Why would a teenage girl want to become a boy?
As a young child, Craig Andrews felt certain about his future. “I always thought I’d grow up to be a man,” he says. At school, however, his mates were quick to remind him that he was a girl, and point out his differences. In far north Queensland, where he grew up, there was nowhere, and no one, he could turn to in his confusion and despair: “It was extremely difficult. They don’t keep that kind of information in the school library.” It was not until he was 25 and had moved to Sydney that Andrews even discovered there were medical treatments available. Ten years later he says hormone therapy and surgery – options he did not undertake lightly – have finally brought his body and mind into harmony. “It’s had a profound effect on me.” It is not only this personal experience that has led Andrews to believe transsexualism is a biological condition in which the brain – “the most powerful of all the sex organs” – develops differently to the reproductive organs, making the desire to live as the
