‘I'm Here, Get Over It’
03 Mar 2018
Originally published in ABC's 40th Anniversary Mardi Gras magazine [offline]
When asked to write about the history of transgender activism I won’t lie, I immediately thought about how young I am. The advances made in hormone access, community acceptance, and public awareness in the last 10 years alone have been considerable, let alone the past 40. Faced with the breadth of this history, I needed to sit down with someone who had been there.
Routed through networks and channels of queers and their lengthy phonebooks, I was pointed in the direction of a woman who has seen so much of this history play out, as an activist, working in government, in our community and in her own life.
Within five minutes of talking with Pindi*, who could easily pass for much younger than her proud late 60s, I am struck by how much the world has changed since she was my age. En route to to this Oxford St café, I pass dozens of ‘Vote Yes’ posters, rainbow flags, queer couples holding hands; a very different vision to the Sydney she moved to as a young woman.
While obviously eager to avoid the glare of the spotlight, it’s clear the role that Pindi has had throughout her life in her community, even now helping out young LGBTQI people who’ve fallen on hard times. In a period where only a loose sense of community among trans women existed, it took people willing to face discrimination head on to substantiate effective change. Despite a deserved air of keeping to herself, it’s evident that she was one of these people.
Though our conversation traverses 50 years of history and policy, Pindi often comes back to one name: her long-time friend and colleague Nadine Stransen, activist, trans woman and largely unwritten hero.
Despite lacking a political background, Stransen recognised early on that the trans community was facing immense discrimination and was determined to see that change in her lifetime, a push that would go on to define many of her relationships. With a collection of activists around her including Pindi, Roberta Perkins, Andy Griffin and Jules Hurley, she sought to change the conversation and create lasting protections for her peers.
Polling showgirls and other trans women along Oxford and William Streets on the language they would like to be used in policy and legislation, Stransen found the term ‘transgender’ was overwhelmingly preferred. This sparked a fervent belief that if we won the right to our language, the rest would follow.
Armed with this dogma, she became a regular fixture in the halls of NSW Parliament, Pindi often in tow, pushing and cajoling until change occurred. Ultimately, in no small part thanks to this persistence, the Transgender (Anti-Discrimination and Other Acts Amendment) Act was passed in 1996, with Stransen personally thanked in the session that saw it enshrined into law.
She would go on to influence anti-discrimination legislation at state and federal levels, help trans surgeries be seen as non-essential for everyone, and normalise trans and queer visibility in both public life and professions previously inaccessible due to systemic disenfranchisement and hate. In recounting the story of a particularly tense meeting with some of the powerbrokers involved in these decisions, Pindi remembers Stransen simply standing and exclaiming “I’m here, get over it”, ultimately living to see a time when they would.
In many ways to this country what Carmen Rupe was to New Zealand, I am regaled with stories of her tenacity and passion in a community that often found itself in deep disagreement and experiencing what were, at the time, Australia’s worst drug use and homelessness rates. These statistics were discovered, in part, thanks to surveys spearheaded by Stransen herself, and I am ashamed and saddened that I hadn’t heard her name before she passed away.
I often ask why it is we always hear these names after a person’s death. Maybe it’s that people still think of us as ‘dangerous’, wondering when our community’s needs will ‘cross the line’: making people uncomfortable, challenging their presumptions. When people have an agenda, there is a comfort that comes with our silence.
Maybe it just takes the communal process of memorialising to learn as many stories as are needed to piece together a whole person. Indeed, Stransen has seen more media coverage in the last year than in the past, which has allowed so many more to hear her story, but that too follows a pattern of memorialising the dead rather than celebrating the living. I see this thriving, messy community today, all doing so much good despite the continued trauma of transphobia, and I want to acknowledge them. For me, when I was first hurting about this; for me, now.
Being not only visibly out and proud but successful and loved allows room for more people who may have remained in the closet their whole lives to come out and take up space; to be healthy and valued. I want to share stages and sitting rooms and booths with these women, I want to see us celebrated in our media, honoured for our work, truly allowed to live our fullest potential. I am sick of just having to read about how we die.
One of the things that stands out in Stransen’s story is that she had the unconditional support and love of her family after coming out and throughout her life, often saying and always believing that “if my family can do this, society can”. Pindi and I both take a moment to reflect on our similar privilege and the love of our families, before returning to details of the battles that this support allowed Nadine to fight and ultimately win. At a point in history when many women – even those accepted by their parents and siblings while alive – were ultimately buried by those same families under their given names and assigned genders as a result of shame and transphobia, this support was instrumental. Since Stransen passed away, her family have tirelessly sought justice for the suspicious circumstances of her death.
Though we often engage with queer history understanding that people had to fight to be where we are today, the individual names and stories of these people are often lost, either forgotten or purposely overwritten and erased in death. Hearing about Stransen and seeing her work and wishes still being realised today brings me joy, and makes me ask who the changemakers will be for the next half-century, and what battles they will face.
We must face this future knowing not only the lessons learned by our elders, but their names, their lives, their struggles and triumphs.
Nadine Stransen was here, an unwritten hero, and will always be with us in the legacy of her acts.
*Pindi’s last name has been omitted at her request.