Captain Clinch Controversy

[Gob]

A MALE army officer, who lives as a woman with his wife and two children, has been locked in a battle to keep his job - as a female army officer.

Captain Matthew - now Bridget - Clinch, 31, plans to have a sex change operation next year after living as a woman for 12 months.



The East Timor veteran's battle with the army has already forced it to abolish its policy of discharging personnel ''undergoing or contemplating gender reassignment''.

The infantry officer and Duntroon graduate who met his wife Tammy at the Royal Military College is now determined to keep his job after he changes his sex to female next year.

Captain Clinch and Tammy, who live in Queensland with their daughters, aged 5 and 16 months, will have to divorce before the operation because it's illegal for married couples to be of the same sex.

When Captain Clinch, who has been on hormone treatment in readiness for womanhood, told superior officers his sex-change plan, they said there was no place for him in the military.

''I'm in uniform, with clippered hair, just thinking, 'What the hell?' This shouldn't be that big a deal,'' Captain Clinch said. ''It's 2010, this is Australia. We don't do this to our people - or we shouldn't. It's not equitable. It's not fair.''

As a teenager, joining the military was one of his dreams - the other was becoming a girl.

At the age of 30, he finally decided he could no longer ignore it.

The army told Captain Clinch he could reapply for his job when he had an F on his birth certificate but there were no guarantees.

The Australian Army policy was: ''Consistent with the current ADF medical and recruiting policy, a person undergoing or contemplating gender reassignment cannot be considered suitable for service in the ADF because of the need for ongoing treatment and/or the presence of a psychiatric disorder.''

A year later Captain Clinch is still in the army and the transgender policy has gone. Some of his earliest memories are of blowing out birthday candles and wishing he was a girl. ''I didn't want to be a different person. I wanted to be me - but a girl me.''

Captain Clinch's teenage years at Melbourne High School were awkward: ''I didn't want the body I had. I wanted a girl's body. That was just the way it had always been. But society and parents and all sorts of influences tell you that's crazy - you can't be thinking like that. You can't be acting on those thoughts. You can't resolve that thing that eats you up.''

He joined the reserves straight out of school and the army two years later, burying himself in the all-male infantry, pumping iron at the gym and fathering two daughters with Tammy. ''But your head and your heart are how they are and you can't get away from yourself.''

The legacy of the past is still there in the bulging biceps and 90-kilogram frame but the hormone treatment has kicked in and there are now breasts where once there were pecs. When Captain Clinch told his wife of eight years that he needed to live as a woman, Tammy said ''the Earth stopped spinning''.

After the shock, came the grief. She mourned her husband and the body he would lose. But she ''realised that the person I loved and built my life with is still there. All the good things I loved are still there. I just have to adjust to what's on the outside now.''

Captain Clinch has the support of Transgender Victoria spokeswoman Sally Goldner, who says his success in challenging the policy and having it abolished will help others.

Ms Goldner said the policy practically, if not explicitly, gave Defence the right to sack employees who were undergoing sex change treatments.

After being told last December he could not dress as a woman at work, Captain Clinch went on leave to begin the transition.

His termination notice was signed in February, weeks after Defence joined the Pride in Diversity employer program, which a Defence newsletter says aims ''to make workplaces more responsive to the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people''.

After lodging a Human Rights Commission complaint in March, which is yet to be heard, and appealing against the sacking through Defence's own channels, the termination was suspended in May.

Defence cancelled its transgender policy in June and withdrew Captain Clinch's termination a month later.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/my-bodys ... 18krq.html