Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, brilliant strategist of military deception during World War Two, once wore a dress. He didn’t care; others continue to be much more interested than he was himself.

When, after six years of consultations and delays, a Bill was finally introduced into the Scottish Parliament in March 2022 to make affirming one’s gender easier, it revealed the deepest split in Scotland’s government in over 15 years. It led to their first ever ministerial resignation on a policy issue, and had seismic effects for both trans people and British constitutional politics. And that was just the beginning.

In her final months, my mother had sat with me and said how glad she was to live some of her life with a daughter she would not otherwise have had.

Just about anyone who has had to endure Australia’s recent six-week national election campaign will have heard of Katherine Deves. She failed to win her seat, but other results have me thinking about how this election will change the Liberal Party and what that might mean for the LGBTIQ+ community.

In the park my son and I battle back and forth on the pavement in a game best described as fencing, only with fingers instead of sabres. I’m wearing trekking pants and a merino t-shirt, black hiking sandals.

We settle down as a woman goes the other way. She grins as she passes, “your mum’s always going to win!” she laughs.

“It’s weird that in all your time as a transgender person, you’ve never experienced homophobia or whatever.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, all transgender people complain about the discrimination or harassment they experience. But you haven’t. It must just be the nice neighbourhood we live in.”

“Maybe.”

I read a plot summary of Hamlet to my son, who accompanies my recitation with appropriate battle sounds, such as clanging swords when the prince is duelling with Laertes.

Now we are wrapping a friend’s birthday present. My son unravels the last curl of the patterned paper and wields its long cardboard tube playfully. “Face me like a man!” he declaims. Pause. “Or like a woman!” he adds. “Whatever.”

I spend a week with my mother while my father is away travelling. On the last morning, we have just exited the front door when a neighbour appears. A moment’s hesitation, then into the brief silence, my mother steps.

After months of research and weeks of waiting, it’s time to go to an appointment to find out about an alternative type of electrolysis. One available only in Sydney. Once inside the consultant’s tiny room, I cannot take my eyes off the menacing contraptions hovering above the bed.

Dozens of wires ending in microscopically sharp needles.

I go to my son’s high school and run a guest session for the English class on writing biography. The class is amazing, and we all seem to have a fun time. But that night, sitting on the bed next to my son, he says, “I think you should perhaps have mentioned the transgender thing.”

In the street, I hug a friend goodbye. Over the road at that moment is a high-vis vest man, standing beside an old Holden ute. He and his mate have just finished topping up the radiator with water. “I always like the kiss on the lips” he hollers out at us. My friend is already in her seat and closing the door when he follows up with “and go a bit of tongue”.

One day my son complains. “Why is your makeup in my bathroom?”

“Because I needed a bench. Does it matter?”

He pulls a face. “Can you do it somewhere else? It smells funny”.

At this point, I adopt my favoured parenting strategy, which is do nothing and see what happens. This is how that played out…

My work colleague is getting gender affirming surgery. I listen to them talk about how they plan to have the operation and then watch three and a half weeks of Netflix.

I ask them if they will continue using neutral pronouns. Yes, they tell me: “I have never felt particularly binary”. I am the same. I say how I have the impression there are not many of us.

“Well, there hasn’t been the language”.

There hasn’t.

My phone rings.

“Hello”: this is my new one-word greeting. One word, because I can’t decide the next one to say. I don’t have one name anymore. It seems untenable. But that is how things are just now: untenable.

The voice at the other end does not have any small talk. It wants to deliver a message.

From one superficial foray into the world of gendered retail, I reached a definite conclusion: women’s shoes won’t fit me. On the strength of a single shopping expedition, a fixed idea formed. This firm belief was clung to with an irrational degree of confidence. Now I look back and wonder if I was erecting a narrative barrier to an internal desire that was trying to get my attention.

After ten weeks of Covid-19 lockdown, my beautician’s appointment book is packed. We clients all emerge into the winter half-light like shaggy bears awakened from sleep. Seated, motionless as I am attended to, I explain to my brow sculpting queen how my eye is drawn always to the Freda Kahlo tattoo on her forearm, and the diamond etched into her neck below her ear. Inwardly, I wonder what it is to be punctured so deliberately.

It is the last meet this year of the school’s afternoon chess club, so apparently they are having a party. Ten kids lined up across chess boards, two by two, their intense focus only broken every sixty seconds by detours to the table of party food. Little intellectual pinballs. Grab a party pie, king to queen’s bishop five. Cracker biscuit, pawn to king’s knight four. Slice of apple, knight takes rook!

When I was a child, our family listened to a program on the wireless on Saturdays called My Word. The moment I remember most clearly was when Frank Muir began telling a story by reluctantly conceding that he was fast approaching the beginning of the first signs of the foothills of early middle age. The studio audience chortled at this point, for he was well into his fifties.

Now at that age myself, I am discovering its gendered – and transgendered – complexities.

How bizarre: a transwoman, an intersex person, and a queer woman, talking in the kitchen. Should the three of us walk into a bar and be the start of a joke?

So, you know how the skin around your heel can get thickened and have cracks in it? No? Well, lucky you. You’re probably young.