Week 46/2024: Recovery week

Week of 11 November 2024

I was tired this week after two busy weekends in a row so I wanted to take it easy.

That worked well, apart from a hurried trip into town very early on Monday morning.

The light was nice though.

Trans awareness week

13-19 November

The week 13-19 November is Transgender Awareness Week, which culminates on 20 November with Trans Day of Remembrance on 20 November.

This is a day for the community to come together to honour lives lost to anti trans violence and transphobia.

I wanted to reflect on this, even though the week is now over, as I feel like I don’t know a lot about trans people. So I’ve been taking some time to educate myself.

This episode of Queer Life Stories with trans woman Francene telling her story was a good place to start.

Fuelling hate survey

Digging further, I found the “Fuelling Hate” survey that looked at “the prevalence and possible escalation of transphobia in Australia” by the Trans Justice Project and the Victorian Pride Lobby in 2023.

There were 3099 respondents to this survey, 1309 of whom were transgender people.

Of all the participants, nine out of ten said they had witnessed online anti-trans hate, including deliberate misgendering, hate speech, bullying, threats of violence and sexual assault, death threats and incitement to suicide. Sadly, I’m not at all surprised by this finding. This type of hate regularly comes up in my Facebook feed—mostly comments on posts from random pages I don’t even follow—without me having to go looking for it. It’s everywhere and it’s very upsetting.

Of the 1309 trans respondents, one in two said they had experienced anti-trans hate, including bullying, street-based harassment, harassment relating to bathrooms, and physical and death threats. One in 10 trans participants had experienced anti trans violence, including physical and sexual assault.

The survey also found anti-trans hate has been increasing over the past three years.

These are horrible findings. The report provides detail of some of the instances of violence against trans people, and it’s horrific to think people would do this to other people because of their gender identify.

Trans people, who make up around one per cent of people, are among the most misunderstood and marginalised people in our society. And I suppose that misunderstanding, together with a hefty dose of fear and a lot of misinformation, contributes to fuelling this hatred, harassment and violence, and to some of the shocking anti-trans comments the report quotes.

This is why we need weeks like Trans Awareness Week.

More information

As a follow-up to this week, I invite you to take some time to do some reading and learn more about what it means to be transgender.

I’ve written a couple of posts about what I’ve been learning, including this one about the Language Matters workshop with Working It Out. There’s also the post on trans author Jan Morris’s book Conundrum, about her transition in the 1970s.

TransHub’s page gives a good overview, and answers some FAQs including “Why are there more trans people than before?” (Spoiler: there aren’t. There are more people feeling able to talk about it than before.)

A key take away is that, even if we don’t understand someone being trans, we still need to respect their gender, their pronouns and their identity.

Doing this costs us nothing.

And remember they are people. We are all people.

Week 46 summary

Habit tracker

• 15 minutes exercise sequence in the morning (7 days): 5/7
• Physio exercises (5 days): 5/5
• Go outside before 8 am (7 days): 7/7
• 2 walks or bike rides or a combination (6 days): 7/6
• Long walk (1 day): 0/1 (see above)
• Walk 8,000 steps (7 days): 7/7
• Evening exercise sequence (7 days): 7/7
• 9.00 shutdown (6 days): 5/6

What was the best thing about this week?

Getting someone in to whipper snip the back yard. It was absolutely worth paying someone to do this. My back/arm/hip wasn’t up to doing the whole lot. Now it’s more manageable, I think I can maintain it.

What did I notice this week?

The back of the RBF building is really cool for photos.

(There had to be something good come out of the early morning trip to town!)

Also, this phone isn’t looking too good.

What did I learn this week?

The parking outside the back of town hall that used to be 30-minute parking is now permit parking only.

What am I reading?

The script of the play I’m learning for my acting class.