'I feel safer in Australia than Aotearoa'

Emily Writes

28 Oct 2026 — 7 min read

Stock image.

CW: Transphobia and homophobia.

Sully never expected he’d have to leave his home. He loves Aotearoa. He loves the beaches, the forests, and his community. His family - chosen and blood - lives here and he’s close with them. His siblings are here…

Still, there was no choice in leaving the country.

“It was like kill myself or move,” he says. “That was how bad it got”.

Now, a month into living in a metropolitan Australian city, Sully can breathe. For the first time, he feels safe. He’s at pains to point out trans women suffer even more transphobia than trans men, but the daily discrimination he faced was relentless.

“I have friends who can’t leave the house. From being stared at constantly to having slurs yelled at them. It’s their daily life, whereas for me I would experience it when people could tell that I’m trans,” Sully says.

Sully has been out for nearly four years. His journey began as an ally with a capital A. “I was that number one ally. Just like, I just love trans people! They’re just the best.”.

He was openly queer, on the way to transitioning and advocating for trans people at his workplace in Aotearoa when Sully first became a target.

“At work, people picked up that I was queer - and it would just come up all the time. They would constantly talk about it. And I was told my colleague was an out-and-proud TERF. She would just openly say: 'I am a trans exclusionary radical feminist' and she was very senior”.

Sully’s work involved education, but quickly he became the ‘Resident Queer Educator’ - a role many queer people find themselves in. A role that is exhausting, emotionally damaging, and just a shit tonne of mahi, on top of all the usual mahi.

“We as trans people have to do the work of educating colleagues on how to not be offensive to us and that’s a whole other job that we are doing on top of our job,” he says.

“I've since learnt in my new job in Australia that it's considered a health and safety issue for a trans person to be experiencing misgendering, deadnaming, and people asking invasive questions”

“In mandatory onboarding training, they lay it out as direct and indirect transphobia. So, indirect is someone who accidentally keeps misgendering a trans staff member. It might be an accident, but it is still transphobia, and so it is still a health and safety issue. You've also failed your duty to prioritise health and safety if you notice transphobia occurring and don't report it”

In Aotearoa, Sully was pulled away from his work as every instance of transphobia was sent to him. He begged his manager to stop the onslaught.

“I said, this is too much. It’s just too much transphobia. Please bring InsideOut in, please do some mandatory training.”

The union said transphobia was “too hard” to deal with, he says.

Sully left the job completely burnt out. Just after having top surgery, his marriage became even more abusive. He found himself in need of support from Women’s Refuge while holding down a lower-paid job.

Domestic violence is devastatingly common in our country, and trans people are at high risk of violence from a partner. In groundbreaking research by The Backbone Collective and Hohou te Rongo Kahukura, 37 percent of Trans and non-binary people surveyed rated their first contact with NZ Police as very poor. What's more, 79 percent of trans and non-binary people experienced bias or mistreatment from police.

At first, Sully was treated well by the Women's Refuge, although other domestic violence support groups he approached said they couldn’t help him because he is trans. But when he moved to another area for housing, he had to go to a different refuge branch. There, they asked him about his pronouns. He'd just secured a flat after being homeless for six weeks, was recovering from top surgery, and was on testosterone.

“She asked me, 'Are you still using he/him pronouns?’ She wanted to know if I’d detransitioned. I said yes I’m using he/him pronouns. And she said, ‘We should never have helped you’.”

“I explained we don’t have women’s refuge for trans people, we don’t have the resources in the community,” he said.

“I was in crisis - that wrecked me.”

Eventually Sully was brave enough to try another workplace. This one involved working with teenagers. He says that the teenagers intentionally misgendered him, which was awful, but the worst thing was when he tried to report it to the staff.

“I tried to get the staff to understand. But they wouldn’t. People don’t believe you that you know what transphobia is and what a mistake is.”

“Mistakes aren't transphobia. But repeated, intentional misgendering is. When colleagues weren’t around, these [teenage] boys would call me Miss, and when colleagues were around, they’d call me Mister,” he says.

In training, without context, his colleague talked about transpeople’s genitals. Another colleague outed him as trans to a group of teenagers.

“They were chanting at me ‘Are you a she? Or a he?’. It was really, really upsetting. I couldn’t go on lunch breaks without teenagers laughing and mocking me.”

Sully began having panic attacks. Along with the exhaustion of trying to navigate a health system where general practitioners knew very little about transgender health, he knew he had to leave New Zealand.

“I just feel so much safer here [in Australia],” he says.

He has started to go out at night without the fear of having slurs screamed at him.

“In Wellington, you leave Ivy, and then you have people screaming the T-slur or F-slur at anyone who doesn’t look like a binary man or woman,” he says.

The level of discrimination in Aotearoa surprised Sully.

“Until I was 31, I had lived as a woman. I had fear - but it’s nothing compared with the daily difficulty of living [I had when I transitioned]. My family was shocked,” he says.

In Australia, Sully says that he "keeps running into trans people who have left the country for the same reason as me.”

“The transphobia in Aotearoa is rampant. It’s so hard to just have a normal life. I just wanna wear my earrings and wear bright colours and not use my straight man voice all the time in order to live,” he says.

“I can just get a coffee here, and people say ‘hey darl!’” he laughs.

Sully recently bought a handbag; the need to ‘pass’ is no longer such an urgent need to stay safe.

“I’m not going shopping for straight clothes. It’s making me so happy. It feels like a massive relief.”

“A marker of inclusivity is how the most marginalised among us are being treated. And trans women here are fine to catch public transport! One of the girls has literally bought an apartment. They have housing!”

“It’s not a utopia, but I feel so much safer and more authentic here. And I’m applying for work, and they have in their job ads that they were looking to hire trans people. It’s mandatory to have queer workplace training.”

“People don’t yell the f-slur at me. They don’t call me T-slur. Nobody blinks when I hand over my ID. I used to feel so uncomfortable handing over my ID in New Zealand.”

Behind the relief though, there is heartbreak.

“I’m so worried about my friends. Before I came here, I thought I’d go back to New Zealand. But I know I can’t. It’s just not possible for me to go back there.”

“But I’m scared for my friends who can’t move. I worry it will make their suicidality worse. I’m always trying to keep my friends alive.”

“There’s so much love and kindness and beauty and I miss it. It’s hard starting over at my age in a new city, and we know how beautiful Aotearoa is.”

Still, just last night Sully was walking through a park at night with his dog.

“I thought ‘Should I go to a park at nighttime?’ and then this straight guy came up to me and said ‘what’s your dog’s name?’ and I was terrified”.

“And then he was just really friendly, he said ‘Have a great night man!'”

Sully smiles widely down the screen. He looks happy and relaxed…and free.

What can you do to address transphobia?

Sully says knowledge is power. Understanding how big the problem is is an important start.

“I wish people knew just how being that stressed can take such a toll on your body. Trans people are in survival mode”.

“I meet so many amazing trans people who could offer so much to a workplace, but their time is being taken up by trying to teach people how to be respectful and not inadvertently hostile towards them.”

“This gender definitions bill is fucked up, and they’re [importing] transphobia here [from the UK and US]. But it’s also already rife here. This environment is already primed for this bullshit.”

“Because we’re already being treated like hard work. We all have to whisper where it’s safe to go, where to work, who is the good GP.

“We rely on each other so much”.

Using your privilege as a cis person to protect trans people is crucial.

“We are pushing for protections in the workplace everywhere we are. We would really appreciate it if cis people were the ones who did that.”

“If you can say at your workplace, ‘We want to work on this so trans people can be safe here, leaders will listen.”

“Hire trans people to manage things - having trans people in leadership will make such a difference.”

Cis people need to stamp out transphobia and be committed to doing so.

“Call transphobia out when you see it. If a trans person tells you: “This upset me”. Don’t try to excuse it. You don’t know how much it hurts to be misgendered. Just say, I’m sorry, that sucks. Do you want me to have a chat with the person who misgendered you?”

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If you’d like to support Sully as he adjusts to his new life. Please consider making a donation - mutual aid is how we look after each other. Sully needs support, and if we can each give a little, we can help a lot. Send your koha to Grace Duxfield, 12-3142-0256021-00, with the reference: SULLY. Grace is a close friend passing donations on directly to Sully so he can protect his anonymity.