Polare 75 Editorial

by Katherine Cummings

(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.)

We all have families. I am not referring here to the families we make for ourselves, the friends, colleagues and lovers we accumulate after we have come out to the world and become the people we were always meant to be. I am writing here of the people to whom we are related by blood, or through marital ties.

These families come, in Mr. Eastwood's immortal phrase, in various guises which can be defined as Good, Bad or Ugly.

The Good families are those who accept the diversity of nature and the truth that the person who transitions is the same as the person who has not yet transitioned.

They recognise that love is love, whether it wears pants or a skirt (or neither) and that love is seated in the brain, not the genitals and should be based on reason, not emotion. The cover image for this issue of Polare shows one such family. Zoe Brain has retained the love of her son and her partner and they are going forward in life in the belief that people love people and sex / gender is less important than 99% of the world seems to believe.

Read the words of Zoe Brain on the inside cover:

"In Transition you usually lose everything. But not always. And marriages may change but close friendship and sisterhood remain. And always, always the love of a parent for her child."

Everyone is different and everyone lives inside his / her own head, so my evaluation of a person is bound to be influenced by my own thoughts, beliefs, fears and experiences. Yet, for what it is worth, I think that Zoe is being repaid by her family for the love and care she invested in them when she was someone else.

The lucky part is that they have not forgotten who she was before they (and she) found out she is Zoe. And my belief that Zoe is an extraordinary person is reinforced by the item I printed about her in Polare 74 when she demonstrated the true spirit of Christmas by making it financially possible for a transgendered woman to pay the legal costs to obtain custody of her child ("Always, always, the love of a parent."). Zoe is an extraordinary person. She writes a blog on many, many subjects which interest her and this blog is fascinating and informative. One of her musings ("Five kinds of gender") appears in this issue. There will be mote of Zoe's thoughts in Polare in the future. Meanwhile on with the Families rant ...

There are Bad families, and I use this term loosely, because usually Bad families aren't bad at all. They may be unthinking, self-centred, misled by popular prejudices or simply too selfish to let go of what they are comfortable with in order to make someone they have loved and who has loved (and probably still loves) them part of a new relationship.

Family love is too precious to be switched off without making every effort to keep it alive. The transgender who is transitioning is coping with many, many new aspects of life and may seem to be totally self-absorbed, but if the Bad families, the ones who believe they are the victims, would make more of an effort to keep love alive, I think in many cases they would succeed.

And then, alas, there are the Ugly. These are the families who actively persecute the transgender within their gates. They take every action open to them to make the transgender's life harder than it need be. They resort to social sanctions, to legal persecution, to lies and gossip and vilification in order to destroy the person who has, in the terms of their twisted code, let them down. Often there is little that can be done in response to this kind of cruelty, as it stays within the limits of the law, but on those occasions when it is possible to fight back, we should. We should use the law where it is appropriate; the media to put our point of view; truthful information to influence the minds of people who might otherwise be receptive to the lies and gossip that make it harder for transgenders to live tranquilly in society, stay in employment and persist with their education. We have legal, social and medical rights but we must have the courage to assert them or they will be eroded and undermined until the small gains we have made disappear back into the morass of bigotry and prejudice.

This Polare also carries a submission to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by Kathy Noble, on the need to make it simpler for transgenders from Britain to be recognised in Australia and have their documentation revised accordingly. Kathy has included some highly evocative letters from victims of Australian policies. Kathy is a hard-working and determined toiler in the vineyard of transgender rights and we thank her for her efforts.

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.