Content warning: This article briefly mentions family violence, transphobia, intravenous drug use and intersex medical interventions.

Georgie Yovanovic (she/her) co-identifies as trans and intersex. She is currently a board member for the Zoe Belle Gender Collective, a member of Intersex Human Rights Australia (IHRA), a co-creator of online resource Transfemme, and an advocate for Sisters & Brothers NT. Georgie is a working member of the Darlington Statement, and has contributed to projects with ACON Health (formerly the National LGBTI Health Alliance), Th!s is Me (a fundraiser supporting all womxn against violence and abuse), Northern Territory AIDS and Hepatitis Council, and within the disability services sector.

Amao Leota Lu is a proud Samoan fa’afafine / trans woman of colour who weaves the intersectionality of race, culture and gender through her work and creative practices.

All images: Hailey Moroney
This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

Georgie: Here we are! Let’s talk about colonisation and gender binaries.

Amao: That runs through our system, and that’s where we have a lot of systemic issues related to trans issues and trans health. I think there’s still a hell of a lot of work that needs to go on.

G: Definitely. But I was also thinking about colonisation for both of us personally, as trans women, and our families, and where we come from as well. We’re migrants. 

My family was displaced by British colonisation in Egypt in the 1950s. The English occupation had all the Europeans there to displace the local Indigenous population – the Egyptians and the Arabs. It was a British-European colony for years, and that’s where I was born and grew up.

A: Knowing all that, and how you’ve come from a cultural background that’s not quite Australian, how has it been for yourself in terms of evolving?

G: So, I grew up in a very male-dominated, patriarchal, abusive family. Of course, my family found it really hard coming to Australia. My mother’s side of the family were educated, and my father’s side ran restaurants and businesses. When we came here, my parents assimilated quite quickly because they had that mix overseas.

I remember one story: when my family arrived here in 1965, my auntie (my mother’s sister) was running around Melbourne looking for a cup of coffee. She goes, “What the hell is this place? They don’t even have coffee here! What happened to our cosmopolitan life back in the old country? The Aussies don’t even know what coffee is!”

A: I think I’ve had a similar journey. When my parents migrated, the testing ground was New Zealand, coming from Samoa. So, they had to unpack some of their traditional ways to fit into society there.

We migrated from New Zealand into Australia in the ’80s. And that produced a whole other challenge for us because it was such a huge country. Things were different – we were able to scrape by when we were in New Zealand, but there were a lot more things that we could do, like money-wise, work-wise, that we were still having to juggle between identifying as Samoan and having this, you know, religion.

Then having to live the Western culture ways, the white Australian ways of, you know, going out, getting a job, and providing for the family. It was an interesting one. It afforded us great opportunities, but we also encountered a bit of racism as well. We were the only Pasifika family in the area at the time.

I’ve had to unpack where the colonialism fitted in. For me it was challenging, the fact that I was having to deal with a bunch of cultures that were different from my own. I was excited by it, but when I encountered things to do with the way I looked, and culture-wise, that became a bit more challenging. I didn’t want to go to school. I just wanted to stay at home.

G: Yeah, I was the same. We had a very similar upbringing – it was about the whole family assimilating. We were lucky that we had other members of the family who had already migrated here. Back in the day, we were the wogs that had migrated.

A: And we were the fobs. [laughs]

G: Right, there you go! Dirty, smelly greasers with the salami and the olives.

A: We’d take our chicken or our food from Sunday lunch, and the kids were like, “What is that?”

G: We copped the same! Even though we appeared white, and we appeared to assimilate to colonisation outside of our home – at home, we didn’t. At home, we lived a very strong cultural lifestyle, like we would have in the old country.

A: I felt it also overlapped when coming into identity politics. Being a young teen boy at the time and just trying to find myself, and trying to find out, Oh, I have this other identity.

I’m not quite sure how to unpack it, because in my culture we use the term fa’afafine or fa’atama, and it’s having to evolve from the constructions of what Western society now places upon me, because I’m now dealing with the white world.

I’m now dealing with Australia, how Australia sees me. So that was a bit of a challenge, trying to navigate that, trying to negotiate where I actually fit in, in terms of my own identity, whether that had been sexuality, or gender identity. And it was the ’80s, so we were in the AIDS epidemic situation. How did that feel for you?

G: Well, that was one of the most traumatic, amazing, life-changing moments. I was living in Sydney as a young tranny, queer, androgynous, in between things; and AIDS hit Sydney first because of the gay male population. That was the rhetoric at the time from America, and the rest of the world: that gay men were passing it around.

We were being attacked outside our clubs and bars while lining up to go in. There were Nazis, neo-Nazis, white supremacists – there were bashings everywhere. 

For the first time, in my eyes, the gay community – it was called the gay community then – finally started to come together. For the first time it wasn’t about sexual identity or anything else, it was just about safety, and people coming together, because we were being blamed and traumatised for something that had nothing to do with us.

A: I remember being quite scared at the time, I kind of had this thing in my mind that, Oh, I’m attracted to someone that was the same sex. And I remember that AIDS ad at the time.

G: The Grim Reaper!

A: That scared the hell out of me.

G: And everybody else!

A: And the discrimination and the fear and the attacks that we were getting – being a young teenager at the time, I was scared. And having to go home to deal with that inner-child thinking, I’m feeling sexually or physically attracted to who I feel like, but I can’t express myself because I’m also being bombarded at home with church, the white kind of Christian attitude of “you shouldn’t be that way, you need to be a boy and you need to act macho.”

But that ad scared me.

G: And that was the idea, wasn’t it? I felt the same way. That was mortifying, because I’m like, I’m to blame for this epidemic, because I’m queer!

I couldn’t identify openly as hetero because I was such a girl. I was obvious. And it’s like, there’s nowhere you can go, nowhere you can hide, so how do I navigate my gender expression among the politics of HIV at the time, the internal politics of the queer community, and the exclusion of trans women at the time? People were being harassed on the street. I wouldn’t go out on my own.

A: How did it feel when you found out that someone that you knew passed away from HIV?

G: Oh, that was horrendous. They were my family, they were my friends. I was a street kid, pretty much, and a sex worker, because of the abuse at home. I was running away from home to get away from it. That’s how I found my own people.

But it was such a dire circumstance – fearing for your life, your physical safety, going out. At times I would just cover up, tone it down to a more ‘masculine’ look, to blend in for safety. And again, we’re transformers. You know, always got a bit of lippy in the pocket and all that sort of stuff. So you can tone it down, run across the road and then take it off and whack it on and sparkle up and away you go! [laughs]

This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

A: It was a challenging time. I remember, it hit me when I was leaving school, and I found out that one of my friends had died, but they made it a secret the way he died. It was only revealed two years later that he had died from HIV, but the family didn’t want that to be put on record, and it was only revealed by his brother.

That’s how I was affected. Because that boy sat next to me in my accounting class, and to find out that he had just passed away was, like you said, we were traumatised.

G: We were children!

A: I wanted to discover myself and go out, and go clubbing and there was a sense of, you know, if I’m going to physically interact and have intercourse or whatever, it was like, good luck.

G: That’s right. It was Russian roulette. That’s what life was on the scene.

A: Yeah, and one of the saddest moments was, one of my friends, when the family found out he had passed away, they put his body on a truck, and that’s how he went to the cemetery. They just were so embarrassed. To this day that’s one of the ones that affects me, because I think to myself – if that’s the way you’re going to go out of this Earth, after you’ve died and that’s the respect that they’re giving you, is on a truck…

G: A very dear friend of mine, Amanda, who passed, she ended up getting the dreaded HIV – she was fully transitioned into female by then, working in King’s Cross, on William Street. That was such a vulnerable place to be – I was using, intravenously, and doing sex work, and the only reason I’m still alive is because I never used anyone’s needle, and I always used condoms.

I did my little community outreach program – the van used to come around to the flats. My bathroom was a target room, so fully replenished every week; clean; no need for anyone to reuse anything. The girls used to come over, we’d have a clean hit, get ready for work, get dressed up to get dressed down, and then hit the street.

A: I’m so grateful for those outreach services. They safeguarded us. We were so lucky to have them.

G: They helped us quite a bit, unbeknown to most of society or even acknowledgement in our community. They were my friends. They were outreach workers, they had the van decked out and they’d find me in my little spot, and they’d go, “Come on!” and I’d jump in the van.

Oh, I so appreciated them.

A: So did I. I appreciated those services that provided for us, whereas mainstream services just didn’t cut it.

G: Not at all. And they were still transphobic. Back in the day, I was going for gender reassignment in Sydney, which was all the go back then. To be a ‘real woman’ you had to have gender reassignment, because that was the talk on the street. That wasn’t just from medical, it was also from our community. The fear was: oh my god, if I’m going to be accepted in this world I have to behave and look and pass like a ‘real woman’.

A: I remember there were older queens and they were very blunt and bold about it, to tell us about that transitioning process. And that did scare me because we had so much to do! If it wasn’t the AIDS thing, it was the transition, the physical aspect. You need to get tits, you need to grow your hair out, or whatever. There was that pressure.

I remember going into sex work with the older queens and thinking to myself, I’ve got to deal with these bitches! They want me to be like this, I just want to be myself!

G: That’s right! Every time you think, I’ve found my place to be myself – it’s always ‘conditions apply’.

A: Yes. And the mental stuff that you have to contend with. It’s not just them, it’s the clients. If it’s not the clients, it’s people that you want to go get services from. It’s everybody!

G: That’s right. It’s everybody! Everybody wants a piece of you. It’s like, can I have something for myself? Am I here to constantly perform? When does this performance stop?

A: And we weren’t just working girls, we were also counsellors. We were each other’s social support. You know, if something happened to another, you’re going to get it!

G: That’s right, you’re going to cop it. “Hey girl, get your arse over here, I saw ya!”

A: If we had a bad thing with a client, we would be there to console the girl or try and pick her mood up.

G: That’s right. We were there for each other. And that’s how I grew up, coming from the Fitzroy housing commission here in Melbourne. Us kids, you know, my crew, my friends, we were all abused in some way. That’s why we gathered.

As we started to get to know each other and tell each other about what was going on in our lives, we were all being abused.

A: Yep. As you said before, we could be at each other’s throats, but at the end of the day, that was our community.

I remember the social hub that we had in St Kilda a few years later, with some of the girls, and it was important for us to build our community from that because we had nobody.

Even if we went to mainstream queer services at the time, they did nothing for us. They didn’t give a fuck.

G: Well, they weren’t inclusive services then. They would be gay services, and I’m not taking away anything from anybody. We can go back through our history books, and our gay history books, and this is all documented. I’ve lived it, you’ve lived it.

And, for me, being over 60 now, it’s like every 10 years or so is a cycle of change on every level – where the politics changes, laws change, which ripple through the medical services. Whatever we need, we’re always having to knock on the door and ask if we’re allowed in. And most of the time, we’re not, because we’re not accepted.

Between hetero services and gay services, they didn’t cut it then. And they still don’t. We’re not included, really.

A: That’s right. I think we’ve learnt to have a tough skin. I just think to myself, and those were the days of our lives. [laughs]

G: I call it the Women’s Weekly tragic drama. [laughs]

A: Some of the stories on the streets, that I’m sure you could tell.

G: From St Kilda to the Cross and back again.

A: Things that we can also laugh about.

G: Oh, totally. To the point of ridiculous at times!

A: I remember one person, a guy that walked up to me, and he looked like he was going to give me a piece of pizza. And then he had the audacity to turn around to me and ask me, “Are you a transaction?”

G: [laughing] Yes, I am actually!

A: But that was some of the funny moments. I knew how to have a good time but sometimes it was the challenging parts, when you had to deal with typically men’s behaviour towards us and, you know, trying to get acknowledged, but also respected.

G: Exactly. For me – and it goes back to that chain of colonisation that gets passed on through generational trauma, traditional, matriarch/patriarch – that’s what I was running away from my whole life.

I still am, I think. Trying to navigate men, and the condition that was put upon us from our families, from our parents, from our fathers, our mothers, our siblings, and our friends on the street, and then through school, and then socialising in the housing commission.

It was always that constant running away from men. And trying to work out, where do we fit in?

A: And then on top of that, getting our housing sorted, getting our medical stuff.

All images: Hailey Moroney
This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

G: We were trying to be ‘real women’ at the same time! After trying to run away from everybody, wherever we run away from, we’ve got to find somewhere else to run to. And it’s like, hey girlfriend, I’ve got to pick up hormones, I’ve got to get my meds, I’ve got to get my val. 

A: For me, I also found it challenging because back in Samoa, in my culture, for fa’afafine, there were no hormones. They just made do with what they got. So it was just challenging trying to find out how to navigate this.

I had to go back home, where my parents were staying, going, Oh god, how do I navigate this with them not turning around and giving me the Christian Bible verses?

Now there’s a lot more visibility, people know a bit more. But to even mention that identity, fa’afafine, back then, I even frowned upon it because I’m here in Australia. I consider myself Australian. At the time, I was trying to shred away my cultural identity because I wanted to fit in.

Even on the streets, like, Oh look at that amazing, gorgeous, blonde, blue-eyed transsexual, I want to look like her. So, you know, what would she do? Go get a foundation that was lighter than her skin. She knew she looked like a ghost! [laughs] But the things that we would do to fit in. Because it was that colonial thing of, well, how do we unbunk this so that we’re safe? And they said, “I don’t feel safe unbunking it, so I’m going to try and absorb it, and go through the motions, and whatever I come across, I’ll just have to deal with it.”

G: That’s right. For myself too, the shame that was put upon us, of trying to transition on top of everything else. And again, back in the day, there’s no trans services, so you’ve got to use mainstream services. You’ve got to find a sympathetic doctor. So I used to run away to St Kilda, where all the queens were, to get hormones.

A: And there were some good doctors that knew you.

G: Yeah, they were great. We used to do the round. You know, sign the form and away you go. It’s like the lolly bag. [laughs]

A: Yeah, you learned from other queens who to go to.

G: That’s right. Referral. You want a referral?

Go to the street. Go to the Prince of Wales.

A: Word of mouth, eh?

G: When I was in Sydney, my little crew, a lot of the girls that I hung out with were Pacific Island women. I still had my little Datsun that I drove up to Sydney with for the Great Transition at Tiresias House refuge, which was the only trans service in Australia at that time. I met up with all these crazy queens, and we’d all jump in my little Datsun, there’d be 10 of us in this Datsun.

A: [laughing] You’d probably think it was the bouncer. Until you realised it was queens.

G: [laughing] It’s like, “Love, get that hoof back in the car, we’re going to get pulled up!”

And we’d do the rounds to all the doctors that all the girls knew, so by the time we went back to my place, I’d pull out a big candy bowl, and all the girls would be pulling out scripts and pills and pockets.

A: That’s right! I remember I got such a shock because I came from such a sheltered Christian life, and I was so amazed. I was like, Oh my god, I’m going to die in 30 seconds! I’m going to die and my parents don’t know I’m here!

G: [laughing] If they could see me now! I’d think of my dad, and I’d go, Oh daddy, if you could see me now! My father, towards the end of his life, I looked after him, with dementia and whatever else. I mean, who goes back and looks after the abuser?

A: Family’s interesting, eh?

G: Very interesting.

This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

A: I remember when I was coming to terms with myself and I turned up to the cinema and my dad took one look at me and was like, “What are you wearing? What are you doing?”

And my nana said, “Look at her, she’s beautiful. She didn’t ask to be that way.”

She said it in Samoan but I got the gist. And my dad just shut up then, and never said anything about my fa’afafine or trans identity. He gave up.

G: It needed the matriarch to step in and say something!

A: I’ve never forgotten that, eh.

G: See I’m like that with my auntie, my mother’s sister. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, that is my family! This is how I’ve lived.

They’re crazy, these Greeks. And it’s that sort of behaviour – it’s the women having to fight the men on every level, even socially. I sat with the women, because they took me in.

“Where’s our little girl?” they would say.

“Where’s that little girly boy?”

So I would sit and knit and crochet with all the women. And my father would just look. And it’s like, Well, what are you going to do? You going to take on the women? I don’t think so!

The men would just go off and do their thing, just leave us alone. I knew I was going to cop it later, but I’m like, while you’ve got the opportunity, enjoy it. That psychology: might as well do what you want to do, because you’re going to get bashed for it anyway.

My father though, towards the end of his life, he shocked me. I used to do nothing I was told, I was a rebel without a cause. I never shut up. But later in life, when I was looking after him, he said to me, he goes, “I know you, because you never shut up. You’re the one that always came out screaming and mouthing off.” Like, at least I know you, I can trust you, I believe in you and I understand you. So, it took trauma and drama and pain and anguish later in life, on both parts, to actually be acknowledged. 

My mother used to say, “You don’t realise how much your father loved you and how beautiful he thought you were when you were born.” And I go, “Yeah, right. That’s all great and fine. But he started it all: the namecalling, shaming your identity in front of other family members.” Things like that.

A: I think when we build a tough exterior, it’s that we just got tired of some of this shit. At the time I didn’t like it, I just cried or whatever. But, when I think about it, I’ve just toughened up. You just had to! And even to this day, I think for me, that trauma, I’m actually grateful for that shit, because it toughened me up.

G: I’m grateful for spirit. I have strong faith. I have a religious component with my family which I will never deny, because of my personal experience as a child, with the Greek Orthodox Church.

My family were never religiously ‘at us’ – we were left to our own devices when it came to faith and religion. But it was present, and it was healthy in that way. With our doctrine, the Greek Orthodox, we have reincarnation and spiritual aspects. So there are aspects that I grew up with that other religions didn’t seem to around me – the Christians and Catholics, and whoever else.

And then I have my own spiritual faith, which I know keeps me safe for life. Because I put myself out on the street with the intent never to come back. And I always fucking wake up again.

And I go, here we go again.

A: I think religion played a big part for me as well because mine was quite preachy, very strict in that sense. I would have church like 24/7: wake up, we have a prayer service. It’d be seen culturally as a thing to do,but I always felt conflicted about it because I was being taught this way and this way, as churches do. And I just found the transitional period hard, where I also rebelled.

So this is where that kind of led me to sex work. Because I said, Well, I need to survive, and nobody’s giving me a job as me. Nobody’s providing for me. I don’t have a partner. So I need to do it.

When I fell into the sex work line of work, I was making great money and got this opportunity to actually live, and be my own boss. And that was a beautiful thing. But the church thing, I knew at the time was just to find belief in yourself. You don’t have to have people.

It’s just trying to find that internal thing – what will work for me. I don’t need to hear the voices of anybody else. Just be a good human being, and provide for myself, and treat others well. Look out if they need food. Culturally, it’s a duty of service that you just do naturally.

G: That’s right, it’s got nothing to do with gender or gender identity. I’m the same. I’m quite an intelligent trans woman.

A: That’s right, girlfriend!

G: I’m not just the “whore” or “junkie” on the street.

A: That’s right!

G: I’m not your dirty little fag at the back of the shelter sheds! So give me back my self-worth!

And I had to reclaim myself, like you have, and most of us have. Constantly we’ve been taken away from ourselves, and all we’re doing is fighting to reclaim it.

A: Yeah, I believe so.

G: My spirit guide, I call it active intelligence.

A: I like that.

G: And I’m like, the only bearded fuck I know is the one paying me by the hour. [laughs] And I have to say, now that we’re talking, I’ve let myself become single again. After years of being needy for relationships and men.

And to have that worth come back to me? I’m like, Fuck you. I don’t need anybody. Especially a man, with their emotional insecurities and whatever else, wanting me at my age (over 60) to be looking after them! All the men in my life are just boys!

A: I’ve come to that conclusion. There’s a feminist thing in there too: I don’t need a man to satisfy me. I can go to the movies, sit there, have popcorn and boysenberry chocolate icecream and just watch my movie! I’m fine with that.

G: I don’t need a man to take me out for dinner and wine and dining. I can do that myself. I work!

A: And I think that’s come from our own strength. We know where to put the barriers of like, you can’t treat me like that. I’ve seen some of the shit that we’ve gone through, but also some of the shit that’s been done to the girls.

G: That’s right. We see that. They’re our community. They’re our family. And some of the atrocities that I’ve seen happen to myself and my sisters along the way, throughout my whole life – it’s not just a past thing. We haven’t come far.

It’s not a lot of change. I might have changed my skirt, but there’s a lot of things that haven’t changed. Systemically, medically.

I co-identify as trans intersex. I was born intersex, I had invasive surgery as a teenager between the ages of 13 and 17, which actually removed body parts.

So my female biology, and when we talk about traits and the ‘being a real woman’ routine, what does that actually mean? I still don’t understand!

A: Yeah, I’ve come to that thought as well, and I’ve just said, Well, it’s what you feel. You know? That’s that. And especially if you’re a woman. You do unto you, what you want.

Before it was like, You need to be this, this. And I just said, Well, I’m going to do it my way, because I’m 53 now, I know a bit. You know? We know a bit, eh.

G: Yeah, totally. We’ve seen and done a little.

When I was in Alice Springs working, it was a great social group, like the old days for me, an amazing community and crew. I was so loved and supported for who I am. I totally transitioned into my alter ego and higher self, the femme fatale, and I started working in the field, what we’re doing now, as an advocate.

I was 52, and I needed a more regular income. So what does a girl do? She goes back and does sex work! So I worked for three years as the only trans sex worker in Alice, and it was just like, Debbie Does Dallas, Georgie Does Alice!

I was the only chick with a dick, or Venus with a penis, and I just monopolised the scene for three years. I was in my glory! But again, the work and the men, and having to navigate this patriarchy… and I have to say, a lot of these poor men have really full-on mental health issues, like ourselves. So we’re mirroring each other.

Where does the abuse come from? Then where does the abuse go? Now you’re back again! Now you want me to be your healer.

Now you’re telling me the problems with your wife and your kids, that you’re unhappy, because you’re living a closeted life, and you’re fucking me!

A: Yes, some of these clients! And we had to sit there and go, okay, they’re telling us all this stuff…

G: Thank you for all the information…

[both laugh]

A: Lastly, we’ve just come out of so-called IDAHOBIT, and we’re going into Pride Month. How’s it been for you?

G: I haven’t done a lot externally in the community, but I’ve been doing more in the background. Just working, promoting and supporting groups.

I’m not able to connect with other intersex people, not in Melbourne. There are a few here, but they’re very strong working in the intersex field, but because I co-identify as trans intersex and non-binary, I tend to work in a more mixed, open community. There aren’t really any intersex talks or things happening in Victoria, because the government won’t let it. It’s about funding – we’re not recognised yet as a community.

Things are slowly changing. But I’m getting old. Could they change a little faster? Because my hips are gone! I don’t know how long I can stand on the street for, love!

[both laugh]

This article first appeared in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue.

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