctor after several weeks of suffering. The doctor admitted me to the local hospital where they ran all sorts of checks on my heart just to make sure, but my heart was physically fine. They figured (but didn't tell me) that I was having panic attacks, and I was put on valium for a couple of months. This worked a treat and I was able to get over the panic attacks, and it was not long after that that my stepfather eventually buggered off.

So from that front, our home life became somewhat better. We were living in a rubbish two-bedroom flat (all four of us) in which I shared a small bedroom with both of my brothers, and my elder brother was then conscripted into the Army so that left myself and my youngest brother with my mother. She was still hurt and bitter from what she'd experienced at the hands (and fists in the case of one of them) of her husbands and she was so used to habitually denigrating and verbally abusing me that she just carried on doing it.

I enrolled in college and started doing very well, thank you, when she was suddenly diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer started in her right breast and was Stage III (which means it had spread from her breast to the surrounding lymph nodes) so she had a mastectomy and lymphectomy on the right side, followed by radiation therapy. That had her in remission for a while, but two years later the cancer had spread to her left breast. So she had a total mastectomy of the left breast too, leaving her flat-chested with two ugly scars on her chest where her breasts used to be.

It was around this time that I read an article about Caroline Cossey, a famous male-to-female transsexual who actually appeared in a James Bond movie (you go, girl!), and figured out that I too am trans. The night I read that article (in People magazine, thanks guys!) I sobbed relentlessly on my bed as I suddenly put together exactly how I'd been feeling my whole life, and how it married up with what Ms. Cossey had felt (although from the opposite direction). I finally understood that I'm transgender and that I would probably benefit from a sex change, but I had very recently been badly abused and had zero self-esteem. And on top of that, I was dealing with the trauma of my mother's breast cancer. So I needed time to figure out what I was going to do with myself.

So one night my mother & I were chatting in her bedroom and she burst into tears. She told me that she was very uncomfortable with the appearance of her chest post-mastectomy. She said she felt like less of a woman without her breasts, and she couldn't stand looking down and seeing herself naked in the bath with those horrible scars where her breasts used to be.

Wow. What an alien concept!

I could empathise with her to a certain extent. I could see that she was upset and I could appreciate that she saw her breasts as symbolic of her womanhood. But I asked myself a very pertinent question: would I feel the same way?

The short answer is: hell, no.

Granted, I'd be very upset and frightened by the cancer. Of course I would. But when I asked myself how I would feel if I were to look down at my chest and see no breasts there, the only answer that came back was "bring it on!". Not only would I be perfectly fine with losing my breasts, I would actually be much happier to be flat-chested because I've hated having breasts ever since they first sprouted and I have never felt comfortable looking at myself in the bath since puberty because of their presence (and the presence and/or absence of other gender characteristics).

I was quite surprised by my answer. Surely if I'm a girl like everyone has been insisting I am, I should want to feel womanly? Surely I should be proud of my pert little B-cups? Turns out I didn't, and I wasn't.

I then probed deeper: would I feel less of a 'woman' if my breasts were removed? The answer to that was even more startling: what do you mean 'less of a woman'? I do NOT feel like a 'woman' and I never have done!

So I commiserated with my mother about her feelings of inadequacy as a breastless woman. I put myself in her shoes and tried to be sympathetic. But I didn't tell her how I really felt and how I had felt for many years. How could I say to a woman that was devastated at having lost her breasts to a life-threatening condition that I would be hugely relieved to get rid of my own?

So in essence, I figured out that I'm a transguy four years before my mother died, but I never said a word to her. Firstly because she used to verbally abuse me (when I aced a Business Management course at age 19, instead of congratulating me she called me a 'jumped-up little fart') so why the hell would I want to give her the equivalent of an ICBM of ammo to use against me? And secondly because I just didn't have the heart to tell a woman whose womanhood had been devastated that I didn't actually want my own.

Incidentally, my mother did go on to have reconstructive surgery, so she did eventually feel a bit better about her body. But the cancer won in the end, unfortunately.