Ben spoke about his childhood with a kind of gentle hindsight, not rewriting the past, but finally understanding it. “It’s almost revisionist history, but it’s not,” he told me. “Because I realised that I was this awkward child, engaging with the world and feeling very much like I didn’t fit in and not sure why.” Now, with decades of distance and the language he once lacked, he can look back at those early moments with greater clarity.

“So, I look back on some of those times and think, well, that makes sense now,” he said. “I’m looking through that lens as a boy.” It’s as though the child has finally been granted the right frame. Not reimagined but properly recognised.

Ben’s first love was acting. He was accepted into a theatre program in Wagga Wagga at seventeen, a moment he once believed would shape everything. But when he wasn’t allowed to go, the path ahead narrowed. “It’s one of my biggest regrets,” he admitted softly. He moved into amateur theatre, searching again for belonging, for language, for himself.

But without understanding his gender, he was lost. “My life was very messy and I was very unhappy for a long, long time,” he told me.

Years later, the confusion around identity deepened into something more painful. He describes his teens and twenties as years spent “lost,” wrestling with sexuality and gender without a map. Counsellors helped peel back layers, what he calls “the onion”, revealing that bisexuality wasn’t the full story, and that something deeper was waiting to be acknowledged.

Everything shifted at 33, when he finally understood: he was a man. That clarity didn’t arrive explosively, it settled. Realising he was transgender was not the end point, it was the beginning of clarity, and relief.

“It was the opening up of joy,” he said simply. “Me being absolutely myself.”

Transition, however, didn’t erase the life he had already lived. Instead, it folded into the person Ben was becoming.

He is both a man who has lived 21 years in the world as male, and someone who carries memories of being socialised and treated as female. That duality gives his writing a richness and complexity that audiences can feel. “It became important that despite wanting to be seen as a man, people also understood I’d lived as female,” he said. “That perspective doesn’t just disappear.”

Transition offered freedom, but it also stripped away anonymity.  Living in a regional town during transition brought its own challenges. Working at a local telco meant his transition became public very quickly, hundreds of people knew within days. “I realised I wasn’t going to be invisible in Bendigo anymore,” he told me. For a while, that visibility was overwhelming. He remembers walking down the street feeling exposed, unsure how people would react. Over time, though, the fear softened, replaced by a sense of pride and self-possession. Today he wears his “Trans Mansplaining” T-shirt (A previous play /monologue of Ben’s) in public with humour and confidence; and he notices how women respond with warmth while men squint at it, trying to work out whether it’s political.

Ben also spoke candidly about identity within queer community. “I struggled with being seen as gay and trans at the same time,” he explained. “It feels like one gets cancelled out for the other.” Visibility, for Ben, has never been singular, it’s layered, complex, sometimes contradictory. But always real.

If transitioning at 33 marked the beginning of being fully himself, then the years before were the groundwork. The rehearsal for the role he was always meant to inhabit. And now, as a playwright, advocate, and storyteller, he uses those experiences with intentionality and care. They inform his characters, his empathy, his humour, his understanding of complexity, and ultimately, they shape the heart behind every story he writes.

What’s striking is that Ben talks about his past not with bitterness, but with an almost artistic curiosity. As if those early years were a rough sketch for who he would become. He acknowledges the pain, the hiding, the shame and the confusion. But he also honours the threads that carried him through: creativity, the women who saw him, the slow revealing of truth, and the eventual arrival of language that aligned with lived experience.

There is another thread running quietly beneath Ben’s story, one that reveals as much about him as any chapter of his gender journey. Ben lives with ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), a condition often misunderstood, reduced, or dismissed entirely. He spoke about it with the same candour he brought to every part of his story, not as a footnote but as a defining element of how he moves through the world. “Some days my one task is having a shower,” he told me. “If I put on clothes instead of staying in my boxers, that might be my entire day.” It wasn’t said with self-pity. It was simply the truth of a body that demands negotiation.

Coming to terms with ME/CFS required its own kind of transition. For years, Ben resisted identifying as disabled, believing that capability meant consistency and productivity. The condition pushed back against those assumptions. He described the challenge not just as physical but emotional, a grief for the life he might have lived if his energy wasn’t rationed so fiercely. And yet, in that limitation, he found a different kind of focus. The hours when his mind is clear and his body cooperative become “precious,” he said, “guarded,” because they are the windows through which the stories arrive.

What changed everything was allowing disability to become part of his identity rather than something he had to hide or minimise. “I realised I could be capable and creative and still be disabled,” he said, a realisation that participating in the Midsumma Pathways mentorship program for disabled LGBTQIA+ artists helped crystallise for him. Instead of viewing ME/CFS as an obstacle that disqualified him, he began to see it as shaping the rhythm of his work. Slower, yes, but also deeply attentive. The pauses, the stillness, the enforced rest became the places where characters deepened and where the stories gained complexity.

And perhaps most beautifully, Ben now speaks about ME/CFS as something that sharpened his empathy. It taught him patience, humility, and a profound respect for the unseen labour behind simply existing. It made him gentler with himself, and, by extension, gentler with his characters. The condition hasn’t limited his creativity; it has changed its texture. His writing carries the imprint of someone who has learned to move carefully through the world, to notice subtleties, and to hold both strength and fragility in the same breath. In that way, his disability doesn’t diminish his work; it deepens it.

Through everything;  the searching, the grief, the revelation, the joy, the thread that carried Ben was story. He is trans. He is queer. He is disabled. And every layer was hard-won.

“My writing is my legacy,” he said. “My plays are my children.”