The Silicone Woman in the Stands

When the 2024 Olympics began, I took little notice. The fact that the IOC did not seem to care that 342 Palestinian Olympians were killed before they could even make it to Paris meant that I was already reluctant to watch the games.

But once the name Imane Khelif reached my carefully curated Instagram feed, I knew my attempts to ignore the games were naïve. After all, this was a prime opportunity to whip up another sports-based transphobic ‘controversy.’ I should have known better.

Exhausting does not even begin to describe an Aboriginal trans woman’s weekly reality. I’ve just spent this past week attending a series of abolition workshops; developing strategies and tactics to stem the tide of Blakfullas currently flowing into the colony’s ‘justice’ system. When it comes to Aboriginal women and girls, the statistics are particularly bleak (cis or trans).

For four days I laughed and cried with other Mob in the face of the intense and unrelenting systemic violence we collectively face. It was healing and restorative, but it was also draining and unearthed a lot of trauma. At the same time, I was trying to squeeze the workshop sessions in around a full week of class. Classes for a degree I’ve only just started because my transition derailed my career of 7 years and I was sick of being rejected for jobs. Jobs which I foolishly applied for under my full name; a name which, when googled, returns an article about my transition. An article I’d only agreed to so that other Aboriginal trans women younger than me could see that they can live to 30. I’ve lost many opportunities simply for being a trans woman and, while I’ll never know how many of those jobs I was rejected for on that basis, the thought never leaves my mind.

To top all of that off, suddenly, it was the weekend and I was bombarded on every app by a fresh transphobic ‘controversy.’ But it was not the ridiculous, click-bait, conservative nonsense that drove me to buy my first pack of cigarettes since April. Rather, it was the endless series of arguments made in ‘defence’ of Imane Khelif that threw us under the bus at the same time (regardless of the author’s intent).

Were all these impassioned posts written out of a genuine sense of cis-trans solidarity? The insistence on using the term ‘biological woman’ suggests otherwise. She is a ‘biological woman!’ She is ‘AFAB!’ How dare you compare her to a man trans woman. If Khelif is ‘biologically’ a woman, does that make me a non-biological woman? What am I made of, silicone? Glitter? Unmitigated faggotry? Or is it that, despite how earnestly some ‘allies’ insist that they believe ‘trans women are women,’ deep down they have not unpacked their own transmisogyny and still see us all as men that made a subversive lifestyle choice?

It makes sense for others to see transition as a choice. It allows our cis-centric society to stay silent whenever something horrible happens to a trans woman. If transition is a choice and violent transmisogyny is a consequence, nobody has to do anything about it – we can die quietly in the backseat of a car, hotel room or on the street. Others can continue to ignore the discomfort we seem to cause by simply trying to live our lives.

I wish I could say that this piece was prompted by hurt feelings about language – something that I suspect many assume is the primary outcome of experiencing transmisogyny – but if I wrote something every time I saw or experienced something that made me feel horrible about myself for being a trans woman, I’d produce an essay collection every month.

Rather, this piece is prompted by ‘allies’ who are claiming to be on our side while predicating their argument on the belief that we are somehow ‘non-biological’ women. Conceptualising us in this way perpetuates many of the social beliefs that result in material, physical harm. I am not even talking about the fact that 94% of trans and gender diverse people murdered in 2023 were trans women and transfeminine people (most of whom were not White). I am talking about the ways in which such language contributes to the way we are treated by other people, every week.

Take doctors. While I know some passionate, empathetic and knowledgeable medical professionals who take trans health seriously; there are many others who cannot prevent their racist, transphobic and transmisogynistic beliefs from seeping into their work (regardless of whether they specialise in Aboriginal or trans health). If I present to the kind of doctor who has been influenced by such widespread (but unfounded) social beliefs and reveal that I am trans, I risk being treated as a ‘biological man’ and I am much more likely to experience medical malpractice and additional complications. I’ve experienced firsthand the way minor health issues can transform into significant problems simply because my doctor was inexperienced in trans healthcare and endocrinology.

Just recently I was speaking about this to a surgeon who specialises in bottom surgery and neo- vaginas. Their experience spoke volumes about the ways in which societal beliefs result in medical malpractice for trans women:

The IOC’s betrayal of Palestinian athletes meant that I did not plan to enjoy or celebrate the Olympics I might have once anyway, but there used to be something communal and pre-internet about the whole thing that I once really enjoyed. Plus, after I transitioned watching sports felt like it was all I had. Each trans-women-in-sport-controversy taught me that participating – even at a local level – could land me in the middle of a media shitstorm that would completely unravel my mental health and end my potential sporting career anyway.

Of course, irrespective of this drama and my inability to participate, like many trans women I already had a complicated relationship with sport. As a kid in a rural town in the 1990s, I was forced to play everything and anything – tennis, golf, swimming, athletics, soccer, rugby. I was good at some things and I can remember how good it felt winning player of the week in my local soccer competition when I was 16. Yet most of my memories, truthfully, are about being ostracised, bullied and even bashed by my ‘team mates.’ This might be hard to imagine, but something that every trans woman learns from an early age, is that cis men can sense our transness. I cannot tell you how or why, but they know that we are not like them (no matter how deeply closeted we are). Whatever aspect of their brains or our brains (or both) that helps them notice us when we walk past or enter the change room makes us easy targets for punishment.

I never told my family. I did not want to admit to my parents that I was being bullied, bashed and sexually assaulted by people I was just supposed to throw a ball around with on the weekend. No matter how many conventionally ‘girly’ traits I suppressed; no matter how convincing my exterior was before I came out; I already lived with the guilt that I was failing them in virtually every way Western society expects a ‘son’ to behave. I do not have the time to get into the additional complications of feeling pressured to conform to Western ideas of sex, gender or the disappointment that stemmed from the racist belief that I should have been good at sport simply because I was an Aboriginal teenager.

Scared of my teammates but too scared to quit, I tried to find some way to navigate things in a way that would not set off too many alarm bells. I would avoid the men’s changeroom at the rugby club and simply underperform on the field. I’d get changed before and after every game in the thick stand of gum trees nearby and avoid bus trips if I could. At the time it seemed more prudent to make others target me for my poor performance than the general sense of ‘wrongness’ that they and I could feel at all times.

I wish that I could say that my relationship with sport as a trans woman (Aboriginal or otherwise) is uniquely complex, painful and multilayered. Sadly, it is a common experience. As the current debate about Khelif rolls on – despite the fact that trans women and anyone that ‘looks like us’ will continue to be disproportionately affected – our voices remain almost entirely absent from the conversation. Some of us sit at the intersection of all the things people want to interrogate in this moment - such as Western society’s demands of ‘femininity’ from non-White women or the widespread and lethal ramifications of ‘looking trans’ - but nobody wants an actual answer. I also do not have the time, energy or lived experience to get into another seperate and equally important discussion: about how this ‘controversy’ impacts the daily life of intersex people in painful and material ways.

I suspect that the unwillingness of allies to engage with us stems from their inability to reflect on the malleable nature of human bodies. It is this reluctance that prevents so many people from loosening their white-knuckle grip on a whole host of bioessentialist beliefs. We, as a society, have yet to reflect on the fact that our hormones and endocrine system influence so much of what we consider immutable aspects of ‘sex’ and ‘gender.’ We are yet to engage with the fact that intersexuality does not just manifest through variations to ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’ sex organs and that it is more common than we think. This is a conversation that affects people who do not medically transition. For so many trans, gender diverse and intersex people, the way this debate is constructed fucks up our lives to varying degrees. It is these kinds of media-generated ‘debates’ that make us sick and get us killed.

Obviously it sucks to have your very existence politicised and questioned daily, but I do not expect that to change any time soon. All I am asking is that you stop to think how the language you are using in ‘solidarity’ with trans women is actually reinforcing the challenges we face. After all, once the public are satisfied that Imane Khelif has not committed the oh-so-heinous crime of being a trans woman; that the real ‘tragedy’ of it all is that she simply looks like what many of you expect us to look like, we will disappear from the headlines again. I suspect that by next Monday everyone else will have moved on and actual trans women will be left alone to navigate whatever fresh hell we’re expected to put up with (or succumb to) next week.

I value the people who show up for us when we actually need it in more ways than I can express, but no matter how much individuals might do to support us, the lack of support we receive at a societal level means there is a real chance each week could be our last. Like almost every trans woman I know, I live with an inescapable sense of terrible, unrelenting fear. Every day I feel crushed between the potential consequences of asking those around me to make the smallest of concessions and the memorised list of other girls who died because others refused to make those concessions. Girls who often died in preventable, horrible circumstances that never even made headlines. Girls who I or my closest friends may one day join.

I know that I’ll likely never play sport with any degree of safety in my lifetime. I know that I cannot stop these controversies from poisoning my experience, even when I am just a spectator. But I’d settle for seeing our ‘allies’ not proclaiming that they are here to save us as they simultaneously shove us under the bus to protect another cis person. After all, I’ve not even touched on how it feels to be treated like a woman so monstrous in appearance and nature that even your ‘allies’ are afraid of being mistaken for you. Given what trans women face each and every week of our lives, is it too much to ask you to use ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ when you talk about all women? I know it does not sound like much, but it is that kind of small concession that might make this pack of smokes my last.