I remember, when I was in Year Three, I told me mother how an older kid at school called me a p-word for homosexual. My mother asked me if I knew what one was. I had no idea, so I answered in the negative but answered in the negative. I asked her what one was and she said, "It's just a nasty name." It wasn't until I watched The Flying Doctors, in September, 1986, when AIDS was mentioned and Australian actors, Peter Fisher and Gerard Kennedy, played a gay couple and a redneck character used the p-word and the bartender, played by Maurie Fields, said, "You can't catch it off a glass!" and I saw Peter Fisher walking with his arm around Gerard Kennedy that I realised what the word meant.

I met two gay men once, and one of them told me that he had been married to a woman for around 30 years, but it was always in the back of his mind. Aside from the barbarous psychiatric "treatments" like electric shock and aversion therapy, some of the conventional "wisdom" of less barbarous psychiatrists imparted to gay men was, "Find a good woman, get married, have a good sex life, and it will disappear." Advice that was as harmful as the "praying the gay away" movements.

I have never been sexually attracted to males, but being a more sensitive autistic male, I was always reviled by males. I remember a guy who I went to school with, who, apparently now, works as a nurse (he had an apprenticeship in engine reconditioning), always used to speak in a high-pitched voice when he saw me, and thought, because I didn't like heavy metal music, that I was queer. I now know that what he was doing was wrong and that he was trying to humiliate me. And, okay, I don't have a really deep voice.

But I do believe that it's very important to live as your authentic self. I disagree with the wording of the ridiculous doctor who claimed that a balanced life can only be achieved by being your true self and that you don't need a book that is supposedly a life-raft stocked with tools to help, what you really need is to observe four words, "Take the mask off." How this ridiculous doctor contradicts himself is that he says that men and women can never be just friends and that people should stick to their own sex (he said gender, but sex and gender are not the same) , but if you feel you are born into the wrong sex, the way to live as your authentic self is not to mask and that means that you live as the sex you feel you are in your mind.

So, you own it, and I say, "Well done!"