"I am genuinely optimistic in Australia": Talking our trans history with Noah Riseman
“The one thing I always say is that this book is by no means the end of trans history, and it’s not even the start”
“It is an oft-stated maxim that to know ourselves we must know our history”.
These are the opening words of a brand-new book, Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910, by Noah Riseman, a Professor of History at Australian Catholic University. At a time when a popular far-right discourse is that trans people have only existed for the past five years and are just a dangerous “fad” encouraging kids to surgically alter their bodies, books like this set the record straight. Trans people have always been a part of society and always will be, get over it!
As the title suggests, the book charts the history of trans people and trans activism in Australia for the last century. I spoke with Professor Riseman and asked him the process he went through in constructing this book and how he thought it related to the current state of trans activism now.
Talking to All The Heterosexual Nonsense, Professor Riseman says they accepted the limitations of starting their story from 1910 as well as the huge challenge of covering the extensive history of such a broad demographic.
The timeframe gave a great insight into how the attitudes towards trans people have evolved in social and medical circles. While certain things have remained the same, such as the persistent myth that transitioning to female is a “sexual fetish”, trans stories have been increasingly humanised from the 1970s onwards, such as trans icon Carlotta appearing on Four Corners in 1974 to Danielle Laidley’s documentary released only a week ago. The first Australian clinic for transgender people, the Transgender Health Clinic founded in the 1970s, is still operational as the Monash Gender Clinic and serving an unprecedented amount of patients.
”Every history needs a starting point, and it’s a huge challenge to cover trans women, trans men, non-binary people and be inclusive of different cultures, stories of activism and everyday life, sex work and the medical lives of a huge range of people.
The one thing I always say is that this book is by no means the end of trans history, and it’s not even the start”.
The double-edged sword of trans visibility
While trans people are more visible today than ever before, this comes with a cost. As British trans writer Shon Faye wrote, trans visibility is a “double-edged sword” as it allows for a more public forum for hostility and toxic anti-trans messaging.
In Australia, headlines are being dominated by trans issues, and a large amount of them have been negative or filled with ignorance. Nonetheless, while there are moves to import the anti-trans rhetoric dominant in the UK and US over here, we are resisting the tide. After notorious British anti-trans commentator Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull toured Australia in events that contained a handful of right-wing supporters and other questionable groups, pro-trans activists responded in kind with demonstrations across the country that drastically outnumbered the anti-trans gatherings. Keen-Minshall is also on the record saying Tasmania is “the worst place she’s ever been”…. just before she went to New Zealand.
Professor Riseman puts Australia’s resistance to anti-trans rhetoric to the hard work done by activists from twenty years ago.
“Activists such as Julie Peters and Jenny Scott did a really good job of reaching out to lesbian groups and feminist groups at university campuses in the 90s and they did a really good job of squashing terfism before it could take off in Australia.
Terfs exist here, they have high profiles because the media gives them high profiles, but they actually are a huge minority and it’s in part because of the bridges that the trans activists built in the 90s.”
This can definitely be seen with the fact that LGBT+ groups in Australia are coming together very strongly in support of trans rights. This book, for instance, was launched at the Victoria Pride Centre which recently also rejected an application from the anti-trans Lesbian Action Group to host an event. We have so many people to thank for this!
Professor Riseman also said that the most exciting moments he had were when he was taken through the extensive scrapbooks and archives that people kept of transgender history, including Julie Peters, which he said caused his “face to light up”.
“There was a collection of scrapbooks that were being held at the Queensland AIDS Council and there were 40 scrapbooks that a person had collected from the 1970s to the 90s and they were just filled with newspaper clippings of all the examples of trans and gender diversity and going through these was so amazing. We managed to get the collection moved to the Australian Queer Archives and they’re now available there.”
Trans people and colonisation
Anyone who’s read in depth about trans issues will know, the gender binary is a social construct that was first introduced to Australia upon colonisation.
Wiradjuri non-binary scholar Sandy O’Sullivan wrote about this in a piece entitled The Colonial Project of Gender (And Everything Else), and they are quoted extensively in the book. However, the book begins well after the colonisation of Australia begun and Professor Riseman admitted that earlier drafts of the book neglected to mention this important detail.
“One thing I will admit is that my first draft I didn’t get it right, the two anonymous reviewers pushed me more in that direction, to think more about that and be explicit about that. I think those were the best edits that were recommended”.
I asked him why, after all his research, he thought that it’s so hard to consider a society outside of the gender binary.
“We live in such a binary and embodied society that for those of which where it works, it’s really hard to imagine something different but there are people for whom it is different and we need to listen and let them challenge your ideas.
We get in theory that gender is performative and we get in theory that we’re socialised into how we perform gender but then it’s still hard to imagine a way in which our bodies are separate from it”.
Speaking as a trans activist myself, hearing about this book had me realise how much I have to learn about trans history and how grateful I should be about the tireless work that activists in the past decades have done to get us to this point now!
Professor Riseman said he was “optimistic” about the direction of trans rights in Australia now in large part due to how effective our messaging and activism has been in the past.
“I am genuinely optimistic in Australia, I do think the reason they’re getting so loud is because they’re losing, legislation in Australia is going in a more pro-trans direction. It’s going backwards in the US and the UK but it’s not in Australia and young people seem to be getting it much more.”
When I asked Professor Riseman what he hoped people would get out of the book, he said:
“I hope that for the trans community it gives a sense of joy, empowerment and historical consciousness to see what’s come before and to learn from that. For cis people, I hope it gives more a sense of empathy and understanding and for greater allyship.”
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Natalie Feliks is a writer and activist originally from Adelaide, now living in Melbourne. She's written for the likes of Junkee, Crikey, and Overland, and spends her time listening to pop music and eating chocolate.
Further Reading:
How Australia’s Understanding of Gender Nonconformity Has Evolved - The Sydney Morning Herald
Friday Essay: ‘I Hope to Eventually Become a Woman’ - Trans Life in Australia from the 1940s to the 1970s - The Conversation
The long and storied history of transgender people in Australia and beyond - ABC
Uncovering trans and gender diverse lives in the archives - Star Observer
How historians are documenting the lives of transgender people - National Geographic