Tales of Tiresias

by Roberta Perkins

(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.)

It was July 1983. The phone rang and when I answered it a voice on the other end said: "Mr. Walker would like to meet you." An appointment was made and when I arrived at his office, Frank Walker, State Minister of Youth and Community Services, greeted me with the fact that he had read my recently published book, The "Drag Queen" Scene.

This was based on a study I had done on the transgender subculture in Kings Cross, and what had impressed - nay, disturbed - him about it most was the semi-nomadic lives young transgenders experienced, forced from their apartments by landlords and unable to get overnight residence in either a men's or a women's refuge - apart from " A Women's Place" in the Cross, which catered for young street women addicts and was always filled to bursting.

Walker's words have never left me. "Roberta, we have got to find them a place where they can lay their heads at night."

Two months later a cheque arrived addressed to me and a house was provided as a refuge strictly for trannies. In October the doors opened at 75 Morgan St. Petersham, and its twelve bed spaces - two double-bunk beds in each of three bedrooms - were filled immediately. On 14 December 1983 Frank Walker officially opened Tiresias House.

The Australian Transsexual Association (A.T.A.), had been founded by a small group of trannies including myself two years earlier at the Wayside Chapel, where I ran a counselling service and it became involved in organising Tiresias and appointed me as the first co­ordinator. The aim of the A.T.A. was to support trannies by advocating legal and social changes. The founding of Tiresias was its proudest moment. We spent an entire day discussing a name for the place and finally decided on Tiresias, after the hero in Greek mythology whose sex was changed by the gods from man to woman because of his disrespect for women. Ten years later after Tiresias admitted that sex was ten times better as a woman than as a man the gods changed her back, from woman to man. The name was retained for the first five or six years after which it was renamed the Gender Centre. In the meantime Tiresias' bed spaces increased to sixteen by turning the lounge room into a fourth bedroom.

Walker's department came to the rescue by providing us with a second house, located in Ashfield, which we dubbed Lili Elbe House, after the first surgical "sex-change" in 1930. A third house was provided in Haberfield, so that by mid-1984 we had a structured residential system from short-to-medium term accommodation.

The first group of residents consisted of young trannies traumatised by being cast out of their parental homes or drifting around the Cross searching for identity roots.

Apart from the occasional tantrum, they caused few problems and were ideal refuge residents. By mid-1984 a new group sought accommodation. These were trannies who had spent time in gaol and were on parole.

Most of them had worked on the streets to support a heavy addiction.

They were victims of a swift change in prostitution laws that drove them from the streets and forced them into holding up banks to pay for their raging habits. The term in prison had sobered them but they were badly in need of social welfare support. I had been visiting them in gaol and came to an arrangement with the Department of Corrective Services to have Tiresias registered as a halfway house for their benefit.

It wasn't long before the parolees were back on drugs and "cracking it" in the Cross. Worse still, the house mix of these street-wise trannies and the earlier group of naive middle­class kids proved to be a disaster, for the latter were soon also on drugs, working the streets and rapidly losing their innocence.

Things began to go from bad to worse when police clamped down on the streets and "my girls" began picking the pockets of guys in the local pub. I told them that if they had to roll their customers they should do it in the Cross, where it is expected and not "shit in their own nest" in Petersham.

Soon, we had guys outside the house yelling they had been robbed, local gangs threatening to break in and rape and bash the lot of us, and police, who had earlier provided protection against local bullies, now banging on the door and carting residents away.

Walker's department once more came to the rescue by providing a fourth house alongside the Petersham railway station. These premises became the official halfway house complete with a detoxification unit and residential nurse. Designed to keep the parolees and the "nice" middle class kids apart, it ultimately failed because the parolees were either back in gaol or had drifted away from Tiresias. Some ended tragically, dying young of an overdose, suicide or AIDS. In some cases, the process reversed with the middle class kids providing a positive model for the parolees to find a straight life and they often shared medium-term accommodation harmoniously in Lili Elbe House. While I managed to keep Tiresias from going completely chaotic, in spite of continuous infighting, the most unfortunate incident was not due to the incompatible mix.

It occurred in 1984 when one of our original residents decided he no longer wanted to be a woman, which was okay, except he turned on Tiresias by going to the media and accusing us of forcing him into women's clothes and getting him hooked on heroin.

These were indeed dark days for me, having to publicly defend my reputation and that of Tiresias House. My staff were driven to nearly insane by the media barrage and I was convinced that Tiresias' days were well and truly numbered. In the end Walker's department proved to be true stalwarts and the Minister placated his nervous parliamentary colleagues by assuring them that it was all an overblown fabrication. These first two year period of Tiresias was the roughest for all of us - residents, staff and me - after which a period of relative stability followed. At times I had been brought to the brink of a breakdown, but I survived. I left in 1985 convinced Tiresias had passed its teething problems unscarred. Only you can judge in was correct.

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.