As well as struggling with gender identity, Lauren had to cope with violence and sexual abuse
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Lauren grew up in a violent and troubled home with alcoholic parents.
She was physically, emotionally and sexually abused by her mother. Later, her mother’s pimp orchestrated the rape of Lauren by a group of men.
Lauren explains that she was born a boy in the 1960s, but as far back as she can remember, she felt female. She wanted to try and express her identity, but felt ‘crushed’ in the violent and abusive environment of her home.
Her father left home when she was very young and she did not see him again until she was in her 40s. After he left, her mother began to work as an escort. Lauren remembers as a child seeing her mother having sex with her clients and her pimp. She would bring men back to their home, get paralytically drunk and beat Lauren severely after they had gone.
The next morning she would be overly affectionate towards Lauren, and this developed into sexual abuse. This pattern of violence, affection and abuse continued until Lauren was 17 years old.
Lauren recounts that after the first time her mother sexually abused her, she climbed a tree and threw herself off. She was taken to hospital, but she says, ‘No one believed why I had done it ... I tried to tell but they said I was telling stories. They believed I just fell, so I stopped trying to tell.’
She adds that the local community knew what her mother was like as she regularly sent her young child to collect alcohol and cigarettes for her, and Lauren often had visible injuries from beatings.
Lauren was also left alone for long periods to fend for herself. Her mother had frequent admissions to hospital due to mental health problems, and social services were involved with the family, but Lauren says no one tried to help and she felt ignored by hospital staff, teachers and neighbours.
For a time, she and her mother moved to another area to live with a man, who Lauren believes was her mother’s pimp. One day, she came home from school and the man told her to change into a set of clothing he had laid out, as she needed to return to school for additional tuition.
When she arrived back at the school gates she was met by a group of four or five men, who took her to the school field and raped her.
She recalls feeling happy on her way to school and then being distressed and covered in blood on the way back. When she told her mother what had happened, they fled the house.
Lauren was enrolled in a new school but she says that by this stage, she was ‘an extremely angry young person’. Having missed so much school she could not read and the head teacher spent time teaching her. But he also subjected her to a caning every day and she questions whether he had a sexual motive.
Other teachers handed out degrading punishments to Lauren. She says no one tried to understand her anger or her ‘foul mouth’. If she tried to explain she just received further punishments.
As an adult Lauren built a career, but a situation brought back the memories of the abuse and she began drinking heavily. She attempted suicide, but ‘had a moment of clarity’ and reached for the telephone and accessed help.
Today Lauren says, she feels at peace with herself, has come to terms with her past and wants to help others with similar experiences.
Lauren believes that professionals need to intervene and act on the signs they observe, ‘joining the dots’ and sharing information to create a holistic picture of the child and what they may be experiencing.