Trans dignity
- Amanda Riddell
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- Nov 19, 2024
- 1 min read
I'm dead serious, Marama: the party owes me an apology.
All you've done is the same things that the state care people did: avoided accountability and scapegoated unimportant people. I've spent the better part of this year trying to get Tory to say sorry, and she went on national TV to call me unwelcome and a fringe weirdo.
That Riff-raff line is how she sees me.
So, yeah, if the Greens wants to build some credibility, 'it won't happen again' isn't enough. I've heard that before, and it kept going.
Your queens, and my local MP and mayor, told me to be 'pretty' and 'passable' in order to be socially accepted as a woman, when they should have accepted me as I was, and told the entire city that they had to (rather than enabling conversion therapy that VUW really needs to apologise and compensate me for).
- I'd say that the NZ audience likes me more than the drag queens cos I'm real. They've seen all these videos of me being a trannie IRL, and realised that they're the ones who are fetishising my clothes, not me. And I attribute that to my 'ugly' style. People realised without the war paint that they're just clothes; while they express my identity, my identity isn't entirely confined to my clothes, and I'm a competent person in my professional life as well.
One more thing: I was discharged from the community mental health team during this war with Tory. They never mentioned it as a 'delusion' .., I'd say that means she really did want me to a) make that movie and b) either be pretty or be a man.
Why would I minimise my drinking when I'm being told to detransition? It makes me angry, though seldom suicidal, and it makes me feel unwelcome in society. So, like poets since time immemorial, I drink to dull the pain. Why can't I be a guitar virtuoso, journalist and filmmaker that likes to wear skirts and dresses? There's basically zero trans journalists in NZ -- I can think of maybe two or three others, and that's a sign that we're not considered to be intelligent, and that they think our fashion will be a liability in the field. Well, in my instance, I think my style made me recogniseable -- and that resulted in all these events that made my name.