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You're listening to Transmission on 4zzz. I am Brody. This isn't my usual show but I am very pleasured to be here today on Transmission. And I'm here with the lovely Bet.

Hi there.

How are you today?

Bet I'm good. We usually declare our pronouns at the start. So my pronouns are she, they.

My pronouns are they, them. It's the morning. I'm not used to being here in the morning. Yes, I'm used to being here at nighttime so.

Yeah, well, nighttime would have suited me better, I guess. And it's been quite a week, hasn't it?

It definitely has been quite a week. It's been a very restless, anxiety provoking week, I feel.

Yeah. And you know what I just realised when this week started or sorry, I guess it was the last week that when that started I wrote down what had happened over the previous month or six weeks and it was all really full on.

Yeah, I bet it's been. I know myself as well. It's been a very full on past month, six weeks or so and I think it's very like it's all just compounding I guess. And yeah, adding Alfred on top of everything last week is just like it bubbled things over, I guess.

Yeah. I had planned to do to pre record some more interviews last weekend but obviously I couldn't get into the station. So we are just, just riffing today.

We really are.

I've got a little bit of something I might read out.

Yes, go for it.

But not right now. Let's warm the listeners up and ourselves up.

Yes, I think we both need it. We all need it. This morning.

Amplifying the voices of the trans and gender non conforming community of Meanjin, Brisbane and beyond. Transmission on 4ZZZ brings you the latest in trans community news, music and events. Every Tuesday from 9am till 10am Join our team of hosts for an hour of celebrating the unique perspectives of the trans transmission. Tuesday mornings from 9am till 10am on 4ZZZ.

I'm Brody. My pronouns are they, them.

I'm bet. My pronouns are she, they.

And this is Transmission.

Yeah.

Believe you have something that you Want to share, Bet?

Sure. Yeah. I was. I was trying to work out what we could do with today's show. So I thought of this speech that I made at the Trans Day of Resistance recently. I have this idea that given the situation that trans kids are in in Queensland at the moment and how we all need to try and help them, that maybe if we tell our stories, the CIS folks will listen a bit more closely about what are some of the other risks you don't hear so often about not not being affirmed when you're young. So if with your leave, Brody, I might read this speech with that in mind. What do you think?

Yes, that sounds amazing.

Okay, so let's imagine that I'm on a stage at the moment. Hello, everyone. My name is Bet. I'm a disability support worker for trans kids and a presenter on 470Z's transmission. I'm also a passionate advocate for trans kids. Actually, I should have said trans folks because I work with some older people as well. To me, protecting gender affirming medical care for young people is the most pressing concern facing our community for two reasons. Firstly, because trans kids are among the most vulnerable members of our community. They are often the most isolated and the least able to advocate for themselves. And they are under the most egregious attack. But also secondly, because a society that does not accept the validity of trans kids does not accept the validity of trans people. After all, what does born this way mean if it doesn't mean I knew myself as a child and that knowing never went away. No matter how long I kept silent, no matter how I tried to ignore it, no matter what abuse I endured because of it. I'll tell you a story. As a child in the 1970s and 80s, I was wounded to my core. In those days, transness was the ultimate taboo and nobody had ever heard of such thing as a trans kid. On my first day at a public primary school in the Adelaide Hills, the other kids crowded around me, demanding to know if I was a boy or a girl. Over the following years, one older boy in particular demeaned and harassed me constantly, aggressively questioning me about my sexuality at a time before that concept meant anything to me. At home, I knew my safety was conditional. For as long as I played my role as a boy, I could avoid the treatment meted out by my father towards women and girls, though a recently uncovered memory suggests I did not avoid it entirely. Meanwhile, my mother was silent, distant, scared. I couldn't trust her to protect me. But I think she tried to. What, seven year Old, regularly wears their mother's clothes and makeup and doesn't make a mess. But nobody said a word. Nonetheless, by the age of 11, I had resolved never to share my secret with anyone. And I went deep in the closet. What had so scared me? My own joy. On that day, I still remember. I looked in the mirror and I liked what I saw. I wanted to go out in the town, to introduce myself. For a second, maybe less. That thought endured. Then came reality. I would be beaten up, humiliated. I would have to change schools. Worst of all, my dad would know. Some people say, why not just be a feminine boy? Well, I tried that. In high school, I discovered David Bowie, and I became intimately acquainted with the f slur. I must have heard it a thousand times. In Melbourne in my early 20s, I found a kind of sanctuary, and I took Bowie esque as far as it could go. Everyone thought I was gay. But I wasn't gay, though, was I? The idea of sex with men horrified me. I know now I was attracted to them, but not if they saw me as one of them. So in my fear and confusion, I turned back again. I created a character, a masculine mask based on my father, and I learned to dissociate. I spent the next decades unable to find peace. I despaired. I was angry. I used to punch walls until my fists bled. I habitually sought escape. I never owned a house, never stuck at a job, never stayed in a city or town longer than a year or two. And I never had children. I didn't live my life. I watched from inside while someone else lived it. Something else. A husk of myself, a shell shaped like a man. And then, in my late 30s, in Sydney's Queer, friendly inner suburbs, I started to venture out late at night as me. I made friends. I was accepted. I could hardly believe it, but this was 2012, just prior to the trans tipping point. And when, after a few months, I began making plans to transition, I quickly became scared and purged my clothes and met and proposed to my future wife. Understand. I had daydreamed of transitioning since the first time. I knew it was possible, but it seemed crazy, like wanting to be an astronaut. So instead, I became a stepfather. I loved my new family, but I felt like a visitor, just as I had always felt like a visitor everywhere. Eight years later, my marriage exploded and I sank so low, the only escape I could see was death or transition. And for once, transition didn't seem like the crazier option. So just when all avenues had seemed closed in desperation, I woke up. I Woke to fear, but also to joy, excitement, possibility, and to so much sadness. I had gone to sleep, a child, and awoken in my late 30s. Sorry, in my late 40s. It was as if I'd been imprisoned for 30 years, but then suddenly released. I was overjoyed, of course I was. I still am. But as blessed as I feel every single day, I know my trauma will never heal. Every night or two, or sometimes three, no matter how beautiful the day, no matter how loved and joyful I feel, I lie on my couch and I cry, thinking of who I was and of who I could have been. And every time after the shame and embarrassment and regret at all, the play acting and the shouting and the making everyone around me unhappy, I imagine that child that scared a lone trans kid who was me. So that's my story. I tell it not because I believe it is unique, but because I know it is not. I know that most, if not all of us, and especially those trans kids of the 1970s and 80s and, heaven forbid, even earlier, know this feeling. The legacy of a trans childhood for so many of us is traumatised. And shame, shame paralyses us. It distorts and disorients. It leaves us lost. There are many terrible risks associated with the kinds of policies being proposed for trans kids by conservatives. But perhaps the most terrible is this that blinded by propaganda, good parents will get bad information and hoping to spare their children's suffering will alienate them. And those kids, if that happens, may be as alone as I was. So please everyone, have conversations if you can bear to tell your stories. We were all trans kids after all. Help reach those parents who are on the fence and afraid and not sure what to believe. Help show them that the real risk, statistically speaking, is not so called detransition, but the inauthentic lives of shame lived by so many of us before we outgrew the hate and conditioning that robbed us of our childhoods. Trans kids are the wedge by which, if we aren't proactive, all of our rights will be taken away. Trans kids can save the world.

Goosebumps. Pet goosebumps.

When trans lives are under attack, what do we do? Stand up. My back.

Bet's wonderful, spine tingling, goosebump worthy speech about sharing her story and how the impact that it had on BET and how not having that support can also have an impact on the younger generation coming through.

I guess that's my biggest fear.

Yes, and I 100% agree with that. Like my own perspective is. I like a similarish thing like I didn't know what I was, where I was for a very long time until I was about 28. And through that time I had a lot of mental health challenges, a lot of different types of challenges. Like I went to all girls Catholic school, all this kind of stuff. So like yeah, I didn't know about, you know, where I was, where I fit. I wasn't aware until I moved away from my hometown. I moved away from what I knew and started to meet the wider community and I didn't have the confidence in myself or the ability to explore my own gender and where I am, where I feel most comfortable until I was able to like, like even though I had lived in Brisbane for quite a few years before I came out and stuff, I didn't have the ability or the knowledge to be able to become who I am. So yeah, I think I look back now and there's so many things where my teenage years, it makes sense now as to why I struggled so much in many different ways because like why did I spend more time at the boys school across the road than the all girls school I went to? Why? Yeah, and now it's like yes, that I understand that and I think the reason that we share these stories and we share, share our experiences for folks to listen into I guess is not to, you know, get the, get sympathy or anything like that, just to have people who may not realise, realise that. Yeah, actually the support for these trans, trans kids and trans young people is so crucial and so important because providing that support and providing the appropriate care is going to be something that will benefit them from that age and also from like for the rest of their life. Like you won't have to go through many years of, of turmoil and just bad times if you are given the appropriate and safe support from when you first start realising. I guess, yeah.

And I mean I think there's enough challenges for them even for, for the kids who are affirmed and whose parents support them, you know, but, but if you take away parental, parental support as we know that's like the biggest factor in teen suicide.

Exactly.

And if you take away, I mean if you have like the government and the, and even physicians telling kids that they're wrong, that you know, they're mentally ill rather than trans or you know, what, whatever nonsense they want to tell them, I think that could just have horrific knock on effects. I don't think I, it sometimes it distresses me that, that our side of the argument stresses suicide so much as the biggest risk.

Yeah.

Because I'm like, yeah, Obviously, that's the worst outcome, but again, statistically, I think it's more likely that more kids are gonna. They're gonna survive, but they're going to go through things like what you and I went through.

Exactly. And I think, like, yeah, the statistics obviously show, but that's one aspect of it. And as you said, that, like, sometimes just going through that for many, many years is enough to have severe detriment, like detrimental impacts on one's health, both physical and mental.

Yeah.

So many aspects to it. And like, for me, I now work in mental health advocacy. I run an LGBTQIA special interest group within a mental health peak body. And I guess I'm lucky that I've been able to turn these terrible times into something that it makes. It adds fuel to my fire. It makes me more passionate to advocate for these things, I guess. And I think I'm lucky to be able to show that in the way that I do, because, yeah, there was times where it was very detrimental and very bad for. For me and I didn't think I would survive. So, you know, I'm lucky now that I'm able to turn that around into something that's powerful. And for me, I feel like I am providing that voice for those who never had a voice.

Yeah, I feel the same. Like, when all this terrible stuff started happening in Queensland five or six weeks ago, I realised after a couple of weeks of doing my thing, my activist thing, my advocacy thing, I realised that I felt privileged because I knew what to do and I was able to do it and I felt useful, you know, and I thought how terrible it would have been to just be lying there on the couch, feeling hopeless that whole time, you know, so, yeah, I agree. I feel like the only good thing I can really do, the only sense I can make out of my childhood and of most of what followed, is by turning it around and turning it into something powerful. Yes, exactly. Useful, you know. Exactly.

And that also makes me think of. In this space, we're also standing on the shoulders of giants who came before us and those who. Those fierce advocates, those staunch ones who fought for the change in what we have now and what has developed over recent years. And then all that stuff, like, they fought for that, and we're lucky to be able to be able to stand on their shoulders and continue to do that. But there's still so much.

Yeah.

So I think it's just. It's a powerful thing to share your story and I really thank you, Bet, for sharing that with us all.

You're welcome. So I also want to point out to anyone listening, can you hear how my voice sounds a lot happier now? And I even laughed before. I often feel like people think that if you let yourself get sad enough, you're not going to be able to come out of it. But my experience is at least since transitioning, if I get really sad quickly, I come out of it really quickly and I'm ready to face whatever happens next. It just needs to come out every now and then.

Exactly. If you just. I like to add it. I like to say I'm just scheduling in some sadness scheduling in some crying time because give myself time to cry. I didn't cry for many years and didn't feel. Feel anything. So now it's like I'll just pencil that in for 10am A bit of a cry.

So yeah, I try not to do it in the morning. I try to do it not in the morning evening.

The evening. A shower cry like a nighttime shower cry is my, my favourite.

So I do do it in the morning sometimes but then I know that it's a bit of a challenging day.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. How many genders are there? I don't know.

I just got here.

Wow. Went nearly at the end of our.

Yeah.

Our show. Thank you so much. Bet for this. It's been a very powerful and. Yeah. Powerful morning.

Oh, thanks, Brody. Thanks for helping out.

No worries. I'm happy to help anytime.

See you next week.

See you next week.

Thank you so much for listening to Transmission. See you next Tuesday, 9 to 10aM on 4 triple Z.