You’d be forgiven for thinking that every other person in your neighbourhood was trans, particularly given the explosive media coverage that has played out over the last week.
It all started with the launch of some leaflets that are headed to public schools with the sole intention of demonising trans and gender-diverse kids. It progressed to a rage-fest about new guidelines that will make the world a bit friendlier for sporty trans people, and has culminated in a sustained and targeted campaign by certain media outlets. This campaign openly invalidates the trans experience and questions whether people like me should even exist, be able to access healthcare, and whether the services and health professionals providing this care have any place in Australian society.
We knew this was coming. The backlash against achieving marriage equality was always going to turn on trans people; we are an easy target, particularly our kids. The content in the articles isn’t new and this round of anti-trans proliferation doesn’t feature much evidence or balance either. As you might imagine, these pieces cause distress, concern and damage.
This so-called “reporting” on the health of trans and gender-diverse people promulgates misinformation, fear and inaccuracies. Not only is the impact felt by trans people, our families, friends and communities, but also those health professionals who continue to step up and provide much needed gender-affirming care.
Estimates suggest that 2% to 3% of the population identify their gender as different to what was presumed when they were born. Trans and gender-diverse people have always existed, even if you’ve never met one. You can trace our presence across the great arc of human history and we continue to have a place within every Indigenous population on the planet.
Despite the obsession, there really aren’t that many of us but, for a population that represents about 200,000 people in New South Wales alone, we shoulder some of the heaviest burdens of poor health when compared with almost any other. When we cobble together the research, we find that trans and gender-diverse adults are nearly 11 times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, with one in five reporting thoughts of suicide or self-harm.
The TransPathways Study (2017), which investigated the mental health of trans and gender-diverse young Australians, found that more than 70% of participants had been diagnosed with depression or anxiety and almost 80% had self-harmed. Participants further identified that it was not inherent to “being trans” that contributed to these outcomes, it was being rejected, being bullied and having a tough time at school.
Spoiler alert: there is plenty of room for all of us, which is lucky since trans people live in every city, country town, and even in some places with just one pub. Often thriving, often doing it really tough, most of the trans people I meet are just keen on living a fulfilling life, like most people are.
In May the World Health Organization made a clear statement that trans adults and children aren’t mentally disordered when it endorsed the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases.
Despite this shift, trans and gender-diverse people report difficulties finding GPs who will treat them for basic issues such as tonsillitis, and we are denied gender-affirming healthcare by default. We see healthy trans people routinely sent to psychiatrists for months and years – at great personal cost – just to start hormones. The approval hoops to jump through for surgical interventions are often so challenging that many of us just give up. Not all trans people seek to medically or surgically affirm their gender but, for those who do, barriers and delays to care regularly equate to suicidality.
I have spent much time with groups for parents of trans kids and they reflect a lot on the questions they’d asked themselves about the kind of kid they wanted, and the kind of parent they realised their child needed. They decided they’d prefer a trans kid to a dead kid – it’s really that simple.
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t take much to accept and respect trans people, we aren’t particularly interested in unravelling the seemingly fragile threads that hold society together, and that our existence seems to threaten.
Despite these myriad challenges, trans and gender-diverse people are some of the most resilient, creative, community-minded, empathetic and wonderful people to meet. What a great honour it has been to live in the world disguised as a woman and then take those learnings to try my best to be a good man.
It’s not trans people who are sick – it’s the systems we are part of and the environments we are trying to live in that make it unnecessarily tough to live the healthiest lives we deserve.
• Teddy Cook is the manager of trans and gender-diverse health equity at Acon, Australia’s largest HIV and sexuality- and gender-diverse health organisation
