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Gender identity is so ingrained in our culture that we often don’t think about it until we meet somebody who doesn’t conform to traditional ideas of a “masculine man” or a “feminine woman.” Even with advances, such as the legalisation of same-sex marriage last year, being trans* presents legal and social problems (which cis-gendered people don’t have to worry about) simply because their personal identity does not match our arbitrary ideas of “male” and “female.” The word trans* is an umbrella term to include anybody from a diverse range of genders, sexualities, and identities who do not identify with a binary cis-gender. Identities include transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, and agender, among others. “Cis” is a word for people whose gender identity conforms to their biological sex as assigned at birth. Intersex people are born with both male and female physical characteristics.

I spoke to Dragonair* (alias chosen after her favourite Pokémon, which morphed from one form into another) about what it is like to be a transgender person in Dunedin. She says coming out was “awesome” and the support of the people around her has been “overwhelming.” But being transgender isn’t easy. “I am a woman,” Dragonair tells me, “but trans* is an undeniable part of that. If somebody asks I’d say female, but it’s the same as any minority or oppressed group. I don’t want people to think ‘this is my transgendered friend,’ it would be better to say this is my friend. Other than that, things like feeling generally uncomfortable or a point of focus in public spaces can often be a discouraging thing, especially if you’re shy anyway. I’m kind of trapped within tolerant circles – elsewhere I feel I am treated differently, like a novelty or something. I’ve also only recently come out, so my trans* experiences are limited. I fear the violence, hatred and discrimination many trans* people face. At my last job people used my old name behind my back. It concerns me to think of the opportunities I may be denied on the basis of my gender.”

She doesn’t feel she “should” have been born in a “different body,” as though there was some kind of mistake. She says, “That’s a common kind of phrase that’s used to describe transgender people but it doesn’t necessarily work for me because it implies some sort of pre-determined sort of thing, like there’s some kind of reason behind everything. It’s almost a religious idea. So ‘should have been?’ No. Another often repeated thing is ‘I’m a woman in a man’s body’ or vice versa. But I don’t think that that whole idea of having the ‘wrong’ body is really true in any sense. I think this idea of men and women and gender is almost arbitrary. I think a lot of it is social construct. Yes I was born a girl, in the sense that there was something kind of innate in me that made me think that my biological body was not correct or right. But I think that so much of my experience of being transgendered is social, and it can’t be captured in saying I was born this way. I think so much is what you are conditioned to believe.”

A common misconception is to conflate a gender with a certain sexuality. As transgender actress and producer Laverne Cox puts it, “Being gay is about who you want to go to bed with. Being trans* is about who you want to go to bed as.” Likewise, if somebody is attracted to a trans* person, they may feel unnecessary confusion over their own sexuality. Dragonair says, “I remember a guy once saying it would be gay if he wanted to make out with me, which is technically not true, but it shows people still have that misunderstanding. It wouldn’t be gay to make out with me because I’m not a man, I’m a woman.”

Education

A study from Auckland University of 8000 school children this year revealed that 1.2 per cent of them identified as transgender, and a further 2.5 per cent were unsure of their gender. Nearly 20 per cent of those who identified as transgender had attempted suicide and around 50 per cent had been physically abused. Yet there is a gaping hole in our education system that leaves many school-leavers uneducated about different queer identities, with most of sex education focused on heterosexual sex, safe sex, and reproduction. The burden then falls on members of the queer community to educate others on their personal identification, which often gets tiring and sometimes intrusive. Dragonair says, “If you’re presented with a concept and you don’t understand what it means, don’t make assumptions. Treat each person as an individual and don’t ascribe to them a whole set of ideas about what they may or may not be. Know that it’s OK to ask questions but remember self-education is a big thing. It’s not the responsibility of queer people to do that.” She compares the experience to an Indian woman with a bindi being constantly asked, “what does it mean?” when you could easily educate yourself about it. She says, “It would be kind of nice to just sort of hang out at parties and not have people asking you that. I don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking on behalf of trans* people because I’m telling you my personal experience.”

Dragonair doesn’t take offence to curiosity, but says, “It is an intimate thing and sometimes part of it is explaining to people that there are limits to what you can ask. I suppose the big thing is what “genitals do you have?” I haven’t actually been asked that too many times, which is good. It’s not always a conversation you’d want to have.” Not having virtual strangers asking about your genitals is a privilege cis-gendered people generally take for granted. Why should anyone feel they have the right to ask somebody that?

Most people have some concept of binary transitions, from female-to-male or vice versa. Things are perhaps more difficult for Kerry, who is non-binary gendered and asexual. “Either of those identities mean like a half hour conversation explaining what the fuck it means. It’s so tiring and it would be nice to be able to not have it assumed, or, failing that, to be able to come out and have people know what it means.” And it can get in the way of everyday life and study. Kerry is often asked questions about their gender and sexual orientation and says, “It’s not always particularly invasive stuff but a lot of political shit as well. It’s like, I’m just in a lab, I don’t actually want to have this conversation. I want to move on with my day.” In their experience what makes life difficult is this every day, low-level stuff. They say, “The big things are rubbish, but you know, you walk into a room and everyone gets your pronouns wrong, or hearing people make snide comment, and it’s like, oh, I don’t feel safe here.”

Transphobia

The malevolent effects of misunderstanding and intolerance are felt by Kerry who has been bullied by strangers for not conforming to a mainstream gender identity. They told me “The times that I’ve been the most scared were in first year. I was at Knox and I had to walk down Castle Street to get home every day. I was seventeen and just starting to figure shit out. I didn’t really have a support network like I do now. On the summer afternoons where you get groups of guys drinking on the lawns – they yell and throw stuff and it’s quite scary. It was like walking a gauntlet to get home every day. I got grabbed once going down Castle Street with my little brother who’d come down to stay. A bunch of guys threw something and we stopped, and they started yelling, “Are you a boy or a girl?” I ignored them. My brother was freaking out. He was fourteen. I ignored them and kept walking, but they came over and grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go until I gave them an answer. My brother was terrified.”

And the bullying often holds a threat of violence. Unfortunately this experience is so common for Kerry they have become hardened to it. They feel un-phased when people throw bottles at them unless it gets close to hitting them. If one of their friends gets cornered and harassed, they feel relief that they weren’t physically hurt. Kerry even said, “One of my friends got jumped outside their house by a couple of guys and punched a few times. They cracked one of the bones in their face. It was like, thank fuck they didn’t end up in hospital. It was a relief. Again, that’s especially with trans-feminine people. There’s a good chance of getting really, really hurt.” Verbal abuse is common. They told me “I was walking home a while ago and someone stopped in front of me, spat at my feet, and said “fag” and kept walking. I thought, “Yes! They didn’t think I was a woman!” That should not be my response to that!”

Toilets on campus

Queer Support have submitted a proposal to Vice Chancellor Harlene Hayne to get more gender-neutral toilets on campus, asking that half of all toilets be designated gender-neutral. The proposal also includes changing the standard male/female signs to include all male or female identifying people. Kerry explains: “We want all the signage changed on half of all existing bathrooms. We recognise that’s it’s important to have those single spaces available, especially for survivors of sexual violence. It’s not fair to force them into vulnerable, open spaces, but it’s also an important part of the proposal, acknowledging and getting sort of written support from the university that binary-identified trans* people are welcome to use the facilities of their identified gender. You shouldn’t be forced into the other gender or into the neutral spaces, which is what we are kind of worried about.” A signage change to include male or female identified people will hopefully increase awareness that gender is not always correlated to biological sex, and help people with diverse gender identities to feel welcome in gendered spaces.

“Passing”

“Passing” is the insidious idea that a transgender person is automatically aiming to “pass” as the socially perceived construction of the binary gender they identify with. It carries the implication that the person is not actually of the gender they are presenting, but are “passing,” like there is a test being sat, and as though if they make the mark they are succeeding at fooling the perceiver. It is a nasty, destructive concept. Dragonair is scathing of the concept of “passing,” saying, “I think it’s stupid on so many levels. It’s a very outdated concept. In older generations, everything was binary. If you came out as being trans*, you had to make the full change as much as possible, as though that’s what you should want, and that’s not the case. For example some transwomen might want to have hormone treatment, have hair removal, have breast augmentation and all these things but they might want to keep their genitalia. I think in old times part of the parcel was that you did everything possible. Another reason why it’s ridiculous is because you’re not passing, you’re being. So passing still implies the idea of trickery or defeat. It doesn’t hold to the idea that you actually are who you say you are, it’s not a façade, you are being. If you fail at this really arbitrary rule, it’s seen as a really bad thing. It shouldn’t matter. It’s a kind of disgusting thing. Like the idea that if I want to use a female restroom in public, I should be doing my best to present hyper-feminine so that people know that I’m really trying to pronounce my femininity and say, “I’m allowed to be here.” I don’t think that I should have to do that.”

“Passing” as a concept is a double-edged sword in that it implies that if the person doesn’t “pass” the arbitrary conditions of the observer then they have failed somehow, and if they do “pass” they may be perceived as having succeeded in “tricking” the general public into thinking they are something they are not. The idea of “passing” and it’s implied “trickery” is portrayed over and over again in mainstream media, with transwomen in particular depicted as people setting out to trick poor, innocent straight men into making out with women who have male genitals. In reality, the threat of violence regularly makes transwomen, in particular, very weary of so much as flirting with somebody without them telling them they are trans*, for fear of being accused of deception and “provoking” violence.

Transwoman Amy P. explains: “For a trans person, a cloud hangs over every flirty interaction. I met a guy at a social event recently and got the feeling he might have been flirting with me, but I didn’t know if he knew. I was scared a little the whole time because he was much larger than me. I waited a month and a half of hanging out, without so much as a touch on the arm, before telling him. It took that long for me to feel sure I’d be safe either way. If you’re saying to yourself, “Well, you shouldn’t have led him on!” remember that some men consider simply being in the room with them to be “leading them on.” You think I’d be safer wearing a sign around my neck? Some people are enraged just by the fact that I exist.”

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy presents further problems for trans* people. It is difficult for people to have their gender changed on official forms like birth certificates and passports, requiring the person to undergo psychological analysis and often to have begun physical changes like hormone treatment or surgery. To get gender changed to an X, showing an agendered identification, is practically impossible, and something usually reserved for babies officially identified as intersex.

Dragonair says, “It’s something that I feel should be a lot easier. The only thing that so far I’ve been able to change without having to pay money and sign a form is being asked to be called “Ms” by some people. You can’t ask to be called by a preferred name. Again, a little thing that’s not being beaten up in the street, but still adds to the frustration of showing that people aren’t accepting of change.”

The future

On the upside, Kerry says their involvement in the political movement has been wonderful and they feel that attitudes toward trans* people is starting to change. They say, “As soon as things get into the public eye, which is mostly thanks to Laverne Cox (who is the first transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy award), everyone gets excited about it. It’s going to lose its novelty value in a bit but at the moment everyone’s excited about it and it feels like things are changing. A spike in visibility is going to improve things at the ground level. Even if it still takes ages for the bureaucracy to change and you still have to get through all the paperwork, to get whatever transition healthcare you need, to have more of the general population understand it and be OK with it is going to make a huge difference.”

Both Kerry and Dragonair insisted they speak from personal experience and not on behalf of the trans* community as a whole. It is particularly important to remember that just as trans* people are expressing their gender identity, so are cis-gendered people; the only difference is that a cis-gender doesn’t invoke the same level of inspection from others. Dragonair says “Just the idea that you’re expected to behave in a certain way because of something biological. It’s ridiculous. Everyone comes into contact with gender, everyone is constantly presenting gender, everyone has a gender identity, but as a trans* person that your experience forces you to question it really, really strongly. Not everyone goes through that.”