“It took me 40 years to go back to Sydney … it was a bastard of a place,” Grant told Hornery. “Not all of us trans girls were treated as celebrities like Carlotta.”
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Grant changed her name and turned her life around after arriving in New Zealand in 1964, where she found a “more lenient attitude to trans people”.
She now runs a sock factory and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of her fostering work caring for 72 children, in between running a zoo and a dairy farm, working as a merchant sailor, becoming a local councillor and working for nine years as a lay judge on the NZ Human Rights Review Tribunal.
“I was a street worker, but I was mostly arrested for dressing up as a girl, which was how I lived 24/7, and for ‘consorting’ with others like me. The cops would see us and arrest us. I lied about my age, I was 15 when they sent me to Long Bay Gaol … twice,” Grant recalled in an interview with the Herald.
“I was stripped in front of the other inmates … bashed and humiliated by the cops. It was only when my grandparents told them my real age they put me in a boys’ home, which frankly was worse. I see myself as a political prisoner from that era, we were the victims of a conservative agenda, our basic human rights were not just ignored, they were completely violated by the state.”
An apology is the least we can do for Grant and the many others like her.
Apologies are much more than a symbolic gesture. I want to thank Hornery for his great work in taking to the heart of Macquarie Street the views of many of those who were unfairly punished by NSW laws, and congratulate the premier (and Environment Minister Penny Sharpe, who I am told played an important role in all this behind the scenes) for responding with such grace and common sense.
What a great start to the weekend!
Thanks for reading, and for your continued support of the Herald.
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