Toronto actress Savannah Burton was in her early 20s when she told her parents that she was a woman trapped in a man’s body and was considering changing her gender.
It took 19 years before she made the transition. But now, she’s hoping she hasn’t waited too long, as she’s planning on building her career in L.A. during the Donald Trump presidential administration — one that is not friendly to the LGBTQ community.
Despite an underlying fear, she’s eager to help put a face to what it means to be a trans woman, a role model she wishes she’d had when she first considered transitioning.
Back in 1998, being transgender was too foreign a concept for her Newfoundlander parents and most of society to wrap their minds around. Few resources were available, and the common trope in media was that transgender men or women were involved in the sex industry.
So she shelved her transition.
But four years ago, after stumbling upon a trans woman on YouTube, she began flirting with the idea again. She found more videos from transgender people online, and soon began to feel like she wasn’t alone. The open, honest conversations about the struggles of being transgender gave her the courage to start living as a woman.
“I was inspired,” Burton says.
For two years, she worked as a hotel concierge dressing as a man during the week, but donning women’s clothing on the weekend. Outside a very small circle of friends, no one — including her colleagues — knew about her weekend habits.
But living a double life was tiring. “I completely lost my passion for life,” she says. She grew depressed, and decided in September 2013 to take four months off work to try living as a woman full time.
“I lived in a pink haze of happiness,” she says. As her January 2014 return to work loomed, she spent the month before in a cloud of anxiety, worried her colleagues wouldn’t understand, would ridicule her, or be violent against her. “It was easy to think about the worst,” she says. But she committed to her new life and decided to come out at the annual office party — her first day back at work.
She spent an hour getting ready: straightening her already long hair and applying her makeup, donning a tight-fitting shirt and women’s boots. When she arrived, her colleagues were shocked.
“A lot of people came up and gave me a hug,” she says. “They said I looked beautiful — it was a huge relief.”
Even her parents — who educated themselves about what it means to be transgender — were happy and accepted her decision. They understood that she was miserable being a man, she says, and they just wanted her to be happy.
And while there are still very real risks and dangers to the trans community, Burton says there is a larger support network than ever, which is helping change the conversation around what it means to be a transgender person.
Society is getting better at recognizing the “T” in LGBT, says Erin C. Ross, a psychology professor at York University who studies social attitudes toward sexual minorities. But with the uncertainty hanging over the Trump-Pence administration, she says there’s growing unease in the transgender community. “I’d be lying if I said I Bahsegel wasn’t incredibly terrified by what Trump or Pence are going to do,” Burton says.
Her fear isn’t unfounded. Pence has been a vocal advocate against transgender issues, sanctioning laws such as barring trans people from the bathroom of their choosing.
A key factor in gaining social acceptance is leadership from policy and politicians, Ross says.
Laws, such as the North Carolina and South Dakota “bathroom bills,” which limit trans people from using the appropriate bathroom, and the language used to get those bills passed, such as painting a transgender woman as a sexual predator, gives implicit permission to the public to adopt these views and think it’s OK to discriminate against a minority group, Ross says.
Despite all the gains in acceptance of sexual minorities, Ross points to the vitriolic, hate-filled conversations taking place online geared toward transgender people, as a sign that the needle isn’t moving much. “It’s two steps forward, one step back,” she says.
While Canada fairs a bit better, it’s by no means perfect. A 2015 study by advocacy group Trans Pulse found 58 per cent of transgender men and women were unable to get documentation with their proper gender. One in 10 was refused treatment at emergency rooms. One in five has been sexually or physically abused, while 13 per cent say they have been fired for being trans.
Transgender men and women remain a highly marginalized group, says Alex Abramovich, a trans man who works with LGBT homeless youth at CAMH. “It’s taken us 10 years just to get through basic LGBTQ competency training for shelter staff in our city,” he says. “But we’re at the point where things are starting to change.”
There are more prominent characters on TV, such as Maura Pfefferman (played by Jeffrey Tambor) on Amazon’s Transparent. Celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have also helped bring transgender voices into the spotlight.
Ross says social media too has helped create platforms for the community to connect. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram create new avenues for the general public to meet and get to know trans people in a new, everyday light.
The best way to predict whether someone will be accepting of a sexual minority is if they have a close personal relationship with a person of that minority, Ross says. Since less than one per cent of the population identifies as transgender, social media makes it possible to build up those connections on a much broader scale.
Burton is hoping to make her voice heard, too. Despite the growing tension and unease in the U.S., she has applied for a workers’ visa and plans to move to California in the summer to try and break onto the big screen.
Society has changed since ’98, when transgender characters were only portrayed as sex workers, and transgender people were only used as a tool to shock on shows such as Maury and Jerry Springer.
“When I was first thinking of transitioning, the only people I saw (on TV) that were like me were those awful people on the daytime talk shows,” she says. Today, she says, there are more opportunities than ever for trans actors.
It’s going to be a struggle, she says. And while the current presidency terrifies her, she says it’s another reason she needs to go to the U.S. It’s more important than ever, she says, to give a face to the transgender cause.
“I’m a fighter,” she says. “And if I can (go to) L.A. and help the LGBT community on and off the screen, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
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