Coordinator's Report

by Elizabeth Riley

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Welcome everyone to 2002. I know by the time you receive this edition of Polare 2002 will already be well under way but such is the nature of bi-monthly publications. I hope everyone had an enjoyable festive season and that 2002 will be a fulfilling year for you all.

I am writing this on my first day back at work after a month's holiday. Katherine has informed me that she wants to get this issue off to the printers tomorrow so I have to write my report urgently. This leaves me with a bit of a dilemma since having been away I don't have a great deal to report on. I could tell you about my holidays but that would be about as exciting as viewing the holiday slides. In order to spare you that experience I think I might make some general observations about aspects of the transsexual experience.

In my report in the last edition of Polare I included a terse paragraph highlighting the problems of people who commit to an organised program and then fail to turn up. In that case it was a series of free aerobics workshops organised in conjunction with South Sydney Council and the Wolloomoolloo Health and Fitness Centre exclusively for transgender people. Despite eight people having signed registration forms, when the council bus arrived on the day only one person had turned up.

The inclusion of that paragraph drew critical responses from some community members. Those letters, and my responses, are included in this edition.

However, since the seeds of debate have been planted it may well be a valuable process to pursue some of the issues and hear some community opinion. In order to get the ball rolling I will dedicate this report to one of the more difficult aspects of our lives. What I propose to discuss is the process of transition, how as individuals we cope with that, and why, when it is all over, some in the community are effectively able to integrate into the wider community while others seem to find themselves constantly marginalized.

Let me begin by saying that I firmly believe the person who changes sex displays a higher degree of courage than anyone else, doing anything else, on the planet. One might be tempted to suggest that stepping into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson or jumping a motorbike over 40 London buses requires more courage. But these actions require courage only in the moment. Changing sex requires courage across a lifetime. Most of us will have experienced the non transgender person's comments about how courageous they think we are. These are sincere affirmations, not simple platitudes.

On to the subject of transition. Since the meaning of ‘transition' is imprecise, let me firstly clarify my usage of the term as it applies to these observations. Transition, here, is intended to convey that period of time beginning when the decision is made to live in one's new sex and ending at that point in time when that goal has been successfully achieved in the eyes of the individual concerned. For some it may take six months for some it may take six years. It is a highly individual journey and one that is fraught with challenges.

While few, if any, in the community will escape the issues that arise with family, friends, work colleagues and the wider community during this time, I think the most significant challenge is an internal one that arises from the quest for a new identity. What often happens here is we step out of an identity that we have been parented into, socialised into, cultivated into, legalised into and shoehorned into hoping to step into the new woman or man that we know ourselves to be. Instead we find ourselves in a void. The new woman or man doesn't quite exist yet.

In my pre transition years of living life in an unhappy sex, I would project my sense of self out onto those women in the world that were my ideal. As a child I wanted to be Doris Day (among others), as an adolescent I wanted to be Dusty Springfield and so on. When I embarked on my transition it was a bit of a rude awakening to discover that I was not any of these women. They were these women and I had to discover/invent my own woman and do so in a body that I had held in disdain for most of my life.

And so begins that process of reinventing, of re-parenting, re-socialising, re-cultivating, re-legalising (not without bureaucratic resistance) and re-shoehorning and largely we are dependant on our own resources and resourcefulness to achieve that. It is a time of experimentation with clothes, make up, jewellery, hair/wigs and so on and few can look back on their transition time without wincing in dismay at the choices we made. But that's okay because that's what experimentation is all about and it is the only route to one's reinvention. It is also a time of transforming to one degree or another those less than ideal bodies that nature lumped us with. With so much to attend to and no clear vision of where we will end up, it is not surprising that we frequently experience intense despair. Correspondingly, it can also be a time of extreme exhilaration and liberation. A time of intensified highs and lows in fact. Fortunately we can always blame the hormones.

Another characteristic of transition is the need to be accepted by others in order to validate ourselves. This is probably an aspect of re-parenting but it can be the source of great distress if we fail to gain that acceptance. And there are no guarantees that we will since we have no control over how others choose to behave. One of my significant discoveries during transition was the importance of self acceptance. The irony of self acceptance is that you find yourself less concerned about others accepting you and at the very same time others begin to accept you quite readily.

Once all of the above is done, and it's a lot easier in the writing than in the doing, the journey is complete. Or is it?

Having already acknowledged the courage and resourcefulness of all transgender people why is it that some in the community are comfortably able to integrate into the wider community and others not? Let me dispel one myth from the onset. It is not dependant on how well you 'pass'. If it were then some of the readily passing transgenders who complain of being discriminated against would not have cause to complain and some of the openly transgender people, such as Georgina Beyer (to name just one of many), would not be Members of Parliament. Clearly then there are more complex reasons.

Too complex in fact for me to address in the space and time that I have left available to me. I will have to continue with these observations in the next edition of Polare. In the meantime, however, perhaps others in the community would like to offer their views on this question. It may generate an interesting and beneficial debate so please jot down your thoughts and send them in.

(p.s. Constructive contributions only please. Inflammatory and defamatory commentary targeting individuals in this community, including Gender Centre staff, will not be tolerated in future editions of Polare).

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.