TONTS. - Living the Questions with Yves Rees

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Today I am joined by Dr Yves Rees. They are a La Trobe University historian, a podcaster, radio broadcaster and now an author of the brilliant, paradigm shifting memoir All About Yves. Yves' book is searing and articulate, bringing to the fore with real clarity and insight what it was like for them to identify as trans. This book and their story is I think, really going to make a difference to so many people in both being able to articulate their own identity and also build empathy in people who haven’t had to examine their own gender or sexuality. Spliced with anecdotes from the history of trans people and vivid moments in Yves own life I really recommend you get yourself a copy of this wonderful memoir and settle in for a fascinating chat about gender, identity, history and finding the magic parts of yourself that perhaps even you didn’t realise were there. Yves encourages us to live the questions and I couldn’t agree more. For more from Yves you can head to their website www.yvesrees.com or purchase a copy of All About Yves hereAnd you can find me at @clairetonti on instagram or at www.clairetonti.com or subscribe to my newsletter hereAs always thank you to RAW Collings for editing this week's episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Claire Tonte here. Welcome to Tonte, the podcast about feeling all of it, about our inner critic, our emotions and the stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves that make us who we are. Today I'm joined by Dr. Eve Rees. They are a La Trobe University historian, a podcaster, radio broadcaster, and now an author of the brilliant paradigm shifting memoir, All About Eve. Eve's book is searing and articulate, bringing to the fore with real clarity and insight what it was like for them to identify as trans. This book and their story is, I think, going to make a difference to so many people in both being able to articulate their own identity and also build empathy in people who haven't had to examine their

own gender or sexuality or even know about the history of trans. I really recommend you get yourself a copy of this wonderful memoir and settle in for a fascinating chat about gender, identity, history, and finding the magic parts of yourself that perhaps you even didn't realize were there. Eve has a tattoo that states, leave the questions. And it's from a poem by Rilke. I couldn't agree more. The full verse is, be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to leave everything, leave the questions. In a world that loves to put us all

into neat boxes, I love this so much and I learned so much from Eve. Here they are, Eve Rees. Hello, thank you so much for coming on, Eve. I'm so excited to talk to you. How are you going at the moment? We're both in Melbourne lockdown. I know. It's been quite a long, long marathon. I'm going okay at the moment because my book was published last year. Sorry, last week. Feels like a year ago. So I'm still in a bit of a high from my book coming out last week. So it's kind of buoyed me up. But yeah, lockdown is tough. I'm living alone in lockdown, so it can be pretty isolating at times. And I'm working from home in my tiny apartment, so definitely get a bit sick of it. But it feels like the finish line is also in sight, so that's good.

I know it does, doesn't it? It's such a strange time. Congratulations. The book is so awesome. I loved it. I just ripped through it. I wanted to ask you first though, taking you back, why did you choose history just in general? Ah, that's a good question. I mean, I suppose I was always one of those little kids who loved reading like historical stories, you know, things that I grew up reading books set in World War II or World War I or the Victorian age. You know, I love BBC period dramas. I was obsessed with, you know, the Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Eil in the 90s. So I was always attracted to kind of storytelling in the past. And I kind of grew up

in a household that was quite kind of fixated on the past as well, I suppose. My mum had been a real big activist in sort of women's liberation in the 1970s and had all these records associated with that time that we used to kind of pour over on rainy days. And she'd show me photos of herself in kind of activist clothes. So I suppose I kind of grew up just feeling like the world of the past was very present and a kind of, you know, way of escapism. And, you know, and I just generally loved reading and writing. And then when I was in year 10, everyone in our high school was sort of forced to enter a prize called the National History Prize, where you just had to write a historical essay. And to my astonishment, I won the National Prize

for my age category, VHN. And I got to go to Canberra and, you know, get a shiny medal and go to Parliament House. And I think that was the moment when I was like, oh, like, you know, this whole like history thing I could be good at and I could turn into a career and it could be a way to keep, you know, reading and writing and thinking about the past for a living. So from then on, I was pretty determined to become a historian. As soon as I finished high school, I went straight to uni and, you know, did my Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History and then a Master's in History and then a PhD in History. So I just kind of ripped straight through and yeah, and then here I am as a lecturer in history today. It all came true.

It strikes me all through the book that you have such a huge work ethic in general. Where do you think that comes from? You're just very prolific. I was researching and thinking, this person, my goodness, you do so much. Probably just from, like, a Protestant inability to experience joy is where my work ethic comes

from. I grew up Catholic and I completely like can relate to that. Yeah. A bit of guilt in there as well. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, my family were not like religious, like we didn't go to church, but I think I really do think the kind of do our local church Protestant

work ethic really saturated the culture of my family on both sides. Both my grandparents were small business owners who worked like, you know, a million hours a week and got up at the crack of dawn to run their business. And they both, you know, told their children, my parents, that education was really important. And my parents were both lawyers were incredible workaholics. So it was just the kind of paradigm I grew up with. And, look, I wouldn't endorse it. I think it's actually quite unhealthy and it's one of the kind of ongoing projects of my life to become less of a workaholic,

not going so well with it so far. And, you know, it's escapism. I think like any addiction, like whether it's alcohol addiction or like binge eating or drugs or, you know, compulsive shopping, like doing anything to extreme, it's just a way to like numb out, get validation, feel in control of a chaotic world and feel safe. So that's kind of what work is for me. Absolutely. For people who don't know your story, do you want to tell us about what you were like as a kid before the world told you any different? Yeah, sure. So I was assigned female at birth and my mother was very excited to have a girl. She'd wanted a girl. And I was just

a kind of, in many ways, a classic little girly girl when I was a kid. I, you know, I loved wearing pink. I had long blonde hair. I had a huge collection of Barbies and doll's houses and dress ups and all those kind of things. And, you know, and I did other, you know, I loved playing with my brother. I played on a boys cricket team. I did sort of other differently gendered things as well. But I was a pretty classic girl from the outside.

And I continued that into my teenage years. And then I, you know, like any good teenage girl in the early 2000s, I had an eating disorder. Tick that box. Tortured middle class white girl angst. And then, you know, went on into my 20s as I was doing all my degrees thinking, you know, I'm just a, I'm a cisgender woman who is heterosexual. And I was, you know, as we've talked about, like high achieving academically, very workaholic. And I was in a five year sort of de facto relationship with a man. And I, you know, just had this pretty

conventional life. And then when I was in my late 20s, around the time I finished my PhD, that's when everything kind of began to break apart. The kind of neat little package of my life, I suppose. I ended my relationship with my partner because even though we had a great relationship and I loved him very much, I just had a sense of kind of suffocation or feeling trapped around it. You know, he really wanted to get married and we talked about, you know, getting married and having kids within a few years. And that I just knew deep in my guts, that was not a future I could countenance. So I broke up with him and finished my PhD and moved cities and kind of entered into a bit of a soul searching kind of phase where I was just trying to figure

out like what's going on like why didn't I want to be with this man I love am I gay like you know maybe I'm a lesbian what's happening and this was all around the time of what's been retrospectively called the trans tipping point this moment around like 2015-2016 when there was this huge explosion in trans culture and trans representation. And I sort of inexplicably, inexplicably at the time found myself really drawn to all this stuff. I was watching all the movies, reading all the books, kind of compulsively consuming this culture. And after a while, I was like, oh, I think I kind of like see myself in these stories. You know, this sensation that's being described in this book as gender dysphoria, that's kind of how I always felt about my body,

except I just assumed that everyone felt like that. But, you know, reading it in a book about transness, I'm realising that that's actually a very specific thing, a sensation, a feeling of discomfort in the body that trans people feel. So I got to the point where in 2018 when I was 30 years of age, I sort of really came to confront the fact that I was transgender and I suppose I spent the last three years working out what that means.

You know, if I'm not a woman, if I'm not the role I was assigned at birth, what am I? And the book that I published last week, All About Eve, is really the story of those three years and my process of figuring out, you know, how do you relearn to live in the world as an adult once you've discovered you're trans? It's such a huge gift, I think, you've given so many people in the book because you write so beautifully and so honestly. It must have been such a difficult process to write, was it?

Or was it cathartic? How did it feel in writing it? It was. It was actually really cathartic. Because I'm someone who kind of apprehends, like encounters the world through language, you know, I've always been a reader, you know, became a historian and then kind of discovered my own transness through reading trans writing, the writing of other people. It just really made sense to me to write about my experience, to kind of sort through

it, to work out what was going on, I suppose as a form of journaling almost in a way. So I started writing just a few really short essays in the first kind of year or so of my transition. And, you know, I published a few of them and they sort of got good feedback. And I found that process really, really useful in, I suppose, staking a claim for my existence. Because, you know, when you're a non-binary trans person, as I've kind of discovered myself to be, you know, the world just kind of says, like, you can't exist. You know, every day I go out and I encounter a world where there's only assumed to be men and women and no one else. And so people might, like me, it's really hard not to feel kind of like you're delusional or you're not really

real. So I think for me to start writing my story and eventually turn it into a memoir was really a way of kind of speaking back or fighting back, speaking back to power and saying, no, like the world is saying we're not real, that like we can't have toilets, that we're not counted in the census. But look, actually we are real because I've written this big book that you can actually like physically hold and to assert legitimacy. And so for those reasons, it was actually a really glorious process to write the book. I mean, it was kind of taxing in that I wrote a lot of it in 2020 during the lockdowns. And it was like quite a full on thing to be doing like while dealing with the stress of the coronavirus and lockdowns. But it was like, you know, I wrote it much more quickly than I've written historical pieces

of writing. It just kind of came out of me in many ways, quite fluidly. And you can hear that your voice just comes out so strongly throughout the book. Can you explain for people who haven't heard of the term gender dysphoria before, what that felt like or what does it feel like for you? Of course. Yeah. So, well, to go back a step, a trans person is someone whose gender identity doesn't align with their assigned sex so everyone is assigned to sex when they're born which is you know normally based on your genitals so someone comes a baby's born with a penis and we're like it's a boy a baby's born with a vagina and say it's a girl and then of course there's a small number of people who are intersex um who don't fit into those boxes but most of us are declared to be boys or girls when we're born.

And so if you're a girl, your gender identity is assumed to be, you know, woman as you grow older, and then for a boy, man. So gender dysphoria is essentially the discomfort that's felt when those two things don't match up. When you've been assigned female, as I was, but somehow I know in like the kind of deepest corner of my guts that I'm not actually a girl or a woman. And that feeling can manifest as extreme discomfort with like looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, oh, look, you know, I've got feminine facial features. I've got breasts, I've got hips. It can manifest with, you know, not wanting to look at yourself when you're naked or not being touched by intimate partners. It can manifest as really cringing and feeling really uncomfortable when

people call you, you know, lady or she or her or ma'am or any of those gendered forms of language. You know, it's different for everyone. But I think for me, the best way I can describe it is really feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Like my skin was like this kind of, my body that I've been stuck in, that everyone read as a woman's body, was somehow this kind of form of a prison or a punishment that I was just kind of desperate to get out of because it was this kind of unending source of discomfort. And, you know, and even it felt kind of torturous at times. It becomes, you know, as you can imagine, quite debilitating when it's kind of like this low level hum all the time, no matter what you're doing during the day

of feeling really uncomfortable in your own skin and, like, you want to climb out of it. So it's one of those feelings that if you've never had it, it can kind of be hard to kind of get. And I think I just assumed everyone felt like that for the rest of my life. It would have been a pretty miserable world if everyone did. But it's, you know, the good news is that, like, when someone is diagnosed with gender dysphoria and can, you know, undergo gender affirmation treatments, various forms such as hormone replacement therapy, gender affirmation surgery, or even just wearing different clothes, those things can make such an enormous difference. trans people like me often experience what's the opposite of gender dysphoria, which is gender

euphoria, which is when we feel really good in our gender, good in our body, and just kind of got a spring in our step and are kind of glad to be alive. And, you know, I had 30 years of gender dysphoria, but more and more these days, my life is characterized by gender euphoria. I love that term you wrote about. And I've just got that book and I've made a little note of it here. And now I'm just trying to find, you've skipped all the way ahead to all my questions that I had. Sorry. No, it's been so great. Yeah. So Alison Evans wrote that book called Euphoria Kids. Can you tell me about that book and what they were saying when they wrote it and

why they wrote it? Yeah, that's a great story. So in the really early days of my transition, when I was like, I think I'm trans, but am I really trans? I don't know any trans people. What does that mean? I was just generally having a bit of a freak out. I forced myself to go along to a regular kind of LGBT storytelling event in Brunswick. This was pre-COVID, of course, called Queer Stories. And that's a regular night run by Maeve Marsden, where, you know, just LGBTQIA plus people from all walks of life get up and give a little story about what, you know, being queer means to them. And the night I happened to go along, I encountered the wonderful Melbourne-based YA novelist called Alison Evans. And they kind of gave an introduction

to their new project, which is the novel, which is out now called Euphoria Kids. And this is a novel about three trans and gender diverse youth living in kind of contemporary Melbourne and they're all kind of you know they've all got complexities around their gender identity but they're not tortured by it they're like actually just kind of teenage kids just chilling out with their friends exploring there's a bit of kind of magic and there's sort of witches and fairies in this book, so they're exploring that side of things. And the way, the kind of motivation Alison had for this project was to really challenge the kind

of trope in trans storytelling that our lives are defined by trauma. You know, so often when you see trans characters in TV or in films, you know, we're the murder victims, we're sex workers who get killed, we're, you know, we're the murderers ourselves, we're deceitful, we're kind of, you know, we're living difficult lives in some ways. And Alison, to their credit, really wanted to push back

against that and say, no, we can tell different types of stories about trans people. We can tell stories about gender euphoria, about lives full of, you know, joy and potential and promise. And that gives hope for, you know, young trans kids, because of course, the problem with the idea that, you know, the idea we'd been sold by culture that trans lives were defined by trauma was it means that becoming trans seems like a fate worse than death. You know, no one wants to be trans themselves or have their kids be trans because it seems like this awful kind of punishment or, you know, they're destined to be a life of an outsider. And so it's, as Alison explained,

and this was sort of the first time I had kind of heard this explained to me you know it's so crucial to tell different types of stories because it opens up different kinds of lives for trans people and it shows you know kids and parents of trans kids that you know having a trans life can be a really rich and complex and meaningful life just like any other like you're not destined to suffer by any stretch of imagination you can have a life full of joy and you know at the time that was such a light bulb moment for me because I was in those early stages of feeling terrified of my own transness and to have someone you know Alison is non-binary themselves to have someone like that

say no like this is there's actually a whole different way of understanding our lives was a really big turning point in making me embrace my transness and actually come to the point I am now which is to see it as you know the best thing that's ever happened to me it's opened so many doors it's you know strengthened my. It's given me a better understanding of myself. It's just improved my mental health. It's just been good all round. That's so powerful, I think. And that's a lesson, right, for all human beings, really, that the more we get to know ourselves and allow other people to see ourselves, the richer our relationships are. And it doesn't mean it doesn't come with challenges. But I loved

that advice that you gave just for all humans in come with challenges. But I loved that advice that you gave just for all humans in the book about that. I think that came through so strongly. And I love the line that you wrote when you were talking about all of that, that said, perhaps eventually we'll even once again be recognised as the magic people we truly are. And I just wanted to ask you a bit about the history of Indigenous cultures and how that plays into the book and what you discovered looking at their approach to trans. Yeah. So, you know, often there's this kind of easy dismissal of trans and particularly non-binary identities that goes around today that, oh, it's just a new fad. It's a trend. It's,

you know, something that the young people have discovered on the internet. And that can be an easy way to not take trans and gender diverse identities seriously. When the reality couldn't be further from the truth, there's so much evidence to show that, you know, many, many, many cultures all around the world have had kind of concepts and words for people who existed outside the kind of gender binary of man and woman you know they might not have understood them as trans in the same way as we understand trans but you know what we might call gender diversity the idea that there are more than two genders, is a really, really well-established idea all around the world. You know, in North America, there's been research to suggest that

168 Indigenous languages have words for people who are not man or woman. And that's, yeah, which is just mind-blowing. And that's, you know, in that North American context, you know, they often use the English language word to spirit today to describe people who are not neither man nor woman. We also see evidence of that among the First Nations people here in Australia. You know, obviously because of the violence of colonisation and genocide, you know, it can be hard to know exactly

what took place pre-colonisation because evidence was destroyed and people were, you know, killed in the genocide. But, you know, there is clear evidence from First Nations people working in this space that gender was more complex than just a binary and the terms brother boys and sister girls are often used to describe what we might loosely call trans people. And, you know, and we see that, yeah, in Indigenous cultures,

in kind of all colonised parts of the world really. And what a growing number of sort of experts in this area think is that it was really the kind of when Europe colonised the world, it brought the gender binary with it and kind of imposed it on the world and decided that everyone who didn't fit into the gender binary was, you know, a freak or it was deviant. But given how widespread gender diversity really is, I think it seems fair to say that this is just part of what it means to be human. You know, just like we have a diversity of sexualities and hair colour and skin colour and height and, you know, taste, just our gender identities are wonderful, wonderful, glorious diversity as well.

And, you know, instead of seeing it as a problem, we could see it as something to celebrate. And to go back to your point about, you know, being seen as the magic people we are, I mean, there is also evidence to suggest that in many of these cultures where there were non-binary or gender diverse people, that they actually occupied quite high status roles. You know, they might have been revered as sort of a, you know, a kind of spiritual leader in the community. There was one great example of this that was reported only a few weeks ago, where there's a thousand year old grave of a Finnish person, well in modern day Finland. And for a long time, researchers were really confused about the gender of the person in the

grave. I mean, it was obviously a high-status grave just because of, you know, the amount of fuss that had gone into building it, but there was a mix of like male and female kind of accoutrements and ornaments in the grave. And what they're now thinking is based on what was in the grave, as well as looking at physical evidence from the specimen, that it's quite likely that this was a non-binary person, a non-binary person who was regarded as a high status person, perhaps a leader in this community in Finland a thousand years ago. So even, you know, even in parts of

Europe, this is certainly a part of what it means to be human. I love that so much. I think, could you walk us through for people who aren't quite sure what the gender binary means? Could you tell us what that means? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's hard to define in one sentence. Yeah, but it's an important idea. It's essentially the idea that there are just two genders, that everyone is a man or a woman, and that those genders, you know, map on to the sex you're assigned at birth. So if you're a penis baby, you become a boy and a man. And then if you were a vagina baby, you become a girl and then a woman. And in that binary, so because,

you know, binary just means two, so man and woman, You know, I suppose there's also the idea that these genders are kind of complementary or the opposites of each other, that, you know, we get all the stereotypes of, you know, woman as the nurturer doing, you know, traditional feminine domestic things. Yeah, totally. And man as the strong provider and the protector. And, you know, that's a crude way of putting it,

but that's kind of what it is in a nutshell, that there are two genders and that they have quite, I suppose, quite rigorous rules about how those genders are meant to behave. That makes total sense. So men are supposed to be out there, I don't know, playing footy and hanging with the boys and the women are at home doing domestic stuff. And obviously there's a lot more complexity with that, but I think it's, there's some terms right around all this stuff that caused so much controversy. Could you talk us through pronouns, I guess, and what that meant to you to figure out what your pronoun was? Yeah. Yeah. This is, I think, a really important but often misunderstood topic when we're talking about trans people. So, you know, pronouns are obviously the

gendered little words we used as a shorthand to describe other people. So, you know, instead of referring to you as Claire, I could say, you know, sort of Claire did this, she did this, your pronoun is she. And I had she, her pronouns for many years because I was living as a woman. But when I realised I was trans, those pronouns just didn't work for me anymore because every time someone referred to me as she or her, it was a reminder that they were seeing me as a woman because I knew I wasn't a woman, that disconnect was really painful and upsetting. So I started to look into other pronouns. And for me, the obvious choice, which is what I use today, was they and them. And so they and them is a gender neutral pronoun, which a lot of non-binary and trans people use because, again, it frees us from having to be man or woman.

It kind of allows us to step outside from the gender binary and say, we don't quite fit into those categories. We're like something else. Now, there's a lot of controversy about they, them pronouns because people often say that they're grammatically incorrect, that, you know, to describe a singular person as they is just wrong and confusing. Because if you think about it in everyday speech, we often use they as a plural. You know, say we were talking about, you know, everyone in Melbourne who's been in lockdown. We could say, oh, they all have had a hard time.

You know, we're talking about the whole community of Melbourne, right? But we do also in everyday speech, when we're not talking about trans people, we do use they as a singular without thinking about it. So an example I like to use is say you were sitting in a cafe and you looked up and you saw that someone on the table next to you had left a phone behind. There was an iPhone sitting on the table and you didn't see who was sitting there. So you don't know what gender they are. And you would probably say something like, oh, someone's left their phone behind. And you're not saying his or her phone, you're saying their phone. And in that case, you know, you're talking about they as a singular person. So when trans people like me use

they as our pronoun, we're sort of doing it in the same way. Like we're just saying, we're using they, them as a singular person. So, you know, people say it's grammatically incorrect to that. I say, you know, we already use it as for one person without thinking about it. So why is it such a problem? And people often also say also say oh this is just a new trend you know it's breaking the rules of English we need to follow proper English rules when actually there's been some really interesting research from from linguists to show that singular they to you know they to refer to one person has been used so far back in the English language like it dates back to Chaucer and you know you know, people like, you know, Shakespeare

and Jane Austen use it. You know, it's in all the kind of canonical classics. So it's actually, you know, it's very proper English to be using they to describe one person. So, you know, there are all the arguments about why it's actually technically fine to use it. But I suppose the bigger point is, like, why wouldn't you use it if it just makes trans people feel good? Like, it's just such a small thing to do to someone.

And like, I know as someone who gets, you know, people call me she and her still every day. I know how crappy that makes me feel. But when people refer to me as they, it literally makes my day. It feels so good. And I mean, why wouldn't you want to do that? Because you're making someone's day and you're signaling that you see them, you respect them, you think they're as worthy of dignity as any other human. And so that's why pronouns can seem a bit of a kind of ridiculous little thing to get head up about, but they actually really, really matter. And, you know, not assuming that, you know, someone's pronouns is a really good thing to do. What does it feel like when someone does that, when they use the wrong pronoun for

you? It feels really humiliating. I feel really ashamed because I feel like, I think there's two things going on. I feel like I've failed to signal that I'm not a woman through my appearance. I've been kind of betrayed by, you know, my high-pitched voice or something like that. And it feels humiliating like I'm a naughty little child being told off. It feels like, you know, I've tried to say, this is who I really am. I'm not a woman. And then someone by referring to me as she, they're saying, don't be absurd,

you little girl, you're a woman, we know best. And suddenly, you know, so even though I'm a 33 year old adult with, you know, a good job and my own apartment and everything, it feels like being turned into a little kid, being shamed and humiliated again and it's really not very pleasant. And I get that often when people do it, like, they just don't know. Like, they're not trying to, you know, they're not trying to upset me or anything like that. You know, it happened to me yesterday when I was getting

a package delivered and the guy doing that, he was a lovely guy, we had a nice chat but he just referred to me as she and you know why would why would he know any different but still even then yeah it just it really feels like a bit of a punch in the guts or another metaphor I like to use is you know it feels like a paper cut and each of those individual paper cuts, you know, you can shrug that off. It's not a big deal. But because it happens every single day, multiple times a day, you know, those paper cuts, they add up and it just starts to feel like you're just kind of one big wound bleeding all over the place. And, yeah, that's when you feel like, you know, life becomes a bit hostile and hard at times.

Yeah. I'm so sorry. That must be so challenging. What is it about understanding your transness that has made your life easier? And I guess conversely, what is the challenge with living with that kind of secret really within you? Yeah, so in terms of making my life easier, I think the first thing is that it just like gave me a set of like words and concepts to understand who I was because, you know, all the years when I'd been experiencing gender dysphoria and I didn't know what it was,

I just felt a bit like I was losing my mind or, you know, I just felt really alone because I was like, I just feel so uncomfortable in my own skin, but I don't really know why. You know, I'm mentally ill, what's going on. And just to know, like, this is a real thing. It's gender dysphoria. It, you know, there are things you can do to make it better. And there are people like you, you're not the only one. It just made me feel instantly overnight so much better. You know, the kind of day I fully realised I was trans, you know, it was one of the best days of my life.

I felt like, you know, throwing a party because I suddenly was like, oh, you know, a lightbulb's going on. This makes sense of the kind of the stress I've been experiencing my whole life. What was that day like? What was the sort of tipping point for you in your life that made you really realise that was the truth to itself for you? Yeah, it was an interesting day. So I was, as I'd said, I'd kind of, you know, been reading about all this, you know, this trans stuff for about a year or so and kind of thinking about it, but I hadn't quite been ready to confront or come to terms with the fact that this was me.

And then this time happened in, it was August 2018, and I had to fly to Vancouver in Canada for a conference for work. And I, you know, I attended the conference in Vancouver for a week. And then I thought, oh, well, you know, if I'm in Canada for a conference for work. And I, you know, I attended the conference in Vancouver for a week. And then I thought, oh, well, you know, if I'm in Canada, I might as well chuck on a holiday at the end because, you know, the work was paying for my flights. So I have a holiday as well. So I'd arranged to have a holiday on the island, well, Vancouver Island, it's called, which is, you know, where Victoria, the capital of British Columbia is just kind of outside of Vancouver. And it's a stunning island with all

this beautiful wildlife. And I thought, I'll just, you know, have a really chilled out week there and go for hikes and bike rides and, you know, go to the beach. I wasn't expecting much of it. And of course, this was at the time when British Columbia as a province had just legalized marijuana. And, you know, so I got to Victoria and I thought, well, you know, I'm here on holidays for a week. I don't have any responsibilities. Might as well try this legalized marijuana. What the hell? You know, I'm a very like innocent law abiding citizen in Australia. You know, I probably wouldn't know where to get marijuana if my life depended on it. But, you know, I was like, well, it's legal here, so fine. So I very nervously went out to the local dispensary, which is, you know, those special shops where they sell marijuana.

And it was very intimidating. It was like, it was like kind of an ASOP shop, like very high end, lots of like intimidating black clad staff and, you know, nice kind of lighting and music. And I just had no, no idea what I was doing, but I finally kind of worked up the courage to ask for help. And I walked out with several capsules of THC and I took one that night and, you know, nothing really happened. It happened it was like whatever so the next day I was like look I need to take a bit more so I took I think I took two or three capsules and then you know the marijuana worked I had a nice night alone in you know my airbnb you know boogie to some music all good collapsed into bed and the next morning I woke up um early, it was a Sunday, with this incredible moment of clarity.

Like, you know, in those moments when you're just kind of your brain is entering consciousness when you wake up in the morning, I had this sudden like message in my mind that was you're not a woman. Wearing women's clothes is drag. You're not really a woman. And, you know, if I believed in God, I would have called it a message from God.

Like that's how kind of powerful and clear it felt. And in that moment, I just didn't think to question or doubt it. I was just like, oh yeah, okay, I'm not a woman. Oh yeah, that makes sense. So I got up and I went into a slightly manic state where I, you know, I still had all these kind of women's clothes with me, like I had a suitcase full of dresses and skirts. And I thought, well, you know, I'm not a woman. I don't need these clothes. So I like bundled them all up, put them in a plastic bag to give away to, you know, to the vintage store, the op shop, and went out for a walk

and kind of threw my clothes away and kind of discarded my womanhood. And, yeah, it was just this really euphoric day where I kind of just pounded the pavement all day digesting this news and feeling incredibly euphoric. And I, to mark the occasion, I went out and got a new tattoo. I'd been reading the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet, in the months preceding this, and he has this great line that you should live the questions,

that, you know, searching for answers is not the point. You know, we can't expect to find definitive answers, but we should live the questions themselves and find joy in them. So to mark the occasion of discovering I was trans, I went to this tattoo parlor and found a very hungover tattooist and got that tattoo marked on my wrist as a reminder of, you know, I'm embracing this big, scary new identity. I don't really know where this is going to go. I don't know if, you know, if I'm not a woman, does that mean I'm a man? I didn't know then.

But I'm just going to kind of get on this ride and see where it leads. And then so a few days later, I came back to Australia and then, you know, launched the bombshell on everyone in my life. Wow. Congratulations. And that's so brave and also incredibly, I think, important for other people to hear. What was the reaction like from your circle of people around you? It was mixed, I suppose I'd say. Look, I was pretty naive. I, you know, as someone working

in a university, you know, I was in a pretty like queer lefty, you know, inner suburbs of Melbourne bubble where I just was like, oh yeah, everyone will be fine with me being trans, like no big deal. It's totally, totally chill. And I was unprepared for the fact that there is still so much fear and ignorance around transness, you know, even in very educated parts of Australia today. And that fear and ignorance manifests as hostility or transphobia. So, you know, when I first told my, you know, my close family members, they were very shocked and surprised. And part of it was because, you know, I'd done such a good job as performing the role of woman. I tried really, really my hardest, you know, as a workaholic, I really, really tried

to do it well. And they'd been suffering by that. So, you know, the night I told my mother, you know, it did not go to plan at all. I expected her to be like, oh, darling, you're trans. That's wonderful. Like, let's have a hug and, you know, let's celebrate. Her response was shock. You know, she said, oh, you want to be a man? What? Like, you're my girl, though. You're my darling little girl. Like, she was not pleased at all. And that was really hard and really frightening for me because I felt so alone and so confused. Of course, you know, I wanted nothing else than to be just held and, you know, told I was loved and safe by my parents. You know, they have come a long way since then and they're wonderful today.

But I was very taken aback at the time by how much aversion there was to this still. But, you know, on the other hand, I have like wonderful friends who embraced it without question. You know, they used my new name because I changed my name. They used my new pronoun from the word go. And my workplace was also pretty good compared to many workplaces out there. So, you know, compared to many, many times in history and many places still in the world, I did have a fairly kind of safe, loving landing, so to speak. But still, it was painful to kind of come back from Canada thinking, you know, I'm trans, I'm going to have a party,

this is fabulous. And then to kind of have everyone kind of treat it like there'd been a death or a sort of serious disease, that this was a kind of sombre, mournful occasion. And, you know, that's why, that's one of the reasons I'm so critical of the medicalisation of transness. You know, still today, being trans is seen as a medical condition, as a problem. And that's, I think that's a big part of the reason why when someone announces they're trans, we tend to see it as bad news, as something to, you know, be sombre and serious about. Whereas if we were to kind of recognise the truth, which is being trans is just part of the glorious variation of humanity, I think we'd be much more likely to have

that celebratory mode of being like, woo-hoo, you know, you're trans, that's great, you figure out who you are, let's throw a party. Yeah, absolutely. I think we should be throwing as many parties as we can, especially after all this pandemic ends. Totally. Absolutely, sure. You don't have to

answer this. I'm not sure whether it's appropriate, but I would love you to talk about what you actually did to then signal to the world that you were trans. Was that a journey in and of itself? Yeah, yeah, completely. And it's an ongoing journey. So to, you know, to kind of go back to basics on that, we use the term like to affirm your gender as like the kind of way in which you kind of come into your transness. And that's often divided into two kind of categories. There's social transition, which is doing things like changing your name, changing your pronouns, changing your haircut. And then there's medical transition or

medical affirmation, which is like getting surgery or going on hormones or things like that. So I really jumped headfirst into social transition. One of the first things I did was to affirm my gender was to buy new clothes. So, you know, I mentioned how when I was in Canada, I threw out all my skirts and dresses and I felt like I needed a new wardrobe to kind of, as a way to, I suppose, play with gender, to like try on different outfits and like work out how I wanted to present myself to the world, which was a whole adventure in itself because at first I kind of naively thought, okay, well, I'll just, I'll just go and buy some men's clothes, no big deal. But that doesn't work out so well when you are in a kind

of female aside body of my size. Well, because first I'd go into, you know, men's boutiques or the menswear side of shops and, you know, as someone who looked like a woman going into these shops, I'd get sort of six shop assistants pouncing on me saying, oh, do you need any help? Are you buying something for your husband or for your son? And I'd say, oh, no, I'm buying clothes for me.

And they'd sort of give me these weird looks like, oh, okay. So that was a bit awkward. And then when I finally managed to get some clothes and take them into the change room, I quickly discovered that none of them fit me because men's sizing is just much bigger than women's sizing and I'm a you know pretty slim person and you know with like not very wide shoulders and pretty flat chest and so even an extra small in um men's clothing just like looked absurd on me it looked like I was a a little kid wearing their father's clothes. But then I discovered the joy of boys' wear.

I realised that the clothes that fit me best are about boys' wear aged 12 to 14. So I discovered that Kmart and Zara Boys have an excellent line in clothes for that age. So before the pandemic hit, I spent a lot of time lurking in the boys wear section, trying not to look suspicious, just trying to look like I was just, you know, buying clothes for my children and got a whole new wardrobe that way. Another thing I did in terms of social transition was change my name. So as I describe in the book, the name I was given at birth was Anne

and I really loved that name in many ways. It really suited me. It was great. But I suppose I just realised like it's such a woman's name and as long as I had that name, people wouldn't really take it seriously that I wasn't a woman. So then I was like, okay, I've got to find a new name, which is another weird process to name yourself. I spent a whole summer where I was basically

just like lurking on baby name websites. And I'd kind of scroll through the websites each day being like, oh, like what name feels right for me? For quite a while, I thought I would choose like an A name so I could keep the same initial. So I could, you know, be Adam instead of Anne or something like that. So I could stay A Rees. But I just worked out none of the A names really worked for me. I just couldn't find one that felt right. And then eventually I stumbled upon Eve, which, you know, I really love because it's such a kind of shape-shifting, ambiguous name. You know, I spell it the masculine French way, which is Y-V-E-S.

So it's pronounced Eve, and in that way it sounds identical to E-V-E, which is the feminine name. So it's this kind of nice name that can kind of, you know, flip between genders. It's sort of I like that it was one syllable. It seemed kind of elegant. So that's what I adopted and that's been a kind of other interesting ongoing journey having a new name

and there's, you know, a lot of kind of admin and endless bureaucratic stuff associated with that. You know, last week only I've been Eve for two and a half years now, but only last week did my workplace update my email address to reflect my name. So, you know, it takes a long time for these things to happen. Yeah. I thought that was interesting about your academic career and how you couldn't just completely throw the name Eve out. Do you want to talk us through why? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I'd been working as

an academic for like almost 10 years before I started transitioning. And, you know, in academia, you have this catchphrase, publish or perish, because it's like ruthlessly competitive industry. You know, it's so hard to get a job even once you have a PhD. And the way you kind of climb up the career ladder as an academic is by publishing in peer-reviewed, high-status journals. So I'd been publishing in my good workaholic way from about 2010, so quite a while ago now. And of course, all those publications were out under Anne Rees. And so when I started

transitioning and changed my name, I had this sort of dilemma of like, I'm moving away from the name Anne and I'm getting this new identity, but I can't actually like kind of let go of Anne completely because her name is on all these publications that kind of formed the bedrock of my career. Like I can't kind of distance myself from these publications because then I have no kind of leg to stand on professionally. I have no track record. So like this was a really interesting contrast to what many trans people do. You know, a lot of trans people, when they change their name, they start referring to their old name as their dead name and they never want to encounter it again. They never want to see it. They want no one else to say it. And, you know,

as a general rule, you should never use the name of the birth name or the dead name of a trans person. It's very, very offensive normally. But I suppose for me, I was in this situation where I didn't have that luxury. I couldn't, you know, kill off Anne and decide she was my dead name because I needed these publications. So I suppose it's brought me to a position where I kind of have this like, kind of multiple identities, you know, that I'm still kind of Anne in one sense of the word. I'm, you know, I'm Eve in daily life and my new publications are Eve, but kind of Anne is always with me. And I've had to make my peace with that. And I just sort of realised that's kind of

part of the cost of doing business as an academic and a trans person. I mean, academic journals, like there's a big push for academic journals to get better at updating their articles when trans people change their name to change the name as well but you know it's really slow and I think it's going to take many years for that to kind of happen across the board so so for the time being Anne will be with me. She'll be around somewhere. Yeah. Do you want to talk us through so you were talking about your social transition where are you at now so there's social transition and then what's the other side of transition? Yeah. So the other side of transition is medical transition. Now,

this is a really kind of, it was a really tricky side of things for me. You know, when I first realised I was trans, I thought, oh, maybe, maybe I am a trans man, you know, in which case I would want to undergo medical procedures, which would change my appearance. So I would look a trans man, you know, in which case I would want to undergo medical procedures which would change my appearance so I would look like a man. You know, that might involve, yeah, taking testosterone, which is very, very effective at masculinising your appearance. You know, there's a lot of trans men who have been on testosterone for years that if you saw them in the street, you would 100% think they were a man. And, you know, there's also options for surgery, such as what's called top surgery,

which is essentially having your breasts removed and your chest masculinized. And I was, I suppose, toying with these ideas for a number of years. I soon kind of realized I wasn't quite a trans man. I didn't want to exist in the world as a man. I started describing myself as non-binary and transmasculine, which essentially means I'm kind of closer towards the man end of the spectrum than the woman end, but I'm not quite a man. And then I suppose there was this decision of how much of a man do I want to look like? You know, if I stay in my current body, even if I wear different clothes and cut my hair, I'm still probably going to be seen as a

woman most of the time by the world because I have a pretty high voice, you know, still got hips, things like that. I just knew from experience the world was going to see me as a woman. So then I thought, well, maybe I should start taking testosterone because being seen as a woman is pretty crappy. And if I started taking testosterone, then at least, you know, I might maybe being read as a man would be like the lesser of two evils. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad. So I was kind of playing with these ideas for a really long time. You know, quite early in transition, I got diagnosed with gender dysphoria and, you know, I got a really high score of gender dysphoria. And I was kind of my psychologist had to sort of shut me down the going on hormones path.

But I wasn't ready for it then. It took me another couple of years to sort of figure it out. And eventually I sort of got to this point where earlier this year, I suppose I decided it was really the right thing for me. And I've been on hormone replacement therapy on a low dose for a number of months now. And I have gender affirmation surgery booked in for later this year, you know, as long, hopefully it's not cancelled by COVID, but COVID permitting that will go ahead. But I also, I suppose, should flag that talking about medical transition can kind of be a tricky thing to talk about when we're talking about trans people, for so long trans people were seen as kind of

freakish spectacles where we were just reduced to our bodies and the weird things that had or hadn't happened to our bodies you know even even back in the 90s so not that long ago when trans people went on tv people would just sort of often ask about their genitals straight up and really like invasive insulting questions like that you know you'd never ask any other stranger about their genitals that would just seem so rude um and awful so I suppose you know there can be a reluctance a really understandable reluctance for trans people now to talk about the medical side of transition because for so long we've just been reduced to our bodies and their perceived freakishness around that you know we want to kind of say look we're just we're more than our bodies we're more than our genitals like

get over the fixation on whether we've had the surgery or not. Like that's not the point. So I think for a lot of us, we really want to try and tell stories about being trans that aren't about surgery or hormone replacement therapy. And that was a big part of the reason I kind of ended my book before those things happen. I wanted to tell a transition narrative, I suppose, that was more about social transition and kind of had medical transition in a way as a bit of an afterthought, because I wanted to make the point that, you know, whether I get surgery or not does not make me any more or less trans. And a lot of trans people do not want any medical transition at all for many reasons. Like they might not want it.

They might not be able to afford it because it's really bloody expensive. You know, my surgery is going to cost at least $12,000 out of pocket and that's at the lower end. Wow. Yeah. That's huge. Yeah. You know, some other surgeries can cost up to $90,000.

So, you know, they're very inaccessible. Like I'm, you know, it's, it's, they're very inaccessible. Like I'm, I'm, you know, as someone who works in university, I'm kind of definitely the more affluent end of trans people when as a group, like we tend to be unemployed or underemployed because of, you know, because of transphobia and stigma around hiring trans people. So, you know, $12,000 is expensive for me, but for most trans people, like, that's, like, you know, hugely vast amount of money. So, you know, trans people might not get surgery for that reason, and that does not make them any less trans. So, you know, on the one hand, I think it's so important to, you know, to explain to cis people what these terms mean, cis being just non-trans, you know, it's important to have frank conversations about it. But at the same time,

yeah, we trans people can be reluctant, I suppose, to start the conversation there because we want to make the point that we're so much more than our bodies and what doctors do to us or don't do to us. How would you describe that then? So what more are you than that? Well, I suppose to go back to that point of the gender identity, like being trans is a matter of your gender identity. It's basically when your gender identity doesn't match up to your perceived sex.

That identity has nothing to do with your body. That's something that happens inside your brain. So it actually is kind of irrelevant what the body looks like for a trans person. It's about how they see themselves and understand themselves in the world. And, you know, that's who we are. That's the story of our transness, our inner sense of ourself and our gender identity, which we all have. You know, every single person alive has a gender identity. It's just that people who aren't trans don't have their gender identity as kind of interrogated or scrutinised as much.

They're not required to kind of prove it to the same extent. But, you know, that's really the essence of being trans and that's why it can be so, I suppose, upsetting when, you know that's that's really the essence of being trans and that's why it can be so I suppose upsetting when you know there's emphasis on on kind of passing as a non-trans person as you know through changing your body to the extent that you can you can deceive people or fool them into thinking you're not really trans because you you know, in a way that's really not the point. The point is, you know, being able to recognise the gender identity that's in your head and live according to that and have the world see that. You know, it's kind of nice if your body can

go along with the ride, but that's really not the most important thing. The most important thing is how you think of yourself between your ears and having the world respect that. And is that why, obviously, for many trans people, there is some real difficulty with mental health in this space and some really devastating consequences of that reaction that people have had. Can you talk us through some of that and just sort of the terrible consequences that this can lead to if people don't understand this, all that transphobia manifests itself in the world in some really scary and problematic ways? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's so much research showing that, you know, trans people just have a much higher incidence of all types of mental illness than the general population. You know, recent research in Australia looking at trans kids showed that one in two, Nellie,

had attempted suicide. You know, this is not just thought about suicide but actually attempted it, like half of trans kids, which is just such a shocking statistic and you know another statistic that gets quoted a lot is that trans people you know adults as well are 11 times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population so there are really devastating um figures there. There can be a misconception that trans people have this mental distress because being trans is itself a sickness. That's really not true and it's important to emphasise that. The reason that trans people, you know, are more likely to attempt suicide

or experience depression or anxiety is because we live in a really transphobic world where people are really hostile to us. The culture is hostile to us and we internalise that. And it's really hard to stop thinking of yourself as a trans person, as not a freak or a deviant or a burden, because that's the messages we're told from earliest childhood. You know, one film that had a big impression on me as a kid was the really popular 90s film Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. That came out in 1994 when I was six years old. And, you know, it was just like I inhaled it at the time.

I was like, this is just a kind of fun slapstick comedy. I watched it heaps of times with my brother at school. It was always on TV. And then only last year when I was watching a great documentary on Netflix called Disclosure, which is about the history of trans representation on the screen, did I realise that that film that had been such a big part of my childhood, the kind of, you know, the climax of that film is revealing a trans woman, like stripping her and showing, you know, that she still has a penis, and then the Jim Carrey character being so disgusted and revolted by this because he'd kissed her at an earlier point that he vomits, like, you know,

kind of convulsively and uncontrollably for minutes on end into the toilet. So this film was sending the message that a trans person existing is disgusting, is vomit worthy, is so gross. And that was one of the first messages I learned as a little kid that what it meant to be trans and then that idea was just reinforced my whole life and that is true for every trans person out there. So, you know, no wonder we feel a bit crap about ourselves. No wonder we feel depressed because the whole world is telling us we're disgusting and, you know, and I mean, of course, there's also practical ramifications to that. You know, trans people, we're more likely to be sexually assaulted,

we're more likely to be unemployed, we're more likely to be homeless, we're more likely to experience, you know, all forms of violence, like people do not treat us well, we experience stigma and discrimination on a daily basis. So that's why, you know, there's high rates of mental illness because we have such a rough time of life. I'm so sorry. It makes me so furious, I think, and disappointed. But then also, as you say in the book, there is this tipping point and there's so much hope as well, I think. What are the sort of the anecdote to that? The stories, the anecdote to Ace Ventura and even things like Family Guy and The Hangover 2 and all these horrible 90s movies. When you start watching some of the stuff we watched as kids, my God, there's like such

subliminal messaging in it that's so difficult. What are the stories that are anecdotes to that? I know that you write about a person called Nikki and their story and even the Danish is it the Danish girl as well that film yeah yeah yeah so there's been like um you know like transphobia still exists in culture but the good news is like things are changing really quickly um you know since 2015, the trans tipping point, as it was called, there's just been this absolute explosion in like positive trans culture, which is having a huge positive impact around the world. There's, you know, a film that many people have seen was The Danish Girl starring Eddie Redmayne about an early trans woman.

You know, that film got a lot of criticism, rightly so, because it cast a non-trans male actor in the lead role. But, you know, I still found that film very personally important in the fact that it didn't display transness as freakish. It displayed it as something dignified and elegant and beautiful. And I saw it as a really pivotal moment on my journey and it meant a lot to me. More recently there's been amazing TV shows like Transparent, which is the wonderful show about a Jewish family in New York

with multiple trans characters. That was a really wonderful mainstream hit. And also I love Pose, which is the FX drama about the ballroom scene in early 90s New York, which is this wonderful kind of glamorous underworld populated by Black and Latinx sort of trans, loosely trans, gender diverse kind of people who dress up in the most wonderful costumes and compete for prizes. And that's Pose is a really kind of incredibly glamorous TV show about that world. And there's just more and more and more every year. You know, my, there's all these great trans actors now. My, my book All About, has been turned into an audio book and that was narrated by a trans actor, this wonderful trans man called Harvey Zelensky, who's, you know, appeared in Hollywood productions and quite mainstream things. So, you know, the the one hand, that's been accompanied by a bit of a backlash where, you know, we are seeing a bit

of a kind of increased incidence of, you know, transphobic hate crimes, particularly in the US, as a kind of reaction to this mainstreaming of transness. But it is also important to emphasise the positive stories, which is that this changes lives and it saves lives. You know, if I hadn't seen positive trans characters on screen or on books, I don't think I would have recognised my transness and I could still be a really tortured person trying to live as a woman. And, you know, this was one of the big

reasons that motivated me to write my book. You know, I'd lived through seeing how beneficial and life-changing positive trans representation can be. And so I suppose I wanted to kind of carry that on by kind of adding my own small contribution to that changing culture. I think it's a much bigger contribution than a small contribution. I think you've just, you've opened up your heart and your head and I think really given a gift to a lot of people, as I keep saying, but I absolutely think that's so true.

And I also loved the peppering of history throughout the book and some of the characters that you talk about from history who were trans. And would you like to tell us the story of, is it Monty Punchon? Is that how I say? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So Monty was this fabulous Australian icon really so Monty was someone who kind of effectively lived as a woman was assigned

female at birth and um you know lived as a woman in Australia in the early 20th century and, you know, seemed quite respectable on the outside but had this kind of secret life where she dressed up in men's clothing and got her friends to call her Mickey and also, you know, had what seemed like romantic, possibly sexual relations with women, made these amazing scrapbooks that kind of document this existence where Monty would cut out any kind of mention of a kind of masculine woman or a sort of slightly butch character in the newspapers over decades and put them in their scrapbook. And I like to kind of think of, you know, Monty looking

for other people like themselves. Now, when Monty's kind of story first came out in the 1980s, Monty was kind of, proclaims the kind of lesbian icon. You know, all these kind of lesbian activists at the time looked at Monty and thought, oh, you were a woman who loved women that, you know, women, that must mean you're a lesbian, you know, you're this early icon, this early hero of ours. But I think it's really interesting to look at her, you know, look at her or them a few decades later and think, you know, Monty was someone who dressed in men's clothes, liked to be called Mickey, you know, kind of a man's name, identified with masculine characters, maybe Mickey was an early trans person.

You know, the concept of transness didn't really exist when Mickey was young, but we can look back and think maybe if Mickey was alive now, that's how they would have identified as a trans person. And, you know, history is littered with these people going back, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years who people who just, you know, didn't fit for the assigned gender they'd been given. It didn't work for them.

And they lived kind of undercover or they had a double life where they dressed in different clothes and had different names and, you know, lived entire lives even, you know, with a different gender. There's a great American character as well called Billy Tipton who was a jazz musician who kind of got semi-famous kind of around the 1950s and, you know, Billy was married to a woman, had two sons, you know,

lived a kind of respectable life as a family man and a muso. Then Billy died in the late 80s and when his body was inspected after death it was revealed that he was biologically female and he'd lived an entire life as, you know, as what we might now call a trans man and no one had any idea until his death. And, you know, there are probably so many more characters like that that have been lost to history, that they just kind of disappeared off the record books

and we'll never know about them. But we know they were there. We know trans people have always lived and existed in one way or another. What did it mean to you to see Elliot Page come out as who he is? That was such, such a big deal for me. So, you know, that happened, I think, in December last year, in December 2020. And, you know, that was still a pretty tough time in terms of the pandemic and, you know, things were still tricky. But that day was one of the most glorious, glorious days I can remember.

To have this really massive Hollywood celebrity who was, you know, universally respected and beloved, to have them say, I'm trans and I'm proud and this is who I am and you've got to be okay with it, that felt like a totally game-changing moment. You know, I like wept with joy that day and I think many people did as well. And it's been so, so lovely to see Elliot, you know, progress over the last nearly a year and, you know,

go through different stages of his journey, have top surgery and just give off this kind of radiant happiness to really show that it's the right step for him. And I think, you know, along with leading trans feminine celebrities like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, Elliot Page has just done huge work in mainstreaming transness. You know, I think it is important to note trans celebrities have a really different experience to the majority of trans people.

Like they have more money, which enables them, you know, to get these really expensive surgeries quickly and their wealth. So, you know, it's important not to kind of see them as a kind of everyman trans person. But I do really respect the work they can do in using their celebrity to change the conversation around transness and gender and draw attention to the, you know, the hardships and the legal obstacles that everyday trans people are experiencing, which Elliot Page has been doing wonderfully well. What are some of the things that can practically be done to help,

especially if you want to be an ally, but just, I guess, from a cultural societal perspective, what are some things that would make life easier? One of the most important things I think to keep in mind on a daily basis is to not assume, you know, the gender of people you come in contact with, like on the street or in a shop. Because that's when you can easily misgender someone. You know, you can see someone like me, who is not a woman, and assume I'm a woman and, you know, put a little punch in the guts. You know, our brains are trained to gender people. It's kind of a, you know, a mental shortcut that we walked out on the street and our brains are kind of unconsciously being like man woman woman man but I think to try and train yourself out of that a bit and just like not assume you know just because of the shape of someone's body or the clothes they're wearing or what their voice sounds like we don't actually know what their gender is and you know you can

actually ask you know one one nice thing to do when you meet someone new is to, when you're giving your name, is to offer your pronouns and then ask for someone else's. So you could say, you know, hi, I'm Eve. I use they, them pronouns. What about you? And then you're kind of opening the conversation for them to gender themselves and, you know, let them self-define, like, so you don't assume and then get things wrong potentially. It can also be a great thing to do is just to put your pronouns in your email signature or your Zoom name or your, you know, social media kind of bio.

That's just another way of signalling to trans people that they're seen and respected and safe and also just normalising a conversation about not assuming we know people's gender, just, you know, making it kind of an everyday thing to actually ask people's pronouns and not assume. So I think there's some really like practical everyday things that everyone can do just to kind of shift the conversation

about how we understand gender in relation to bodies. I think that's so valuable. Thank you so much. Cause I know it must be frustrating or exhausting sometimes having to educate people all the time. Do you find that, or do you also sort of find it energizing to be able to talk about this stuff? I think I actually really love it. I think I'm, you know, as my like, you know, a lot of my day job is as an educator, I suppose, because I, you know, I teach history at my work at La Trobe University, as well as writing it. And I love that. I love educating people, no matter what I'm talking about. It feels like really meaningful work. I think it would be dispiriting and exhausting

to educate people about trans stuff if they weren't receptive or engaged, but I just actually feel so heartened over the last few years I've been talking about this, how everyone actually is just so open and wants to learn and is curious and open-minded and want to better support the trans people in their life. And that makes me feel so energised and so enthusiastic and passionate about doing this work because, you know, it feels meaningful.

It feels like, you know, it's doing a little bit to, you know, improve the world. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Eve. It's just been so valuable and thank you as well for all about Eve. Thank you. It's just brilliant. I love the definition of the word trans, so the Latin meaning.

And I love that you write about that we are all continually becoming. So the Latin meaning is beyond or across. What does that mean in your life now? Where are you becoming next or who are you becoming next? It's a great question. I think I'm in a process of becoming in relation to my writing. I, you know, I was trained as a historian. So we did, you know, very academic writing and very kind of sometimes dry writing for

many years, writing for other historians. And writing this book all about Eve and other essays has really made me realise how much I love more creative, more personal kinds of writing. And I really want to, you know, dive into that space and would love to start writing fiction and perhaps write a novel or two. So I feel like I'm really, I suppose, finding my creative self. I think for a lot of my life, I had been such a kind of intellectual workaholic academic self and that part of my brain was kind of the most engaged. And I feel like I'm in a moment of shifting, you know, not only in my gender, but shifting towards engaging the more creative parts of who I am

and that just feels really like rich and juicy and exciting and I really want to go with that. Oh I can't wait to read more I think absolutely thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. All right cool oh you're welcome it's been a pleasure. You've been listening to a podcast with me claire 20 and this week with dr eve reese you can find more from eve at their website eve reese.com that's y-v-e-s-r-e-e-s.com where you can find links to all about eve their brilliant memoir as well as recent academic publications and podcasts. All right. And for more from me, you can head to claire20.com. I have all my podcasts over there and I also do a newsletter,

which is linked below in the show notes or just in my Instagram bio. That's at Claire20 where I occasionally tell stories over there on social media. I currently have my birthday cake that I made from scratch over there and let me tell you, it's a thing of beauty. So you can head scratch over there. And let me tell you, it's a thing of beauty. So you can head on over there. If you love this episode, I would so love you to share it with a friend. That's the best way for podcasts to get discovered. And I just would do me a massive favor. And as always, rate, review and subscribe. Thank you so much. And I'll talk to you soon. Thank you as well to Collings who has again edited this episode

brilliantly. And I also do a podcast with my husband, James, that comes out every Thursday called Suggestible, where we recommend you things to watch, read and listen to. So that's every Thursday, Tons is every Tuesday. Sending you lots of love out there. Okay, bye.