Welcomed, not shunned

Coming out, and the Rotary reaction

It’s been seven years since Queenstown woman and Irish expat Monica Mulholland came out as a transgender woman, and she did so from deep in the heart of conservative New Zealand.

‘‘Friends were saying ‘well there’s one thing more conservative than a red neck Southland farmer, and that’s a red neck Southland farmer’s wife’,’’ she says.

In 2016, Mulholland was a member of the Queenstown Rotary Club, traditionally filled with ex farmers, business community and conservative types. ‘‘Rotary clubs are mostly white older folks, lots of men,’’ she said at the time.

Women were first admitted to Rotary clubs in 1989 and the first female club president was elected in 2004. So when she broke the news she was transitioning and would be living the rest of her life as a woman, she was terrified how her Rotary peers would take the news.

As the story goes, these old school conservative types celebrated the news so much, she was elected president of the Rotary Club that year, making her only the second transgender president of a Rotary Club. ‘‘One should not be led astray by stereotypes.’’

The relief she felt can’t be put into words, and the joy she now feels living as her authentic self is explosive. ‘‘It has been beyond my wildest dreams.’’

Since coming out in 2016, she married her partner Joan for a second time and became the world’s first transgender woman to be president of the New Zealand women’s Inner Wheel Club – an international women’s organisation established in 1924 by ‘‘the wives and girlfriends of Rotary men’’.

Mulholland has been wholeheartedly accepted by those often painted with the narrow-minded brush.

‘‘We thought we are going to be shunned socially and not get invited to dinner parties. How wrong we were.

‘‘Traditionally you lose half your friends and half your family when you come out. That is what is generally accepted in the transgender community.’’

While coming out has seen her life change for the better, there is a dark element to keeping this secret

between her and Joan for so long. As recently as 2022, studies show that internationally 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide. The youth rate is higher - 50% attempting.

Mulholland is blunt about it. She had two choices, come out, or end it.

‘‘We knew I had to come out because I didn’t really have any option. The other was not the option I wanted to take. It was very hard [keeping her self hidden] and it was getting harder and harder as time went on.’’

Mulholland knew at four she wasn’t what was considered normal. Having been brought up in the tiny town of Fermoy in County Cork, Ireland, there weren’t role models or deviations from the conservative norm.

It was 1950s Catholic Ireland, and she was the oldest of nine children.

‘‘There seemed to be no one apart from white Catholic heterosexuals. Home alone, I often dressed as a girl.’’

She found love early at 19 with her now-wife and when things became more serious between them, Mulholland felt honourbound to tell her she was different. The couple have been together 46 years.

Apart from her wife, Mulholland told no-one how she felt, and went about her public life as a man. They moved to London for two decades, Hong Kong and then in 2002 they moved to Queenstown.

It was their friend’s cancer diagnosis that tipped the scales towards coming out. ‘‘I thought, I don’t want to die not being who I really am.’’

The couple went to Esprit in Washington, a convention for transgender people coming out.

This was a transition for Joan too. ‘‘We were going from being a heterosexual couple to a gay couple, this was as much of a deal for her as it was for me.’’

One of the most surprising parts of their visit to Washington was the amount of ‘‘macho’’ types transitioning. She recalls meeting men in the military, firefighters and truck drivers.

The penny dropped. She wasn’t the only one hiding under a ‘‘blokey’’ personna. The mask had to come off.

More than others accepting her, Mulholland had to learn to accept herself. She says she has struck a thing called ‘‘reverse imposter syndrome’’.

‘‘I am a man in a women’s world. I am trying to be a woman with a very male background, so how do I fit in here? How do I try and make sure they accept me as a woman?’’

Fitting into societal norms as a woman has been difficult. She’s changed her clothes and hair, and she is particularly self-conscious about her voice.

‘‘My voice plays on my mind. Even though I have worked on it for years. Sometimes when I hear my voice I just think ‘Oh, god’. If you want to be accepted by women then you’ve got to try fit in and look like one of them. If you look weird then you know you are going to be treated as weird.’’

She laughs and recalls one of the first nights out as a gay couple in Arrowtown, Central Otago. The couple were hit on by a man on holiday from Auckland.

‘‘I guess he thought he was coming on to a pair of single middle-aged women.’’

The laughs are there every day now, she says. And while attention has been on pro versus antitransgender voices this year, she doesn’t believe it reflects New Zealand’s attitude towards the transgender community.

‘‘I guess it is the same as saying ‘how do you think chauvinism is right now’? It’s there, it exists amongst certain proportions of the population. There are always going to be anti-trans people. There are always going to be chauvinistic people. Of course, it is still there. It is hidden probably, now.’’

Nobody’s perfect, but Mulholland believes removing stereotypes on what certain groups ‘‘may think’’ is an important thing to remember when coming out, or accepting those who have.

‘‘There is no big shock factor when I tell people. It is boring now. Do I feel as though I have done something useful for other people? Yes.’’