More than 55,000 new prostate cancer cases occur every year (Cancer Research UK), with the number rising. Most of these patients are cis males, but there are also transgender females with prostate cancer. Feature writer Molly Lee speaks to Michaela Taylor who is one of them
Michaela is sat in a consultant’s room at a hospital in Newcastle wearing a pretty skirt next to her wife. She has just received life-changing news, both for herself and for her family. Walking out into a waiting room filled with old, bald men facing a similar diagnosis, she knew that she had to make the most out of what time she had left.
For 20 years, Michaela lived a double life. At home with her sons, she was a loving father in a nuclear family. But to her newfound cis female friends, outside of her hometown, she was one of the girls going to coffee shops and bike rides.
This day at the hospital changed her life by ending this double life. It gave her the courage to tell her two sons and other people around her about her true self.
She’s a transgender female with prostate cancer who was told she only had two years left to live.
“Hearing that [diagnosis] gave me the absolute shock of my life,” says Michaela, now 76. “After that I knew I had to be out to everybody, to hell with the consequences.
“I was going to live who I was while I had two years left.”
Almost six years later, she is in her house, still happily married to her wife of 55 years, Ella, and a grandparent. Her prostate cancer is manageable, and she is fully out and proud.
Ever since she was six years old, she knew she was in the wrong body. But as she grew up in Britain in the 1950s, transgenderism wasn’t heard of, let alone accepted in society.
“I kind of hid it, suppressed it, tried to stamp hard on it all my life,” she says. “But it kept coming back to mind.”
Despite knowing deep down that she wasn’t a cis male, she married her wife in 1969 – but her wife didn’t know that her husband wasn’t their authentic self. When Michaela’s wife was out of the house, she would dress up in female clothes and started going out a bit to explore the LGBTQ+ community.
After 30 years of happy marriage, and raising two beloved sons, Michaela told her wife the truth. Although devastated, Ella decided to support her entirely. She would attend appointments at the gender health clinic, but they couldn’t bear to tell their children.
“We’d seen other trans women who are sort of disowned by most of the family and wouldn’t see their children,” says Michaela, who didn’t tell her sons until her cancer diagnosis. “I really, really couldn’t bear that to happen to me.”
So, Michaela lived a double life with her car as a changing room and beauty parlour – strewn across the backseats were her female clothes, her wig, jewellery and make-up. She got pretty good at quickly switching from a male to female appearance and vice versa.
A few years after she came out to her wife, she started to notice a few symptoms that correlated with prostate cancer.
Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) tests started to be used in diagnostic practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the UK. The test measures the amount of PSA, a protein produced in the prostate gland, in a person’s blood to detect cancer, enlargement or infection.
However, when Michaela asked to have one, the doctors didn’t recommend it due to how it was a new method. A few years later, at the age of 69, her symptoms were much worse, so a PSA test was needed.
Just before Christmas in 2019, Michaela was in York and received the dreaded phone call from her doctor. A normal PSA level for someone of her age is below 6.5ng/Ml. Hers was 286ng/Ml.
So that was it. Michaela, a transgender woman who still wasn’t fully out, was sat in a waiting room surrounded by old, bald men. Her male name was shouted out when the consultant was ready to see her. She sat down and heard the news.
“He said ‘don’t look so worried, you’re not going to die now, you’ve probably got two years to live’”, she recalls. But it did worry her. How could she not be concerned? She had just been told she had two years left to live.
It was in that moment she knew she had to be honest with her sons and grandchildren. She wanted to be her authentic self before it was too late.
“Now it’s an act as a cis male rather than an act as a trans female,” says Michaela, whose family, friends and neighbours have been brilliant.
Everyone she has met – the nurses, the doctors, the receptionists – have been respectful and kind. Although she did have to change consultant after a disagreement regarding lack of treatment.
“Going in to meet the new consultant, I expected to go in and battle with him,” says Michaela, who wanted a second opinion. “I sat down in front of him, and he told me I had been under treated, and radiotherapy was needed.”
It was previously thought that, due to her incredibly high PSA range, the cancer would have metastasised all over her body, spine and skull. But the new consultant found that it wasn’t in her bones, wasn’t in her lungs nor skull.
This meant that treatment, such as radiotherapy and a testosterone blocker, was an option. And the treatment worked – her PSA levels are down to an almost immeasurable amount, and she surpassed the previous two-year life expectancy.
“I’m just so glad I had the balls, if you like, to say to this guy [first consultant], look, I’m really not happy with this, I want to have a second opinion,” says Michaela, with a smile.
Unfortunately for Michaela and her family, this isn’t the last experience with cancer. Her older son was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had to have surgery. Her wife has breast cancer. Her younger son finally did a PSA test and is currently clear. But they’ve been referred for BRCA gene testing to determine if there is a gene that is increasing the chances of developing cancer.
Although everyone Michaela meets is kind and respectful, it is, unfortunately, not the case higher up in the system.
In April, the UK Supreme Court recently ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex, not gender identity.
“I feel a little less authentic, I feel a little less real, I feel a little more scared and I fear for the future,” says Michaela, who tries not to worry about this.
But in the meantime, she supports others going through a prostate cancer diagnosis, carries on with life, spending time with new-found friends and enjoys being her authentic self.
