Being true to yourself:
ordinary people changing genders
It was the tensest of stand-offs. On one side stood a man terrorising a family with a loaded crossbow. On the other was Senior Constable Bernice Canty, her hand hovering over her semi-automatic pistol, ordering him to lay down his deadly weapon.
Suddenly, the man peered at the officer more closely. “So,” he said finally, “are you a man or a woman?” It was all the lapse in concentration Bernice needed to safely disarm and arrest him.
“That was the only time here anyone’s asked me that,” says Bernice, Victoria’s first openly transgender police officer, with a laugh. “But if it was going to be anyone, it might as well be someone I nearly shot!”
Today in Australia, there are transgender people in every walk of life, often in professions and careers that might once have never accepted them. Yet, just like Bernice, who joined the police force in 2004 after transitioning from male to female in the 1980s, they are now, happily, mostly welcomed by their colleagues, bosses and the public.
Jasmin Taylor-Scott, for instance, was once a man working in Australia’s rugged mining industry and who
transitioned to a woman … working in Australia’s rugged mining industry. “It was pretty full-on, but having said that, it was isolated in Queensland’s outback and so, in some ways, it was easier,” Jasmin says.
“The mine bosses were fine and the more I transitioned, the easier it got. The boys were good. I introduced myself slowly with a bit of make-up on and having [ Keeping Up With
The Kardashians star] Caitlyn Jenner come out as such a high-profile person helped people to understand, too.”
Years ago, transgender people – whose gender identity differs from the one they were born with – would often not make the change they felt they wanted, or needed, for fear of public ostracism. Others did it discreetly, equally worried about the risks of rejection and discrimination. While exact figures are not known, The Gender Centre estimates that there are around 5000 Australians who have undergone genderreassignment surgery, here and overseas.
Today, many feel much more confident about being able to pursue their true lives. While Les Girls performer Carlotta was one of our first public sex-change identities in the early 1970s, Australian of the Year finalist, former RAAF Group Captain and Army Lieutenant Colonel Catherine McGregor, who changed from a man called Malcolm, has more recently become another inspirational figure in the transgender community.
Meanwhile, last year, the TV show The Project had its first transgender host, Andrew Guy, who was born a woman called Anna. Then the recent, muchacclaimed TV drama Secret City, a Canberra-based whodunnit, had a transgender intelligence analyst called Kim Gordon as a major character, played by Damon Herriman.
New identity, same jobs
Yet, as always, life is far stranger than fiction. Transgender people have been making everyday waves here, often in the most stereotypically unlikely areas of life. Heather Stokes, for instance, is a top criminal barrister, taking over from her former male self in the same high-level position. Young Queensland police constable Mairead Devlin, who transitioned from female to male shortly after joining the force, is being celebrated by the service. And a male Deputy Superintendent of one of the country’s toughest men’s jails became a female while still in the role. Now all three are proud transgender people, happy to be pushing ahead in their lives with new public identities.
Of course, it hasn’t always been easy and being able to laugh about difficulties is often a valuable outlet. The former prison superintendent says becoming a woman actually helped in some ways in her job. “At the prison, if there was ever an escapee, I was able to find them,” she says. “When I became a woman, I found I became much more aware of my surroundings and other people’s behaviour. But it was strange. As a man, I could be face-to-face with anyone, including [notorious backpacker murderer] Ivan Milat, and my heart wouldn’t raise a beat. But as a woman, I was much more careful, as I knew I could be a victim of violence.
“Also, it can be horrendous emotionally with the hormones. But that’s one of the reasons I’m happy to speak out publicly about my life.
It’s important to let others in difficulties know that we’re out there and we can survive.”
The good and the bad
There have been plenty of hard times for Jasmin, now 42. Growing up as a boy, but choosing her “girl” name at the age of 12, she was finally diagnosed with gender dysphoria and started taking hormones to transition to a woman 17 months ago, while working in the mining camp. She couldn’t, she says, “live a lie any longer”. Yet the only real negativity was that her whole family – her mum, dad, brother and sister – turned their backs on her.
It was only later, in December last year, when she was one of the 1700 people laid off by the mine, that life became tougher. She moved to the Gold Coast, but it’s been a constant struggle to find work. “There’s quite high unemployment here, so employers have the pick of the crop and if someone’s a bit different and they don’t know how to deal with that, they’ll go for someone else every time,” she says. “That’s very stressful.
“Life can be a battle. You are always getting stared at and you do get sick of that, but you do get used to it.
I tend to block a lot of that out, as it does wear you out. But I am much happier like this, even though periods are such hard work! I sometimes think life is like a battery and you have to have both positives and negatives in your life and, sad as they are, the negatives do make you stronger.”
Comparatively speaking, life for 60-something Adelaide criminal barrister Heather Stokes has been a lot easier. After feeling an “overwhelming need” to live as a woman, she finally made the decision to do something about it.
For a while, she worked as David in the courts, but lived as Heather at home, telling everyone she worked with that she was soon planning to become Heather full-time.
“I spent so long talking to people about it, everyone was getting pissed off with me for taking so long to do it!” she says, laughing. “They were saying, ‘Just get on with it!’ So when it finally happened [in August 2012], it was quite seamless. A senior judge sent around a message to other judges that Mr Stokes is now Ms Stokes, and that was that. I might have lost a couple of clients who might have been concerned about what a jury might think, but most didn’t care; they just wanted someone who’d look after them in court. It was all surprisingly easy.”
Since then, Heather has maintained a high profile, being open with her transgender status, knowing it may help others in similar positions. That’s especially so with a suicide rate for transgender people documented in the US to be an horrific 41 per cent – because they don’t feel they can “come out” and live as their true self or are victimised when they do – compared to the rest of the population’s 4.6 per cent. In Australia, Beyondblue reports that up to 50 per cent of transgender people have attempted suicide at least once.
Heather has been named by top firm Sydney Criminal Lawyers as one of the nation’s five most inspirational lawyers. “I was addressing a jury once and made the comment that many young men in particular, but also older men, seem to rate women behind their Commodore, their plasma TV and their bull terrier, and, despite break-ups and apprehended violence orders, still take the view they own their ex-partners. Then
I said to the all-women jury, ‘You know now I can say that and mean it!’ The response was laughter because they’d realised who I was.
“I’ve had the odd negative comment, but most people have been very supportive. I owe a lot to my eldest daughter and my partner who helped me enormously in the transition
A senior judge sent around a message that Mr Stokes was now Ms Stokes and that was that. Heather Stokes
process. I suppose I’m lucky I’m not a six-foot truck driver with huge shoulders. I feel like I’ve been born again and I’m still learning to be a girl.”
That sense of humour comes in handy time and again for dealing with the myriad bumps on the road to full acceptance. Mairead, 22, who works in Caboolture, 40km north of Brisbane, was stunned when his bosses were fine with his decision to move from female to male, expecting to have his gun and badge taken away as soon as he told them in late 2014. Yet now Mairead is being commended as a reflection of “the diversity and inclusiveness of the service”.
He has even found the people he arrests are pretty accepting.
“I went through a relatively androgynous period and some people might not have known what gender or sex I was, although they were still generally mostly respectful,” Mairead says.
“I went to one incident; I was trying to get into a woman’s house in relation to a call for service. She looked at me with this really intense look that felt as if it went straight into my soul, and said, ‘You’re a he-she, aren’t you? Wow!’ I said this wasn’t the time or place to have this conversation, and carried on with my job, but I thought afterwards she knew exactly who I was. We laugh every day in the office about my transition.”
Today, Bernice Canty can also laugh at the way, back in 2003, when she first applied to join the police as a 40-year-old transgender woman, her details were leaked to the media and she ended up on the front page of the Herald Sun as the “sex swap cop”. When the Seven Network’s Sunrise program then ran a poll on whether a transgender person should be allowed to be a police officer, she was quietly content to see it came out in her favour.
It was worse to hear then state Opposition leader Robert Doyle – now Melbourne’s Lord Mayor – later saying, “I mean, are you allowed to join the police force if you’ve been found guilty of an indictable crime? The answer is no ... ” He later withdrew his comments.
“That was hard, to see transgender people compared to criminals!” says Bernice, 52, who now works at Bacchus Marsh, 65km north-west of Melbourne, and won a medal for bravery in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. “But I think that just made me more determined. At times, you do get a bit down about it, but then you think, forget them!
“I think there’s still some stigma around, but management has always been very supportive and Victoria Police has been fantastic. And it’s important to be able to laugh about these things, to laugh at yourself.”
We laugh every day in the office about my transition. Mairead Devlin
If you or anyone you know needs emotional support, phone Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyondblue on 1300 224 636.