This article was originally published by the Nonsense Newsletter team. You can find the original article here.
We’re a quarter of the way into the century, one that has seen massive change in the way we talk about gender and sexuality. While trans people are more visible to the wider public than ever, the idea of what a trans person is has itself undergone a massive shift. When we once were expected to undergo hormone replacement therapy, a million surgeries and blend in as much as possible to gain societal approval, now the fight for Self-ID has led to some high-profile trans people coming out without even changing their name.
This beautiful array of trans experiences is nothing new to the community, but emerging into the cisgender world so quickly when the cultural perception of a trans person was still stuck on Kim Petras (yeah we staaan!) created an apparent wealth of confusion. A major part of our campaigning is centred around the fact that restrictions on transgender healthcare would be life-ending for many trans people, but the existence of trans people who have never accessed transgender healthcare, and thus live on the hormones that their body already produces as cis people do, seems to contradict this.
Of course, there are multiple problems with this.
For one, the trans experience is not universal, and all of us interact with our body and identity in unique ways. And the suggestion that something needs to be life or death for us to be considered a “human right” by the cisgender majority is typical paternalistic bullshit.
It’s a troubling sign that our society has lost itself so much that human rights are regarded as the bare essentials to keep a person alive, even if that life is one trapped in a cruel, exploitative system. Why instead, don’t we focus on quality of life, humanity and the beauty inherent in freedom of choice?
What is a human right?
In my opinion, one of the best Australian movies ever is Mad Max: Fury Road. Not just because I’m gay and Furiosa exists, but because it has such a compelling villain. One of the first scenes features cult leader Immortan Joe opening his floodgates, dropping fresh water to the dehydrated people below. After a few seconds, he closes them again, and advises his cult “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water!”
It’s a chilling dystopian moment, brutally effective for many reasons. The most obvious one is that water addiction is a natural part of being human. But also, because fresh water access is genuinely limited in many parts of the world, a lot of which is thanks to the efforts of companies which profit off of restricting fresh water access and selling bottled water, such as Nestlé. In 2000, Nestlé was a major part of the World Water Council changing its statement of access to drinking water from a “right” to a “need”. Playing Immortan Joe fifteen years before he was cool.
This is a particularly severe example in fiction and in real life where the use of language from powerful individuals can change the way we think about human rights. When someone controls the distribution of a resource, it is their prerogative, not ours, that determines how much we need and will reprimand us when we desire more. In the case of Immortan Joe, because his weak-willed cultists were “addicted”. In the case of Nestlé, because we don’t work hard enough to pay for the water they extract and hoard.
Drinking is a biological requirement, and dehydration causes all kinds of health issues. However, not every human right is biological. Take Internet access, for example. The Internet has become a crucial part of everyday life, from socialising, education, community, employment, and so on, and human rights organisations recognise this. In 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a non-binding resolution condemning the intentional disruption of internet access by governments. Not because the human bodies biologically demands Internet access, but because it’s a core component of quality of life.
A year after this resolution, I found myself in a situation where my human rights were breached. I was in Sydney and living in a mixture of social housing and homeless shelters. I was desperate for any roof over my head, but couldn’t help but complain when I realised that the services I was settled in didn’t provide internet access. I communicated this to the management of these spaces and every single person told me a variant of me being a typical entitled screen-addicted child, that I should learn how to read the books provided, and that I was ungrateful. My sister told me “internet is a luxury”.
The irony of my sister, living in a house that she owns, with two televisions with Netflix, telling this to me, a transgender girl in a homeless shelter, was not lost on me. This was also a wake-up call on that the difference between a “right” and a “luxury” are usually determined by people with limitless access to both. It didn’t matter that stress relief, talking to friends, or finding a secure place to live, were all unnecessarily harder for me. What mattered was that the institutions themselves decided that it was a luxury and therefore they didn’t have to bother providing it to me. I might be distressed, but at least I wasn’t dying whilst in their care.
This brings us back to the topic of hormones. The question is less, are hormones a human right, and more, who actually decides if they’re a human right? Not trans people, obviously.
