But for the morbidly curious, here is the Opera House website description:

It really is a hard-knock life for ten year old little orphan Fannie (Trevor Ashley).  His parents left him in a basket on the doorstep of the Sutherland Shire Children’s Orphanage with nothing but a bracelet and a bottle of Stoli.  Now he is desperate to get his long-overdue gender reassignment surgery, but there’s so much standing in his way: including that boozy matron Miss Trannigan (Rhonda Burchmore) who has just been listed on the sex-offender registry, and is bitter from years of Logie losses.  Thank God Fannie has a bunch of foul mouthed orphans and his/her trusty ex-sniffer dog to help him/her survive.

When word gets out that multi-millionaire / amateur photographer Daddy Warlow is on the lookout to take in a young ward, Fannie sees her way out! But first she’ll have to pass a rigorous set of blind auditions, a “very arty” photo shoot and an appearance on evil talk-back radio personality Ellen Jones’ show. Even then, there’s still no guarantee for her sex change… she may need a Christmas miracle!

Featuring songs, audience participation, and out-of-work television personalities, this brand new adults-only panto will have you in fits of laughter… and wishing that you too could be adopted by a sexy bald millionaire.

I know, right?  How clever.  Such devastating wit.  Such close attention to the lived realities of trans lives, to be able to make humour from marginalisation and social rejection.  Utter, utter genius.  etc.

Chai edi Padilla has an excellent note on Facebook that’s worth reading about this, but I’m going to keep it simpler.  A text like this is essentially ventriloquism, a display of male entitlement over and aggression towards trans women.  Scripted by a man, a female character to be played by a man (reinforcing societal perceptions of trans women as “really” men), for an audience, for laughs.  Setting up trans women as punch lines, using a slur for a title, a slur that itself frequently accompanies violence, and giving that slur ever extended currency in the public sphere.

And the Sydney Opera House legitimises this.  This is vicious, blatant sexist transphobia, masquerading as light-hearted entertainment.

You can contact the Sydney Opera House here, if you wish to complain.

---

Related posts:

1. Review: Lady Sings it Better
2. Arsehat alert: misuse of the word “victimisation”
3. The new Australian passport regulations

I have complicated feelings about Australia Day, as the celebration of English colonialism.  There was a piece on the ABC’s The Drum this morning from Liana Neri, an Italian-Maltese woman, about loving Australia and not being a bogan.  As a Greek Australian, I understand the urge to embrace the country which your family has emigrated to, but this analysis to me seems to rush too quickly over the bloodier pasts of our country’s history and present.  The Aboriginal tent embassy has been going for forty years today.  Forty years.  Forty years, and there is still so much work to be done.

image via There's Our Catastrophe via Siriusly Deep on tumblr | original source unknown

It’s not just “bogans” who make the display of patriotic pride so problematic, it’s our foundation on a colonial violence that continues from the sailing of Captain Cook Phillip into Botany Bay in 1788 that we “celebrate” today to the Intervention in the Northern Territory.  Racism has been a huge part of our history as a country, has been a huge part of our governmental policy, and it is a huge part of the way that Aboriginal and other non-white people experience Australia today.  So it’s not simply the apparent tackiness of the particular codes (the flag cape, the fuck off we’re full sticker) that stand for Australian white racism, it is the violence those symbols and rhetoric is embedded in.

It was only seven years ago that the Cronulla race riots happened in Sydney, a month and a half before Australia Day.  Looking at the pictures of the participants, it is very hard to tell the difference from a particularly rowdy Australia Day celebration.  The Cronulla riots were a reminder of not just the racist violence against Aboriginal people, but against Muslims, Lebanese people, and more.  One of the most surprising things for me to experience out of Australia was people saying–even in the American South!–Australia’s really racist, isn’t it?  On Australia Day evening, the hum of beer and violence is in the air at the Perth foreshore, just as surely as the fireworks.

And personally, I hate that.  I hate that there is such a strong implicit idea of who an Australian “is,” and how racist and dependent on assimilation that is.  I hate the way that is enforced with violence and ugly rhetoric, and I hate the policies that our country mobilises against Aboriginal communities and refugees.

And yet.  For all that I hate what Australia Day represents, I am more homesick than usual today.  Because for all of its many faults, I do love Australia, and I do miss it.  It is home to me, and it will perhaps always be.  Australia Day is also my aunt’s birthday, and I miss celebrating that with her and the rest of my family, too.

From across the ocean, it is easy to romanticise Australia, to shrug off the serious ethical challenges that Australia Day poses as a person with anti-colonialist sympathies and solidarities, to simply just whack some Vegemite on some toast, put on the Hottest 100 and slurp down the Bundaberg that I managed to track down and mumble a little bit of “Advance Australia Fair” to my uncomprehending partner.  I might be in America still, to misquote the Waifs, but that is too easy.  You don’t just wave away history and your complicity in it like that.

What is clear to me then, is that what I need to properly celebrate Australia Day, to properly hate Australia Day, is to be in Australia.

---

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Australia Day / Invasion Day
2. Friday Hoyden: Sekai Holland
3. Australia Day Corso racist displays: Sharon realises she’s busted, rings 2GB

This is definitely progress, and very good news for trans men and women and intersex people indeed. Obviously it’s left out non-binary people, which is less good. And the general medicalisation of sex and gender diversity is kind of an issue – it definitely seems to be framed with trans men and women on hormones in mind (though there is some wiggle room over what “appropriate” might mean I suppose). So there are distinct exclusions.

Still, this is a huge step forward in shifting the definitions of legal sex and gender away from genitals into something more holistically lived for transsexual, transgender and intersex people in Australia.

---

Related posts:

1. Round up the lawyers! A trans person wants a correct birth certificate
2. Breastfeeding children and women a “low priority” – Western Australian parliament
3. Quick Hit: Want Androcur? Join the Sex Offender Registry!

"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it "
- George Santayana

International Transgender Day of Remembrance

But if you look at the report, you’ll note that there isn’t a murder reported in Australia over the last year, so why should Australians be commemorating this day? My answer is this: murder is only the most notable aspect of societal transphobia—and that, Australia has in spades. Violence against trans people is institutionalised, and pervasive.

As a trans woman, I have learned to live with the the threat of violence. In my first year of living out in Perth, I was assaulted, threatened with death, sexually assaulted numerous times, called various slurs by random strangers, spat on, harassed by Transperth guards, and given appallingly substandard medical care.

You learn very quickly that you are not valuable, you are despised, disposable, always in a precarious position (especially with regard to institutions). Every time you have to show your identification and it has the wrong sex, every time you have a cold and your voice has dropped to a gravelly rasp. You never really know when it might come, or how bad it might be.

A couple news stories involving trans women make this clear. In 2007, white Sydney trans woman Bridget Fell was outed by the police to her boyfriend, who then beat her so seriously she was hospitalised for several days. “Mate, you’re rooting a bloke,” they told a man known to be violent. Fell had come to the police for their help.

In 2009, Veronica Baxter, an Aboriginal trans woman, was placed in a male jail against NSW policy for handling trans inmates. Six days later, she was found dead, hanging in her single cell. Protestors have called for an inquiry, though as with so many Aboriginal deaths in custody, none has been forthcoming as far as I’m aware.

Trans women are often placed in the wrong sex prison in many states (the risks of rape and violence in that situation should be clear), with the dividing line being the ability to have accessed SRS—something that can take years to jump through the psycho-medical hoops for. But even for those lucky enough to have had that treatment, those hard-fought policies may not protect, anyway. Similarly, with homeless shelters, indeed any form of sex segregated institution or service. Trans people’s lived sexes are simply not treated as real enough to be respected, by institutions, laws, police, doctors, the media (note the uncritical reproduction of the transphobic police perspective in the Daily Telegraph coverage of Bridget Fell’s case), and on the street.

So it’s hard to know the true shape of the problem of transphobia in Australia because we so often fall through the cracks, reported wrongly as our assigned sexes, or just plain unmourned at all. Or we learn as I did, to not report, to distrust cissexual authorities who may just as easily cause you more harm as help.

And this, as much as anything, is what we should remember on Transgender Day of Remembrance. Yes, remember the dead, remember their names, their lives and their circumstances of their deaths. TDOR allows us to note the most visible and virulent forms of transphobia in this world. But we must also remember that it does not emerge in a vacuum. Transphobia lurks everywhere, unacknowledged, in public life in Australia.

---

Related posts:

1. Libra’s new transphobic ad, and what you can do about it
2. Light a candle: Transgender Day of Remembrance
3. The new Australian passport regulations

Conor Montgomery, 50, was born a female in Australia but took male hormones, had a double mastectomy and a chest reconstruction 2½ years ago to become a man.*

His passport says he is male but the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages will not convert his birth certificate because he has not had genital surgery.

Now, normally I think the obligatory media mentioning of hormonal and surgical status of a trans person is irrelevant and objectifying, but it’s for once it’s actually relevant here.  Like most other states in Australia, New South Wales requires trans people wishing to have the correct documents to undergo genital surgery, namely SRS or Gender Affirmation Surgery. For those that are unfamiliar with the arcane institutionalised machinery that is Australia’s management of trans people, this requires

1.  the physical ability to have the surgery

2.  the ability to pay for said surgery or

3.  the ability to negotiate Melbourne’s notoriously awful Monash Gender Clinic, who may well refuse you treatment anyway should you not mean their ableist, fatphobic and gender-normative standards

Mr Montgomery’s doctors, however, advise him that this surgery is potentially life-threatening and advise against it.  What this means, of course, is that he’s stuck in an impossibly ambiguous legal situation, with a male passport and female birth certificate.

Mr Montgomery is far from alone in fighting Australia’s outdated transition laws.  In Western Australia the case won in September last year by two trans men to have their documents changed is still dragging out in appeals.  The Western Australian case in particular demonstrates the kind of antipathy that Australian governments have towards their transsexual populations–it wasn’t enough to lose, rather than accept the loss or even God forbid bring in a new gender recognition regime that doesn’t require expensive, painful, sometimes risky surgery,* they had to appeal and do this thing once again.  Yeah, that’s a great use of public resources.

As both cases have made clear, the New South Wales and West Australian governments are terrified of trans men getting pregnant, of having Australian Thomas Beatties.  Hence the drive towards the mandatory sterilisation that is SRS.  Couple that with the law against already married trans people changing their documents, and you see how much institutional effort is being made to “protect” the legal categories of male and female, and heterosexual coupling and parenthood from the transsexual “contamination” (not to mention, gay marriages).

Clearly, state laws need to change, and the genital surgery requirement to change documents should be abolished to make way for other more humane and sensible requirements as in the UK, where medical and psych evidence, two years living in your sex and an declaration that you won’t change back suffice.  Trans people shouldn’t require surgery and singleness to have the correct documents, shouldn’t be put at risk of very real discrimination in order to reinforce some abstract ideas about what men and women “are” and what their bodies can do.

*   SRS gets a lot of scaremongering so I want to point out that it’s not inherently dangerous.  All surgery comes with some risks.  Trans people who wish to access SRS can and should be able to, it’s the mandatory compulsion to under Australian law that I object to.

---

Related posts:

1. The new Australian passport regulations
2. Quickhit: Trans men still fighting mandatory sterilisation in WA
3. The legacies of trans-exclusive feminism (aka why are you angry?)

But for me, this isn’t just an anger about Daly, this is about the legacies of second wave feminism—and more, pertinently, the way its effects linger in the present.

As a number of people have pointed, as well as her pioneering work in feminist theology, a great deal of Mary Daly’s legacy is marred by racism and transphobia.  As Sady said:

Daly hated on trans people something fierce. This has been sort of lightly mentioned and hinted at elsewhere, but I have to tell you this in plain language: MARY. DALY. HATED. TRANS. PEOPLE. Particularly trans women. She intimated, at times, that they were part of a plot to eliminate “real” women, and to assign “men” all “authentic” female functions. She also said that they were like whites putting on blackface (yeah: Lorde might have been right, about the whole appropriating-other-people’s-oppression thing?) and implied that they should have bodily violence done to them, or at least should be physically intimidated, by “real” feminists, so that they could not enter the feminist movement or feminist space. Let’s not be coy, here: no matter whether she believed this for her entire life, no matter whether she privately got over it later, she published it,This, right here, is the face of the oppressor. without apparently ever publishing a retraction, as far as I can tell. This is hate. This is privilege.

I’ve read a number of people make apologetics for Daly, that she was a product of her time, it’s all in the past, that we should take the good with the bad, nobody’s perfect etc.  Or that hey, she was a woman so.. uhh.  it’s ok to wistfully long for genocide, even if you never act on it?  Or that she wasn’t really transphobic, she was just against the medical establishment, or that she wasn’t transphobic at the end or in person.  One person has suggested at Sungold’s that she had personal knowledge Daly changed her mind on trans women in private.  Ok, fine, I can accept that as a possibility, though it seems to me that if you’ve made a genocidal argument in the past, you may wish to publically recant that.

And that seems wildly insufficient to me, not because that isn’t true, but because the shape of the problem has been barely defined.  It wasn’t just words.  No, she weren’t out there killing trans women, but the transphobia of Daly and other feminist writers has and continues to have consequences, flesh and blood consequences.

The problem is this.  Mary Daly had a substantial hand in creating the specifically feminist form of transphobia that continues to affect trans women today.  She, along with her former PhD student Janice Raymond, Germaine Greer and others beyond their mistakes in the utopian days of the 70s gave sustenance to yet another generation of transphobes from Sheila Jeffreys to Julie Bindel—feminists who argue in the name of (a certain kind of) feminism* against trans women’s rights—against legal recognition, against access to necessary medical treatment, against anti-discrimination policy, and against our ability to access women’s homeless, domestic abuse and rape shelters.

So part of why I and other trans women remain angry at people like Daly is this is not past for us.  Feminist transphobia has unfortunately segued rather neatly into the institutionalised cissexism of the State.  To choose two examples—the Vancouver Rape Centre enlisted the British Columbia Supreme Court to stop trans woman Kimberley Nixon from working for them.

In Victoria, which has the most comprehensive gender identity anti-discrimination laws in Australia extending to pre-op and no-op trans people as well as post-op, a case tried by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in 2007 effectively negated the rights of transsexual and transgendered women to be housed in a women’s shelter in Victoria (as well as denying trans women the right to be employed in that shelter).  In Hanover Welfare Services Lt (Anti Discrimination Exemption) VCAT 640, a women’s homeless shelter was allowed the right to refuse to house trans women if it so chose.  Here is the justification for the ruling by C.L. McKenzie, Deputy President of VCAT:

It [excluding trans women] seeks to provide safe and secure accommodation and services to women and goes no further than is necessary for this purpose.  It seeks to ensure that that services are provided to vulnerable and homeless women in the best way that will meet their needs and not make them feel threatened and traumatised

Note the wording.  First that “women” and “transsexual women” are mutually exclusive categories, and therefore it is acceptable to exclude transsexual women from women-only spaces and employment.  Furthermore, (cis) “women” require safe accommodation, whilst transsexual women are conjured as threatening and traumatizing and presumably not in need of safe and secure accommodation. Trans staff, moreover, are presented in the same way, for “it would be inappropriate if the staff at these services were not women” (n.pag).  The mere presence of a pre-operative trans woman, therefore, is being legally enshrined as threatening, emotionally violent in some circumstances, whilst the very real violent erasure of trans women by cissexual women is elided under the sign of “women’s safety.”

I am happy to say that Hanover eventually reversed its decision itself, but the point I want to make is that as far as I’m aware the law in Victoria remains the same—“women only” spaces do not legally include trans women.  So even in those few rare places where there are gender identity protections in anti-discrimination law (which WA does not, and New South Wales is vague and only covers post-op trans people), trans-exclusive exemptions often apply—leaving us either excluded, or dependent on the whims of cis providers.

The most famous example of trans-exclusive “women’s only” spaces is of course Michfest, but as an ethos it stretches well beyond a musical festival (seriously, Do Not Care one bit).  The problem is, trans-exclusive “women’s only” space remain very often the default for—and this is acknowledged or unacknowledged, an idea as often as not that has had its roots in feminist thought.  The consequences on trans communities of trans-exclusive “women only” has been catastrophic, and continues to be.

To choose just one example: In November 2008, a trans women named Jennifer Gale froze to death in Austin, Texas, because the Salvation Army would not house her with the women—and further, completely disregarded her identity as a woman, using the wrong name, pronouns etc.  In short, they were abusive enough that she went out into a winter cold that she froze to death in.

Now think, homelessness is a massive problem in the trans community, and for trans women, being housed in “men’s” shelters, as well as being unpalatable, puts us at the risk of violence and rape.  A year ago I rang around a number of homeless shelters, and none of them actually had a policy on trans women.  Given the institutionalised cissexism of institutions, I’m willing to bet that in practice when presented with a trans woman needing help, they’d put her in the wrong shelter—if they even let her in.  Viviane Namaste found in Invisible Lives that many North American shelters used “dress code” as a form of terrorising trans people, of forcing trans women to dress in “male” clothes and be ungendered persistently—a highly unpleasant and indeed traumatic experience, to say the least.

Anyway, the point is, if you are a trans woman and you are in need of help, you cannot know whether you have anywhere to go.  If policies do accept trans women, that is infrequently made clear.  If they don’t, well, what do you?  Sleep on the streets?  Go back to your violent partner?  Would you even bother going to a women’s shelter if you didn’t know you’d be safe, if you didn’t know whether you’d be ejected back out into the cold or put at the risk of even more violence?

That there are women’s shelters at all is undoubtedly a legacy of second wave feminism–a massive, important one.  But so is the fact that they continue to frequently shut trans women out—leaving us in a world where safety and shelter is neglible.  This, to me, is a legacy which I cannot ignore.  It is not entirely Mary Daly’s fault, not a situation solely created by feminism.  Of course not.   No, she was not amonster, she was a writer, a flawed and misguided one.  But the fact remains, she and other second wave feminist writers created a transphobic climate in feminism with real world consequences for trans women, which has extended for over four decades now and for that, hell yeah I’m still angry.

*Obviously this is not the only or even dominant form of feminism, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now, or any other trans women at large feminist blogs)

---

Related posts:

1. Feminism Friday: this week on the Feminism 101 Blog
2. Feminism destroyed chivalry nyahnyah nyahnyah nyahnyah
3. Round up the lawyers! A trans person wants a correct birth certificate

Why, you might ask?  What is so important, so pressing, such a grave injustice that the WA Attorney General’s office would use taxpayers money to continue to fight a case they’ve only just recently lost?  The scary transsexual men might breed.  The genesis of the case I covered on Questioning Transphobia back in November last year, after the State first denied the mens’ petition.  From the Australian:

After former West Australian attorney-general Jim McGinty decided to challenge the case in the tribunal, the state will argue that the possibility of pregnancy exists.

“The ability to bear children is plainly not a gender characteristic of a male,” George Tannin SC said in the State’s submission to the appeal.

“The retention of such an ability must necessarily result in the applicant not possessing the gender characteristics of a male.”

That’s right.  It’s not whether they currently can bear children – because both are on testosterone and cannot – but the possibility that they might.  One day.  Maybe.  Both men testified that they intended to take testosterone for the rest of their lives, but that apparently doesn’t suffice for the Attorney General’s office.  What cannot be abided is the mere thought of a Thomas Beattie, of trans people having power over their own reproductive capacities.

Even the judgment of the tribunal victory for the two men two weeks ago makes clear that the document change was conditional on their infertility:

“Both applicants had undergone bilateral mastectomies and testosterone treatment as a result of which each had undergone extensive physical changes consistent with being male,” the tribunal said in its finding.

” … the tribunal accepted the evidence of each applicant that he intended to continue testosterone treatment for the rest of his life.

“It accepted the medical evidence that each was, and would remain, infertile for as long as he continued testosterone treatment”.

Now, the West Australian rules are inconsistent on this front with regard to trans women—our permanent sterility from estrogen counts for precisely nothing, legally speaking.  This would have, I hope, given trans women a lever into another test case with non SRS based criteria.  But no, first this case needs to be appealed again.

Also important to note is that this represents one half of heteronormativity—the clear exertions of the State to try to keep trans people from contaminating heterosexual reproduction with our.  The other is the fact that trans people who marry pre-SRS cannot change their birth certificate either.  The ostensible reason is that with the Federal ban on same-sex marriages, the State would be creating them.  However, the Federal government in July suggested it would accept same-sex marriages with one transsexual partner.  The point is then, that it is the West Australian State (the Gender Reassignment Board) that is working hardest, trying to “protect” the heterosexual institutions of marriage and childbirth from trans people.

So what if there’s the unlikely event that one or both of these guys has a baby sometime?  So what?  They and other trans people deserve the right to the correct documentation.  But I know, I know, I’m living in Magic Fairy Land, where populations don’t need to be sterilised in order to not be put at risk for discrimination and violence.  Back in the real world, apparently it does seem like quite a threat to the State.

**  Note:  Trans threads have a way of getting ugly on feminist blogs, so when commenting, please refer to trans people by their correct genders.  OR ELSE.

---

Related posts:

1. The new Australian passport regulations
2. Round up the lawyers! A trans person wants a correct birth certificate
3. Quickhit: Trans men still fighting mandatory sterilisation in WA