Dr Rachel Richardson speaks with the kind of gravitas you’d expect from a lifetime working in education, yet she maintains an eloquent outrage about the shortfall in services for trans, gender-diverse and non-binary (TGDNB) people in rural Australia.
A trans woman who grew up in country New South Wales and has lived in rural Victoria for nearly three decades, Richardson is chair of Transcend Australia, a charity that has been providing advocacy to families of young TGDNB people for 10 years.
“We work directly with parents who seek us out,” Richardson says.
“We’re directing people to sources of information or support, and it may be that the real concerns are related to accessing medical support, and our advice would be to see the GP of course, or to contact a gender service.
“I do think it’s harder for children outside the city sometimes to declare that they’re trans. The country can be a little bit more conservative.”
It was the 2021 census, the recent anti-trans commentary during the election campaign, and what Richardson calls the “scurrilous” pushback around trans women in sport that made her angry about the progress of TGDNB services, particularly in the bush.
When the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) limited the number of questions around sexual orientation and TGDNB, the fear was the results would be politicised.
“We want to see our numbers being more clearly reflected in the data, because we do see that as a way of better representing the need,” Richardson says.
“We know that at least 1% of the population is trans, but not nearly that number of people have been identified or feel safe enough to identify themselves.”
Richardson, 61, has worked in education for 38 years and always knew she was trans.
“I started my career as an early childhood teacher. Had I ever disclosed that I was transgender, I would have lost my job,” she says.
“My process of real affirmation, and all that went with it – the legal changes – all of that started just a little over 10 years ago.”
Richardson is passionate about raising awareness of gender affirmation, a very individual process where TGDNB people become more socially and/or physically aligned with their gender.
“I’ve also been talking to schools and other services about the sorts of things that young trans people will need, and most of that is around socialisation,” she says.
“So that’s recognising names and pronouns, and the right to be able to wear a gender-neutral uniform.”
Richardson was instrumental in starting the country’s first non-metropolitan gender centre at Wodonga in rural Victoria during 2015, remembering it as a case of “build it and they will come”.
“We always knew there was a lot of unmet need,” she says.
Rural trans and gender-diverse lives are improving because people are simply encountering them more, according to Richardson.
“I think there’s a much better understanding out in the community now about accepting that not everybody has this ironclad view about themselves as heteronormative cisgender; and that’s been a huge improvement for all of us under the rainbow,” she says.
Not enough support
Trans man Jeremy Wiggins, a Castlemaine-based TGDNB advocate and CEO of Transcend, recently returned to live in central Victoria.
“I’m really grateful that the families living in regional and rural Australia can contact us for some support, because they don’t have enough support where they live,” he says.
According to 40-year-old Wiggins, there is “just no data” on the number of TGDNB people in rural regions.
“However, because gender affirming healthcare is more readily available in metropolitan areas, and metro areas can also be safer and more accepting, many trans people move from regional places to the city,” he says.
One of the recommendations of a 2020 report on the health and wellbeing of LGBTIQ Australians was the expansion of funded services outside inner suburban areas.
But according to Wiggins, the trans space is one of the most underfunded in Australia, despite the TGDNB community experiencing the highest suicide rate.
“Trans people face really poor mental health outcomes because of the level of stigma and harassment,” he says.
“The trans experience can’t be classified in a generalised way, it’s very individual and personal.
“People come to realise how they feel about being trans at different ages. There are people that take action around a gender affirmation process even in their 70s and 80s.”
Wiggins was co-investigator on the Kirby Institute’s 2018 Australian Trans and Gender Diverse Sexual Health Survey, which found the average age for people realising they were TGDNB was about 14 years.
“There’s many young people that can be thinking that they’re trans for some time before they vocalise it,” he says.
“There’s many situations, particularly people like myself or other trans adults, who vocalised it when they were young children.
“If young people are supported and listened to, then they have better health outcomes in the future; and the gender affirmation process doesn’t have to be the same for everybody. It doesn’t always involve medical intervention, but for many it needs to.”
Wiggins also sees a level of myth-making about TGDNB lives.
“There’s a misconception that being trans is going to immediately equate to living an unhappy life, which is just untrue,” he says.
The breadth of anti-trans sentiment in Australia is changing, Wiggins says, because negative campaigns against TGDNB people – such as those that flared during the federal election – backfired.
“We received an enormous amount of support. We made more relationships, more allies came out, we got further support and solidarity from places that we didn’t have before,” he says.
“When considering trans and gender-diverse people, please just consider that it’s a population that already experiences high rates of bullying, harassment and violence, so please lean in with a bit of empathy and compassion.
“These families are in all sorts of small towns, all across regional and rural Australia.”
