‘Words matter’: time to talk about the real trans issues this federal election

Politicians have again missed the point. The discussion of trans-women in sport has failed to debate any of the real issues. Read more here:

IT HAS happened again; in as many weeks, feminist voices have questioned the legitimacy of my presence in these movements.

Trans rights have become political fodder for debate across the country.

My community, one of the smallest minorities in Australia, have become the target of rhetoric that conflates “trans people in sport as a women’s rights issue”.

The debate has become fictitious, with the Prime Minister Scott Morrison claiming teenagers undergoing gender affirming surgery was a “troubling issue”.

According to the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health trans teens don’t currently have access to what are often lifesaving surgeries.

Yet no one debated the issue of trans people’s access to healthcare.

Instead, the PM’s comments come after weeks of alarmist commentary from hand-picked Warringah liberal candidate Katherine Deves, which labelled trans people as “mutilated and sterilised”.

Deves’ comments were then backed by the Territory’s own CLP senate candidate Jacinta Price who said “if people didn’t stand up for women like (Deves) then the voices of other marginalised women .... don’t get to have a voice either.”

These prominent political women have dismissed the experiences of trans women and gender diverse humans despite our experience of the patriarchy being relatively similar.

Historically, trans identity has been labelled as a sickness and is still problematically categorised as body dysmorphia.

In Australia, to access specialised gender health services one has to be diagnosed with a mental health condition and the waitlist for gender clinics is often well over a year.

According to research by the Kirby Institute, nearly a third of gender diverse people earn less than $15,000 per year despite almost 75 per cent of us having a tertiary qualification.

What does this tell you about employment and wage parity?

The same research found trans and gender diverse people also experience sexual violence at four times the rate of the general public.

Statistics for gender diverse people show increased experiences of partner violence, homelessness, unpaid labour, violations of human rights and disparity in health and education. Furthermore, studies from UNSW show 50 per cent of trans and non-binary Australians will attempt suicide at some point in their life.

For these reasons, words matter.

Most of us have navigated a feeling that our bodies take up too much space but what if that same body was neither female nor male?

For me society has created a binary idea of gender that intersects with politics, and these parallels have become destructive.

I have grappled with my broad shoulders and size 12 feet often causing others to misgender me.

My child bearing hips are flesh over bones that will never shift for a foetus.

My breasts are both markers of my sexual pleasure and a disconnection with identity.

This six-foot frame is power and pain but when settling into my gender fluidity it was my identity as a feminist that I found the hardest to reconcile.

For most of my life I have heard trans discrimination from feminists circle; an inference that biological sex could somehow override patriarchal structures that attempt to contain us all.

In the recent months since I’ve moved to the NT I’ve bore both physical and emotional abuse targeted at my trans identity. As a woman I experienced the same.

For this reason making space for each other matters; belonging is core to our humanity.

Trans can mean many things but in the field of sport at elite levels it is still a medicalised process.

It requires a person to severely reconfigure their body composition using hormone therapy.

For trans-women it means high body fat and lower muscle tone.

It can also impact haemoglobin levels, a critical component in anaerobic fitness.

And while many cisgendered women continue to use fear to politicise my community’s existence in sport, the most important factor is overlooked.

Sport is community; it is a place of belonging and where my longest and dearest friends, some of two plus decades, were founded. Those friendships have sustained me.

They are the reason I’m alive.

So my message to these leaders is simple.

When you stop othering us, you together us.

Ultimately, what sits beneath my black lace G-string, or that of anyone in the sisterhood, is neither relevant to identity nor politics.