Contents
Charlotte Coulthard-Dare knows that some people have a problem with her very existence.
“How would anybody else feel if they were put in a box within a box within a box? And that’s pretty much me,” she says.
For Ms Coulthard-Dare, simply living her identity as a transgender Indigenous woman is a type of activism she has no choice but to embrace.
“I’m a black person, that’s to my core — I’m an Aboriginal person,” she says.
“Then people are labelling us as, they want to say, ‘Oh are we cis [those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth] or gay?’ and whatnot.
The Adnyamathanha, Barngarla and Yankunytjatjara woman lives in Adelaide.
Ms Coulthard-Dare is carving out a media career that she hopes will contribute to transgender visibility, something that has helped her in her own journey of self-discovery.
Born to a father who was a pioneer of Aboriginal community radio in Port Augusta, Ms Coulthard-Dare spent her formative years adventuring outdoors in the Flinders Ranges.
She says her Indigenous heritage has given her the strength to keep fighting for transgender rights.
“Some of these days, when I just want to sit at home … and not put on makeup, and not go outside, and you know sometimes you just have to do that,” Ms Coulthard-Dare says.
“It’s hard, but we live with it — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been fighting for our rights since 1788, and we’ve been warriors all our lives.”
Coming out of the closet gradually
Ms Coulthard-Dare says her coming out was not the spontaneous announcement that many people imagine it to be.
Instead, it happened over several years.
“Well, the first time coming out of the closet, the very first time, was at 16, to my cousin Tanya in Stirling North,” she says.
“So the second coming, so to speak — it sounds really weird — that also would have been 2013, just me sort of looking for myself, redefining myself.”
Ms Coulthard-Dare did something many in the LGBTQIA+ community can relate to: she googled her identity.
“I was actually looking back at my life from when I was a child to then, and I’m thinking I’ve always known that I was trans all my life. Without obviously knowing it until I was 25.”
Coming out as transgender on TV
It was an NITV documentary that revealed the budding broadcaster and media personality’s newly embraced identity to most of her family, community and the world.
Her NITV Our Stories segment was released at a watershed moment for the visibility of transgender people in popular culture.
She found strength in visibility from a rather unlikely person’s journey, Olympian and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner.
“I think it was maybe a few months before that, Caitlyn Jenner came out as [transgender], and her series came out, and I was … quite obsessed with that series because she’s coming out quite publicly,” Ms Coulthard-Dare said.
“Obviously, I did come out quite publicly as well and at a whole different end of that, without any of the privileges that Caitlyn had in her life.”
Ms Coulthard-Dare also credits many members of the LGBTQIA+ community who have come before her as a source of strength.
She is inspired, in particular, by transgender civil rights icon and activist Marsha P Johnson, who is said to have played an instrumental part in the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969, when patrons of a New York gay bar rose up against police harassment.
Ms Coulthard-Dare’s transition was accepted and supported by most of her family, including by her father, prominent Barngarla elder Harry Dare, to whom she came out during the filming of the documentary.
“I sort of laugh in his face because he’s like, ‘What’s transgender?’ He puts me on the spot, and I’m sort of laughing. I’m like, ‘How can I explain that to my Dad, what transgender is?'” she says.
“But yeah, he’s been one of the biggest supporters, that I could say.”
Despite a few nasty comments from others, she says the vast majority of people in her life reacted well.
“There were a few push-backs. I’m not going to deny that,” Ms Coulthard-Dare says.
‘The growing hurts’
After more than 18 months of what will be lifelong hormone replacement therapy, she is still ecstatic about the drastic changes in her body.
“I just look at myself in the mirror every day like, starkers. I look at myself starkers, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I have changed’,” Ms Coulthard-Dare says.
“The only downside I could say about it is the growing. The growing hurts.
“Now I’ve got a bum, now I’ve got breasts, and yeah — it’s, I just can’t really explain it. It’s just fascinating.”
Ms Coulthard-Dare balances her day job as co-host and producer of Nunga Wangga Radio on community station Radio Adelaide with her own activism.
She was named NAIDOC SA LGBTQIA+ person of the year in 2019 and has been an ambassador of Adelaide’s queer festival, Feast.
Ms Coulthard-Dare says she doesn’t know what’s next, but she knows the world is at her feet, and paying attention.
“Maybe start up my own radio station. Maybe be a spokesperson for black queer issues. I don’t know. Maybe governor? Premier?” she says, joking.
Posted , updated
