Isabelle Lake Memorial Lecture 2014
BEVERLEY HILL: I think the choice of our keynote speaker tonight - Mr Aram Hosie - is
inspired, and one that is truly appropriate for this celebration and acknowledgement of
Isabelle. I'd now like you to join me in welcoming Ms Allanah Lucas, The Western
Australian Commissioner for equal opportunity so that she can introduce our keynote
speaker. Thank you Allanah.
ALLANAH LUCAS: Thanks Bev. Good evening everyone and welcome, and I also
acknowledge Len and the noongar people, um, and for that wonderful address to us all. I
also did not have the privilege of ever meeting Isabelle but I just want to say that within the
commission she is loved and honoured and, and this was particularly – you know so I
know Mark really really hard and it's wonderful to see so many people here tonight in
honour of Isabelle. I wish I had met her, clearly she was a very very special, warm, bright
and inspiring person and continues to do so. Particularly since we're going to have Aram
speaking to us in a minute. And I just am going to give you a quick introduction on Aram.
So Aram came out in high school, both in terms of his sexuality and political activism. He
continued into university where he served on the student guild as the queer officer for a
number of years. In 2008 he was the pride, the WA Pride Patron, the first and only
transperson to be so, and the youngest. There's so many achievements all in one go, and
he also received the WAA's council World Aids Day Youth Award. And at various times
Aram has served on the Boards of Pride, the WA Same Sex Domestic Abuse Group, and
the Welfare Rights and Advocacy Service, and all of his queer activism has been in a
voluntary capacity. His professional career saw him originally qualify as an Occupational
Therapist but then moved into public policy. And his work has found a range of social
policy roles across both government and non-government. He is currently working in the
youth mental health area.
Now Aram's work to date has included contributing to the lobbing effort which saw the
Australian Human Rights Commission conduct the sex files inquiry. And he's worked with
the Federal Attorney General's department on the development and introduction of the
Australian government guidelines on the recognition of sex and gender. And working with
the department of foreign affairs and trade to develop a new passport policy for trans and
inter-sex applicants. He's also been the reluctant star of various visibility raising media
articles and TV shows. And if you'd like to know a little bit more on the personal side he
rides a motorbike, has five tattoos including a full back piece – I can't wait to see it!
(laughs) – he loves coffee and he lives and works between Perth and Sydney, is a bit of a
gym junkie, and doesn't, oh you look wonderful for it too, and a twitter addict. So Aram
Hosie, come up here and give us this wonderful memorial lecture for the very special
human being that was Isabelle Lake, thank you.
ARAM HOSIE: I need to stop blushing first, after that introduction. I know Professor
Collard left, but I'd really like to acknowledge the welcome that he provided, and for my
part acknowledge that we're meeting on noongar land and pay my respects to their elders
past and present. I'd also certainly like to acknowledge Isabelle Lake who I did have the
privilege of meeting and working with a few times, she indeed made a magnificent
contribution to the community in a very short time and acknowledging her parents and
family who are here and I really thank you for your ongoing support of the things that she
cared about.
And hello to the rest of you, you all look fabulous, thanks for coming along and showing
some interest. I will try and be entertaining and informative. I am very honoured to have
been invited here today to talk to you, and what I will be talking to you about, to mangle Dr
Seuss a little bit is all of the places that we've been, and all of the places that we will
hopefully go in the road for achieving the quality for trans and inter-sex people. Tell some
stories about how we got to those places and set out some ideas that I have about how we
can get to the places we still need to get to.
It's been thirteen years since the major gay and lesbian law reform happened in WA. I
remember it quite well, at the time I was an eighteen year old lesbian and I remember
sitting in the parliament as it was debated after having run the gauntlet of the angry
protesters to get in there. I remember having to stifle the urge to interject when some of
the opponents of the law reform said particularly offensive things. I remember a few walks
around the table to calm down while that was going on. And I really remember the sense of
solidarity that existed amongst the people that had been working on it, The sense of
solidarity with the MPs on the floor who were pushing that, and the massive celebrations
we had when it all went through. I think the noise in the foyer got so loud that it interrupted
the chamber for a little while, and the big rainbow banner over the freeway was pretty
spectacular when it happened. And I remember thinking as an eighteen year old lesbian,
“Hey, I'm kind of relatively equal to the straight people now!” and thinking that that felt
pretty good. Five years later when I was twenty three years old I transitioned from female
to male. It's fairly obvious that transition brings along a lot of changes and that's kind of the
point (laughs). And most of the focus, most of the focus with transition is very much on the
physical, the medical focus, society's focus, certainly your own focuses the person
transitioning is on what is happening physically. I'm sure I drove my partner nuts with all
the questions like, “Do you think my voice has changed?”, “I've got more whiskers right?”,
“I'm getting a beard.” So it's very very physically focused.
But at the same time, some pretty, ugh, other significant changes are happening.
Psychosocial changes are pretty big, how to be in the world as a man, when you haven't
been practising it for the first twenty three years of your life takes a little adjusting.
Everything from how to navigate toilets through to how to not get punched by girls
boyfriends on the bus because you were just being friendly, you think. I've not actually
been punched, but it could have happened. The other thing they changed was my legal
rights and that was something that I hadn't really put any thought into until I was
confronted by the reality of it.
As a lesbian living in WA I've been covered by anti-discrimination law, I have the right to
access reproductive and medical services and the public health system, and critically – as
a woman – you know that caries a wide variety of challenges, I still had control over my
personal identity. As a woman, as a lesbian, and it was mine to own without any
interference. As Dr Seuss put it – he's going to appear a few times – with brains in my
head and feet in my shoes I can steer myself in any direction I choose. So it was then a bit
of a shock for me to realise that seven years ago as a newly hatched transguy that I no
longer had ownership of my personal identity. The government and a whole other bunch of
institutions had a whole bunch of opinions about who I was and interfered in it pretty pro
actively. In addition, I didn't have anti-discrimination protection any more, the medical
treatment I needed was only available through the private health system, and I had my
rights of free movement restricted because the government decided what gender should
go on my passport. And I can tell you that out of all the places to have an involuntary
conversation about why you're a woman with a beard, a tiny immigrations office is not the
place you want to be doing that.
So like Isabelle I have never been very good at accepting inequality and living within
constraints that are imposed upon me. That started from a very young age, I think it was
hard-wired into me. I grew up in a Jehovah's witness family, which brought with it a lot of
excellent amazing introductions to life but also some challenges because they had some
very strict ideas about gender and rules in general. I often pushed against those so on
very practical grounds I argued strongly for the to be able to wear sneakers and pants
when we went door knocking on the basis you could do it for longer and escape more
effectively from aggressive dogs (laughs), win that one(?) But it didn't this way, I mean I
didn't continue to have fights over the course of my life so, I've talked briefly about lesbian
activism and so it wasn't then a big jump for me to start doing advocacy around the
constraints I found as a trans-guy.
That's not to say I was the only person doing this and here in WA in particular, there was a
small group of young people who established something called the youth gender project,
Which is a group that Isabelle later joined. I wan to give a special shout out to Atari
Metcalfe and others, who drove that group. We were all very young, not very very
knowledgeable but we were passionate. And we wanted to try and make it make a
difference to what we saw were the inequalities that were facing trans and inter-sex
people. Despite our relative lack of ability we did manage to achieve some things and in
particular that was our contribution for calling to the human rights commission to conduct
an inquiry into the issues facing trans and inter-sex people.
There's a call that was being echoed around the country – people like Sally Goldman in
Victoria, Martez Alainey(?) in Tasmania and Peter Hindle in the ACT – they were all also
pushing and poking the commission to look at what could be done with this space. We
used an enquiry that the commission was doing which was the was the same sex
discrimination enquiry to tell stories as trans discrimination. And we knew that the enquiry
wasn't about us, but it was the avenue we could use to try and draw some attention to
what was going on. We put in written submissions, we tried to make sure there was a
trans-person at every face to face consultation who jumped up and said the same kind of
thing. And what we wanted to make clear was that we didn't want to, we didn't want to
hijack that inquiry, but there was some intersections and some differences between the
discrimination faced by same sex people and trans and inter-sex people and something
needed to be done about it.
Fortunately the commission took kindly to our interfering in their commission, and in 2009
they conducted the sex files which is not a pornographic remake of the X-Files, but it was
a special project looking at the legal rights of trans and inter-sex people. I think the sex
files project was probably one of the largest consultation that has ever been done with
trans and inter-sex people around Australia, it included the opportunity for written
submissions, they did face to face consultations, and they also ran an online forum or blog
where there was a lot of conversation which took a huge amount of material from that.
The enquiry found that Australia had – and unfortunately still has – and incredibly
inconsistent approach to the way that we set up legal mechanisms for trans and inter-sex
people to get their legal identity recognised. And the processes that do exist were basically
a bit shit, I'm paraphrasing here a little bit. All of the processes required some level of
medical intervention, usually surgical, and all required that a person be unmarried. This of
course has lots of consequences for trans and inter-sex people that don't fit those criteria.
It is not much fun to have to disclose your status and risk discrimination, abuse, potentially
even violence every time you're in a situation that needs some ID.
The commission also made some other recommendations about the need for
discrimination protection – You'd think that was a no brainer – but in 2009 the law didn't
agree and to some extent even in 2014 our laws don't quite agree. So out of that enquiry
we had a great report with some great recommendations so the challenge then was to
make sure that the report didn't slip quietly into history on a bookshelf somewhere, but that
it could be used and it's recommendations could be implemented. Compounding the
challenge was the fact that whilst there was a few of us – and I emphasis a few of us –
around the country working on this stuff we were largely not very joined up and
coordinated. So you'd have invention and reinvention and reinvention of the wheel, and
whilst many of the issues were national we weren't working on them in a coordinated way.
So to feature Dr Seuss again, “We were headed, I fear, towards a most useless place”
until 2010.
In 2010 there was a health indifference conference which was hosted by the national
LGBTI health alliance. And one of the sessions in there was a working session, which was
focused on how to we move beyond talking, which is what always happens at
conferences, into doing, and we managed to achieve that. At the back of that conference
there was a small group of committed activists that actually started information sharing,
working together in seeing how we could progress things. So the take away from that is
the next time you have to go to a conference and you're rolling your eyes about it, have
some faith that occasionally some conferences can actually make a difference and change
everything.
And indeed after that conference we started to have some real wins. I think the first really
significant win that we've had in this space was the culmination of the legal challenge here
in WA which was known as AH and AB versus the state of Western Australia. That case
was about challenging the interpretation and the application of WA gender recognition
legislation which is our laws for how you go about getting your birth certificate changed.
AH and AB were two trans-men, who's identities were formally suppressed but you may be
aware of one or the other of them, who applied to the gender reassignment board and
were refused recognition of their gender identity on the basis that neither had had a
hysterectomy. It's what I like to call the pregnant man panic. Fortunately, three hills lawyers
took on the case pro bono, and did a heap of work in gathering at what the case law was
around the country, bringing in experts both nationally and internationally into that first
hearing.
So the first hearing was at the State administrative tribunal, which is where you go when
you want to appeal something under that act, and the appeal was won. The tribunal
ordered that AH and AB should be recognised as men. The state attorney general at the
time didn't like it very much so he appealed to the supreme court. The Supreme Court, in a
split decision, upheld the attorney general's appeal, so went back to saying that the two
men weren't really men weirdly not because AH and AB hadn't had a hysterectomy, but
because they didn't have penises. So we can perhaps call this the man without a penis
panic.
Had that decision been allowed to stand in WA we would have had the dubious honour of
being one of the only places in the world that required people to have full sex
reassignment surgery in order to have access to a gender recognition particularly in that
application for trans-men. And it effectively would have made it impossible for anyone to
get a gender recognition certificate. That surgery that they were asking for is not available
in WA or Australia, it's kind of a two hundred, hundred thousand, two hundred thousand
dollar surgery in Europe so the likelihood of people being able to meet that test was very
low.
So of course there was another appeal, this time it went to the high court which gave the
applicants special leave to appeal and after hearing the arguments unanimously upheld
the appeal and quite pleasingly I thought during the course of the hearing made it sound
like the whole this was a bit ridiculous and publicly questioned what the public interest was
in the state opposing AH and AB's recognition. The AG at the time didn't perhaps read the
hearing transcript or wasn't briefed on that particular criticism because for a moment there
he mused out loud that maybe the law needed to be changed given the high courts
change, but fortunately to his credit premier Barnett came out publicly and said that's the
end of that, thanks very much these people are very happy now and we'll leave it and
that's where it's been left.
The decision has since be reiterated in the state administrative tribunal, the gender
reassignment board as it currently stands seems to struggle occasionally with applying the
high courts decision to people as they come before it so if you hear about that get onto
them. And the state administrative tribunal has again reiterated that decision and said and
what it means essentially is that people who live in WA should be able to get access to
gender reassignment, to having their birth certificate changed on the basis of hormone
treatment only.
The really important thing about this decision too is that it helped create a precedent.
Whilst I was only directly applicable to WA legislation, it pointed a direction in terms of
where we should be going with this. So it's been referred to frequently both in national and
international context. It was used in a case in South Korea for example to help try and
push it all along. The next big development that happened was passports.
Now, passports might not seem like a big deal but they really are we had many instances
of people for example turning down jobs because it required international travel and they
either didn't want to have to out themselves to their employer about why this might be
difficult or they just didn't want to run the risk of a difficult immigration interview when they
were travelling. Even aside from international travel passports are a primary form of
identification and documentation. So people would find themselves having to have
conversations about their gender history with their bank tellers when they were trying to
open a bank account, with mortgage brokers when they were trying to get a mortgage, at
the desk at Centrelink, and a range of other places and it's really just not okay for people
to have to be cool talking about their transition to complete strangers in order to access
everyday services.
The passports issue was already on the radar, it had been bubbling along a bit, a few
people had taken complaints about passports through the Australian Rights Commission
and had gotten some favourable decisions but it was very much ad hoc, it was a case of
do you win passport lottery today or not which is pretty unsatisfactory. Until one day some
trans-woman in Queensland went and visited the foreign minister at the time Kevin Rudd
in his electoral office to talk to him about their experiences with being trans-woman and he
was so moved by their personal stories that he walked out of that meeting and into his
department and said I want you to find the places where we are discriminating against
trans-people and fix it. Something which I think really speaks to the power of personal
stories and sharing those stories is a way to help push reform along.
So what followed after that directive from the foreign minister probably I think one of the
most authentically consolation policy developments and processes I've ever been involved
in from either side where the minister's office, the department and trans and inter-sex
people really worked together to craft a policy. The conversation went a little bit like we
need to change the policy what would you like it to be? And the trans and inter-sex people
said could you give us this and they came back and said yeah pretty much. Which is great
when you're the person being consulted. So Australian passport policy is now some of the
best in the world – it could still do with some minor improvements – but it's pretty good.
Effectively you only need a letter from your doctor that says you are whatever you say you
are and then you can get a passport in that designator, and it includes the option for
people to have 'X' on their passport should they feel that that is appropriate for them.
Now believe me when I say this really was a life altering reform for some people, I will
never forget the trans-woman who came to me in tears saying that she would now get to
go back to the UK and see her family who she assumed she would never see again
because she didn't think she could travel or that it would be too hard, she was an older
woman, and now she was looking forward to seeing her family. In the meantime, whilst
these kind of biggish reforms were happening a really pleasing thing was happening which
was that the mainstream world was starting to understand that trans and inter-sex people
existed and so we started to be featured and included in policies and programs, not in a
tokenistic way, the TI often gets lumped in, in the abbreviation, but it doesn't mean
anything. Where as the Commonwealth introduced national mental health strategies, and
national age care strategies which they were funding, so they weren't just words on paper
they were actual things and both of them included very specific stuff around trans and
inter-sex people when the organisations responding to them had to address our needs.
Early last year there were then another three further significant changes that happened
almost at the same time. The first was the members(?) to the federal sex discrimination
act, there was the introduction of federal recognition guidelines for trans and inter-sex
people and there were changes to Medicare. Now, the anti-discrimination stuff had I think
possibly one of the longest gestations ever in terms of legislation, it would have been
several male pregnancy links I think. The draft legislation had initially been developed by
Nicola Roxon when she was the shadow attorney general way before 2007, before labour
every came to government at a federal level. And then there was a whole series of
parliamentary enquiries and consultations and conversations about it which of course
required constantly writing submissions and turning up at enquiries.
And then the legislation nearly died because it had been packaged up in that large,
consolidated anti-discrimination bill that came in for some pretty heavy criticism and then
got shelved when Mark Dreyfus took over as attorney general. Fortunately though he was
persuaded that whilst there might have been some problems and some challenges to work
through with the other discrimination, getting discrimination protection for not just trans and
inter-sex people but also same sex people into federal legislation was really really
important, so then they ended up looking at the sex discrimination act as their avenue to
do that.
It didn't end the fight though, because the next fight was about getting the exemption given
to religious institutions and organisations were moved from age care. So that no age care
could discriminate against people based on their sexuality, their sex or their gender
identity. Don't underestimate how hard that was, that entire bill nearly went down in the
house of representatives because the liberals didn't want to support it and it was only
through some very very clever back room wrangling with a couple of supportive liberal
people that that didn't happen.
Don't underestimate how important that is either, because many if not, well not all but
many many age care institutions are run by religious groups and elderly people who need
care are often at their most vulnerable so it's a really critical change. So the end result of
all of that incredibly long development was that LGBTI folks are now protected under
federal anti-discrimination law, which I think is especially important here in WA where our
anti-discrimination legislation still requires a little bit of work.
The second of those significant reforms I mentioned was the release of the federal
recognition guidelines which used the sex files report very much as a base to inform the
way they were constructed. They were again developed by the same group that worked
with DFAT on passports, so again there was a great process where the attorney generals
coordinated the rest of the public sector with that group to develop policy. And now those
guidelines very much mimic the passport policy, so a letter is all you need and you can
have an M or an F or according to whatever is appropriate for you.
The third big reform were changes to Medicare. So previously – not sure if people are
aware of this – but a number of items within Medicare were gender coded. So for example
if I had a pap smear and then rocked up at Medicare there would a “Computer says no,
Err, you're a boy, it can't possibly happen, you can't do that.” Or if you had a particularly
industrious Medicare official that you were dealing with they can magically change you on
the computer to a girl, pay your rebate and magically change it back to being a boy.
Obviously not a very helpful system. So a very thorough review by the department
removed almost all of the gender related markers on there, again lead to some very
interesting conversation when we got to pregnancy, yeah pregnant man panic again
appeared, but they did a sterling job of removing everything that they could just by
regulation, there's a few things that need some legislative change that they're still working
through slowly. And as an aside on that actually I have to say that when I see those
posters – you know the ones that say, “If a man could get pregnant, maternity leave would
be a universal human right” - and I chuckle at them probably for reasons that other people
don't but just in a way, the whole world frames this stuff.
So those three reforms around discrimination protection, around Medicare and around the
regulations round out a period of really a huge amount of positive change in a pretty short
time, it was really only three years. And when I reflect on how all of that happened in such
a short period of time I think there's kinda three key factors that contributed to it. The first
one is visibility. People maybe who have heard me talk before will have heard me give the
analogy that when I think about the progress of gay/lesbian rights I think it started with
visibility. It started with some brave gay and lesbian people coming out and being visible
and all of a sudden people had a neighbour or a brother or a work mate who was gay or
lesbian and they weren't some kind of freak that didn't exist. That then provoked
conversation about the fact that gay and lesbian people existed and what their lives were
like which then eventually moved into advocacy which eventually then moved into changes
in law.
I think it's very much the same for trans and inter-sex folks, except that we are a couple of
decades behind. When I came out as a trans-person which was on the front page of the
West Australian – no less, thank you politician girlfriend – it was about the time there
started to be quite an upswing in positive stories about trans-people in our media. More
trans-people coming out, talking about which can be quite a challenging thing to do. And I
know in my own experience and I think probably every trans-person that has come out
would say the same thing. Once those conversations got started, people who never really
thought about the fact that we existed or what our life were like was often quite shocked to
understand what was going on. To understand the legal situation and universally were
interested in how to make things better. So I think visibility has been a really really key
component there.
The second important thing I think was working in alliance. As I said there's only a tiny, its
genuinely tiny group of trans and inter-sex people who are actively working on issues, but
that whole group really trusted each other, still trust each other, they worked together and
they worked with the government as opposed to shouting at government from the outside
which I think is pretty critical to success, and works in alliance with other organisations
where there is some mutual crossover. So that's includes often gay and lesbian allies, but
sometimes there are some other crossovers with groups such as domestic violence
groups for example where some of our privacy concerns have some crossover. So working
in alliance is a way to take a small group, make it bigger, make it more powerful and
amplify those voices.
And the third thing I think that was successful was using all of the avenues. So we used
the courts, we used human rights institutions, parliamentary enquiries and submissions,
we directly lobbied MPs either with very factual evidence based arguments or with those
personal stories, we worked with allies, we used the media. And I think all of those things,
being willing to try and use everything helped make those issues very much stayed on the
radar.
I also want to talk about political party structures because I think one of the reasons why
that rush of things came through last year was because there had been a very significant
change to the ALP's party platform that talked about in very explicit terms what should
happen in terms of policy for trans and inter-sex people and it was incredibly powerful to
walk into a minister's office and say, “Your party's policy says you should do this what are
you going to do about it?” and to work with advocates within the party to have those same
conversations. So I would certainly recommend across all political parties is that what is in
their policies is incredibly important and incredibly useful as an advocacy tool. So excellent
progress has been made but there remains a lot to do, so I think we can do some patting
ourselves on the back but we can't slack off just yet. We certainly need a bunch more legal
reforms.
At a state level here in WA the equal opportunity act needs some tweaking and I know that
the commission here is very alive to that. Currently it provides protection on the basis of
your gender history. So that means the protection only kicks in after your agenda has been
legally amended and there's a little bit of ambiguity around exactly how or if intersex
people are covered under that legislation too. The problem with this is that the legislation
ignores the fact that a really critical time for discrimination for people is when they're
transitioning. That bit where people can't tell whether you're a boy or a girl and you can't
really tell whether you're a boy or a girl when you're looking at the mirror and often that's in
a workplace context, often that's out in public and that's a really vulnerable time for people
and there is no discrimination protection.
We also need changes to our gender recognition laws. So while it's great that we had that
high court decision our board continues to apply in not excellent ways so really, and the
law still requires people to have undergone some medical intervention. Elsewhere in the
world the general move is towards a human rights approach where people can self
determine their own gender and that's the direction I think our laws need to go in. There is
all kinds of arguments that get put up when you propose that to people and I think most of
them are a bit absurd when you unpack them. The first one that I hear all the time is
around security, if we let people pick their gender they might do it for criminal purposes. To
which I respond that if something as simple as changing the M to the F on your paperwork
enables you to get away with crime then I think the problems are in our crime detection
and our surveillance systems and our police rather than our trans-people.
There's the toilet argument or the penises in the ladies loo panic, to which I have a long
and four part response. The first is quite a serious response which actually says if you look
at the research it finds that trans-people are more likely to be the victims of violence in the
toilet than ever the perpetrators so let's be a bit real about what goes on here. The second
one is – I'd like people to put their hand up if they've ever been asked to provide a birth
certificate when accessing the toilet they wish to use – doesn't happen, so what's on your
birth certificate is completely irrelevant to which door you walk in your day to day life.
The third thing is that there is no law that says that men can't be in women's toilets and
women can't be in men's toilets, it's actually not a legal thing, and in fact if we're talking
about legal things there is no legal definition of what is male or what is female, they don't
exist as legal constructs. So we've spent all this time policing what you have to do to go
from one to the other but we've never defined exactly what male or female is. So the toilet
thing is a bit stupid.
Then there is the how will you cope if you don't have the right bits argument, or framed in
the contribution of one of the supreme court judges in AHAB what would men without
penises look like in speedos at the beach. Yes, he actually said that, actually in the
transcript. Obviously no one has ever told him about packers, no one's ever told him about
what happens to the testicles of boys who use steroids, and I'm not sure that a trans-man
in speedos would be more offensive than this particular judge in speedos at the beach. Not
to mention there is board shorts which is what I would hope many people would wear.
The other requirement that still exists in our gender recognition laws is the requirement for
people to be unmarried. Now this one I think is especially cruel. It is an attempt to avoid
same sex marriage by proxy. Even though subsequent federal attorney generals have said
there is no conflict, a marriage is whatever it is when you entered into it, if one person then
changes sex the marriage is still, if you're heterosexual at the time it was formed we don't
consider it a same sex marriage, but despite that, in WA and in all states and territories
except for the ACT there is this requirement that people be divorced. This of course put
everyone in the position of having to make the decision between do they maintain their
marriage or do they get their legal identity changed and that's an impossible decision to
force on people, and it's also really brutal on partners and potentially children who've been
with a person during their transition, stuck with them have maintained that family unit and
so they're dragged into this ridiculous thing about needing to be divorced if their partner is
to be recognised.
As I said these problems of medical treatment and of unmarriage are a problem right
across the country except for the ACT which just got legislation passed which is excellent.
Which takes out all of these stupid requirements for surgical intervention or for lack of, for
the need to be unmarried, and is exactly the kind of legislation that we should see rolled
out across every state and territory. And I have to say too that if you want to worry about
security the fact that under current legislation you could have a passport one gender and a
birth certificate in another gender when both of those things are cardinal identity
documents should be far more of a concern for people, and far more of a reason to get
some harmonisation across this then kind of concerns about anatomy in toilets.
At a federal level we need to get regis(?) exemptions out of all of our anti-discrimination
legislation. It's really good that they don't cover age care, but it's really bad that you still
have those exemptions in education and health care in particular not to mention
homelessness services, employment services and a range of other things. While these
exemptions are still allowed you can have situations such as – and this is not a
hypothetical – a trans-person in a regional town needs to go to hospital, the only hospital is
catholic run, they go there not for anything to do with their transition and they're there for a
while and the hospital refuses to let them access their hormone therapy, it's a really
significant impact on people's day to day life and we need to stop that happening.
My view is that if you get government funding, in any form, you shouldn't be able to
discriminate against anyone end of. We are after all all tax payers who provide the funding
and we don't get an LGBTI tax rebate. Which I think under the current system we should,
you know fourteen percent of your GST and income tax goes to fund services that won't let
you use them so have it back. I'd be happy with that too, if they want to do that too but if
not them we should change the law. We have very pressing needs too for reform on the
health and medical front, the sex files report identified the human rights implications of
what's called “normalising surgery on inter-sex infants” but an centre inquiry that was
conducted last year found that this was still going on with great regularity within Australia.
These interventions are very rarely for any kind of lifesaving or important medical purpose,
they are used to apparently normalise someone. They don't always align with the sex that
the person identifies with later on when they grow up, and they can have incredibly serious
consequences for a person's sexual enjoyment function and their reproductive function.
We haven't had a formal response from the government centre enquiry and it's a problem
that I would suggest needs urgently addressing given that one in two thousand children
are born inter-sex and these surgeries that are carried out on children who are way to
young to consent or have a good sense of themselves, really violate the integrity of their
body and have the potential to cause really significant harm. So we need to regulate that
practice out of existence as fast as humanly possible, and what we should be doing
instead is educating and supporting parents so that they can support their young person,
including in educational settings.
Access to medical transition for trans-people continues to remain problematic, especially
here in WA. There is some but limited services for young people and the system takes a
pretty conservative approach to what young people have to go through before they are
able to access puberty blockers and access cross-sex hormones. Again, a little out of step
for the general direction that the rest of the world is moving on.
Often this stuff is framed in terms of protecting a young trans-person's reproductive future,
something that I kind of smile at a little bit because as an adult no one ever spoke to me
about my potential reproductive choices, so there's this kind of weird contradiction that
goes on between children and adults. As an adult there are no public health options for
transition, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, hormone surgery they're all out of pocket and
there's not actually that many of them around either. So to use myself as an example I
currently want to do some tweaks to my hormone regime, I'm on a 5 month waiting list to
see an endocrinologist – fortunately I've got other hormones in the meantime – So I’m not
going mad unable to access services but other folks will be wanting to start transition and
will be stuck in that long wait and as a rough estimate on my medical expenses over the
last seven years I reckon maybe twenty five thousand dollars roughly, and that's bearing in
mind the fact that I'm a trans-man, and so the hormones that I have to access are simpler
and cheaper than what trans-women need to do. So it's a very expensive process that
people are expected to fork out of pocket.
It's particularly ridiculous given that as I've said our legal system requires you to have all of
these interventions in order to get gender recognition but then our medical system doesn't
provide for them so there's an inherent tension there. And it's a huge problem in terms of
people mental health and well being, it has a very direct link to people's experience of
anxiety and depression and self harm and suicide and tragically one in two, that is half of
all trans-people have attempted suicide, which is an astounding statistic that is not seen
anywhere else in any other kind of sub-population in Australia. In addition other transpeople try and self medicate or self treat which can lead to other complications and whilst I
would always support the right of someone to engage through sex work if they're doing
that through a free agency by choice, for some trans-folk they feel pushed into that as the
only way that they can generate any income to do what they want to do and that then puts
them at high risk because they're not doing that by choice.
So it's a incredibly false economy to not provide transition services in our public health
system when you then have all of these knock on effects, and its kind of appalling from a
human rights perspective too. We really need to address mental health, as I said that one
in two statistic is pretty shocking and that's just talking about attempted suicide, that's not
picking up all of the other broader mental health issues around there. I was very pleased
when the previous federal government introduced a mental health strategy that included
trans and inter-sex people and I hope, I really hope, that the current government continues
that but I have some concerns about the direction that they might go in.
As good as that strategy might be it's not enough of course, it's not nearly enough, we
need to do a whole bunch of work to address the causes of poor mental health in trans
and inter-sex people, including lack of access to treatment, including discrimination
particularly in schools, and we also need to develop targeted services and interventions
and messages for trans and inter-sex people themselves and the people around them.
And, you know, mental health professionals aren't the only ones who need training, I'm
pretty appalled that the training that our own medical students here in WA get is very small
and patchy, unless something has changed in the last couple of years I think it's an
optional, it's kind of an optional three hour class to find out about trans and inter-sex
people, sorry one hour compulsory, right. So I have to say, If I get knocked over by a bus
on the way out of here, I don't really want to have to go to the emergency department and
hope that the doctor treating me has done beyond the one hour compulsory and has done
the three hour optional extra. The level of knowledge in the medical system is actually
incredibly low by and large which also probably makes it unsurprising that there's a real
porosity of research around trans and inter-sex people's health.
We need targeted sexual health research and interventions, we need some longitudinal
health research and nobody really, my generation is one of the first generations that by the
time we are old people, will have spent the majority of our lives on cross-sex hormones
and we don't really know what happens when we get old and nobody is doing any work to
find out what happens and it could get pretty interesting when checking into age care
services. What happens if I get demented? Do I remember that I transitioned? If I don't
how do I handle that? How are my hormones going to interact with the other medicine that
you might be giving me? What's going to happen after I've been on testosterone for fifty
years? It'd make me eighty right? Fifty or sixty years, what's going to happen? None of this
research is being done.
These are all obviously big problems, we I think have knocked off a lot of the low hanging
fruit and the stuff that remains is big and hard to do. I think some of the anti-discrimination
stuff and the legal recognition stuff is the easiest of that big long shopping list of things to
address and I have some hope that with the ACT moving in with some good policy and in
party platform some of that stuff will change but it can feel a little bit overwhelming. There's
only a small group of people who are working on it and I think sometimes this is seen as
niche, it only affects a small group of people, it's not a priority, Knighting and Dameing is
kind of more important.
But I think we can get it done, I think that the relatively quick overview I've given of the
progress we've made in the last three years and how we got there should give you some
optimism and a sense of hope and I think that everybody in this room can play a role in
helping get us there. If you're gendered – for the people that aren't familiar that means
people who are not trans or inter-sex – you can be an ally, and that is so important given
there's only a small group of trans and inter-sex people who are working in this area.
Get educated, so well done for coming tonight. Get educated, talk to other people, so that
they can also get educated and think about either in your day to day work you can be trans
and inter-sex inclusive, think about how you can speak up in forums where the two trans
voices in the state might not be there, I'm oversimplifying but be an ally. That is incredibly,
incredibly important and to that end I certainly want to congratulate particularly the equal
opportunity commission for having this lecture series which I think really helped in that
effort.
If you're trans or inter-sex then I want to encourage you to tell your story. And I'm not
encouraging you to come out because for many people that's not right and that's not safe
and I don't say everybody should come out, I don't agree. But there are a lot of avenues
which you can tell your stories in a way that is confidential and doesn't have your name
attached to it. Particularly parliamentary enquiries and submissions are a great avenue for
doing that and the more stories we have out there, they're tangible examples of where
people are experiencing discrimination and not accessing services, the bigger a body of
evidence we have to advocate on them. So please tell your stories, get in touch with
activists you might know about how you can work with them even if you don't want to be
the public face that's fine but think about how you can convey what's going on with you.
And whoever you are, remember that change is going to happen only when our
governments and institutions make it happen. I know it can be incredibly frustrating
working from within them but actually we need really good people working from within
them. So if you can stomach it, get into those institutions, get into political parties and
change their policy platforms, think about what you can do within the bigger institutions
that helps move them all along. There's a place for advocating from the outside in, but we
need those good people inside to really keep things moving.
So in conclusion, as you probably gathered by now I am a big Dr Seuss fan, I even, one of
my tattoos is Dr Seuss related, in fact it's connected to the, “Oh the places you'll go” story.
And so as you think about the places that we need to still go in trans and inter-sex rights
and what you can do to help get us there I would like to leave you with the closing lines of
“Oh the places you'll go”. Which says, “Will you succeed? Yes you will indeed, ninety-eight
and three quarter percent guaranteed. So be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or
Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, you're off to great places, today is your day! Your mountain
is waiting, So...get on your way!” (Applause)