It's Tiring, Teaching the World One Person at a Time

I'm a person, not a political statement or an argument about safety

I have been in a version of this room, having a version of this conversation, multiple times a year since 2020. I have been hearing about it since earlier than that. 2015, to be exact.

Five years of watching it arrive from somewhere else, then six of answering for it. The same objections in the same order, my voice kept steady while a room decides whether I will be allowed to use the bathroom without incident. I sit down, take a breath, start again. Third room this month. I say what I have said in all of them: this isn't about safety. If it were, we'd be talking about the people who commit violence. We're talking about my safety weighed against your comfort, and losing. When your comfort wins, I am the one hurt in the car park afterwards.

Then someone nods, thanks me for my openness, and the meeting moves on. Three weeks later I am in another room, starting from the beginning.

Here is what all of it is for. I was at one of our sites recently and went to use the bathroom. A manager was in there. I said hello, the way you say hello to anyone. Her face did something I have seen often enough to name while it was happening: horror, then anger, then something underneath both that I am fairly sure was fear. She didn't say a word. I washed my hands. I left. I went about my day, because what else is there to do.

She has met me a few times. She has never had reason to think about who I actually am, and nor should she have to. The fear on her face didn't come from me, and it didn't come from her. It came from ten years of headlines about people like me, written by people who never met us. And still, I am the one who explains it. Not her. Me. In a meeting, calmly, with sources.

If it were just the toilets I could manage, maybe. But it's never only the toilets. It's sport, mental health, how one should look, and apparently just being trans makes you perverted or wanting to groom children. It's the paperwork, the school policies, each raised as though nobody has raised it before. Each time I perform, justify myself, gather evidence, stay patient and kind, while someone works out whether I am dangerous.

There is a name for it: affective epistemic labour, the emotional resources trans people spend communicating what we know about our lives into a world that refuses to file it as knowledge. What drives us, researchers found, is responsibility, a hope of making it easier for those coming after. I read that and laughed. The reason I keep showing up is the reason it never stops.

Here is what I never get to say in the room. Most of the people asking are not bad people, and would be hurt to hear this. You are not asking so you can get it right. You are asking so you can feel comfortable. Those are not the same, and the gap between them is where I live.

This is not wilful hatred, and it took me a long time to separate the two. The person asking sincerely believes they are being a good ally. But notice what the question is in service of. No policy is at stake. No decision waits on it. It exists so someone uneasy about my existence can stop feeling uneasy, using my time to do it, then walk away satisfied they did something generous for my community. I did not agree to that price. Being told my answer sounds reasonable is not the same as being left alone.

This should end the debate, and it does not. You will not get it wrong if you care. Nobody gets this wrong by being a decent human being. You don't need my biography for that. I am not a policy question. I want what everyone in that room wants: work I am proud of, someone to come home to, a Sunday that belongs to nobody. That is the list. The most radical thing about my life is how ordinary it is, and how much argument it takes to be allowed it.

And none of it travels past the one person in the room, which wears me down more than the repetition. Someone leaves believing they understand, and they do, for themselves. But nobody carries it into the next room for me. So I am teaching the world one person at a time, forever, because being good at explaining it keeps getting mistaken for being willing to.

And I didn't choose it; honestly, who would? So much of the hostility rests on the assumption that somewhere along the line I picked this up and could put it down if I were reasonable. I did not. Nobody does. I chose to stop lying because the lie was harming me, which most people would call courage in any other context. But because I did not choose this, every time I justify it I am not defending a position. I am arguing for being a person, while someone who never met me decides.

Six years of that leaves marks. Not dramatic ones. I still work, I still write, I still turn up. But I sit in the car afterwards longer than I need to. My shoulders don't come down until somewhere near home. And I lie awake rehearsing the version I actually wanted to say, the one that wasn't measured, that wouldn't have made anyone comfortable. Private Lives 3, the largest survey of LGBTIQ health here, found trans and gender diverse Australians report psychological distress far above the general population, and the workplace research points at the same mechanism: not who we are, but the constant management of other people's reactions. The distress is not the condition. The distress is the meetings.

So why keep going? The young ones. I meet them at events, seventeen and eighteen and twenty-two, and I can see the whole road ahead of them from where I stand. Every time I explain the toilets to people who should already know clears a metre of that road before they walk it. I do not want them doing this at forty. I want them to have Sundays.

And on the days I'm too tired to say yes? I am met as though I have broken a contract, as though the person praised as brave for existing is suddenly unreasonable for resting. The label flips the moment I stop being useful. Nobody asks a champion to have limits. But I cannot think for everybody, or carry this endlessly and still call it a life.

I am not going to finish by telling you it is worth it, because some weeks I do not. Would you, sitting in your 40th meeting of the year, listening to comfort dressed up as a safety scenario? What I will say is this. If you have ever asked a trans person a question and they answered kindly, made it look easy, you were not their first. You were somewhere past their 500th. They did it anyway, for someone who is not you and who they will never meet.

The least you can do is know it. Learn it well enough to teach the next person yourself, so I do not have to.

Sources: Heimonen & Pantti (2026), 'The affective epistemic labor of trans people: Sharing knowledge in media spaces', European Journal of Cultural Studies; Hill, Bourne, McNair, Carman & Lyons (2020), Private Lives 3: The Health and Wellbeing of LGBTIQ People in Australia, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University; Cancela, Stutterheim & Uitdewilligen (2025), 'The Workplace Experiences of Transgender and Gender Diverse Employees: A Systematic Literature Review Using the Minority Stress Model', Journal of Homosexuality, 72(1), 60-88.