Congress Paper Abstract

Invisibility versus visibility: the road to transgender empowerment

Elizabeth Riley, co-ordinator of The Gender Centre, New South Wales 

Email: gender@rainbow.org.uk

This paper will seek to address the issues of invisibility vs visibility for transgender people. It will explore the process of empowerment and success through self acknowledgment, which refutes the notion of the desirability of ’passing’.

The paper will make comparisons between the externally imposed medical model and its disempowering effects on transsexual identity and the new commitment to self determination gaining increasing strength in transgender identity. It will examine the reasons behind the improving standing of transgenders in the NSW community.

Using our experiences as a model the paper will demonstrate the processes followed in the past two years to facilitate the acceptance of transgender people into mainstream NSW society. It will look at specific networking strategies which have proved successful in raising the general communities’ awareness of the social injustices facing transgenders and the methods employed to gain the support of people across those networks. It will also explore how this has been catalyst to steadily increasing levels of consultation with attendant high levels of acknowledgment and respect that we have previously been denied.

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