“Workaway” is a programme for intrepid travelers who want to get off the tourist trail and really get to know a place for a while. In the programme, you exchange a wee bit of work for food and housing. The typical deal is that you work for five hours a day, five days a week, and the host covers room and board.
In the hellish transition “year” (okay, eight months; I lied and shaved off four) that WPATH made me go through, between when I figured out who I was and what was wrong with me, and when I was allowed to have the operation that cured me, I did Workaway. In Australia. With a woman named Liz who wanted help gardening in her family’s beautiful, semi-rural property in Ballan, Victoria.
Liz knew that I had the wrong stuff down there. It was a constant presence in my life, every time I sat down on the toilet bowl – or sat down anywhere, and felt it. I hated that I’d finally figured out that I could be (and was) a woman despite that thing, but couldn’t help feeling like I was living a lie. So I put it on my Workaway profile when I reached out to her. Bottom line: she knew.
But she didn’t treat me as “trans”. In fact, she was an amazing host; I’d recommend her to anyone! Not only was the work undemanding, she let me sleep in a whole in-law suite, and I got to have my meals as part of her family. (There were two kids, a fourteen-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old daughter.) And did the kids treat me strangely? Not in the least! According to Liz, she’d said I was trans, to which the daughter had responded: “Why are you telling us this?”
Really, why? It didn’t matter what I had in my pants, not to anyone but me – the woman who had to live with it.
It’s different – how the new generation deals with gender. Different in the best way.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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