Life Worth Living by Lady Colin Campbell Read Free Book Online

inaccurate assumptions which I was not allowed to challenge – every time I tried to do so I was informed that I was only a child and had no say in such a crucial matter – I began to get the strong feeling that things would never go my way if no one even wanted to listen to what I had to say.
    Sure enough, in the ensuing days and weeks, things went any way but mine. Daddy adjudged me too young to merit being provided with even the most rudimentary scraps of information about what steps were being taken to help me. The contrast between the way he and the gynaecologist dealt with me was so great that I sensed the true reason for the secrecy was that plans were being laid to treat me in a way in which I did not wish to be treated. Anxious to the point of collapse, I asked to be restored to the care of the gynaecologist, only to be told the family doctor was arranging for me to receive the best treatment available. In the event, my case was turned over to a German husband-and-wife team.
    He was an internist, she a psychiatrist. Neither knew the slightest thing about the field into which they were now delvingas if they were experts. That did not stop them from confidently putting forth opinions which impressed my father no end. The wife was especially capable of bedazzling my intelligent but authoritarian father. Highly articulate, and blessed with the plausibility that used to be the speciality of Freudian psychiatrists, she asserted that gender was not an absolute to which you either belonged or did not (a claim now disproven by recent findings concerning the differing size of gender zones in male and female brains). She told him that it was a series of habits and learned responses. The reason why I wanted to live as a female was not because I was female, but because I was rebellious. She supported this breath taking claptrap with the contention that the tussles which Daddy and I had been having over my scholastic performance for the previous three years were manifestations of the same rebelliousness. Adding insult to injury, she claimed that rebelliousness was a symptom of maladjustment, and that I was obviously maladjusted, otherwise I would not wish to swap the gender I was being raised as. People who wanted to exchange one gender for another, she advised, were invariably ill. My dissatisfaction was understandable, she explained. Someone who was expected to function in the masculine gender should look the role, which I did not. Two weeks short of my fourteenth birthday, such evidence as there was of puberty was not masculine. My voice was high-pitched; I was smooth of face and body; I had budding nipples. I was also thin, being five foot four and weighing only eighty-four pounds, although I had a good appetite. Her recommendation was that Daddy should permit her to hospitalise me, allow her husband to shoot me full of male hormones for the month I was out of circulation, and begin the process of masculinisation which would give me a body I could be proud of. Meanwhile, she would administer daily an intensive psychiatric treatment to break down my resistance and restructure my personality to be better adjusted and less rebellious – that is, more accepting of the masculine gender.
    When I was released from hospital, the process would continue, with the help of medication from her husband, therapy from her, and visits to the gym so that I could build up my muscles. Although I would need to be on male hormones for the rest of my life, she had no doubt that this was the best course of treatment – infinitely preferable to altering my gender. That would involve extreme awkwardness. Not only would I be the centre of unwelcome attention, but I would have to familiarise myself with an entirely new role. And what would happen if I could not cope with the pressure, or disliked my new gender? The insanity of what she was advising might be apparent now, but in 1963, when the medical profession knew less about gender, and when