Bonjour. I'm very honoured to be here today. It has so much meaning to be here on the Trans Day of Remembrance, which is a worldwide occasion, as you know.
My name is Hershel Russell. I'm a psychotherapist in private practice in Toronto. I also do specializing in work with transgender people and their families. I also do a lot of education work around trans issues across the province and in other parts of Canada. I'm a clinical member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and I'm the co-chair of the education committee for the Canadian branch of that organization.
One of the things I wanted to mention is that we have had two really excellent pieces of research recently, one from the United States, a very large piece of research, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, and another from Ontario, the Trans PULSE Survey, which has given us a tremendous amount of information about trans lives.
Some of the information I would really like you to grasp in terms of this bill is that both studies show very clearly that we are an exceptionally highly educated community. We have more education than almost any other community, and we are a community that suffers from extraordinary poverty. I would like to argue that this combination of things can only be explained by discrimination. There really isn't another way to explain it. Both of these documents also really show the terrifying, heartbreaking levels of suicidality in our community, and certainly, as a mental health professional, I have to work with these painful, painful issues over and over and over.
Speaking a little about myself, because I know that personal stories are important, I look fairly convincingly like a man these days, especially when I don't speak. Once upon a time, I looked pretty convincingly like a woman. However, there was a period in between—of about three years—when I looked very gender ambiguous and, on a daily basis, we punish people who look gender ambiguous in this current society.
I remember walking down the street and people gazing like this...quite frequently. I remember walking down the street in Toronto in the late 1990s, and as I walked by, people were spitting on the sidewalk in front of me. I remember going to the drugstore to buy a tube of toothpaste. I'm getting my change, and the clerk says: “Thank you, sir. Oh—madam. Oh—sir. Oh—madam”. Suddenly I'm this spectacle and everyone is looking at me.
This kind of gaze also, as my colleague Sara was saying, really impacts on our experiences of public bathrooms. In that ambiguous period, I remember situations where in the first year I at first would go to the women's bathroom. Towards the end of that year, sometimes I would have a woman open the door, go “oh!”, and leave. A little further on I had a woman point at me and say: “You get out of here. You don't belong.” Then I began to go to the men's washroom, at least some of the time, where I faced a small but very real threat of physical and/or sexual assault.
I wonder if you would be willing to imagine the impact on anxiety and the impact on self-esteem for someone who, every time they need to use a bathroom in a public space, has to choose between the high likelihood of harassment and the low but real likelihood of sexual assault. You can understand that kind of level of stress, perhaps.
I was very fortunate and I feel enormously blessed to have not been physically assaulted, but I will never forget the time when I was coming home after a concert. I was standing on the corner of Queen and University opposite the concert hall in downtown Toronto. Not very far in front of me, a white van pulled up, and the door opened. Inside the van were half a dozen young men. They shouted, “You epithet, epithet, get in here.” I was terrified that they would seize me, because they were very close, and also terrified that, because I looked very gender ambiguous, the people standing around me would make no attempt to protect me. Thank goodness the light changed. But I still, many years later, when I walk past that corner, feel my heartbeat speed up.
Much more recently, I was struggling with issues around identity documents. I'm very glad the issue is being raised. I have a medical condition that means it would be quite dangerous for me to undergo transgender-related surgeries. So far I have succeeded in holding off from having them anyway, but because I have not had any of those surgeries, I am not permitted to change my passport.
Looking like this, I walk through the security system at an airport with a passport that says I am female. For this reason, there are a number of countries I simply don't go to because I'm afraid to.
Recently, however, I went down to a very important conference in Atlanta, in the United States, put on by WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. I came home a little early because I had work the next day. I was in the airport in the afternoon, when it was slow. There were not many people around, and the security guards were perhaps a little bored.
As I handed over my passport, I saw a nudge. A security officer came up to me. He was large and he was red in the face—and he was red in the neck—and he said to me, “Go into the scanner”. Of course, trans people are particularly anxious about the scanner, because it creates an outline of the genitals. I was a little shaken, but I came out of the scanner and I waited. He said, “Into the scanner again”. And then a third time he made me go into the scanner. By this time, I could hear titters.
He then looked me in the eye and said, “I have to examine you manually, because there seems to be something—here”: he put his hand on my chest and squeezed, looking me in the eye. You can perhaps imagine my humiliation and my anger.
I am still a little disappointed in myself that I didn't make a complaint. I was alone in the airport, I was afraid, I was humiliated. It was Atlanta, and as a Canadian I have some assumptions about what goes on in Atlanta, Georgia.
So one of the things I really do want to urge in terms of next steps is that it becomes possible—as several countries have now made it possible—for it to be much easier to change our identity documents, all of them.
How am I doing on time?
