Features

“Arthur or Martha? Let the commission decide!” was NZ First's sensationalist response to the Human Rights Commission's Transgender Inquiry in 2008. “If you're born a male, you stay a male. If you're born a female, you stay a female. If you want to start fiddling around and changing your body, that's a decision you make and you must bear the consequences,” said Dail Jones, a member of the party at the time. Responses like these show that transphobia is alive and well in New Zealand.

 A big part of fear and intolerance is ignorance. Most people have never had the chance to speak with a trans person about their lives and choices. It is not something we're taught about at school. On TV and in the movies, trans characters are the butt of jokes or depicted as very disturbed individuals. Even when trans people are portrayed sympathetically, it's as people with an unfortunate medical condition where their bodies and brains are at odds. In reality, there is huge diversity within the group of people who identify as transgender. Critic spoke to two Otago students, Travis and Jake, who identify as trans males, about their unique stories and what it means to be trans.
 
   Travis never considered that he could be a trans man until he was at university. “I didn't have the concept of it before. My story is not that ever since I was little I knew I was a boy. My story is that I grew up as a girl, and that was all right, I had a pretty fine childhood. But once I had that framework, once someone said “I'm a trans man,” suddenly this world opened up to me ... then suddenly in my mind things just felt like they clicked, which was terrifying. But it felt very real.”
   Jake's journey from a girl to a trans guy was gradual. “I had a really non-gendered childhood. I didn't really think about the concept of gender except that I was told that girls can do anything. Including, as one of our trans guy friends said, “become boys.” I remember getting into high school and thinking, I don't feel like a normal girl, and I thought that's because I'm gay, or because I'm bi, or because I'm queer, or because I'm something. And that was fine. I did the kind of dyke-y thing from when I was about 15, and still dated guys, because I didn't feel like I couldn't, and that was okay too. Queer would have been a good word but I didn't know it at the time.” It wasn't until Jake went overseas during university and met a larger group of queer people that he realised what was possible. “I discovered there were all these different ways you could be queer, with gender and sexuality.” By the time he got back to New Zealand, Jake had realised that he definitely wasn't a girl.
    “It's been a gradual shift towards [me realising that] what feels more and more comfortable is being treated more like a male person than a female person. But I don't want to disown my female history. I like being a trans boy – I don't just want to be a boy, because that wouldn't be my past and my body, that would be something else. But certainly not all trans people feel that way. Some people just straight up identify as male and there's nothing trans about it for them.”
   The media seems to focus on one particular view of trans people. As Travis put it, “it's focused on sex change! And scandal! And this girl thinks she's a boy!” The popular idea of transgender people, and also often the medical idea, is of someone who is trapped in the wrong body. The story is of a person who has always known that they were the 'opposite' sex: little boys who wear dresses and play with dolls and don't understand why they can't grow up to be women. Some people genuinely identify with this narrative, and some don’t – it’s important to understand that there are multiple narratives and ways of expressing and experiencing our genders.
   Media and popular culture also emphasise surgery. The words ‘pre-op’ and ‘post-op’ are very common, despite the fact that surgery changes the outside appearance rather than someone's identity, and is not a choice every trans person makes. Travis finds this frustrating. “I'm still trans regardless of the medical system. I'm always going to be a trans man, that's what I am. I don't need surgeries to make me something else, it's more to help everyone else along.”
   The focus on surgery stretches as far as the legal system. A trans person in New Zealand cannot change the sex noted on their birth certificate until they have made a “permanent physical change” towards the “nominated sex.” Not only does this punish trans people who are unwilling or unable to undergo major surgery, but as Jake points out, “it's so incredibly classist. Surgery is incredibly expensive. There is a huge amount of trans people who will never be able to afford surgeries, and those people should still be treated as their gender identity. We should all be able to say what we are.”
   Although being transgender is not all about medical treatment, health care for trans people is very important. In New Zealand, there are currently no standard guidelines as to how transgender individuals are treated by the medical profession. There is a wide variation in the knowledge and understanding of gender identity issues between GPs, endocrinologists, surgeons, and others involved in caring for transgender people. 
   Jake is involved in a national project that aims to produce recommendations on improving access to and consistency of healthcare for trans people and creating a 'how to' resource for health practitioners working with them. He wants to see the system moving away from acting as gatekeepers whose role is to limit access to treatments like hormones and surgery, and towards supporting trans people and focusing on well-being.
   The medical view of gender variation tends to focus on the diagnosis of 'gender identity disorder'. This is a psychiatric condition that is applied to someone who identifies strongly with another gender and feels uncomfortable with one's 'own' gender, over a long period of time. For many trans people, the assumption that they must be mentally ill to feel the way they do is inherently offensive. As well, there is the problem that this diagnosis does not acknowledge the diversity of gender identities and presentations that exist.
   There are growing numbers of people who are refusing to accept the gender binary, the idea that there are only two possible or acceptable genders. There are people who identify as third gender or bigender or genderqueer, which as Jake explains is “someone who identifies as both or neither or something different altogether,” or as any other of a huge variety of descriptions. There is also an idea that for some people gender is fluid, and can change over time. “I’ve been a girl, a gender queer person, a trans boy – and none of these genders were ‘wrong’, it just shifted over time,” Jake says. “Like everyone else, I grow and change, and so does my sense of myself as a gendered and sexual person.”
   However a person defines themselves, choosing to change their external appearance to match their identity is an important step. “Gender is such a social construct – when I felt my gender was ‘boy’ and everyone around me thought it was ‘girl’, it was quite a process to get to the point where I insisted people see me and relate to me as a boy, r as a more-male, less-female person,” Jake says. “It’s empowering because I asked for, and got, recognition of the person that I am by the world around me.”
   In some ways, it can also be a scary process. “I think it's important to acknowledge the hard stuff as well as the good stuff,” says Travis, “I feel incredibly angry that people feel they have the right to yell at us, or stare.” Trans people have a greater risk of violence than the general population, and Jake and Travis have both been harassed for the way they present their gender, facing transphobic and homophobic verbal assaults. Jake wants to emphasise, however, that trans people aren't all abused and miserable. “There's definitely a real danger involved in presenting a different kind of gender… That goes for anyone, trans or not. I’m frustrated by the media telling us that trans people are either the victims or perpetuators of violence.”
   Often, the opposite is true. Both Jake and Travis have had very positive experiences with social support, particularly with the queer community around the university. However, Otago has further to go before it can really call itself trans-friendly. Often it's the simple things that make the difference, like having single-stall unisex toilets available on campus. Automatically walking into the right bathroom is something most students take for granted, but trans students can find themselves in a position where whichever one they choose, their presence there is likely to be questioned.
   There are things students themselves can do to make the campus a friendlier place for trans people. For a start, said Jake, “one of my thoughts would be stop policing gender, in general, on everyone.” It's not only trans people who suffer from bullying, abuse, or discrimination because they don't fit the gender role society expects of them. Over the last century, so many of the boundaries on what men and women can and can't do have loosened, but there are still very different expectations on how men and women should behave.
   It's hard to lose ingrained stereotypes about trans people. But in the end, we're all people. As Travis says, “It's great being trans. It's hard as well. But that's everyone's life, everyone's life is wonderful and hard.”
 
   The Vocab
   Words are important. Unfortunately, a lot of the words we can use to describe transgender individuals are not part of our everyday vocabulary. More unfortunately, a variety of derogatory words like 'tranny', 'she-male', and 'cross-dresser' are often what people use in their place. Here are some basics that will help out if you want to talk about gender without hurting people.
   Transgender or trans: An umbrella term for individuals whose gender expression or gender identity varies from conventional expectations.
   Trans man, trans guy, FTM (female to male): A transgender person who identifies as male.
   Trans woman, trans girl, MTF (male to female): A transgender person who identifies as female.
   Gender identity: What gender a person feels like on the inside.
   Gender presentation: How someone chooses to show their gender to other people.
   Pronouns: If you paid attention at school you'll already know that pronouns are words like he, she, them, and that they are used in place of nouns. When talking about a trans person, it's respectful to use the pronouns of the gender they present themselves as.
   Transition: The personal, social and possibly medical process of moving from one gender to another.
   Gender reassignment surgery: Surgery can be desired as a possible part of the transition process. Stop calling it a sex change. There are many kinds of surgery available to transgender individuals and many different ways to describe them. Gender reassignment surgery is a pretty good general term.
   Transsexual: Someone who identifies with the sex opposite to the one they were born with, often someone who has had gender reassignment surgery. For many people this word has a negative association with the diagnosis of transgender as a mental disorder.
   Gender binary: The view that gender can be neatly classified into two genders (and two genders only), male and female
   Gender queer: A term used by some individuals who have a gender identity other than man or woman. Someone may identify as gender queer because they feel like neither a man nor a woman, or that they have elements of both.