It’s the second time Madison has worn this gingham dress, and she’s just not sure it suits her.
“I’m really hard on myself in terms of how I look and how I am” she says.
As a woman who took a while to find herself, trying out new things has always been part of the process – just not a straightforward one.
Not like the other girls
A precocious child, Madison often felt different from the other kids around her.
“I realised I wasn’t typical at a very young age,” she says.
“I found other kids boring … I used to spend my time with the adults as much as I could.”
But her quirks soon stopped being cute and started causing her trouble.
“I would say something that was funny, and people would laugh, but then the immediate response would be ‘Oh Warwick, you’re a real worry.’ And in working-class, Western suburbs Sydney parlance, ‘being a real worry’ would mean that you’re a bit queer.”
“I felt like I needed to [suppress myself] but couldn’t.”
This wasn’t helped by the fact that Madison was fascinated by flamboyant characters and androgynous pop stars.
“I was a bowerbird. I watched TV, and I’d pick things up, and that’s how I knew these jokes.
“The people I would [imitate] were people like Jeannie Little [from the Mike Walsh Show]. She was a woman, but she was also a female drag queen – [mimicking] ‘Daaaarling, it’s just absolutely amaaaazing, just fabulous!’
“There were other people like Frank Thring, who was gay, and he played the audience with it. David Sylvian, who had a band called Japan, Annie Lennox from Eurythmics, Sigue Sigue Sputnik.”
“At one point I was told to stop asking whether I could go to ‘Lez Girls’ [Les Girls, an Australian drag cabaret show]. I didn’t know what it was, but they looked great.”
“My father, rather inexplicably if you ask me, started having a short fuse for me. No one said that this was why, but as far as I’m concerned that’s why I became a disappointment.”
Madison initially interpreted this attraction towards queerness as the desire for a creative life.
“I had an obsession to be creative. I wanted a creative career. And it wasn’t actually creativity as such that I was after – I was wanting freedom. That’s how it manifested itself for years.
“I thought I was a creative person trapped in a non-creative body, to use an analogy. One of the reasons I think I couldn’t act on this wish is that I was wishing for the wrong thing.”
Madison was aware that trans people existed, but “there was a type of person who could do that, and I wasn’t that type of person.”
A tough egg to crack
Only after having an existential crisis in her late forties did Madison come to the realisation that she couldn’t keep pretending to be straight or a man any more.
While the epiphany was sudden, it also helped her make sense of her past.
“I hated, hated suburban social gatherings because they would always expect the blokes to hang around and talk, and the women to hang around separately and talk. It just didn’t fit [me]” she says.
Trying to fit in with her peers had turned her into somewhat of a social chameleon, and though her intellect had brought her social success and a high-flying corporate career, it also meant that she was good at rationalising her feelings away.
“I always had a strong personality, but you can use that iron strength to cage yourself too.”
The cage turned out to be a labyrinth that would take years to traverse, just as it took years to construct. But the people who helped to build it weren’t the same ones who helped to deconstruct it – Madison needed to connect to a new community.
She joined a feminist and gender diverse reading group and slowly learned about the possibilities of a different kind of life. It was there that she was given a profound piece of advice that shaped her attitude towards transitioning.
“One of my first conversations with a trans woman was with Brenda Appleton, who was, at the time, a chairperson of Transgender Victoria.
“She said to me that you won’t necessarily be happy as a result of transitioning, but you will be more comfortable. That was very wise.”
With this in mind, Madison started to experiment. First she tried little things – lipstick in the mirror at home, buying a few different types of nail polish, going out and getting acrylics done – things that were easy to achieve and easy to hide. A little dip into the waters of femininity to see how she and others would react.
However, her true feelings soon became irrepressible after years of being denied. Trying hormone replacement therapy (HRT) only confirmed that she was on the right path – the physical and mental changes felt right, and she felt like she was becoming more herself. She had to admit that she was more than just gender diverse or non-binary – deep down she was a woman.
“As painful as the realisation was in many ways, I knew what I had to do, so I started doing it,” she says, proudly.
“I realised the feminised changes I’d experienced were very affirming. I shared that with the endo[crinologist] and we changed the dosages to go a bit higher, like ‘This is great, let’s do more!’”
Like the word suggests, transition is a process, and Madison isn’t finished yet.
“I’ve done the psych exams that make [me] applicable for gender affirming surgery, but it’s a long, long waiting list. In the public system it’s between 6 and 10 years.”
From happiness to joy
Now, almost ten years after her initial crisis, Madison would describe her life as existentially joyful.
“I have gradually reached a point where I am myself” she says, immediately demonstrating this by diving straight into dense existentialist theory.
“Erich Fromm [German philosopher and psychoanalyst] made a distinction between happiness – which he saw as a capitalistic pursuit of frivolous feelings – and joy, which he felt was a more universal ethos that was possible despite suffering.
“I'm more about this style of universal joy where it's more about authenticity and communal solidarity with people, regardless of the circumstance.”
“I think true happiness is when you look back and go ‘Wow, you know, I was really happy. That was a happy time.’”
This habit of putting things into perspective is something she suggests for other trans people starting out on their journeys.
“By all means plan for what you want to be, but be prepared for things to take a completely different turn. And try to be accepting of yourself.”
Like a 1970s jelly salad, the past is clearer from a distance.
Though she only started taking hormones in her 40s, Madison’s transition had already been going on for decades – from a child who couldn’t stop being herself to a woman who could finally acknowledge who she was to herself.
By the time she began medically transitioning, the real transformation had less to do with changing into something new than allowing herself to fully exist as the person she had always been. Her transition wasn’t only about becoming a woman, but becoming herself.
