BM
This is a West Wimmera Health Service podcast. Presented by me Brigitte Muir.
This series focuses around stories and issues related to health and wellbeing. Some of the people we hear from are sharing their stories, hoping that their experiences will help us with our own health and wellbeing. Please be aware that some of their life experiences may touch on issues that are sensitive to some. Please listen with care. You will find information on seeking help if you need it in the notes attached to each episode.
Lessons in life come from many voices, Leigh Dwyer has a voice that needs to be heard. A story that needs to be understood. A life that deserves to be celebrated. Lee is a transgender farmer. And she talked to me about the journey of discovery, to her true self.
LD
I've grown up here all my life… Toolong, Port Fairy. Been on a farm all my life.
BM
Your parents were farmers?
LD
Yep…yep, dairy farmers. I went to university here in Warrnambool and I… worked on the farm to help with education costs and I was studying a double degree in accounting and computer programming. The life …of being stuck indoors, 12 hours of the day didn't appeal to me…so I just… continued working on the family farm… dairy for about 20 years and another 15 years of beef farming.
BM
I'm here talking with you, because you've got a bit of a special story.
LD
Yes, I’m transgender.
BM
Ok can you explain to me what that means?
LD
Transgender is a… is a broad term. So that's peoples who don't quite align with their sex …assigned at birth. In my case, I happen to be a trans woman. It was a process that took… a… quite a bit of time. When I was growing up, I… knew nothing about it, being in a rural religious area. As you can imagine, there wasn't a lot of information that was available to be able to try and understand. So, I always had this sense that I was different to other people…thought differently. You know, when I had friends and everything like that, but when I was amongst a group I just felt off, never quite fitting. Going through teenage years and religious schools wasn't speaking…verbally that you know, it's against God's laws and against society and, you tend to create a view in your mind that this must be something that everybody goes through, and you’re going through the teenage years so you just think you just gotta grow out of it. You kid yourself. You're look at ways of trying to …confuse the mind, so it's occupied so you don't think about gender. So I got involved in football and that became a very… strong focus of my life. I was just an average footballer wasn't done anything special and it was just a… great way to focus the mind on and it wasn't till… finished football that sort of had this sense something was missing. That couldn't put a finger or anything on it.
BM
Why’d you stop football?
LD
Injury …injury
BM
So you lost that focus and you had to start thinking?
LD
Yeah…involved with the farm, I had a girlfriend and we got married in… around the same time I finished as well. So I soon had things back, occupying the mind again. We had some issues early on where… we found out we couldn't have children. Then we went down the path of an adoption, and so just had the mind… fully involved again, consumed, I should say, and… we ended up adopting a little girl and wanting to be the best dad possible, you know to do girly things, and then that opened the door, the gender door again. And… with everything we've been through, had a fairly heavy depression, we were going through some drought, and things were tough. I went in to buy a birthday presents for my… ex-wife, went into Target and walking through, I ended up going through the lingerie section, bought some things and came out, sat in the car and just looked at what I'd done and gone what the hell am I doing, Realised I hadn't bought my ex-wife a birthday present and just went okay, something's a little odd, I suppose. In starting to engage the feminine side, you do things… where… kept hidden from people, lingerie and things like that was easily to be hidden, and in doing that… you'd find your moods and everything, would pick right up. So, I started researching, joining the dots and taking I guess notes… ‘Okay, so, you may not be… straight’ I suppose you could say. Started engaging in tips of… okay… what you need to do and one of the things I came across, that really struck a chord with me, was if you're researching about gender, and it's for… yourself your somewhere on the gender diverse spectrum, then its’s a matter of trailing things, just to start seeing how things fit. As time went on… I started to notice when I was doing… feminine things, my mood was very high. But when I had to go back in the male form, I suppose… moods really …were low and the thing is, is once you start working out that your gender diverse, the depression and everything starts to amplify 1,000%. Because you start learning that there's things you can actually do to improve your wellbeing. My ex-wife was talking about you know, you're depressed you need to see a doctor… and that's …I started researching doctors to find somebody who was experienced in gender diversity, so I managed to find one in Warrnambool, I went in there to talk about depression, and I thought, oh, I'll just …mention …some of the feminine things I was doing, and all of a sudden the conversation just changed, in a total different direction, took me pretty much by surprise. She was talking, you got to embrace your feminine side and start talking about hormones and… and I'm just going noooo way, you know, got the old redneck thinking. It's all wrong and it's not me. I sort of went out there with the head just shaking. I suppose I had the appointment somewhere around about half past 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning… and the doctor rang me at seven o'clock at night to ask whether I was okay …or suicidal. That's when I've just gone… shit, this is real, this is full on. So… she made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist, a gender specialist in Melbourne, went and saw him and just started down the path …of embracing my feminine side a lot more …and how …moods and everything started to change and… that process happened over about three years before I actually really starte embraced my feminine side and realised…. that I just couldn't keep pretending anymore.
BM
How old were you then?
LD
About at 40-41? I've just learned that you …really focus on your mood and your emotions…and that led me once I really embraced it and actually went on hormones, the colour just come back into my world. Whereas in the past it was quite dark, dull and had this heavy burden.
So essentially, I switched… one set of problems for another set of problems. I was mentally in a better position to handle the …swapped problems. Once you start to learn about gender diversity and know that we all have masculine and feminine traits. Through, whatever reasons whether it's through pregnancy, receiving different hormones at different times. We sometimes… develop more of a female brain than a male brain or if you're a trans man, it's more masculine brain than a feminine brain. I just happen to sit at the far end of the scale.
BM
It's not just the brain though…it’s…it's gotta be the heart as well. I…I know…when people tell guys to embrace their feminine side, but that's not what we're talking about here is it?
LD
Ah… no you …you're embracing who you are,
BM
Yeah… as a whole person
LD
As a whole person. It's a very, very complex process. You do not go out to choose… to be trans. Well for starters, there's so much hatred and bigotry in society. You just don't choose to go and be hated. You choose to go down this path because you need to, to be happy and to live life. You don't really have a lot of choices. A lot of people… I think the stats are somewhere like 41% of the trans population have attempted suicide.
BM
That's terrible, it really is. I…I find it really hard to comprehend that people could be that nasty, that that rate of suicide is linked to how people react to someone just trying to be themselves.
LD
Yep. Yeah…
BM
We all have a journey and… without respect and tolerance and love in life, what is there?
LD
Yeah, and …a lot of people who take this path… of …attacking trans people pick and choose their arguments, but we're …we’re an easy target. That's the unfortunate part.
BM
Why do you think people are scared of transgender people?
LD
It's just a total lack of understanding. We are only a small minority …of society. It's just not out there for people to understand. I don't see it in papers all that often… and so there's a lot of myth.. floats around about trans people, because the majority of society don't know somebody who's trans, especially in the rural areas.
BM
What strikes me in your case is a bit of an oddity that you lived the first, let's say 40 years of your life, as a man, and in small community…
LD
Yep
BM
…and then you realise that you are not a man that's you are a woman. But you still are the same person
LD
Yeah.
BM
So has there been a change in the community around us when you realise what happened to you and where you wanted to go.
LD
There's definitely a change, and it's not in a good way,
BM
But your still you.
LD
Yeah, absolutely. But people just fear I don't know why. You know, one of the things about being still in the community that I grew up in and everything, you know the background talk… and that's one of the reasons why you hide it for so long. How people talk about LGBTIQ folks, and it's very derogatory people just distance themselves from you. They don't want to be known… that they your friend or anything like that, when you're in my position, you really notice it. I can have one on one conversations with people, where there's nobody about, that go into a setting where there's a group of people, and they’ll distance themselves from you. Some of the most loneliest times …loneliest I felt has been in a room full of people, that I know.
BM
What about your family?
LD
Well, it was a challenge, they were quite religious people, of course, you know, they're 70 odd and in that generation. Their response took me by surprise, they sat and listened, but I also …gave them room. When I went in to see them I brought in some information for them and just sat down, just explained things and explained… that if they showed their bigotry views or anything like that, what that meant and what it entailed for our relationships, and I gave them the space to understand the information and let it be but I also gave them a little bit of slack to not really be in their face about it, and I took the stance …that… if they… I don't know whether acceptance is the right word…but some understanding that it'd be fine. I'd be happy with that, and you know, they've been they've been good. They've had some major challenges …for themselves to try and get their heads around because they were very scared of how society would look upon them, kind of jumping at shadows a little bit. But yeah, they've been pretty good.
BM
What about your beautiful little child?
LD
It's a non-issue, absolute non-issue. When I said to my ex, I might be trans her first instincts was going to cause our daughter a huge amount of issues… that people don't understand that the early years of a child's life is actually the best time to come out in, because they haven't been exposed to all the rubbish of society. They've got very open minds and she's just grown up with it, and I’ll give my ex a lot of credit… that she understood to educate her in a positive way. We put her first… and we did it together, even though we clashed and when we did eventually split up my daughter actually lived with me full time, and my ex was getting phone calls about how dare you leave her with me. This is the thing that we're paedophiles.
BM
I don't get where they get that idea comes from
LD
It's just a way of people attacking us, and there's no signs, there's no evidence behind it, or anything.
BM
It doesn't make sense. Okay, you told me you were a beef farmer, but also an earth mover
LD
Earth measurer and contractor, yes.
BM
Coming out how did that affect your business?
LD
I constructed my coming out …fairly controlled. One of the problems …of coming out is you just don't come out. You come out time and time again, everybody you meet you come out to and I knew that very well. I'm involved in the local brigade here, I was captain a at the time. So, I stood down from the captaincy, then created an… extraordinary meeting. The local CFA is a community hub, I used that to come out. The day before, the night before we had the meeting… the main clients that I worked for, I rang them up personally to tell them the circumstances… my story and out of respect that they hear from me first. By giving them the respect, they respected me too, and I really didn't have any …issues with my clients. But in society, we no longer get really direct discrimination and people target you in different ways. I had heavy…a heavy truck one day somebody decided to pour dirt, sticks and everything in the fuel tank, caused me a whole heap of grief and people just would do things like that. About a month after I come out WorkSafe started to get …continued phone calls about me, but just being an independent contractor, really they couldn't do anything because I had no employees so… that …it doesn't stop people from pounding them, and thankfully, I knew the local representative and we had a good chat about things, and he knew my circumstances, that at the end of the day, once people started realising that if they couldn't get at me that that start going after my clients. At the end of the day I just decided the best thing would be to step away. Just wind the business up essentially. Yeah. So, that… knocks you around a fair bit. Transition is not an overnight thing. It takes years and pretty much it goes forever in a day. You're continually learning. There's a lot of physical traits that you'd love to change, but you can't change, people don't really understand that surgeries and everything are…are horrendously expensive and it's just a difficult, difficult process. All the reasons that I've mentioned… you just don’t choose that… on a whim.
BM
No, I can see that yes. It takes a lot of courage.
LD
Yes, yes, it is a lot of courage, but you don't look at it that way. You're just looking at it to survive, and that's the only reason you go down this path. Society makes it awfully bloody hard, especially in the rural areas.
BM
Have you ever considered moving to a city?
LD
There's not a week go by that I don't think about it. But cities… just aren't me.
BM
So…I…I would say that an organisation like the Wimmera Pride Project is absolutely essential for people who live in the country.
LD
Oh truly, truly
BM
and it's a long way from here
LD
We don't actually have anything like that down here.
BM
Have you ever thought about starting one?
LD
When you're in our position…we use up an immense amount of energy just to go out during the day. At the end of the day, you're exhausted and sometimes going out publicly. I will need to stay home just by myself for a couple of days to just recharge.
BM
Do you regret coming out?
LD
Yes and no. I'm a lot happier than what I ever was …but dealing with the society issues, the loneliness, you sometimes wonder, you know because transition is so expensive and so difficult. You do wonder and some people do actually de-transition because of how society treats us, you just sometimes you just feel, well, it's better to hide than… coup all the abuse and things that is out there
BM
All because you are you.
LD
Yeah.
BM
Yeah
LD
You know I’ve spent…being in CFA and in surf clubs, I've spent my life around trying to help people. You know one of the things I say about being in my position being trans and everything. I actually get to see into peoples souls, I get to see who they truly are, and I’ve met some absolutely beautiful people… who have made an effort to… especially when I first come out, just to come out, just give me a hug. But I do admit, some of the people surprised me, but that's what happens. The people you expect to be supportive and they're often the ones that surprise you in the negative way. So, I tend to… look at the positives of life rather than negative. Because if you focus on the negative, it'll swallow you up and just throw you out.
BM
Considering what you've been going through what would be… what would you advice be to the people on the land who are not comfortable in their own skin and say that perhaps …don't be happy being the other gender.
LD
First things first, is to seek some help, seek some support. That's critical. You can't go out and do it on your own. It's challenging being in, in rural areas, so, a lot of the services… that we need are centralised in the bigger cities, the likes some Ballarat and Melbourne. When I first started down the path, it was only in Melbourne. It's now come out to Ballarat, services are in Ballarat. But the waiting list for the public system and everything is quite long. It was about three years before you can get an appointment, and that was before COVID times. The Monash gender clinic pretty much closed up over COVID. I would assume that's now…that’s now even longer. But there's some support groups that you can get in contact with, information is available on the internet. You just got to do your research and …reach out to get your support systems and medical help and everything there for you before you even go down that path of coming out publicly or anything like that. Yeah, that's my advice.
BM
Anything else you would like to share with people?
LD
That you are loved. That you are… you are wanted and that people care. And you'll be surprised who those people are. To embrace yourself, embrace who you are, and to be free is just this…there’s nothing like it… absolutely nothing like it. My true belief is, is that the majority of people have no idea what true freedom is, they all hide things… and we as trans people have let go of all our baggage and we just live true free lives the best we can.
BM
Thank you so much for you time, its been an absolute pleasure and honor speaking with you.
LD
Thank you Bridget.
BM
Thank you
LD
My pleasure.
BM
That was Leigh Dwyer beef farmer in Toolong.
You will find as always contact numbers and details in the notes attached to this episode. And while you're at it, please give us a star rating. We'd also love to hear your comments and suggestions. Our Facebook and Twitter details are in the notes. Until next have a healthy life won’t you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai edited by WWHS Health Promotion team.