May 10, 2020

No trans women reported support from police or justice agencies.

Friends were the greatest source of support for all women.

  
Negative experiences with police and legal system were also experienced by many of the participants in our study, who reported feelings of judgement, blame, mistrust and a lack of acknowledgment that sexual violence had occurred.

  
Sexual violence prevention and support programs need to engage with, and be co-designed by, multicultural women’s services and LGBTQI+ services, as well as women leaders from CALD and queer communities.

  
The term ‘transgender’, commonly shortened to ‘trans’, is a collective term used to describe individuals whose gender identity and expression is at variance with the biological sex they were assigned at birth (Levitt & Ippolito, 2014; Schilt & Lagos, 2017). The term ‘trans women’ means ‘across from’ , with ‘transwomen’ referring to individuals who were assigned male at birth, but now
identify as feminine, taking up a range of gender identity descriptors that may include woman, feminine, fa'afafine, sistergirl, femme, nonbinary, gender queer, gender fluid or gender-nonconforming, or non-binary transfeminine.

TEXT TBC: correct statistics on deaths of trans women, and statement on difficulty of accessing these statistics. There is strong evidence that visibly appearing different heightens the risk of violence for transwomen, leading to the conclusion that the threat of violence serves as “gender policing”(Jauk, 2013, p.808).

Trans women of colour are at high risk of sexual violence. However, they are often overlooked in national statistics or research on sexual violence against women. This exhibition draws on the findings of a research study which explores the lived experiences of sexual violence against trans women of colour living in Australia.

The photographs and stories in this exhibition represent women’s accounts of sexual violence, their resilience and their need for acknowledgement and support. The full research report can be accessed here.