Leigh Dwyer is a farmer, volunteer firefighter, was a well-known footballer back in the day - and she is also transgender.

When the call went out for volunteers to help battle the blazes in New South Wales, the former Toolong brigade captain didn't hesitate.

Leigh was part of the south-west strike team that returned this week after 18-hour days on the truck in the Gosper mountains battling the blaze and back burning.

While the CFA Pride ambassador was away fighting fires it just happened to be transgender awareness week, and being part of the firefighting effort she said had "helped break the myths and lies" about transgender people.

In fact it was her connection with the CFA that helped Leigh come out to the wider community as a transwoman two years ago.

Coming to terms with being transgender was a long journey for Leigh, who said she was lucky she had a unisex name and hasn't had to change it.

As a 10-year-old, Leigh started to dream of being a girl and would dress up in his mum's or sister's clothes - not that they knew about it.

Around the same time Leigh started playing footy, eventually playing seniors for Port Fairy and Warrnambool.

It was such a big part of Leigh's life that thoughts of wanting to be a girl were pushed aside. "Football filled the void," Leigh said.

Although on Mad Mondays and fancy dress days, Leigh would dress as a woman.

"I was part of the group but I always felt on the outer," Leigh said.

"There was always that sense of feeling and I never thought a lot about it. I just thought it was because I was shy. It's an inbuilt thing that's in you. You carry a shame."

Growing up in an all-boys religious school, Leigh said it was drummed into you as a teenager that being gay was wrong and you'd go to hell.

"Any kids that were assumed to be gay or whatever weren't treated very well," she said.

Injury ended Leigh's footy playing days and soon after he got married. After years of trying to conceive, the couple adopted a four-month-old baby girl.

"Wanting to be the best dad possible and having a girl and doing girly stuff with her it opened up the door again," Leigh said.

"I was very depressed. I was probably depressed for about 25 years but just didn't know it because that was just the way I normally felt.

"As the years progressed, the burden started to get heavier and heavier. The colours started to become duller."

It was around the time that Hollywood's Caitlyn Jenner was going through her transition. "The ex-wife was heavily into The Kardashians, I couldn't escape that," Leigh said.

"There was just some things she was saying that it just tweaked my interest and I started to research about it."

The more research Leigh did, there were more people's stories to relate to.

"So I started to investigate the feminine side a little bit more and I found as I got more heavily into it my moods started to change," Leigh said.

"One night we were sitting down and the ex was watching the Kardashians and she was talking in a positive way at the time. I thought this might be a good time to say something, so I told her that I thought I might be transgender."

She pushed Leigh to see a doctor, but it took six months to find one in Warrnambool that had the expertise.

"I went and saw her and talked about depression and mentioned the feminine side and wearing women's clothes," Leigh said.

"She picked it up straight away. I was skirting around the subject. She started talking about going on hormones and all that sort of thing and I was just sort of lost and kind of shocked and going 'this is not happening'.

"It's this inbred thing about it not being right. The shame and embarrassment that is attached to it and the stigma and everything like that."

Leigh described that first doctor's appointment as surreal and left her shaking her head, but when the doctor called later that night to check up and make sure she wasn't suicidal "that's when it hit me that 's***, this is something serious'".

"When I started to do the feminine stuff I started to get a sense of joy," she said.

Her mood lifted and she said it wasn't the anti-depressants the doctor had prescribed.

"The medication would flatten you out over a day, this was an immediate change. When I had to go back presenting in male way I'd be really, really low," she said.

"I was still fighting it within myself. I wasn't accepting it consciously. It was just a slow progression.

"Port Fairy is a sort of gossipy town. I was very mindful of that. I would really only dress up around home or if I was going out of town."

But going out in Melbourne or Ballarat wearing women's clothing, Leigh was always worried she would run into someone she knew and be forced to come out.

For three years Leigh dressed as a woman part-time while working out how to come out.

It had taken six months to get in to see the psychiatrist at Monash Medical Centre and about four weeks later Leigh started hormones.

Estrogen, she said, was not as strong a hormone as testosterone but would soften the skin and make it more translucent.

It also changed some terminal hair to vallus hair, but what it doesn't do is take away the facial hair - something she said required about 400 hours of electrolosis at $150 a session.

If anyone noticed the changes in Leigh's appearance during that time, no one said anything except a builder one day who asked: "Are you feeling OK? You just don't look well".

"The moment I started taking the hormones the colour came back into my world. Everything just became bright. It was an amazing difference," she said.

"And plus you develop breasts. The hassle with doing all this later in life is your skeleton doesn't change so you've still got broad shoulders and all those sorts of things.

"It's something you can't change and it's something that's very challenging to deal with when you look at your reflection in mirrors."

Leigh said that if she knew when she was younger what she knows now, her one wish would be to have transitioned sooner.

"It's a totally different time now to back then. Somebody being transgender back then was virtually non-existent or spoken about," she said.

"It was always brushed under the carpet.

"Gender and sexuality is on a spectrum. They're completely different. They're not the same.

"Everybody's got male and female traits when it comes to gender identity...we all fall somewhere along that line. It just happens to be that I fall on the far end of the line."

Leigh said that while times had changed and people were more accepting, it was still very difficult because the stigma and discrimination was still out there.

"What it does in finding yourself, you love yourself and you become comfortable in who you are and that is powerful and it gives you a strength to deal with the hard stuff," she said.

"I'm lucky that I've got a farm. That space is my sanctuary and I can get away from people and be able to de-stress."

Leigh lost a lot of friends when she came out. While people were initially OK and offered support, as time progressed they distanced themselves.

"The difficult part with being an older transitioner is it's very entrenched in people who you are, so everybody transitions with you and it's difficult for people," she said.

"Most people don't go out of their way to say anything to you if you bump into them. They might say 'G'day' but that's about it.

"It's pretty obvious when you go walking down the street, you notice people and the stares, but you get to a point where, excuse the language, ''f**k you all, I don't care'.

"I'm really good about myself and I know exactly how I was and how I am now.

"It's just who I am. People regard it as a choice and they talk to you like it's a choice. But it's no more a choice than it is for you to breathe. I couldn't have kept going the way I was going. I just couldn't."

The same-sex marriage debate gave Leigh the opportunity to sound out people about their views.

She told three close friends what she was going through but wasn't going to tell others until she had developed the strength to go and see them.

"It came to a point where it just had to be done," she said.

Knowing she was about to come out, she stepped down as Toolong fire brigade captain because she didn't want to jeopardise the membership of the brigade thinking people would be turned away when they found out she was a transwoman.

At an extraordinary meeting of the brigade in August 2017 Leigh shared her story. "It was probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do. We had about 30 or 40 people there. I was pretty much physically ill for two days beforehand," she said.

"Within five minutes of the meeting closing, the town of Port Fairy knew.

"I took a low profile for about three months after to just let it circulate.

"The relief and the load off the shoulders was instant. It was a completely different day. It was the start of a new life essentially. It was awesome."

Leigh said she never rushed into any decisions, and took things slow and gentle.

The night before she came out publicly, Leigh had contacted a number of clients who used her bobcat and excavation business just so they didn't hear it from someone else.

No one has got in her face or attacked her in the street, she said, but the cruelty was more subtle like business drying up or people being told not to buy the land she'd subdivided off her farm because they would have to live next to a transwoman.

"The bobcat and excavation business took a hit. Pretty clear cut. There's an exact day where it was before and after. The differences are quite obvious," she said.

"But I have a couple of really great clients, and great neighbours.

"These things go on. That's just an unfortunate side of it."

Christmas and New Year's can be be lonely. "You want to go out and enjoy yourself but you just can't," she said.

Leigh said it was wise to stay away from social events around the festive season because that's when lots of alcohol was consumed and people were more likely to be looser with what they said.

"You just move on and try and work out where the next stage of life goes," she said.

Gender surgery is not cheap. Leigh said it cost around $30,000 for the full surgery and up to $100,000 if you took into account breast augmentation, electrolysis, facial feminisation surgery.

"So it's not something you can just go and do. It's the difference between living a reasonable life and being in poverty," she said.

"I've done breast augmentation and that was about $17,000 and that hurt like hell. I was in immense pain but I couldn't get the smile off my face. It was a bizarre one, having a really high mood while in an awful lot of pain.

"People see the surgeries as a cosmetic thing. It really is a medical need. That's another step in the road down the track.

"Science is only starting to study it more and starting to get a better understanding of it."

Leigh said one night she was watching a medical show on TV with her daughter about how scientists don't know why we yawn.

"I just say they don't know a simple thing like yawning, how the hell are they going to know anything as complex as gender and sexuality and things like that," she said.

"I've found the journey absolutely fascinating."

And despite it all, Leigh said she was "straight out happy".

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