‘We really are trailblazers’: coming out as in later life
he first time AJ Brown felt rain on their chest after getting top surgery, it felt like it was “meant to be”. It was 2am in the small coastal town of Berrara, and it was storming. AJ, then 47, arrived home drenched and exhilarated, unused to no longer being burdened by chest binders to give their body a less typically feminine appearance. Assigned female at birth, AJ had only publicly come out as non-binary in middle age.“Like – ‘oh my god, I’m free, I can run around naked and be everything’.
Before Brown came out as non-binary , they struggled with wearing clothes and with the experience of puberty.Now 54, Brown has been taking testosterone for seven years and their hormone level is the equivalent to that of an 18-year-old man.Brown serves as president of Trans Pride Australia – set up in 2017 to provide a wealth of resources for people who began transitioning later in life and shed parts of their former lives.
When Pye did come out, she’d been living as a straight white male, in a loving heterosexual relationship with two children. But she was lying – to her partner and herself.“When I got to 52, it wasn’t a choice. It was a matter of, I had to [come out], or I wasn’t going to be here. And unfortunately, I lost a lot of people from that path.”
“Just the anaesthetist was $650 an hour … I was dumbstruck,” she says. “A lot of the girls can’t afford that.” “Transitioning is a very long and slow process. We are always in the process of becoming,” she says. “For some trans people, there are detours, there are stalls, there are complete reversals.“All the time, you’re weighing up all the negatives possible about the process … from adolescence into adulthood … because [of] the consequences in terms of loss of job, loss of career, loss of friends … the expense of surgery and the trauma of it.
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