‘In the middle of a civil rights struggle’: Trans community’s call to arms

It is a figure “burnt into the mind” of parents of transgender young people, said Eloise Brook.

Almost one in two trans young people had attempted suicide – a rate 20 times the national average – and four out of five had self-harmed, according to a survey published in 2017 by the Telethon Kids Institute.

Brook, a writer, advocate and academic who is health and communications manager at The Gender Centre in Sydney, said the centre saw “347 families in the last financial year, and of those families 67 were on suicide watch”.

Dr Eloise Brook outside the NSW inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crimes.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

“As our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and siblings were about a decade or two ago, we are in the middle of a civil rights struggle to be able to further the lives of our community,” she said.

The trans and gender-diverse community was at greater risk of violence than ever before, Brook told a NSW inquiry into hate crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people on Thursday.

It was experiencing “unparalleled” levels of violence globally, coupled with transphobic and discriminatory media reporting.

‘We are in the middle of a civil rights struggle to be able to further the lives of our community.’

Dr Eloise Brook from The Gender Centre in Sydney, speaking about the challenges facing the trans and gender-diverse community.

“We live in a world where weekly we have another international article targeting trans people, whether that’s in sport, whether that’s children,” she said.

“This year in particular we have seen a federal election; we’ve seen an American midterm, we’ve seen in the UK as well the forefronting of trans identity as being somehow a central aspect of policy or of platforming towards re-election.”

Brook said in most instances those campaigns “failed, because the wider community of Australia and even the UK and also the US can see how problematic, dangerous and discriminatory it is”.

“But that comes at a cost. [That] unrelenting negativity that washes through social media and across our media in general has a wearing effect upon the resilience of our community,” she said.

“We are all hands on deck trying to make sure that we can bring our community through whatever it is that we would call this at the moment.”

In a statement tendered at the inquiry, Brook pointed to Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire as fuelling “hateful and transphobic discourse against trans women in particular”. The same arguments were “still often wheeled out and recycled”, she told the hearing.

The NSW inquiry, a world-first, has called a string of witnesses to help illuminate the “social, legal and cultural factors affecting the LGBTIQ community” in the 40 years from 1970 to 2010, before it trains its sights on a series of suspected hate crimes.

Headed by Supreme Court Justice John Sackar, the inquiry will explore dozens of deaths in NSW during that time after every known unsolved homicide from those years was reviewed – totalling more than 700 cases.

The trans and gender-diverse community was swept up in the violence affecting the wider LGBTIQ community in the 1980s and ’90s, the inquiry heard, but they also faced a real risk of being rendered “invisible” in official data.

“The 2016 census for the first time attempted to collect some data on the trans and gender diverse community,” counsel assisting the inquiry, Kathleen Heath, said. “According to that census, how many people would be part of the trans and gender-diverse community?”

“One thousand, two hundred and sixty-three,” Brook said.

Asked if that was an accurate figure in her opinion, Brook said: “It sounds like The Gender Centre’s Facebook Group.”

Of the 88 deaths considered by Strike Force Parrabell, a police review of deaths between 1976 and 2000 suspected to involve gay-hate bias, only three people were known to be trans or gender diverse. Brook said this was unlikely to be the true figure.

“Up until 2020, or 2019, we could account for two trans women in particular who had died by violence, which was not reflective of the kinds of disadvantage that the community was experiencing,” she said.

Brook said the trans and gender-diverse community had long had a “fraught relationship” with police but The Gender Centre worked on building rapport, and she acknowledged the work of LGBTIQ liaison officers, known as GLLOs, in making themselves more accessible.

Their work was “really appreciated, but they represent a small section of the police”, she said.

Crisis support can be found at Lifeline: (13 11 14 and lifeline.org.au), the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467 and suicidecallbackservice.org.au) and beyondblue (1300 22 4636 and beyondblue.org.au)

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