OH4595/10: Interview with Karron Swinn in 2019 by Helena Cohen-Robertson.

Summary

Karron was born in 1976 in Perth, grew up in Greenwood, Western Australia. She has an older brother.Her paternal grandparents from England and Scotland. Karron is a transgender person, she came out when she was 34. She started looking into transsexualism when she was about 13 or 14. As a three or four year old, she wanted her mother to buy her a dress. She joined the Army Reserve, pre-transition to try and make a man out of himself, encouraged by her father who wanted her to train as an Army officer, but she ended up in the Infantry and Army Reserve. Karron studied part-time and worked in the Army Reserve and travelled around Western Australia as a relief medical scientist after graduating from University and found that she could not commit to the Reserve anymore. There are transgenders in the Army and out of Army. Transphobia and homophobia were not tolerated in the Army at that time. Karron felt that transgender people were left behind in the Marriage Equality Act. It was only on February 13, 2019 that Western Australia abolished the law which forced transgender people to divorce the person they love in order to update their gender on their birth certificates. After two and a half years after leaving Army Reserve, she started researching and while travelling around the state for work. In 2003, Karron tried suppressing her urge to cross dressing and associated herself to Jehovah's Witnesses to get rid of the urge for cross dressing, thinking that it was wrong. She had a nervous breakdown, had to see a psychiatrist and was on anti-depressants for three or four years, but the feeling to want to transition came back and she started cross dressing again in 2009 and started going to Chameleon Society, defunct in 2015, a transgender support society, dressed as a woman. She felt that there is no support group for transsexuals between 30-65 years old. Her father passed away in 2005 and her mother went through a lot of grief, she decided to get a dog for her mother, which was wonderful. Her father's relatives did not talk to her anymore and they found that it was too confusing for their children. In 2010, she decided to come out to her mother who came around after a month and her aunty on her mother's side supported her, not judgemental. She changed her name legally, a day after her first gender psychiatry appointment in August 2010 and had her sex change surgery in Thailand in May 2012. In July 2012, she apply to have a gender change certificate and then changed her birth certificate in August, that year. She took the name Karron which her mother has chosen before she was born. Karron joined GALSWA in 2018 after attending their Open night. She known a few of choir members before. Highlight of her choir experience, was performing at the GALSWA concert last year.