HEY GIRL: As You Are: A Trans Teen Story

Earlier this year, in an interview for Australian Story, Melbourne teenager Georgie Stone described the confusion of her early childhood. She was a girl, inside the body of a boy. ‘I felt like a mythical creature,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t really real’.

For transgender and gender-diverse youth, the disparity between the way they see themselves and the way they are seen by others can be the cause of intense distress. In addition to that – and the prospect of bullying from their peers – transgender youth in Australia face a specific set of medical and legal hurdles. Australia is the only country in the world where it’s necessary to apply to court to access puberty-blocking hormones.

When Georgie was 11, she became the youngest person in this country to be granted this permission from the courts. Now a thriving 16-year-old, Georgie is fighting to spare other children and teenagers from the distress and cost of the court process.  

Georgie is joined by her mother and founder of the Transcend support network, Rebekah Robertson, Campbell Paul, a child psychiatrist specialising in gender dysphoria and host, Jacinta Parsons.