Transgender Awareness Week 2024

It’s currently Transgender Awareness Week, a week to bring awareness to transgender and gender diverse (TGD) experiences and stories. November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to honour TGD lives lost due to anti-trans acts of violence, discrimination and transphobia.

Note: When I say trans for short in this piece, I’m referring to all trans and gender diverse folks, including binary trans, non-binary trans, genderqueer, gender questioning and folks who do not align with their assigned cisgender man/woman identity.

This week, I sent out an all staff email to my workplace disclosing that I’m a Vietnamese-Australian, autistic, trans man. You may be thinking, “Why would you disclose something so personal at work?” To that I answer: to pave a more inclusive and understanding workplace for marginalised people to be seen and celebrated in a comfortable and relatively safe environment. Besides this, it minimises the need to mask and suppress our identities, which negatively impacts on mental health and work performance.

Continuing the email, I spoke about:

• Past examples of trans advocacy and its impacts on members of my community.

• Past experience of workplace transphobia.

• Trans Day Of Remembrance 

• Suggestions of actionable steps to get started on being a better ally, including a resource to a trans podcast I participated in.

I didn't believe the email would achieve much, but I was wrong. It started with a reply from a queer person in the administrative and leadership team. It followed with a few colleagues thanking me for sharing my experiences and the resources. Lastly, there was a response from a fellow trans man amplifying the suggestion about inclusive language use and thanking me for community advocacy.

A few hours later, management started using more inclusive language in team chats, namely, using man/woman/non-binary person etc., to describe gender as opposed to male/female.

Last night, someone asked me how I'm doing and I responded with words I'd not answered to the question before. “I feel powerful, like there's this power in my hands”.

I’ve often noticed that the work to educate folks lies on the shoulders of trans people, which is exhausting, but there is a gap that requires bridging. I feel frustrated at people's inaction, so I ignite the conversation through vulnerability, which sparks a chain reaction of people jumping on board.

We can all support each other to replace old, damaging standards of “normal” through learning and camaraderie.