Lawrence Bing sits in front of the camera with his eyes closed and smiles nervously into a mirror as his mother undoes his chest covering to perform his “top surgery reveal”. He looks ecstatic as he opens his eyes and sees the results, faint fresh scars across a chest that once held his breasts.
The clip, one of many similar “top surgery reveal” videos shot by transgender influencers, is a celebration of being transgender and is compelling viewing to teen- agers coming to terms with their gender identity.
Lawrence knew his body didn’t match his internal identity from the age of five. But it wasn’t until he was 19 and saw a YouTube video about gender identity that he realised he could find happiness if he changed his outward presentation. Now the 24 year-old hopes he can be an inspiration for kids even younger than he was.
“A lot of the TikTok audience is quite young…So I want to be that person I wish I had when I was in primary school. Because everyone at my school was either telling me I was wrong, or telling me no, you can’t do that, or no, you can’t be that.”
In another video to his 251,600 TikTok followers, there is a picture of Lawrence in high school, presenting as a young woman with the words “dead name 1999 to 2017” before it cuts to him as a man, smiling. The caption reads: “Much happier now since this transition journey all took place.”
While his parents let him express himself however he liked throughout childhood, such as by wearing the boys’ school uniform to his public school in Sydney’s west, he says he was “forced back into the closet” by bullies and conservative teachers.
The first video he saw on YouTube was a transgender person talking about gender identity. “I was like, oh, that’s exactly how I’ve always been,” he said. “If I didn’t have that representation I don’t think I would be where I am today. I think I would be many years delayed.”
Many transgender influencers The Weekend Australian spoke to said children and teenagers were discovering they were transgender younger and often through their TikTok videos. “When I was in school, no one knew what a trans person was. And now you walk into a school, and everyone knows what a transperson is. It’s a beautiful thing,” one creator said.
For Grace Hyland, who has 631,800 followers on TikTok and 135,000 on Instagram, that comes with a responsibility to be a positive example, especially with “so much horrible representation of trans women in the media”. “That is quite a lot of pressure,” she said.
Her videos, cover every aspect of her transition, from bottom surgery to the effects of hormones, to hair removal and her nose job. Grace is strikingly beautiful and a lot of the content is highly stylised. “I lately have opened up about my surgeries that I’ve had, because I do get a lot of comments from people saying, I wish I looked like you. I wish I was as pretty as you and stuff like that. And so I wouldn’t want people to think that that’s just hormone replacement. I want them to know that does cost extra money.”
In a video uploaded in the days before she spoke to The Weekend Australian, Grace says she thinks minors should be able to medically transition just as she did when she was about 15. The video has now been deleted. This occurs when videos don’t meet strict community guidelines or are heavily reported by users.
“Allowing minors to transition is a risk. My parents faced two options. Either don’t let me medically transition as a minor and I’ll have a 40 per cent chance of self-harming or do let me medically transition and there’ll be a 2 per cent chance I’ll end up regretting it,” she says in the video in her direct tone.
The self-described trans-educator, who came out age 12, recounts these thoughts again over the phone. “For me, it was like, if I don’t get on these (puberty) blockers, I’ll kill myself.” Her family, including father, Australian actor Mat Stevenson, were incredibly supportive of her transition.
She reads a few of the 300 comments on the video, which she says is a lot. “There are people that say ‘It’s so wrong’, ‘You’re hurting children’, but that’s where I say, look, it’s an informed decision to transition as a child … it’s very thorough.”
This is a big part of Grace’s motivation to upload content about being transgender.
“I want to highlight how diligent diagnosis of gender dysphoria is in Australia. I can’t speak for America. I can’t speak for England. I can’t speak for anywhere else. In Australia, however, it’s extremely thorough,” she says.
Source: The Weekend Australian