MY TRANSGENDER JOURNEY
After coming out as a lesbian at 15 and transitioning to male two years later, Nevo Zisin feels at home no longer identifying with either gender l Who
After coming out as a lesbian at 15 then transitioning to male, Nevo Zisin no longer identifies with either gender.
Nevo Zisin was 5 years old when an invitation arrived for a mermaidthemed birthday party. While all the other little girls donned blue bikinis, Nevo chose a pirate costume, complete with drawn-on beard and moustache. There was no other option, explains Nevo: “I was set on the fact I was a boy.”
It was an early sign of things to come for the fearless writer and transgender activist who came out as a lesbian at 15, transitioned at 17 to present as a man, and later rejected both “binary” male and female stereotypes. “I went from the rigid box assigned to women to the one assigned to men, and I couldn’t fit into either,” says the passionate 21-year-old, whose coming-of age memoir, Finding Nevo (Black Dog Books, $18.99), documents that journey. “Maybe I was neither male or female. Once I recognised this, a liberating thing happened and I came out again, for about the fourth time. This time not as a lesbian, not as a transgender man or queer. This time I came out as me.”
Nowadays, the Melbourne University student and part-time swim coach teams masculine facial hair with glitter, eyeliner, lipstick and mascara, and sometimes sports a skirt. “I don’t dress hyper-feminine very often, but when I do the space around me swells, and on public transport no-one wants to sit next to me,” laughingly notes the Israeli-australian Nevo, who prefers to be identified as “they” or “them,” rather than the gender-specific “she” or “he,” which occasionally stumps supportive mum Sharon Zisin. “I still have a problem with the pronouns thing, because I was a high-school English teacher for over 30 years,” concedes Sharon, 59, who lives with Nevo in Melbourne’s Caulfield. “It didn’t bother me when Nevo came out as lesbian, because I had suspected that. From the age of 4, he refused to have long hair and was just a boy, into skulls and dragons.”
Nevo’s transition to present as male “was very, very difficult for me and also for him, although I tried not to see that,” adds Sharon. “I was too enmeshed in my own disappointment. All my friends’ daughters were getting married and having babies, and I wasn’t going to have that ... And then there was the body hair! Nevo was overseas in Israel when he first started taking testosterone and I didn’t see him for eight months, so it was pretty confronting the day he lifted up his T-shirt and I saw a hairy tummy.”
Growing up comfortably in Caulfield with three older half-siblings, Nevo was precociously clever but lonely and something of a misfit. Bullied at school, Nevo took refuge in solitary but elaborate games, constructing intricate worlds with Barbie dolls. “One of my biggest secrets. I was embarrassed because they were so girly.”
Depressed by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, teenaged Nevo started to suffer gender dysphoria and to dream of becoming a man. At 17 the transition began, influenced primarily by US transgender activist Laverne Cox and pop star Pink. “The hardest part was other people,” says Nevo. “There are always trolls online telling you to kill yourself. But hopefully that will change in future ... If my book helps one child come to terms with their own identity, then I have succeeded.”
Nevo turned to crowd-funding to help pay for testosterone treatment and later underwent breast-removal surgery, despite haters who blasted it as “attention seeking.” Today, identifying as neither male nor female, Nevo continues as a youth leader while completing a BA degree in Australian Indigenous Studies and creative writing. Happily polyamorous, Nevo jokes, “Questions about what’s in my pants happen fairly often. My response is, ‘If you’re asking me, you’re really minimising your chance of finding out!’ ” As for romance, “I date people I’m interested in, and who are interested in me, like anyone else. I don’t care about their sexuality or gender.”
Crazy about children, Nevo wants to found a youth movement for queer kids and vows, “I will have children in whatever way, shape or form I can. If I can’t have biological children, I will adopt.” In the short term, however, something else beckons: “I really want to get on Ellen!” says Nevo, with a grin. “I think we would get along really well.”