Aimee Chapman, Casey Rice & Louise Terry
DR: Just a fairly general
question to get things going – How do you think about your relationship to the
LGBTQIA+ community?
AC: It’s a tricky one. Because I present as heteronormative in most parts of my life. And for the most part, I am. I’m in a relationship that is heteronormative, but I'm not actively out there flying a flag like this is a big part of me. It's just …
CR: But it is though …
AC: No, but it's something …
CR: It's a part of you …
AC: It's a part of me but it’s not the part that I run with all the time, and it’s …
LT: An identity that you have, but then there’s the identity that you promote or project.
AC: It's not something I overtly avoid. It's really just something that, if someone asks me, I answer. And mostly people don't ask me. Louise happened to ask me, so I answered, and that's the way I am. I don't hide it. Because my life is just the life it is.
CR: I relate to that too. You know, it's one of those things, just because someone's queer doesn't mean you find them interesting or that they feel like your people all the time. I think that there are people who find strength in that and find the acceptance that they need and the love they need in communities like that, and I do too. But I don’t think it’s my main event in life to be a trans person. I think of myself as my practice rather than my gendered identity. Those things often collide, and I’m reminded very quickly about the fact that they do intersect and overlap … If you don’t project a capital Q queerness, or you don’t have cultural signs that are emanating from your appearance, or your actions, or your practice or whatever, then a lot of times people can be less accepting of you as queer. It’s almost like you’re a bad queer, or you’re a bad trans, if you don’t adhere to the dominant cultural narrative.
AC: Or you're an ally so, you go and be in the ‘Ally’ box.
CR: Yeah, that's right. What she's describing is actually quite common in the community where there are so few people. We could round up all the rainbow people in Castlemaine and put them in a room together. I do things with the community, like I did a gig and I’m on the working group with the council, and I always act in solidarity with other people who are oppressed or minoritised – whether they are First Nations folks or queer folks or women or whatever. But I don't necessarily see my people in just that demographic or descriptor. I'm sorry to get philosophical about it, but quite often I don't feel like I'm accepted into those circles because I'm not a cartoon transsexual. If I were more so, it would be easier for other people ultimately. I think people find non-conformity threatening. So we have that in common and I think that's why we bond together – we're all also non-typical.
AC: Yeah, that's one of many reasons. Yeah, absolutely.
CR: We're not typical. You know – non-typical fags
CR: It’s like those stereotypes exist in every archetype of queerness, like the circuit boy who is really cute and pretty and beautiful and hangs on the scene and everybody wants him and he's really great, and then at some point changes and ages or whatever. There are all those stereotypes like that. Or a butch dyke, or something else. Those stereotypes exist for a reason, but I think a lot of people don't fit into them.
AC: So you've got your letters, but if there was an alternate alphabet, there would be so many different letters and shades in between.
CR: There's also this whole idea of the T in the acronym. There's a lot of L & G people who are starting to be reactionary – especially the older crowd – against the fact that there's a T or a B or even an I in there and, why do we have to include asexuals and all this other stuff? As a modern queer, who also works with young people, I'm pretty across how they are, but I think there are a lot of people my generation who aren't like that. They’re very unaccepting of trans people actually, they’re really not into it. The kids are cool.
AC: The kids have totally got it. That’s how I feel, like I just am … and I don't actually care about any of the definitions. It just doesn't really matter to me, and I think the kids are just so fluid and so accepting. They’re this today and different things tomorrow, and none of it matters and they don't have to justify that.
CR: That matters to them in a straight world – they'll stand up for their rights. It's like being a secular Jew and saying, well, I mean, yeah, technically, I'm a Jew, my mother's Jewish but I didn't really go to synagogue growing up and I don't really believe in religion. I am none of that. But part of that being is the way other people see you. Do you know what I mean? It's not just a matter of how you feel, and what you're projecting to the world. It's that there are people within the prism of colonialism who see you as an ‘other,’ and so you don't have any choice.
DR: And how do you feel you're seen?
CR: I don't know because I'm transitioning. So it changes, and it depends on how much costume and artifice I put into my appearance when I go out. Like, how am I seen now? I don't know actually, I look like a transsexual without makeup on with her hair up in a hoodie in my PJs at home But if I put on a dress and put a face on and really femme out and go to the world with a mask on, people call me ‘ma’am’. So, I don't know how I'm seen. It's mutable. It depends on how clued-in people are to queer identities. I mean, in the Coffs Harbour airport, the woman patted me down and said, Thank you, ma'am. Have a nice day after I had a full body scan. So I couldn't tell whether I was passing, or she just couldn't tell, or was just being nice, or both ... I don't know why she was really sweet like that. But I don't really care as long as she was nice.
LT: I also relate to what Aimee and Casey were saying. As a queer person, I don't know where I fit within that community in a loud and proud kind of a way. And I think I've always felt that as a queer person right from the early days of realising what my sexual orientations were and navigating that world and not really feeling like I slotted right in. My immediate friendship network revolves around all the shades of the rainbow, and that is something that I don't put any thought or any conscious effort into. I didn't meet those people in the context of any kind of queer umbrella-ing or any kind of events or whatever. But I do think that my natural gravitation, organically, is towards people who either see themselves somewhere in a queer spectrum, or are able to discuss sexuality really broadly and have a really open mind and are into philosophically considering how that functions in society and everyday life. So yeah, I would say queerness is my immediate community and that's an organic gravitation – like mindedness is how that's happened for me. I think it's part of why I feel particularly safe in this group of people. One of many reasons why we've gravitated together. And that's really valuable to me.
CR: What you said just now brings to mind the whole concept of code switching, you know. You say, well, how do you think people see you? And it depends. There is some mutability in how I want them to see me. We all can do that and sometimes you do it for convenience. Some people can’t, some people can. And some people have to do it more than others – like queer Black folks have to code switch all the time, to make themselves non-threatening to white folks, and for their own existence within Black culture.
AC: To keep themselves physically safe.
CR: To keep themselves physically safe and to get through life, period. It’s illustrated really well in the difference between being a pretty basic gay man, then going down the scale to being a trans man, and then going down even further to being a trans woman. If you can pass as what people perceive you as, you're less threatening to the white male heteronormative patriarchal vibe, or whoever has the most power in the colonial pyramid scheme. I think that's the difference between trans men and trans women – basically I don't pass as a woman most of the time. And that's fine in my own heart, but it's inconvenient sometimes. These two could be at the supermarket and some hillbilly could yell out some homophobic or terrible thing and they wouldn't necessarily feel like they were the target of it. Whereas I might look around a little more and go fuck it, he’s definitely directing this at me.
That's part of the code-switching thing. There’s just not as much of that available to you. You just have to be yourself out in public and that’s that. I think that's why so many trans women invest so much in cosmetic stuff – because they just long to be left alone.
LT: Yeah, that's really interesting.
CR: I think that I can exist in this workspace with these two, and they get it, I mean, it comes up, we talked about it, but it's not like our main event.
AC, LT: No, not at all.
CR: We’re making music.
LT: It came up at the start when we were getting to know each other and asking those questions. And it was a realisation that it's something that we've got in common, and I suppose it comes out in our politics and our values. The experiences that you have affect how you move through the world and what you end up being sensitive to. So, it allows us to have really nuanced conversations around gender and sexuality and inclusivity and diversity.
CR: And you know, two bisexuals in heteronormative relationships and a trans woman are kind of outliers in the whole rainbow family too. We're not exactly the most common or accepted of queer archetypes in that whole fabric of the community.
DR: What does not being accepted feel or look like to you? How do you gauge that?
CR: Shifty looks from butch dykes and the old folks ignoring me and giving me shady looks when I'm in a meeting with them. Or going to a queer get together, and all the men are sitting at one table and all the women are sitting at another table and I'm like, why aren’t you all sitting together? You know, stuff like that. Having to win people over. Having to go up and introduce myself to people and use my social skills to open a door and charm them so that they'll accept me and be friendly to me or at least be polite to me. I've had to break the ice on numerous occasions. Mostly the older crowd but younger people too. There's a lot of hostility towards trans people, mostly transwomen not transmen, which is very ironic in terms of patriarchy, but that's the way it works.
DR: How do you think you’re seen by others?
LT: I definitely feel like I'm pretty hard to read probably. For me its quite enjoyable to occupy that space. So I think I cultivate that on some level for my own pleasure.
CR: Well, you've got your show face on too. You’ve got your hairdo and ‘look’ right now. It’s for a show – so it's not necessarily your normal look.
LT: It's not my normal look, but I wouldn't choose to do this if I wasn't prepared to walk around the street representing myself in this way. I enjoy looking like a little bit like a questionable human – like an alien perhaps. That for me is an enjoyable space to occupy.
CR: You're very bright, always really colourful. Always loud and unapologetic about it.
LT: Yeah. And unapologetic about how I dress and how loud I am in spaces. I vacillate between enjoying getting incredibly femmed out, as well as being incredibly – I kind of loathe to use this language – tomboyish. I enjoy that. I have ever since I was a kid. I was misgendered as a kid, and part of me felt weird to be called a boy. But part of me was like, it kind of feels good too.
DR: What happened when you were misgendered as a kid?
LT: It was a period of time in my life when I was pre-pubescent and into puberty, where I just was a pretty chunky child. I always had short hair dos and that was always my choice to have really short hair. I was just a blobby, amorphous kind of preteen teen, and I was working. One really clear memory where I felt that slight discomfort and slight pleasure of being misgendered was working at my parents’ fruit and veg shop in the school holidays and carrying boxes out to the cars for the clientele. Being the person carrying the boxes, you know, ‘the muscles’. I got misgendered a lot doing that. I got a lot of, Thank you. You're a really good little boy. I was pretty smug about it actually. I mean, initially it was a bit of a shocking experience. And then I felt like it was maybe a bit of a superpower as well. I didn't really care and there was something cool about it.
**
[CR: I got misgendered too. My brother’s transgender as well. So, I have a trans man brother. And when we were growing up, before puberty, I always wanted my hair long and he always wanted his hair short. And we were allowed some sort of compromise there, which ended up basically as the same haircut-ish. This a long time ago. Right? So, I’m not going to date myself, but it was not the eighties. And everyone always thought that he was the boy, and I was the girl when they met us. So, we would be introduced by our gendered given names. And my name was always Casey, his was not. His name's Matt now. And they'd always think that we were swapped. It always vexed my father no end. You always knew that when it happened there was going to be a repercussion. And it wasn't anything we could help.
DR: What was the repercussion?
CR: Basically, it resulted in recrimination and rejection, and there was a lot of gender policing going on with both children. I copped a lot more of it from my dad for being a girl basically.
DR: What’s gender policing?
CR: Any kind of behavior that was perceived as being in the wrong gender by the parents. For example in primary school, we’d moved to a new school system, and they had a music class. We came home from school on the day you get to pick your instrument, and my brother was like, I'm going to play the drums and I was like, I'm going to play the flute.
LT: I knew you were going to say the flute.
DR: Can you talk about your relationship to gender?
AC: I’ve actually thought about this a lot more since becoming a mother to two females. More than my sexuality, my gender has been the hardest thing for me in my life. In my work life I find patriarchal settings, patriarchal mindset, more of a stumbling block to being me than my sexual preferences. Having two little girls, I think a lot about what I want for them. It's a tricky question – what's my relationship to gender? It's difficult because I love being female. I love who I am, I love women. I love how powerful women are. I love men too and I love those attributes. But what you're talking about, Casey, is society’s expectations about what gender means and what you must do and the boxes that you need to fit in. That's where I start to have big problems.
DR: What are they?
CR: Just barriers to access.
AC: Absolutely.
CR: It's the same thing as colonialism, intersectional feminism and racism. This is the thing about being on top of the pyramid schemes – everybody has work to do. You know, no one's going to push the button on the camera for you, David, you have to take the photo. I'm just saying, we all have to work to get to where we want to go. For some people, there's nothing standing in the way of them doing hard work and there's a lot of room for failure and picking themselves up and dusting themselves off and pulling themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps and doing it again. But for other people, one failure can mean total disaster [and] - there are barriers to access.
In Australia, gender is one aspect of this big Venn diagram, and we all reside somewhere in this circle of different things, it just depends on where you are. The thing about being queer in public is that you have to police yourself. It's like the gender policing my dad did to me. One of the things that I like about Louise is, she doesn't police herself for anyone. She's a loud bitch in public when she wants to be. I really admire that about her and wish I had more of that in myself. She brings that out in me a little bit too. But gender is just one aspect of that. I've lived as both genders or all of them – the whole continuum. I've shifted. So, my feelings are contextually specific, massively and historically specific.
LT: I personally feel really excited about gender being questioned so much in the 21st century. We've had so much more questioning and open dialogue culturally around gender being a construct. I can breathe a sigh of relief when I hear those kinds of conversations. As a woman, as a feminist and as somebody who doesnt identify as non-binary, but who feels liberated by not needing to uphold the codes and conduct of female behaviour. Ultimately it feels like it benefits me and everybody to question these things.
CR: We keep coming back to this idea of colonialism being a prism through which we are valued. We experience our life in a former British colony, arguably still an American colony. We’re still part of that white minority rule of colonialism and all the wealth that's come from it and you see those behaviours in our political and social fabric. But you also see it in the non-acceptance of trans people. Right now, in this moment in history, it's the low hanging fruit of the so-called culture wars.
In the Victorian era, homosexuality and gender nonconformity or being transgender was seen as an aberration and was proscribed in law. But in India - in the Vedas – which is much older than the Bible – there are many mentions of transgender people. Interestingly enough, Narendra Modi's Hindu supremacist government has legally recognized Hijra people as having equal rights. There’s a particular classification of third gender people in India who are trans women, who dress like women and pass as women. They do sex work, and they do art and music if they're lucky. He recently gave them back their rights as a nod to the Vedas and to Hindu supremacy. It wasn't because he wanted to give people their rights. His whole promotion of yoga is the same thing as well – he's trying to shed the colonial vibe which the English imposed upon him and promote Hindu supremacy.
DR: Whats your experience of living in regional Victoria, compared to other places you’ve lived?
CR: This is a unique town. I don't think it's typical of regional Victoria by any means. It’s a very polite and tolerant place on the street. I don't get a lot of shit. I get way more shit from people on the street in Melbourne on Sydney Road than I would ever get here. And there’s a 28 or 29 per cent primary vote for the Greens party here. So I think that's indicative of the kind of demographic that might be present here.
AC: It's a spread-out demographic. So many people have moved from Melbourne over generations and there are different age groups and motivations for moving there. It's not like Castlemaine, that's where all the gay people live. So, I'm going to move here. There’s artists …
CR: I think there’s a lot of queer people of a certain generation who couldn't afford to move to Daylesford, but they wanted to do a tree change. A lot of lesbians initially moved here because historically queers and lesbians half a generation ahead of me – who had access to full time work and all the things that aren't givens anymore – came here because they could afford to buy property here. It was the cheaper option. Daylesford is leafier and more beautiful and more upmarket so this was cheaper for a while. There is also an inbuilt counter-cultural aspect because there's the continually operating theatre that's always been here. They've always had cinema, always had gigs here, whereas a lot of towns of 6,000 people in regional Victoria don't have any cultural places. So, it's really unique in that way.
LT: Since I dyed my hair fluoro-yellow and bleached my eyebrows and stuff, I actually like just going for walks in my neighbourhood area, which is by no means downtown cool Castlemaine. It's a little bit outskirts. People are like, Oh, love your hair colour! All sorts of people like boomers and old men in tradie gear walking their doggies. I have had lots of people make cute, polite comments – they genuinely like to see someone doing something different. I feel like there's a lot of celebration in this community. There’s a lot of celebration of difference, just a little bit more preparedness to be open.
CR: It’s important to recognise that during the marriage quality thing, there was a big battle here that happened in the local government. The mayor got all hurt. But it really made people talk and brought the issue to the surface. People in the community were standing up for their rights, having an intelligent debate about it. People then formed an opinion about the so-called community, as if it's a monolithic community, and they didn’t understand the problem. Because that was an issue here, it forced a lot of people who would have had a Herald Sun kind of opinion about it, to be like, you know what I think – ‘live and let live’ is the best policy, we should just let people do what they want, and I'll do what I want. There's a hotrod community here, the custom car thing is really big here and the motor head thing, and I think it's awesome.
LT: I love how different they are. My next-door neighbour is a motor head and there's just a nuclear family vibe, with older kids, hotheads, hot rods. I'm also like, check out my neighbours, because I don't live like that at all, but we have really nice chats across the fence.
CR: Growing up in the country and being working class, I don't have a problem relating to those people at all. I think some people here who have a problem relating to everyone are the super wealthy privileged boomers. They just feel it's their retirement village. But everybody else is kind of cool.
DR: How do they communicate that to you?
CR: You just see the examples of it all the time – people acting out and being demanding. The guy who moved in next door bought this house and cut the fence down and cut the neighbour's trees down and didn't introduce himself to anyone. That was pretty entitled behaviour. We know lots of people who work in hospo and the stories are rife of the behaviour of the older crowd.
LT: There's also the radio show on Friday mornings, ‘In Maldon today’, which is out loud and proud, kind of like, we are boomers and we're going to say shit that's going to ruffle your feathers. And so the joke's on you …
AC: They take great pride in saying volatile things.
CR: They say racist and sexist shit regularly to wind people up.
AC: Luckily my parents had purchased in Newstead 16 years prior to me moving here. So it was like I had a buffer. And it was like, okay, well, you're sort of okay, because there's a bit of a lineage there. I was just told it's going to take a long time before you have any claim to being here.
People who’ve moved here are like, Wow, some people were just so welcoming and others are like, you need to prove yourself, you need to be here for a long time. I see it in community politics where they want all of the new families to come and use the local pool, but they're referred to as ring-ins and flybys. It's just like, they'll be gone, you know, soon enough …
CR: But they don't talk about tourists that way.
AC: I actually didn't feel it myself, but I think it was because I had been coming down here for so many years. I developed relationships with the oldies, I went to the pub, I knew people by name. But I’ve seen it with other people all the time where someone's like, I've just moved to town and I'm looking for a plumber or someone who can clean our gutters or whatever. And it's this kind of shutdown like, well, you moved here, if you were a local you’d know. There's a little bit of that happens, particularly on social media. I think that's where this town gets let down, on social media.
LT: Yeah the tribalism really comes out on social media.
CR: But this doesn't really come out on the street.
I’ve noticed that if I look at social media, I get feelings that something might happen, but if I just ignore it and go around and be my normal friendly self – I'm very polite in public – it's fine.
DR: What do you think of the whole idea of Pride?
AC: I've had a completely different childhood in the way that I see my queerness. I've grown up in a family where there was no combativeness. There was no, oh my god you’re what!? I was allowed to just be and evolve and do whatever I did. No one ever questioned anything that I did. I just became friends with who I became friends with. There was always a whole mix, and I never became part of a group. I never over-thought it. I just was who I was. I had friends in different places. I had relationships with whoever I wanted. My parents were just – hey, this is Aimee’s friend, or this is Aimee’s girlfriend, or Aimee’s boyfriend or whatever. I've been to Pride events, and I love being part of celebrating. Many people haven't had my experience, have not been able to be who they are with so many roadblocks and so much hurt and repercussions, so I think Pride is important because I really understand how hard some people's journeys have been. They need Pride as a big marker to say, I'm here and I am me and to celebrate that. I really see that.
CR: If you examine the history of Pride parades and events, they were actually radical actions when they started. You’d get your ass beat. You still can get your ass beat and jailed in some countries in the world for marching in a Pride Parade. I think Pride Parade started as gay rights demonstrations, Stonewall era. Being American I have a very different take on Pride because I would march in the Pride Parade in solidarity with my queer friends and my brother. My brother was in the first group of trans men to march in the Pride Parade in Chicago in the 90s. They were at the front of the parade and it was a really big deal because, you know, trans people weren't accepted in the queer community. They still aren't, really. Nobody really wants to talk about it because it's not very nice.
I think Pride is important to be visible. Just to show solidarity with the people who have struggled before us so that we can be in the world. I think disability is super important as well. I'm not going to disappear under a rock because Fred Nile doesn’t like me or something, but I also think the history of Pride here might be a little different. What happens to counterculture in general in societies, is it will be subsumed into advertising and event money-making and tourism. I'm a little cynical. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, pride, right? It's great for the Council because all queers from Melbourne can see how queer-friendly we are. They’re just going to move up here and I'm going to get forced out of my rental and gentrified out of yet another area because I’m visible queer and an artist and making the community more enriched culturally. So, I have mixed feelings about pride as it exists now. But the first Pride Parade I marched in was radical and angry.
LT: It was like a protest. Right?
CR: And it was like, fuck you! Why aren’t you funding AIDS research? We're all dying! It was Queer Nation and Act Up. It was about being visible and saying I’m demanding the same rights as everyone else. I think the softening of it into a tourist attraction or party is really a subversion of its original intention and so I feel a little cynical about it. But I’m not going to be so cynical that I play ‘divide and rule’ like a lot of people, and I'm still going to exist in solidarity with those other people, but I feel like it could really do with returning to its radical roots. That fight isn't as prominent here, so Pride is more of a happy go lucky excuse to get fucked up and wear hot pants and rainbow face paint.
LT: I agree, I wouldn't want there to be no Pride events or focus, but it definitely doesn't feel connected to any of its original story, and so it feels a little diluted in terms of what its purpose is. But events are still really positive for bringing people together in the community and connection and visibility – you’re talking about some of the most vulnerable people in the communities. So that's really great. But I don't necessarily jump on board pride events just because I am a queer person.
CR: There's a queer formal being held here.
DR: Oh, yeah. Someone else told me about that.
CR: I made it a point to sign up to do sound for that. I did it for free for a couple of years, but they're paying me this year. But I just wanted to be visible there and just be like, hey, the sound engineer is trans and the people running the event are queer and they are just like you. You can be a grown up and be queer and be semi-interesting, or hip or whatever. I do it for the children. And I go to the trans and gender diverse community meetings for the same reason. I'm there to try to find young people and support them and help the trans kids navigate through the system that's labyrinthine, and onerous and demeaning. It’s a very laborious process to access care as a young person.
Being trans is a lot more radical than being a generic lesbian or whatever. I don't want to belabour the point, but I went to the pride picnic thing which was held indoors at the town hall because it was really rainy that weekend, and two people said hi to me, and they're both transgender people, and no one else said anything. I did a couple of laps around the town hall. I talked to Star Lady, I talked to this trans masculine person from Melbourne who was outwardly friendly and spotted me and talked to me, and everyone else just ignored me, including people that I know.
DR: That's horrible. I’m so sorry to hear that.
CR: Well, yeah, it is horrible but that’s life, but I'm saying this is just part of your conversation about ‘the’ queer community. It is not a happy family because everyone is traumatised in some regard.
Right now, we're at a point where there's a wedge that the Christian right is trying to drive through the queer community to fracture its power and solidarity by using trans people as the low hanging fruit. I want to be visible because, when Trump became president, I was like, fuck this, I am not going to be a low-profile transsexual anymore. I'm just going to go and do it and exist as a revolutionary act, because I can see what's happening and they want to erase us. It feels like the early 90s or the 80s again, when I was just like, Well, fuck this. I'm going to stand up and demand my rights. Now, I'm not going to just be nice.
The things that queer people undergo in life to get to where they are, wherever they may be, is traumatic. Hang out with a bunch of trans women and listen to their stories and you're just like, holy shit, this is horrific. Because we're such a minority, people don't know the story, but once they're adjacent to the lived experience of someone who's minoritised and discriminated against, then they start to understand what it's like. They have more empathy. I think the divide and rule thing around the queer community is actually working, with people starting to become anti-trans, unfortunately, so I'm just putting that in our conversation because I think the narratives around anti-trans are real and they're rising. They're not diminishing, unfortunately.
I'm definitely queer, I’ve had sex with lesbians, gay men, straight men, straight women, transsexuals. So, I tick all the boxes. I qualify. And I find sometimes I have to say that to people because they think because I generally prefer the company of women now and I’m trans woman that I'm one of those infiltrators. It's fucking true though. We all know someone who believes that stuff.
LT: That you're an infiltrator?
CR: That trans women are fake, and they just want to steal women's spaces ... power. Trans women can’t be lesbians, the whole trans athletes thing, the bathroom thing. It’s been invented in America in Christian right-wing focus groups – it’s not a debate that was generated from actual things in the real world. It was made up. Cultivated to divide people on purpose and it's working. And don't ask me about sport because I'm not interested in sport.
AC: It’s a tricky one. Because I present as heteronormative in most parts of my life. And for the most part, I am. I’m in a relationship that is heteronormative, but I'm not actively out there flying a flag like this is a big part of me. It's just …
CR: But it is though …
AC: No, but it's something …
CR: It's a part of you …
AC: It's a part of me but it’s not the part that I run with all the time, and it’s …
LT: An identity that you have, but then there’s the identity that you promote or project.
AC: It's not something I overtly avoid. It's really just something that, if someone asks me, I answer. And mostly people don't ask me. Louise happened to ask me, so I answered, and that's the way I am. I don't hide it. Because my life is just the life it is.
CR: I relate to that too. You know, it's one of those things, just because someone's queer doesn't mean you find them interesting or that they feel like your people all the time. I think that there are people who find strength in that and find the acceptance that they need and the love they need in communities like that, and I do too. But I don’t think it’s my main event in life to be a trans person. I think of myself as my practice rather than my gendered identity. Those things often collide, and I’m reminded very quickly about the fact that they do intersect and overlap … If you don’t project a capital Q queerness, or you don’t have cultural signs that are emanating from your appearance, or your actions, or your practice or whatever, then a lot of times people can be less accepting of you as queer. It’s almost like you’re a bad queer, or you’re a bad trans, if you don’t adhere to the dominant cultural narrative.
AC: Or you're an ally so, you go and be in the ‘Ally’ box.
CR: Yeah, that's right. What she's describing is actually quite common in the community where there are so few people. We could round up all the rainbow people in Castlemaine and put them in a room together. I do things with the community, like I did a gig and I’m on the working group with the council, and I always act in solidarity with other people who are oppressed or minoritised – whether they are First Nations folks or queer folks or women or whatever. But I don't necessarily see my people in just that demographic or descriptor. I'm sorry to get philosophical about it, but quite often I don't feel like I'm accepted into those circles because I'm not a cartoon transsexual. If I were more so, it would be easier for other people ultimately. I think people find non-conformity threatening. So we have that in common and I think that's why we bond together – we're all also non-typical.
AC: Yeah, that's one of many reasons. Yeah, absolutely.
CR: We're not typical. You know – non-typical fags
CR: It’s like those stereotypes exist in every archetype of queerness, like the circuit boy who is really cute and pretty and beautiful and hangs on the scene and everybody wants him and he's really great, and then at some point changes and ages or whatever. There are all those stereotypes like that. Or a butch dyke, or something else. Those stereotypes exist for a reason, but I think a lot of people don't fit into them.
AC: So you've got your letters, but if there was an alternate alphabet, there would be so many different letters and shades in between.
CR: There's also this whole idea of the T in the acronym. There's a lot of L & G people who are starting to be reactionary – especially the older crowd – against the fact that there's a T or a B or even an I in there and, why do we have to include asexuals and all this other stuff? As a modern queer, who also works with young people, I'm pretty across how they are, but I think there are a lot of people my generation who aren't like that. They’re very unaccepting of trans people actually, they’re really not into it. The kids are cool.
AC: The kids have totally got it. That’s how I feel, like I just am … and I don't actually care about any of the definitions. It just doesn't really matter to me, and I think the kids are just so fluid and so accepting. They’re this today and different things tomorrow, and none of it matters and they don't have to justify that.
CR: That matters to them in a straight world – they'll stand up for their rights. It's like being a secular Jew and saying, well, I mean, yeah, technically, I'm a Jew, my mother's Jewish but I didn't really go to synagogue growing up and I don't really believe in religion. I am none of that. But part of that being is the way other people see you. Do you know what I mean? It's not just a matter of how you feel, and what you're projecting to the world. It's that there are people within the prism of colonialism who see you as an ‘other,’ and so you don't have any choice.
DR: And how do you feel you're seen?
CR: I don't know because I'm transitioning. So it changes, and it depends on how much costume and artifice I put into my appearance when I go out. Like, how am I seen now? I don't know actually, I look like a transsexual without makeup on with her hair up in a hoodie in my PJs at home But if I put on a dress and put a face on and really femme out and go to the world with a mask on, people call me ‘ma’am’. So, I don't know how I'm seen. It's mutable. It depends on how clued-in people are to queer identities. I mean, in the Coffs Harbour airport, the woman patted me down and said, Thank you, ma'am. Have a nice day after I had a full body scan. So I couldn't tell whether I was passing, or she just couldn't tell, or was just being nice, or both ... I don't know why she was really sweet like that. But I don't really care as long as she was nice.
LT: I also relate to what Aimee and Casey were saying. As a queer person, I don't know where I fit within that community in a loud and proud kind of a way. And I think I've always felt that as a queer person right from the early days of realising what my sexual orientations were and navigating that world and not really feeling like I slotted right in. My immediate friendship network revolves around all the shades of the rainbow, and that is something that I don't put any thought or any conscious effort into. I didn't meet those people in the context of any kind of queer umbrella-ing or any kind of events or whatever. But I do think that my natural gravitation, organically, is towards people who either see themselves somewhere in a queer spectrum, or are able to discuss sexuality really broadly and have a really open mind and are into philosophically considering how that functions in society and everyday life. So yeah, I would say queerness is my immediate community and that's an organic gravitation – like mindedness is how that's happened for me. I think it's part of why I feel particularly safe in this group of people. One of many reasons why we've gravitated together. And that's really valuable to me.
CR: What you said just now brings to mind the whole concept of code switching, you know. You say, well, how do you think people see you? And it depends. There is some mutability in how I want them to see me. We all can do that and sometimes you do it for convenience. Some people can’t, some people can. And some people have to do it more than others – like queer Black folks have to code switch all the time, to make themselves non-threatening to white folks, and for their own existence within Black culture.
AC: To keep themselves physically safe.
CR: To keep themselves physically safe and to get through life, period. It’s illustrated really well in the difference between being a pretty basic gay man, then going down the scale to being a trans man, and then going down even further to being a trans woman. If you can pass as what people perceive you as, you're less threatening to the white male heteronormative patriarchal vibe, or whoever has the most power in the colonial pyramid scheme. I think that's the difference between trans men and trans women – basically I don't pass as a woman most of the time. And that's fine in my own heart, but it's inconvenient sometimes. These two could be at the supermarket and some hillbilly could yell out some homophobic or terrible thing and they wouldn't necessarily feel like they were the target of it. Whereas I might look around a little more and go fuck it, he’s definitely directing this at me.
That's part of the code-switching thing. There’s just not as much of that available to you. You just have to be yourself out in public and that’s that. I think that's why so many trans women invest so much in cosmetic stuff – because they just long to be left alone.
LT: Yeah, that's really interesting.
CR: I think that I can exist in this workspace with these two, and they get it, I mean, it comes up, we talked about it, but it's not like our main event.
AC, LT: No, not at all.
CR: We’re making music.
LT: It came up at the start when we were getting to know each other and asking those questions. And it was a realisation that it's something that we've got in common, and I suppose it comes out in our politics and our values. The experiences that you have affect how you move through the world and what you end up being sensitive to. So, it allows us to have really nuanced conversations around gender and sexuality and inclusivity and diversity.
CR: And you know, two bisexuals in heteronormative relationships and a trans woman are kind of outliers in the whole rainbow family too. We're not exactly the most common or accepted of queer archetypes in that whole fabric of the community.
DR: What does not being accepted feel or look like to you? How do you gauge that?
CR: Shifty looks from butch dykes and the old folks ignoring me and giving me shady looks when I'm in a meeting with them. Or going to a queer get together, and all the men are sitting at one table and all the women are sitting at another table and I'm like, why aren’t you all sitting together? You know, stuff like that. Having to win people over. Having to go up and introduce myself to people and use my social skills to open a door and charm them so that they'll accept me and be friendly to me or at least be polite to me. I've had to break the ice on numerous occasions. Mostly the older crowd but younger people too. There's a lot of hostility towards trans people, mostly transwomen not transmen, which is very ironic in terms of patriarchy, but that's the way it works.
DR: How do you think you’re seen by others?
LT: I definitely feel like I'm pretty hard to read probably. For me its quite enjoyable to occupy that space. So I think I cultivate that on some level for my own pleasure.
CR: Well, you've got your show face on too. You’ve got your hairdo and ‘look’ right now. It’s for a show – so it's not necessarily your normal look.
LT: It's not my normal look, but I wouldn't choose to do this if I wasn't prepared to walk around the street representing myself in this way. I enjoy looking like a little bit like a questionable human – like an alien perhaps. That for me is an enjoyable space to occupy.
CR: You're very bright, always really colourful. Always loud and unapologetic about it.
LT: Yeah. And unapologetic about how I dress and how loud I am in spaces. I vacillate between enjoying getting incredibly femmed out, as well as being incredibly – I kind of loathe to use this language – tomboyish. I enjoy that. I have ever since I was a kid. I was misgendered as a kid, and part of me felt weird to be called a boy. But part of me was like, it kind of feels good too.
DR: What happened when you were misgendered as a kid?
LT: It was a period of time in my life when I was pre-pubescent and into puberty, where I just was a pretty chunky child. I always had short hair dos and that was always my choice to have really short hair. I was just a blobby, amorphous kind of preteen teen, and I was working. One really clear memory where I felt that slight discomfort and slight pleasure of being misgendered was working at my parents’ fruit and veg shop in the school holidays and carrying boxes out to the cars for the clientele. Being the person carrying the boxes, you know, ‘the muscles’. I got misgendered a lot doing that. I got a lot of, Thank you. You're a really good little boy. I was pretty smug about it actually. I mean, initially it was a bit of a shocking experience. And then I felt like it was maybe a bit of a superpower as well. I didn't really care and there was something cool about it.
**
[CR: I got misgendered too. My brother’s transgender as well. So, I have a trans man brother. And when we were growing up, before puberty, I always wanted my hair long and he always wanted his hair short. And we were allowed some sort of compromise there, which ended up basically as the same haircut-ish. This a long time ago. Right? So, I’m not going to date myself, but it was not the eighties. And everyone always thought that he was the boy, and I was the girl when they met us. So, we would be introduced by our gendered given names. And my name was always Casey, his was not. His name's Matt now. And they'd always think that we were swapped. It always vexed my father no end. You always knew that when it happened there was going to be a repercussion. And it wasn't anything we could help.
DR: What was the repercussion?
CR: Basically, it resulted in recrimination and rejection, and there was a lot of gender policing going on with both children. I copped a lot more of it from my dad for being a girl basically.
DR: What’s gender policing?
CR: Any kind of behavior that was perceived as being in the wrong gender by the parents. For example in primary school, we’d moved to a new school system, and they had a music class. We came home from school on the day you get to pick your instrument, and my brother was like, I'm going to play the drums and I was like, I'm going to play the flute.
LT: I knew you were going to say the flute.
DR: Can you talk about your relationship to gender?
AC: I’ve actually thought about this a lot more since becoming a mother to two females. More than my sexuality, my gender has been the hardest thing for me in my life. In my work life I find patriarchal settings, patriarchal mindset, more of a stumbling block to being me than my sexual preferences. Having two little girls, I think a lot about what I want for them. It's a tricky question – what's my relationship to gender? It's difficult because I love being female. I love who I am, I love women. I love how powerful women are. I love men too and I love those attributes. But what you're talking about, Casey, is society’s expectations about what gender means and what you must do and the boxes that you need to fit in. That's where I start to have big problems.
DR: What are they?
CR: Just barriers to access.
AC: Absolutely.
CR: It's the same thing as colonialism, intersectional feminism and racism. This is the thing about being on top of the pyramid schemes – everybody has work to do. You know, no one's going to push the button on the camera for you, David, you have to take the photo. I'm just saying, we all have to work to get to where we want to go. For some people, there's nothing standing in the way of them doing hard work and there's a lot of room for failure and picking themselves up and dusting themselves off and pulling themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps and doing it again. But for other people, one failure can mean total disaster [and] - there are barriers to access.
In Australia, gender is one aspect of this big Venn diagram, and we all reside somewhere in this circle of different things, it just depends on where you are. The thing about being queer in public is that you have to police yourself. It's like the gender policing my dad did to me. One of the things that I like about Louise is, she doesn't police herself for anyone. She's a loud bitch in public when she wants to be. I really admire that about her and wish I had more of that in myself. She brings that out in me a little bit too. But gender is just one aspect of that. I've lived as both genders or all of them – the whole continuum. I've shifted. So, my feelings are contextually specific, massively and historically specific.
LT: I personally feel really excited about gender being questioned so much in the 21st century. We've had so much more questioning and open dialogue culturally around gender being a construct. I can breathe a sigh of relief when I hear those kinds of conversations. As a woman, as a feminist and as somebody who doesnt identify as non-binary, but who feels liberated by not needing to uphold the codes and conduct of female behaviour. Ultimately it feels like it benefits me and everybody to question these things.
CR: We keep coming back to this idea of colonialism being a prism through which we are valued. We experience our life in a former British colony, arguably still an American colony. We’re still part of that white minority rule of colonialism and all the wealth that's come from it and you see those behaviours in our political and social fabric. But you also see it in the non-acceptance of trans people. Right now, in this moment in history, it's the low hanging fruit of the so-called culture wars.
In the Victorian era, homosexuality and gender nonconformity or being transgender was seen as an aberration and was proscribed in law. But in India - in the Vedas – which is much older than the Bible – there are many mentions of transgender people. Interestingly enough, Narendra Modi's Hindu supremacist government has legally recognized Hijra people as having equal rights. There’s a particular classification of third gender people in India who are trans women, who dress like women and pass as women. They do sex work, and they do art and music if they're lucky. He recently gave them back their rights as a nod to the Vedas and to Hindu supremacy. It wasn't because he wanted to give people their rights. His whole promotion of yoga is the same thing as well – he's trying to shed the colonial vibe which the English imposed upon him and promote Hindu supremacy.
DR: Whats your experience of living in regional Victoria, compared to other places you’ve lived?
CR: This is a unique town. I don't think it's typical of regional Victoria by any means. It’s a very polite and tolerant place on the street. I don't get a lot of shit. I get way more shit from people on the street in Melbourne on Sydney Road than I would ever get here. And there’s a 28 or 29 per cent primary vote for the Greens party here. So I think that's indicative of the kind of demographic that might be present here.
AC: It's a spread-out demographic. So many people have moved from Melbourne over generations and there are different age groups and motivations for moving there. It's not like Castlemaine, that's where all the gay people live. So, I'm going to move here. There’s artists …
CR: I think there’s a lot of queer people of a certain generation who couldn't afford to move to Daylesford, but they wanted to do a tree change. A lot of lesbians initially moved here because historically queers and lesbians half a generation ahead of me – who had access to full time work and all the things that aren't givens anymore – came here because they could afford to buy property here. It was the cheaper option. Daylesford is leafier and more beautiful and more upmarket so this was cheaper for a while. There is also an inbuilt counter-cultural aspect because there's the continually operating theatre that's always been here. They've always had cinema, always had gigs here, whereas a lot of towns of 6,000 people in regional Victoria don't have any cultural places. So, it's really unique in that way.
LT: Since I dyed my hair fluoro-yellow and bleached my eyebrows and stuff, I actually like just going for walks in my neighbourhood area, which is by no means downtown cool Castlemaine. It's a little bit outskirts. People are like, Oh, love your hair colour! All sorts of people like boomers and old men in tradie gear walking their doggies. I have had lots of people make cute, polite comments – they genuinely like to see someone doing something different. I feel like there's a lot of celebration in this community. There’s a lot of celebration of difference, just a little bit more preparedness to be open.
CR: It’s important to recognise that during the marriage quality thing, there was a big battle here that happened in the local government. The mayor got all hurt. But it really made people talk and brought the issue to the surface. People in the community were standing up for their rights, having an intelligent debate about it. People then formed an opinion about the so-called community, as if it's a monolithic community, and they didn’t understand the problem. Because that was an issue here, it forced a lot of people who would have had a Herald Sun kind of opinion about it, to be like, you know what I think – ‘live and let live’ is the best policy, we should just let people do what they want, and I'll do what I want. There's a hotrod community here, the custom car thing is really big here and the motor head thing, and I think it's awesome.
LT: I love how different they are. My next-door neighbour is a motor head and there's just a nuclear family vibe, with older kids, hotheads, hot rods. I'm also like, check out my neighbours, because I don't live like that at all, but we have really nice chats across the fence.
CR: Growing up in the country and being working class, I don't have a problem relating to those people at all. I think some people here who have a problem relating to everyone are the super wealthy privileged boomers. They just feel it's their retirement village. But everybody else is kind of cool.
DR: How do they communicate that to you?
CR: You just see the examples of it all the time – people acting out and being demanding. The guy who moved in next door bought this house and cut the fence down and cut the neighbour's trees down and didn't introduce himself to anyone. That was pretty entitled behaviour. We know lots of people who work in hospo and the stories are rife of the behaviour of the older crowd.
LT: There's also the radio show on Friday mornings, ‘In Maldon today’, which is out loud and proud, kind of like, we are boomers and we're going to say shit that's going to ruffle your feathers. And so the joke's on you …
AC: They take great pride in saying volatile things.
CR: They say racist and sexist shit regularly to wind people up.
AC: Luckily my parents had purchased in Newstead 16 years prior to me moving here. So it was like I had a buffer. And it was like, okay, well, you're sort of okay, because there's a bit of a lineage there. I was just told it's going to take a long time before you have any claim to being here.
People who’ve moved here are like, Wow, some people were just so welcoming and others are like, you need to prove yourself, you need to be here for a long time. I see it in community politics where they want all of the new families to come and use the local pool, but they're referred to as ring-ins and flybys. It's just like, they'll be gone, you know, soon enough …
CR: But they don't talk about tourists that way.
AC: I actually didn't feel it myself, but I think it was because I had been coming down here for so many years. I developed relationships with the oldies, I went to the pub, I knew people by name. But I’ve seen it with other people all the time where someone's like, I've just moved to town and I'm looking for a plumber or someone who can clean our gutters or whatever. And it's this kind of shutdown like, well, you moved here, if you were a local you’d know. There's a little bit of that happens, particularly on social media. I think that's where this town gets let down, on social media.
LT: Yeah the tribalism really comes out on social media.
CR: But this doesn't really come out on the street.
I’ve noticed that if I look at social media, I get feelings that something might happen, but if I just ignore it and go around and be my normal friendly self – I'm very polite in public – it's fine.
DR: What do you think of the whole idea of Pride?
AC: I've had a completely different childhood in the way that I see my queerness. I've grown up in a family where there was no combativeness. There was no, oh my god you’re what!? I was allowed to just be and evolve and do whatever I did. No one ever questioned anything that I did. I just became friends with who I became friends with. There was always a whole mix, and I never became part of a group. I never over-thought it. I just was who I was. I had friends in different places. I had relationships with whoever I wanted. My parents were just – hey, this is Aimee’s friend, or this is Aimee’s girlfriend, or Aimee’s boyfriend or whatever. I've been to Pride events, and I love being part of celebrating. Many people haven't had my experience, have not been able to be who they are with so many roadblocks and so much hurt and repercussions, so I think Pride is important because I really understand how hard some people's journeys have been. They need Pride as a big marker to say, I'm here and I am me and to celebrate that. I really see that.
CR: If you examine the history of Pride parades and events, they were actually radical actions when they started. You’d get your ass beat. You still can get your ass beat and jailed in some countries in the world for marching in a Pride Parade. I think Pride Parade started as gay rights demonstrations, Stonewall era. Being American I have a very different take on Pride because I would march in the Pride Parade in solidarity with my queer friends and my brother. My brother was in the first group of trans men to march in the Pride Parade in Chicago in the 90s. They were at the front of the parade and it was a really big deal because, you know, trans people weren't accepted in the queer community. They still aren't, really. Nobody really wants to talk about it because it's not very nice.
I think Pride is important to be visible. Just to show solidarity with the people who have struggled before us so that we can be in the world. I think disability is super important as well. I'm not going to disappear under a rock because Fred Nile doesn’t like me or something, but I also think the history of Pride here might be a little different. What happens to counterculture in general in societies, is it will be subsumed into advertising and event money-making and tourism. I'm a little cynical. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, pride, right? It's great for the Council because all queers from Melbourne can see how queer-friendly we are. They’re just going to move up here and I'm going to get forced out of my rental and gentrified out of yet another area because I’m visible queer and an artist and making the community more enriched culturally. So, I have mixed feelings about pride as it exists now. But the first Pride Parade I marched in was radical and angry.
LT: It was like a protest. Right?
CR: And it was like, fuck you! Why aren’t you funding AIDS research? We're all dying! It was Queer Nation and Act Up. It was about being visible and saying I’m demanding the same rights as everyone else. I think the softening of it into a tourist attraction or party is really a subversion of its original intention and so I feel a little cynical about it. But I’m not going to be so cynical that I play ‘divide and rule’ like a lot of people, and I'm still going to exist in solidarity with those other people, but I feel like it could really do with returning to its radical roots. That fight isn't as prominent here, so Pride is more of a happy go lucky excuse to get fucked up and wear hot pants and rainbow face paint.
LT: I agree, I wouldn't want there to be no Pride events or focus, but it definitely doesn't feel connected to any of its original story, and so it feels a little diluted in terms of what its purpose is. But events are still really positive for bringing people together in the community and connection and visibility – you’re talking about some of the most vulnerable people in the communities. So that's really great. But I don't necessarily jump on board pride events just because I am a queer person.
CR: There's a queer formal being held here.
DR: Oh, yeah. Someone else told me about that.
CR: I made it a point to sign up to do sound for that. I did it for free for a couple of years, but they're paying me this year. But I just wanted to be visible there and just be like, hey, the sound engineer is trans and the people running the event are queer and they are just like you. You can be a grown up and be queer and be semi-interesting, or hip or whatever. I do it for the children. And I go to the trans and gender diverse community meetings for the same reason. I'm there to try to find young people and support them and help the trans kids navigate through the system that's labyrinthine, and onerous and demeaning. It’s a very laborious process to access care as a young person.
Being trans is a lot more radical than being a generic lesbian or whatever. I don't want to belabour the point, but I went to the pride picnic thing which was held indoors at the town hall because it was really rainy that weekend, and two people said hi to me, and they're both transgender people, and no one else said anything. I did a couple of laps around the town hall. I talked to Star Lady, I talked to this trans masculine person from Melbourne who was outwardly friendly and spotted me and talked to me, and everyone else just ignored me, including people that I know.
DR: That's horrible. I’m so sorry to hear that.
CR: Well, yeah, it is horrible but that’s life, but I'm saying this is just part of your conversation about ‘the’ queer community. It is not a happy family because everyone is traumatised in some regard.
Right now, we're at a point where there's a wedge that the Christian right is trying to drive through the queer community to fracture its power and solidarity by using trans people as the low hanging fruit. I want to be visible because, when Trump became president, I was like, fuck this, I am not going to be a low-profile transsexual anymore. I'm just going to go and do it and exist as a revolutionary act, because I can see what's happening and they want to erase us. It feels like the early 90s or the 80s again, when I was just like, Well, fuck this. I'm going to stand up and demand my rights. Now, I'm not going to just be nice.
The things that queer people undergo in life to get to where they are, wherever they may be, is traumatic. Hang out with a bunch of trans women and listen to their stories and you're just like, holy shit, this is horrific. Because we're such a minority, people don't know the story, but once they're adjacent to the lived experience of someone who's minoritised and discriminated against, then they start to understand what it's like. They have more empathy. I think the divide and rule thing around the queer community is actually working, with people starting to become anti-trans, unfortunately, so I'm just putting that in our conversation because I think the narratives around anti-trans are real and they're rising. They're not diminishing, unfortunately.
I'm definitely queer, I’ve had sex with lesbians, gay men, straight men, straight women, transsexuals. So, I tick all the boxes. I qualify. And I find sometimes I have to say that to people because they think because I generally prefer the company of women now and I’m trans woman that I'm one of those infiltrators. It's fucking true though. We all know someone who believes that stuff.
LT: That you're an infiltrator?
CR: That trans women are fake, and they just want to steal women's spaces ... power. Trans women can’t be lesbians, the whole trans athletes thing, the bathroom thing. It’s been invented in America in Christian right-wing focus groups – it’s not a debate that was generated from actual things in the real world. It was made up. Cultivated to divide people on purpose and it's working. And don't ask me about sport because I'm not interested in sport.