A transgendered woman will make golfing history next month when she tees up for the Australian Women’s Open. Never before has a transgender woman played in a professional women’s tournament.

“It’s a dream for me,” said 37-year-old Mianne Bagger. “I’ve been playing golf since I was eight, but I turned professional only in August last year. So it’s been a long time coming,”

Bagger admitted that while most women on the golf course accepted her sex-change operation, some still found it hard to come to terms with.

“I have made a lot of great girlfriends through golf, but there are some women who find me hard to accept,” Bagger said. “To most people, I am just another one of the girls out there playing.”

Bagger said she went through two years of hormone replacement therapy before surgery in 1995.

“There seems to be a misconception in society that one day we [transsexuals] just wake up and think, ‘I’m going to have a sex-change today’,” she said.

“I have always known there was something different about me since I was young — we are born this way.”

A Women’s Golf Australia spokesperson said the WGA welcomes Bagger in the tournament, and has been following her progress since the 1990s when it formed a policy to allow her to play in, and win, the South Australia amateur championship.

“Mianne has been playing for years in our amateur tournaments where we have no rules against transgender players,” the spokeswoman said. “There is no reason why she should not continue her golfing career in the professional tournament.”

Maisie Mooney, chief executive of Women’s Golf Australia, says she still remembers the board meeting in 1998 when the South Australian delegate piped up with a matter that, it could safely be said, had never crossed their minds before.

Pennant players in Adelaide were threatening to boycott their competition if two women, who had previously played as men, were allowed to compete. The controversy prompted the WGA to adopt the policy letting transgender golfers play.

Most of the professional tournaments in the world, run by regular tours such as Australian Ladies Professional Golf, ban players not born as women.

But Mooney believes the tours will be under pressure to change their thinking in the wake of the International Olympic Committee’s attitude, and the appearance of Bagger at the Concord Golf Club next month.

“It poses a challenge to the tours,” Mooney said. “It opens questions about whether it’s discrimination to ban people on this basis. We think that it is.”

Warren Sevil noted Bagger’s entry to the Open with interest, although he doubted the chances of major change.

“In an association such as this, the rules are decided on by the membership, so it would be the members who voted on it. We’ll be looking at the guidelines set down by the IOC,” he said.

Bagger said she one day hoped to move on from being seen as “the transsexual” golfer.

“My sexuality is just one of the obstacles I am going to have to face,” she said. “What people have to realize is that plenty of men and women out there are transsexuals.”