WHILE the lives of transgender people have marginally improved over the past five years, fear for their safety and discrimination by the general population have kept many members of the community cautious and hidden.
TT Transgender Coalition director Rae Alibey said the trans community was the most marginalised, as it was not even recognised in TT. She believed national discussions and attitudinal research was necessary to educate people and to find out why trans people continued to be marginalised.
“Whether people agree or disagree, sexual orientation is something you recognise happens and exists. But the whole concept of what it is to have a different gender identity, that has nothing to do with sexual orientation, is not recognised.
“Now we’re doing some work on getting gender expression physically, but things like gender identity markers on forms, especially within more institutionalised systems, and not having sex and gender conflated, would be great.
"It could be very triggering for trans people, but people on the whole just don’t get it.”
She explained gender identity was how a person recognised their own gender expression in terms of their behaviours and how they thought of themselves. She said a lot of transgender people did not recognise themselves as trans because they only thought of gender along binary lines – a person who was assigned female at birth, but lived and expressed themselves as male, or vice versa.
But there were many other different expressions of gender. These included non-binary people, who may feel like a mix of genders or that they have no gender at all, or gender-nonconforming, which, oversimplified, was a masculine woman or a feminine man, whether they were straight or gay.
“A big challenge is people are stuck in the binary of the heterosexual world and they try to pull it into the gender and sexually diverse world.
[caption id="attachment_1097465" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Members of PrideTT stage a demonstration outside the Red House, Abercromby Street, Port of Spain, during Pride Month in 2023. - FILE PHOTO[/caption]
"Many just exist as they are. They express themselves as they feel they are in their awareness.
"We now have a huge umbrella that encompasses everything not gender-conforming.”
Also, there were different levels of transitioning as not everyone wanted to change their bodies. So while there were gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments, there was social transitioning, in which people used clothes and pronouns to represent themselves. There was also legal transitioning, in which a person’s gender was recognised on legal documents.
Alibey said there had been improvements in TT. A major one was the coalition’s collaboration with some private doctors who were willing to help people of trans experience live their authentic lives through hormone replacement treatment.
She said trans people could access treatment in the pubic health care system, but that was not reliable, so it was usually those who could afford it privately who benef
