Sarah Fuller & Rachel Evans, Sydney
In late July, Mission Australia was granted permission from the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board to ban all transgender women who are not “recognised transgender persons” from its publicly funded homeless women’s services. These include Lou’s Place, A Women’s Place, and the Women’s Accommodation Service in Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo.
The New South Wales legal definition of “transgendered person” excludes anyone who has not had their birth certificate changed, either because they are pre-operative, or because they were born in jurisdictions that don’t allow them to change their birth certificates (which is the case in around half of Australian states). Operations to change one’s sex cost up to $20,000.
Green Left Weekly spoke to norrie mAy-welby, media spokesperson for SAGE (Sex and Gender Education), about the ban.
According to mAy-welby, Mission Australia is 60% publicly funded. “Their website says they were once separate welfare services affiliated with churches, but have now merged as welfare services”, she explained.
“A Roberta Perkins address to a Gender Centre Annual General Meeting in 2003 noted these homeless services were extensively accessed by transsexual women — 20 years ago — at a time when no other women’s services accepted us. I’m personally aware of transsexual women who’ve used the services in more recent years. Transsexuals have also worked there.”
Mission Australia justified the ban by saying women who had experienced abuse by men felt “particularly unsafe” in the presence of male-to-female transgendered people and that “In the past 18 months there have been incidents of males and unrecognised transgender clients present in services, resulting in concerns for the safety of both workers and clients”.
However, mAy-welby argued: “There are more appropriate ways to manage problematic behaviour and keep men out of a women’s refuge than the harsh draconian banning of one particular kind of woman. Education would be the most obvious choice of dealing with the issue. If there were women frightened of lesbians in a women’s refuge, would it be fair to ban lesbians? Obviously, blanket bans cannot be justified.”
According to mAy-welby, specific issues facing pre-operative transgendered people are “being accepted as a woman” and “not being forced to identify as a man (or woman in male-to-female cases) — when that is against everything true to your heart — and to get basic welfare services”. She points out that “the genitals of pre-op transsexual women are no more displayed in a welfare setting than the genitals of other women. Making a public issue of a little bit of private tissue is scandalous, unfair and inhumane.”
SAGE is “hopeful that principles of fair welfare provision, as documented by SAAP [the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program] and DOCS [the Department of Community Services], will eventually be upheld”, said mAy-welby. “Activists are closely observing the bureaucratic progress. We are also looking for transsexual women who are refused service by Mission Australia so we can take legal action against [Mission Australia].” To help email <norrie@acon.org.au>.
From Green Left Weekly, December 1, 2004.
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