Isabelle Lake Memorial Lecture 2014

BEVERLEY HILL: I think the choice of our keynote speaker tonight - Mr Aram Hosie - is inspired, and one that is truly appropriate for this celebration and acknowledgement of Isabelle. I'd now like you to join me in welcoming Ms Allanah Lucas, The Western Australian Commissioner for equal opportunity so that she can introduce our keynote speaker. Thank you Allanah.

ALLANAH LUCAS: Thanks Bev. Good evening everyone and welcome, and I also acknowledge Len and the noongar people, um, and for that wonderful address to us all. I also did not have the privilege of ever meeting Isabelle but I just want to say that within the commission she is loved and honoured and, and this was particularly – you know so I know Mark really really hard and it's wonderful to see so many people here tonight in honour of Isabelle. I wish I had met her, clearly she was a very very special, warm, bright and inspiring person and continues to do so. Particularly since we're going to have Aram speaking to us in a minute. And I just am going to give you a quick introduction on Aram.

So Aram came out in high school, both in terms of his sexuality and political activism. He continued into university where he served on the student guild as the queer officer for a number of years. In 2008 he was the pride, the WA Pride Patron, the first and only transperson to be so, and the youngest. There's so many achievements all in one go, and he also received the WAA's council World Aids Day Youth Award. And at various times Aram has served on the Boards of Pride, the WA Same Sex Domestic Abuse Group, and the Welfare Rights and Advocacy Service, and all of his queer activism has been in a voluntary capacity. His professional career saw him originally qualify as an Occupational Therapist but then moved into public policy. And his work has found a range of social policy roles across both government and non-government. He is currently working in the youth mental health area.

Now Aram's work to date has included contributing to the lobbing effort which saw the Australian Human Rights Commission conduct the sex files inquiry. And he's worked with the Federal Attorney General's department on the development and introduction of the Australian government guidelines on the recognition of sex and gender. And working with the department of foreign affairs and trade to develop a new passport policy for trans and inter-sex applicants. He's also been the reluctant star of various visibility raising media articles and TV shows. And if you'd like to know a little bit more on the personal side he rides a motorbike, has five tattoos including a full back piece – I can't wait to see it! (laughs) – he loves coffee and he lives and works between Perth and Sydney, is a bit of a gym junkie, and doesn't, oh you look wonderful for it too, and a twitter addict. So Aram Hosie, come up here and give us this wonderful memorial lecture for the very special human being that was Isabelle Lake, thank you.

ARAM HOSIE: I need to stop blushing first, after that introduction. I know Professor Collard left, but I'd really like to acknowledge the welcome that he provided, and for my part acknowledge that we're meeting on noongar land and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I'd also certainly like to acknowledge Isabelle Lake who I did have the privilege of meeting and working with a few times, she indeed made a magnificent contribution to the community in a very short time and acknowledging her parents and family who are here and I really thank you for your ongoing support of the things that she cared about.

And hello to the rest of you, you all look fabulous, thanks for coming along and showing some interest. I will try and be entertaining and informative. I am very honoured to have been invited here today to talk to you, and what I will be talking to you about, to mangle Dr Seuss a little bit is all of the places that we've been, and all of the places that we will hopefully go in the road for achieving the quality for trans and inter-sex people. Tell some stories about how we got to those places and set out some ideas that I have about how we can get to the places we still need to get to.

It's been thirteen years since the major gay and lesbian law reform happened in WA. I remember it quite well, at the time I was an eighteen year old lesbian and I remember sitting in the parliament as it was debated after having run the gauntlet of the angry protesters to get in there. I remember having to stifle the urge to interject when some of the opponents of the law reform said particularly offensive things. I remember a few walks around the table to calm down while that was going on. And I really remember the sense of solidarity that existed amongst the people that had been working on it, The sense of solidarity with the MPs on the floor who were pushing that, and the massive celebrations we had when it all went through. I think the noise in the foyer got so loud that it interrupted the chamber for a little while, and the big rainbow banner over the freeway was pretty spectacular when it happened. And I remember thinking as an eighteen year old lesbian, “Hey, I'm kind of relatively equal to the straight people now!” and thinking that that felt pretty good. Five years later when I was twenty three years old I transitioned from female to male. It's fairly obvious that transition brings along a lot of changes and that's kind of the point (laughs). And most of the focus, most of the focus with transition is very much on the physical, the medical focus, society's focus, certainly your own focuses the person transitioning is on what is happening physically. I'm sure I drove my partner nuts with all the questions like, “Do you think my voice has changed?”, “I've got more whiskers right?”, “I'm getting a beard.” So it's very very physically focused.

But at the same time, some pretty, ugh, other significant changes are happening. Psychosocial changes are pretty big, how to be in the world as a man, when you haven't been practising it for the first twenty three years of your life takes a little adjusting. Everything from how to navigate toilets through to how to not get punched by girls boyfriends on the bus because you were just being friendly, you think. I've not actually been punched, but it could have happened. The other thing they changed was my legal rights and that was something that I hadn't really put any thought into until I was confronted by the reality of it.

As a lesbian living in WA I've been covered by anti-discrimination law, I have the right to access reproductive and medical services and the public health system, and critically – as a woman – you know that caries a wide variety of challenges, I still had control over my personal identity. As a woman, as a lesbian, and it was mine to own without any interference. As Dr Seuss put it – he's going to appear a few times – with brains in my head and feet in my shoes I can steer myself in any direction I choose. So it was then a bit of a shock for me to realise that seven years ago as a newly hatched transguy that I no longer had ownership of my personal identity. The government and a whole other bunch of institutions had a whole bunch of opinions about who I was and interfered in it pretty pro actively. In addition, I didn't have anti-discrimination protection any more, the medical treatment I needed was only available through the private health system, and I had my rights of free movement restricted because the government decided what gender should go on my passport. And I can tell you that out of all the places to have an involuntary conversation about why you're a woman with a beard, a tiny immigrations office is not the place you want to be doing that.

So like Isabelle I have never been very good at accepting inequality and living within constraints that are imposed upon me. That started from a very young age, I think it was hard-wired into me. I grew up in a Jehovah's witness family, which brought with it a lot of excellent amazing introductions to life but also some challenges because they had some very strict ideas about gender and rules in general. I often pushed against those so on very practical grounds I argued strongly for the to be able to wear sneakers and pants when we went door knocking on the basis you could do it for longer and escape more effectively from aggressive dogs (laughs), win that one(?) But it didn't this way, I mean I didn't continue to have fights over the course of my life so, I've talked briefly about lesbian activism and so it wasn't then a big jump for me to start doing advocacy around the constraints I found as a trans-guy.

That's not to say I was the only person doing this and here in WA in particular, there was a small group of young people who established something called the youth gender project, Which is a group that Isabelle later joined. I wan to give a special shout out to Atari Metcalfe and others, who drove that group. We were all very young, not very very knowledgeable but we were passionate. And we wanted to try and make it make a difference to what we saw were the inequalities that were facing trans and inter-sex people. Despite our relative lack of ability we did manage to achieve some things and in particular that was our contribution for calling to the human rights commission to conduct an inquiry into the issues facing trans and inter-sex people.

There's a call that was being echoed around the country – people like Sally Goldman in Victoria, Martez Alainey(?) in Tasmania and Peter Hindle in the ACT – they were all also pushing and poking the commission to look at what could be done with this space. We used an enquiry that the commission was doing which was the was the same sex discrimination enquiry to tell stories as trans discrimination. And we knew that the enquiry wasn't about us, but it was the avenue we could use to try and draw some attention to what was going on. We put in written submissions, we tried to make sure there was a trans-person at every face to face consultation who jumped up and said the same kind of thing. And what we wanted to make clear was that we didn't want to, we didn't want to hijack that inquiry, but there was some intersections and some differences between the discrimination faced by same sex people and trans and inter-sex people and something needed to be done about it.

Fortunately the commission took kindly to our interfering in their commission, and in 2009 they conducted the sex files which is not a pornographic remake of the X-Files, but it was a special project looking at the legal rights of trans and inter-sex people. I think the sex files project was probably one of the largest consultation that has ever been done with trans and inter-sex people around Australia, it included the opportunity for written submissions, they did face to face consultations, and they also ran an online forum or blog where there was a lot of conversation which took a huge amount of material from that.

The enquiry found that Australia had – and unfortunately still has – and incredibly inconsistent approach to the way that we set up legal mechanisms for trans and inter-sex people to get their legal identity recognised. And the processes that do exist were basically a bit shit, I'm paraphrasing here a little bit. All of the processes required some level of medical intervention, usually surgical, and all required that a person be unmarried. This of course has lots of consequences for trans and inter-sex people that don't fit those criteria. It is not much fun to have to disclose your status and risk discrimination, abuse, potentially even violence every time you're in a situation that needs some ID.

The commission also made some other recommendations about the need for discrimination protection – You'd think that was a no brainer – but in 2009 the law didn't agree and to some extent even in 2014 our laws don't quite agree. So out of that enquiry we had a great report with some great recommendations so the challenge then was to make sure that the report didn't slip quietly into history on a bookshelf somewhere, but that it could be used and it's recommendations could be implemented. Compounding the challenge was the fact that whilst there was a few of us – and I emphasis a few of us – around the country working on this stuff we were largely not very joined up and coordinated. So you'd have invention and reinvention and reinvention of the wheel, and whilst many of the issues were national we weren't working on them in a coordinated way. So to feature Dr Seuss again, “We were headed, I fear, towards a most useless place” until 2010.

In 2010 there was a health indifference conference which was hosted by the national LGBTI health alliance. And one of the sessions in there was a working session, which was focused on how to we move beyond talking, which is what always happens at conferences, into doing, and we managed to achieve that. At the back of that conference there was a small group of committed activists that actually started information sharing, working together in seeing how we could progress things. So the take away from that is the next time you have to go to a conference and you're rolling your eyes about it, have some faith that occasionally some conferences can actually make a difference and change everything.

And indeed after that conference we started to have some real wins. I think the first really significant win that we've had in this space was the culmination of the legal challenge here in WA which was known as AH and AB versus the state of Western Australia. That case was about challenging the interpretation and the application of WA gender recognition legislation which is our laws for how you go about getting your birth certificate changed. AH and AB were two trans-men, who's identities were formally suppressed but you may be aware of one or the other of them, who applied to the gender reassignment board and were refused recognition of their gender identity on the basis that neither had had a hysterectomy. It's what I like to call the pregnant man panic. Fortunately, three hills lawyers took on the case pro bono, and did a heap of work in gathering at what the case law was around the country, bringing in experts both nationally and internationally into that first hearing.

So the first hearing was at the State administrative tribunal, which is where you go when you want to appeal something under that act, and the appeal was won. The tribunal ordered that AH and AB should be recognised as men. The state attorney general at the time didn't like it very much so he appealed to the supreme court. The Supreme Court, in a split decision, upheld the attorney general's appeal, so went back to saying that the two men weren't really men weirdly not because AH and AB hadn't had a hysterectomy, but because they didn't have penises. So we can perhaps call this the man without a penis panic.

Had that decision been allowed to stand in WA we would have had the dubious honour of being one of the only places in the world that required people to have full sex reassignment surgery in order to have access to a gender recognition particularly in that application for trans-men. And it effectively would have made it impossible for anyone to get a gender recognition certificate. That surgery that they were asking for is not available in WA or Australia, it's kind of a two hundred, hundred thousand, two hundred thousand dollar surgery in Europe so the likelihood of people being able to meet that test was very low.

So of course there was another appeal, this time it went to the high court which gave the applicants special leave to appeal and after hearing the arguments unanimously upheld the appeal and quite pleasingly I thought during the course of the hearing made it sound like the whole this was a bit ridiculous and publicly questioned what the public interest was in the state opposing AH and AB's recognition. The AG at the time didn't perhaps read the hearing transcript or wasn't briefed on that particular criticism because for a moment there he mused out loud that maybe the law needed to be changed given the high courts change, but fortunately to his credit premier Barnett came out publicly and said that's the end of that, thanks very much these people are very happy now and we'll leave it and that's where it's been left.