Norrie helped shape transgender history in Australia, with ripples across the world. Ultrasex charts Norrie’s life as a boy, girl, spansexual, sex worker, journalist and courageous champion for equality.
One lonely evening when I was feeling unloved and unwanted, for still I could not find a man who wanted me to stay with him, a transsexual took me home for company. She told me of her feelings as a transsexual, growing up as a boy, but only being happy as a girl. She may not have realised it, but she was telling me my own story, and it was with a chill in my heart that I realised that I may well be headed in the same direction she had taken.
The thought of being a transsexual scared me, for it seemed to be a life of heart-breaking struggle for acceptance, emotionally fraught with the dangers of discovery and rejection, and the mysterious unpredictable effects of the strange drugs known as hormones.
Was I forever to be a one-night stand, forever alone by day?
Then I met a one-night stand who stayed for a whole year. His name was Michael.
That year, I also made the worst career move of my entire life: I joined the Public Service. Its bigotry and anti-gay prejudice took its toll on my mental health.
I took sick leave and lodged a claim for workers compensation.
One day, as I was rehearsing for a show, I noticed a woman in the mirror. I instantly realised that she was me, and it followed that a decision about my sex had to be made. It seemed like the most sobering, liberating revelation I had ever had. Everything made sense when viewed in the context of my sex being female. The profound clarity of this “truth” (as I then felt it to be) was astounding, and I felt a surge of hope as I realised my “true identify” and the proper direction for my life.
I waited three days before I was satisfied that this was no mere impulse, and had my doctor prescribe female hormone tablets. He warned me of some of the possible health hazards, but I would not be dissuaded, for I had an almost religious conviction of my newfound direction.
I eventually found a sympathetic psychiatrist for assessment, but it is appalling how much crap many professionals put transgender women through. They moralise, they preach, they impose their own idea of what a woman is, and insist that their patients aspire to the same conformist norms. In doing this, transgender women realise that the truth is in conflict with the rigid preconceptions of individual (usually male) doctors, and learn to lie so as not to risk refusal of approval for “the op”.
This approval was so vital and easily jeopardised, so much so that I was very careful to try to give the impression that I was coping reasonably, even when I wasn’t. Life without the prospect of surgical salvation was not worth living. I knew of no other options. I hid my suicide attempts from my psychiatrist so as not to jeopardise surgical approval. I had to.
A few months after my op I returned to work at the Department of Social Security (DSS). I requested that my courtesy title be changed from Master to Ms only to find that the adverse treatment I had received for being an obvious queen was only a hint of the punishment to come for being a transgender woman and daring to work in a “straight job”.
More discrimination followed.
I took my fight with the DSS all the way to the Supreme Court after which the Public Service Commission finally announced they had ordered the DSS to recompense me for my suspension without pay. They eventually ordered that I be paid for the difference between the welfare benefits received and my full salary and leave entitlements.
It was in Sydney, in 1989, during a Commonwealth Employment Service-sponsored bar course, that I’d received the final psychiatric approval for the (long awaited) operation, and the following day had an appointment with the surgeon. I immediately took the required thirty-seven hundred dollars from the bank, and paid his fee there and then, and left to book myself into the hospital.
I had little idea of what female anatomy was until I had my own to explore, though by far the greatest change was in my self-image. No longer did I see a freak in the mirror. The woman I saw now was undeniably female, and I could at last see without effort that I had an attractive body. Suddenly I no longer looked like a boy with tits. This was a curvaceous frame that I felt very sexy to possess.
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In 1991, I was elected President of the Transsexual Liberation Coalition (TLC).
The TLC involved quite a few transgender folk who questioned or outright rejected the standard transsexual medical model. There were transgender people who identified as of both genders, and of no gender. There were transgender people who identified as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and asexual. There were transgender people who identified as “real women”, transsexuals, queens, cross-dressers and transvestites. We agreed that any definition of the organisation be as broad as possible, so that no one who genuinely saw themselves as transgender would be excluded.
Transgender, most importantly, was our word. It wasn’t coined by somebody else purporting to make decisions on our behalf, it wasn’t invented by the medical profession, it wasn’t some sexual deviance defined as a disorder that required treatment. We defined it as broadly as we could.
When I gave the Stonewall welcoming address to marchers at Town Hall on the last Saturday in June, Stonewall Day, in 1992, this was the first public mention of the term “transgender” in Australia. It was also a call for inclusion – for gays and lesbians to work with bisexuals and transgender people and everybody else.
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At the end of 1995, I gave a workshop at the Down to Earth Confest. I’d reached the stage of believing that, as the kind of transgender person I was, it was my job to conciliate the “gender wars”, to put men and women in touch with each other, and with the “feminine” and “masculine” within. I believed I could show and teach that men and women are not separate species, as many people (particularly men) seemed to believe. I wanted people to give themselves the permission to accept the whole of who they are, yin and yang.
I called the workshop Ultra Sex.
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With the NSW government contemplating transgender legislation, my faction of the TLC lobbied hard to ensure all transgender people were included in the draft anti-discrimination legislation regardless of their medical, hormonal, or surgical status.
I was sitting in the public gallery the last day the Transgender Anti-Discrimination and Other Acts Amendment bill was discussed in the parliament’s Upper House and, after a lengthy debate, the bill was finally passed in the early evening of June 5, 1996.
As well as the birth certificate and anti-discrimination changes, the bill protected transgender people against vilification, and amended the Wills Act to ensure transgender people weren’t automatically disinherited, and the Crimes Act to ensure genitally realigned male to female transsexuals were protected against rapists.
More importantly, all transgender people gained legal protection from being discriminated against in employment, accommodation, or the provision of goods and services.
No more would we have to seek surgical salvation from a patronising medical fraternity. No more would we have to hide behind the labels of gender dysphoria, gender disorder, transsexuality, or any other term that labelled us sick.
We were no longer victims. We had changed the world, and done so on our own terms. Never have I been more proud to be a transgender person.
When I was a lad, which wasn’t very often, same-sex sex was illegal. Over the years the laws against “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” have been abolished, along with the laws against “cross dressing”. Eventually, sex changes were legally recognised and now anyone can marry anyone they love, and the fiction that all people have to be male or female has been legally refuted. It may well be that in the future, fewer babies born with intersex variations will be rushed into surgery to “normalise them”. Legal sex and gender distinctions may well be seen as irrelevant as race or religion or “father’s occupation”, all things that used to appear on legal identity documents. Children may grow up in environments that nurture them no matter how diverse their natures and interests may be. Society may well be more inclusive, and less divisive. After all, we’re all in this together.
The future is beyond division. Ultra (beyond) Sex (division).
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This is an edited extract from Norrie’s memoir Ultrasex launched at Gould’s Book Arcade in Newtown on October 5. Copies from https://www.amazon.com/dp/1689573317
