Body politics end when everyone feels safe

Transgenderism is not a part of my personal identity story, and I don't try to be a voice for those who identify as transgender - it's not my place. As a cis woman who is continuously learning about the incredible diversity of life on this revolving rock and strengthening her allyship through education, connection and listening, I feel enriched through reading the stories of those who live different experiences than I have.

But don't listen to me. Read All About Yves: Notes from a Transition, by Dr Yves Rees, Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia co-edited by Sam Elkin, Alex Gallagher, Yves Rees and Bobuq Sayed, As Beautiful as any Other by Kaya Wilson. I particularly loved how Wilson reminded us that our bodies are a record of our lives, being marked by the trauma we have suffered, but also by the loving and positive experiences that we have been blessed with.

However, his question about privacy - why the privacy we demand for our cis bodies is not extended to the trans body - was both confronting and eye-opening. It's a vital question: why indeed? Why do we (as a society) get to have a say about a trans person's body at all, if we don't even think about invading a cis person's corporeal space? Why do we question a trans person's mental capacity to transition in open forums? Invade and comment on body parts and features? Judge sounds and size?

We don't have that right. But many of us do it anyway.

I encountered a person on Twitter last week who characterised support for trans and gender-diverse people and the exposure of children to this social diversity as "grooming".

The context of this comment was with regards to a claim made in a Senate estimates committee meeting earlier this month where Liberal senator Alex Antic accused the ABC of "grooming" children as the result of an episode of the ABC's Play School where a drag queen, Courtney Act, read a story about a girl who likes to wear pants.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young rightly took offence at the use of the word "grooming" - which traditionally refers to an adult deliberately building a relationship of trust and emotional connection with a young person for the purpose of manipulating, exploiting and abusing them.

MORE ZOE WUNDENBERG:

A person cannot "groom" another simply by existing in the same space as another, and yet this seems to be the highly damaging and offensive, not to mention entirely inaccurate, assumption. If you saw Courtney on the ABC's Little Kids, Big Talk episode about gender, you would see how open, genuinely engaging, kind and thoroughly beautiful from the inside out, she is with children.

However, it is important to note that being a drag queen and being transgender are not the same thing. And Senator Antic's anti-trans comments relating to Courtney's appearance on Play School highlight how uneducated - and trigger-happy - those who speak out against transgender actually are. It must feel like living with a live grenade in their hand where any moment they could encounter a transgender person or see an article, startling their thumb into slipping and a diatribe of nervous, fearful anti-trans hate explodes out. I have good news for those of you living like this - it's a choice. You can put the grenade down.

You are right to feel concern about the mental health of transgender people, but not the way you probably think. The World Health Organisation has updated its understanding of transgender identity as "not actually a mental health condition", however, transgender people aged 14-25 are 15 times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, 79.7 per cent of them have reported self-harming, 74 per cent have been diagnosed with depression in their lifetime, and 72.5 per cent have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Your concern is misplaced when it is defined by a transgender person's gender-identity. Instead, think about how you can make the world a better place for those who don't necessarily fit your mould of what you think a person should be. We don't have a right to say how another person should look or feel and we certainly don't have a right to tell someone that how they feel is wrong.

And for those of you desperately demanding "where will it all end?" I say "hopefully when everyone feels safe."