Today — Just another significant day along the road.

I am sitting at my desk thinking about what today will be. It’s a significant day in Victoria for Trans and Gender Diverse folk. Not because it’s a diversity day for us, not because it is a day of a Pride parade, though by the end of today we do hope to be able to celebrate a significant win for our community.

No, it’s a significant day today as we sit, watch, listen and await the outcome of the passage of the Births Deaths and Marriages Amendment Act 2019 through the upper house of the Victorian Parliament. Many of us have been here before, in 2016 when this legislation failed by just one vote and dashed the hopes of the TGD community. Today we are hopeful of a better outcome.

There’s no question that this will make a tangible difference to the lives of Trans and Gender Diverse Victorians. It will mean being able to have a primary identification document that matches who we are. This is a huge step towards equality for TGD folk.

I don’t think anyone is under any delusion that this is the end of the journey for equality for TGD folk, but it is a significant step — just as Marriage Equality was a significant step.

It’s taken a lot to get here. A lot of advocacy by a lot of people has been in play to make this happen. It’s been a long and not easy path. TGD folk have travelled this path with a barrage of negative and at times hateful rhetoric thrown our way.

Whilst some media outlets at times report on TGD folk with fairness and facts many don’t. The conservative media in Australia and around the world regularly throw TGD folk under the bus as if we are somehow less than human and worthy of journalistic integrity and basic human respect and dignity.

Over the last several weeks in just one Australian publication an average of more than 1 negative article per day has been written about TGD folk. The current target is, of course, the legislation before parliament and how to stop it from progressive. Though it is not the legislation, nor the politicians responsible for it that feel the pain of it but the actual TGD community and their families.

A picture is painted of TGD people that is almost entirely negative. We are delusional, defective and destructive. We are pretenders, pedophiles and predators. We are invaders of spaces not our own and a danger to women and children.

To reads many of the articles one could easily be convinced that TGD folk simply woke up one day and made a snap spontaneous decision to change our gender. Characterised as though, there is no reflection, no therapy, no journey of working out who we are and no work to come to terms with accept and finally celebrate becoming our authentic selves.

We see the words Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and Social Contagion thrown around as if these are empirical realities when nothing can be further from the truth. We see the few and far between services that assist us in our journeys being disparaged and accused of atrocities against children.

We see people who are essentially bigoted against us regularly trotted out as experts in Gender Identity when they have never ever had an actual TGD person as a patient. They are sought over and again for comment because it fits the ideology of the media outlet for more than getting the actual information from the actual experts in the field that have helped hundreds of Transgender and Gender Diverse people navigate their journey to wholeness.

So yes it’s a significant day today for the TGD community. A day that I know will be difficult. I day that I know I will have to hear horrible things. But. A day that at the end I hope to be celebrating with my people a victory. A very significant victory that will make a tangible positive difference to the lives of my people.

I don’t want to even countenance the idea that we won’t be celebrating at the end of today. I can’t imagine how that will impact me personally or what the impact will be on my community.

As much as we go into today with some confidence and belief in a positive outcome it must be remembered that the result is not assured and we must not forget that.

Regardless of the outcome, it has been a privilege to advocate for this. It has been a wonder to work alongside amazing advocates and allies in the TGD community and beyond. Regardless of the outcome our community is stronger and will continue to grow in strength.

Transgender and Gender Diverse folk, their families and their allies have a unique insight into life and how it can be. We are stronger because of it and we will prevail, if not today then sooner or later, the date matters naught because we will prevail.

We will prevail because we will not stop fighting for equality until we have it. We will not stop agitating for inclusion until it is a reality. We will not stop advocating for our full humanity because we know, deep within ourselves that not only is it our right but it is in fact how we know ourselves to be -simply human.

Originally published at A Transtistic Life.