Finding her true self

Lexie Matheson was born Alexander Matheson in Christchurch at the close of WWII. His mother, though, called him Sally.

“She knew,” Lexie tells me, “even then, she knew. Mum had the ‘gift’, she could see things.” Alexander’s mother knew “he” was destined to be a “she”.

And so began an early life of secrecy and confusion, of loneliness and hurt – a life now thankfully happy and fulfilled but, in Lexie’s words, “it’s been complicated.”

Lexie was born into a blended family, unusual in the 1940s. Her mother, Anne, had been orphaned as an infant and was brought up by nuns in an Anglican orphanage. She was widowed with two children by the time she met Lexie’s father, Jack. Jack had had, as Lexie puts it, a “chequered” youth. He was mad about rugby and cricket and alcohol. “I suspect he was an alcoholic,” she tells me. But he was “a charming ratbag”.

Jack voluntarily joined the army to fight in WWII and would return four and a half years later, injured by a machine gun blast and suffering badly from PTSD. “Mum would