[3] McGregor stated that she was diagnosed as transgender in 1985, following a prolonged period of alcohol and drug abuse, but it was not until 2012 that she, in her own words, "repudiated... [her] birth sex".
[4] McGregor joined the Australian Army as an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military College Duntroon on 14 January 1974, where she spent the next four years, before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the end of 1977.
[3] In the early 1980s, not long after being promoted to captain, McGregor resigned from the Army (later working for law firms McClellands and Sparke Helmore as an articled clerk, and for the Labor Party and Liberals as a speechwriter), before deciding to return to the Australian Army in 2001 after wanting to seek an operational deployment to East Timor (Timor-Leste).
This message was prompted by repeated high-profile incidents of unacceptable behaviour towards women by serving Army members.
[12] McGregor went public with her transition in November 2013 and as a result became the highest ranking transgender person in the Australian Defence Force at that time.
[13] Following her public revelation in 2013, there followed a number of acrimonious social media exchanges about McGregor, in which McGregor took an active part, that led to her being formally counselled by the Australian Defence Force for conduct that reflected poorly on her judgment[14] and for which the Department of Defence made a payment in compensation to a complainant.
Abbott called the Chief of Army's launch of the book "a fitting salute to [moral] courage"[21] In late 2016, McGregor resumed her cricket career playing for a Canberra women's cricket team, and stated she wished to play in the Women's Big Bash League.
[36] A 2018 production by the Sydney Theatre Company, Still Point Turning, is a dramatisation of the lives of McGregor and Royal Air Force helicopter pilot Ayla Holdom, who is also a transgender woman.