Being Trans in New Zealand
I’m going to publicly proclaim it now. Hi, I’m transgender. I changed my medium account name and will probably find a picture of me being all girly and all soonish. Yay.
First of all, being trans sucks. So it’s probably quite understandable that finally getting to live in the body you should have been born with in the first place feels absolutely amazing. Like a puzzle that suddenly magically fits together. Like an ingrown hair that you finally freed from what feels like a thousand layers on skin to finally pull it out of its porey jail. Uhm well you get the idea. That’s the reason most of us will eventually do what’s called a “transition”, a slow process with the goal to finally one day have your body be like what you’ve always wanted it to be(you know like losing weight, but a little more permanent. And harder. Ok maybe it’s not harder than losing weight.).
A transition has many aspects, ranging from clinical and medical up to social aspects and takes a good while. And not in every country you can expect your society to be accepting. My biggest fear is running against the hardship that a German university’s bureaucracy apparatus. In other countries, life is quite harder, discrimination and assaults are everyday life for trans people. So the interesting question here is; how does the trans everyday life look like in big NZ and how does it compare to trans life in Germany?
Well, for every country, even in the West, the saying is true that generally the city areas are more open than the countryside. So while the shepherd/winemaker next door might not be accepting of what you’re doing, cities, especially university cities like Auckland have support groups to aid you during your life, like Uniq or Qtopia. Still, you are protected by the law against any sort of discrimination, so that is already worth quite a lot(as it should be really in a Western country). Ask around in America and how trans people in the bible belt have to live. Of course life isn’t going to be discrimination free no matter where in world you are(thats people for you…), but the situation is quite comparable to the one in Germany and that is that there is really little discrimination.
Medical transition can be a bit of a hardship as well. Because a lot of general practitioners have little experience with transgender patients, they’re often very clueless on how to treat them, an issues I have experienced in Germany as well. A similar thing goes for surgeons that perform SRS, “Sex Reassignment surgery”(you know… THAT one…), of which there are currently appear to be none in the entirety of New Zealand. Whoops. Well I heard Thailand isn’t all too far off from NZ.
But on the other hand, not everything about the medical aspect is actually bad. Because New Zealand has a public health care system(which is a awesome), most stuff that actually surrounds transition like hormone therapy and therapist visits(no we’re not crazy) are covered by the governmental health care. Which, again is just like in Germany. This is not a standard for Western countries btw. Another point for progressiveness!
While we’re at progressiveness, New Zealand also boasted the world’s first trans MP! Georgina Beyer(born as George), a former actor and sex worker of all things, became mayor of Carterton in 1995 as the worlds first openly transgender mayor! That wasn’t enough for her though, in 1999 she became a Member of Parliament as -of course- the first openly transgender MP in the world, taking a seat for the Labour Party. She inhibited that post until 2007. In 2014, she returned in an attempt to get an MP seat for the Mana Party. If she isn’t a role model for every trans person in New Zealand and the world who else is? By the way, the first trans person in the German parliament was Christian Schenk(born Christiane, yes we’re seeing a pattern here…), MP for “Bündnis 90/Die Grüne”, who came out in 2002.
Overall, the trans experience of what I have read about in New Zealand has been fairly positive overall. Discriminations are low, hurdles for transition aren’t too high (well expect for personal reasons…) and public health care is affordable and covers a large part of the costs of your transition. It is actually quite comparable to the situation in Germany, down to the long waiting periods. Which is to say, it’s by far not the worst trans experience you can get (which is honestly a blessing considering you’re already trans to boot).
So stay queer folks!
(All pictures taken from wikipedia)
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