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A Melbourne Group “Y Gender” in the Age
The following is a well written article with the right pronouns
Apparently the reporter plans do write more Trans articles in the future.
Moderator
Quote:Quote:What are you? Consigned to a box with the gender question”Are you a man or a woman?”
Lee Taube was walking through a park with his girlfriend Michaela Rodgers when four teenage boys demanded to know who and what they were.
Mr Taube, 20, was only just starting his transition to being male, after a long unhappy girlhood. He was living in a refuge while doing VCE when he was diagnosed with gender identity disorder.
Advertisement: Story continues below”I was looking pretty androgynous, because I was pre-testosterone and pre-chest-binding. I didn’t want to give them an answer when I was pre-everything. So I just said ‘I’m a person’.”
When his attackers tried to knee him in the crotch ”to find out”, the couple turned and ran.
It’s moments like these that inspired Mr Taube to found Y Gender, Australia’s first transgender youth group, in December. Once a month, 10 to 20 people, aged between 15 and 25, turn up to talk at a discreet, safe city venue. Gay and lesbian youth groups have different issues, says Mr Taube, and older transsexuals are, well, older.
Some Y Gender members are just beginning to ask questions about their identity; others have always believed they were born in the wrong body. Some, like Cameron, a 22-year-old university student with a fine moustache and elegantly painted nails, don’t believe they’re male or female, and want to live an androgynous life.
”People will put you in a box and even when you explain you don’t fit in any of them, they’ll say ‘what are you really’?” Cameron would like the right not to check the male or female box on every form, but when legally obliged, ticks female.
Last Friday, at a meet-and-greet at the Sunshine youth hub, Mr Taube handed the Prime Minister a letter calling for legal protection of transgender people. ”I want you to understand the struggles we face and that we need to be protected,” he wrote.
A bullying report released by the Australian Human Rights Commission highlights many instances of violence, especially towards people shifting from one sex to another. A 2010 La Trobe University survey found that 92 per cent of trans women and 55 per cent of trans men had been verbally abused. Two out of five trans women reported attacks with knives or rocks.
Bayley, a shy 22-year-old male-to-female with long brown hair, says she was threatened with sexual assault on the last bus home one night by men unsure of her sex. Bayley isn’t out to all her family yet. She’s not sure she’ll have gender reassignment surgery, and she’s only started taking oestrogen.
Mr Taube will have a double mastectomy next February, but isn’t sure when he’ll have the hysterectomy he needs to become legally male. ”I may or may not freeze the eggs first,” he says.
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