Beyond Visibility: Interview with Crystal Love Johnson

We often comprehend Transgender people simply as not identifying with the sex you were assigned at birth. And if you don’t know someone or have yet to meet someone who is Transgender, you have probably seen issues surrounding what it means to be Transgender up for debate. Argued during election cycles, heightened during Pride festivities, or just simply the comment section of whatever your algorithm has placed before you, a dog whistle used to drive engagement stats up.

These conversations undermine the right we all have to have healthy connections with the people around us. However for many, in First Nations communities and migrant communities who come from their own Indigenous cultures, gender, something that everyone has, is more than just a label. Or that simple definition.

Across the east basin, from where I reside, the visibility of Transgender women of colour, known to me as The Dolls, has surged. Through Ballroom, they have stormed industries; fashion week, music, galleries, festivals, dance and theatre. Permanent fixtures reflective of a cultural renaissance occurring nationwide.

It is here, Bhenji Ra, Legendary Founding Mother of Ballroom Oceania, announces at Sissy Ball, “You can take away the T [Transgender], but you can never take the FQ [Femme Queen].”

To the ear, it might land like a chant of resilience. It suggests that governments may erase Transgender (T) identities from the broader increasingly corporatised lesbian-and-gay-centred cultural imaginary. But what it means to be a Femme Queen, on the ground, in community, is immovable. That we define ourselves as Femme Queens. And we always have. Self-determination is what anchors our identities.

Still, the subtext nudges at something deeper. This kind of visibility does not come free. It’s expense is a familiar violence, some muted, and others overt. So while a trans person becomes the first to grace the cover of Vogue Australia, days later a mutual aid post circulates. Another trans woman, same community, same city, recovering from a brutal public attack for merely existing, being visible.

“They call it a safe city, but that safety’s curated,” Leah Pao, Overall Australian Mother of IMAN explains. “It depends on how you look, who you know, and how well you fit the story they want to tell. Word to Elders past and present babe. And what’s visibility without a $1000 pay ID moment?”

You see these issues are interconnected. Up north, specifically The Tiwi Islands, there is also no word for Transgender.

Much like what it means to be a Femme Queen in Ballroom, they’ve always just had Sistagirls.

       And here, a friend of the aforementioned Bhenji Ra, resides Crystal Love Johnson.

“I’m an Aboriginal first,” she tells us. “A Sistagirl second. And a spiritual person third.”

That order matters. Mostly because a common thread for LGBTQIA+ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is that we walk into a room Aboriginal first, even in Queer spaces. And this is often neglected when looking at mainstream LGBTQIA+ culture.

“There is an expectation we leave our Blackness at the door,” says Kai Clancy, Brotherboy and Father of House of Brown. “Even in queer spaces. Until they want our culture for the closing number. But you don’t get part of us, you get all of us.”

In line with Kai Clancy, Crystal reiterates that in Tiwi culture, gender and culture is not a private matter. It is not a political stance either. It stands in direct contrast to the cosmopolitan centricity of places like Sydney, though it shares the sense of community found in Ballroom culture here.

It’s a set of obligations. You are who you care for. Who you sing for. Who you bury. And Crystal, matriarch and mentor, is a Sistagirl in the truest sense. Not a spectacle but a social role. She describes it as a spiritual responsibility. She continues,

“I go and I cry for people… You’re actually educating them by telling them that we are here, we are alive, we’re breathing, and we can participate in our culture… I sing when people die,” she continues. “That’s my job. That’s part of being a Sistagirl. It’s not just hair and heels. It’s a funeral. It’s cooking. It’s looking after the kids when no one else does.”

The western ideas of legal battles, rainbow capitalism, debates regarding Queer youth, who can use what toilet and why, who is allowed to play what sport, feel off-key here. Because on Tiwi, it’s about who shows up. And it's evident from her legacy that Crystal’s always shown up. Even when her own people couldn’t see her. Even when she explains that the churches told her she was going to hell.

Even when the only name they had for her was “funny one.” So her solution? “You just have to keep talking… keep being in the community. Even when they don’t want you there.”

What becomes clear, almost immediately, is that acceptance and expectation are not the same thing. Mob knows this already. Indigenous cultures globally are familiar too. So while Crystal is celebrated in some corners of her community, it’s because she has worked hard for it, but at the same time she is also worked hard by it.

“They know we can cook. They know we can clean. They know we can help the women, help the men, raise the babies. So they expect it. No one asks if we’re tired.”

And yet, Crystal keeps showing up. Because that’s what Sistagirls do. Not because they owe it to anyone. But because they owe it to each other.

Crystal doesn’t shy away when it comes to the role of Christianity in her life. “They say you’re gonna go to hell for being a Sistagirl, I say, your God is your God. My God is everywhere. In the land. In the trees. In the wind.”

She’s learned to hold contradiction with grace: belief and pain, kinship and rejection, love and rage. However, these contradictions, when placed in a global context, start to look less like nuance normal to any community engagement, and more like cruelty.

“They forget we had people like us before the missions,” and like a reflex she quips in jest, “They act like gender diversity is new. Like it came on a Qantas flight in 1994. But we’ve always been here.”

Crystal reasserts that here, it did not begin with Mardi Gras. Definitely not a Qantas flight in 1994. For Crystal it began prior to colonisation. And it has survived centuries of silence, stigma and straight-faced active denial.        

Without saying much, my fatigue is felt when Crystal quietly confesses…

“I’m depressed… I don’t always have support. But lucky for my friends. Lucky for the Brotherboys and Sistagirls. We lift each other up.”

Even then she lays out a solution to the symptoms of a shared fatigue sweeping our communities. Friendship, chosen family. But Crystal doesn’t want applause. She wants resources. One of which she mentions more than once.

“Education.” Not meaning textbooks, or curriculums. She means yarning. She means talking to Elders who don’t have the language to understand gender diverse identities.

Unlike many public-facing trans people, Crystal didn’t materialise because a pendulum of Western acceptability made it ok for her to be viewed. Because she dared to be visible before visibility was a marketing strategy, used to sell products during Pride Month.

For isn’t visibility without safety nothing but a car crash witnessed in slow-motion? An experience LGBTQIA+ Mob are familiar with, as we are put in magazines, and left off policy.

“We don’t have the rights other straight folks have,” she says. “Sometimes we don’t even have jobs.”

Crystal is not talking to legal issues, because trans people are absolutely protected under the Sex Discrimination Act, but more the lived and social issues that remain within our communities. And these social issues have symptoms, including disadvantages shaped by employment discrimination and austerity, with Transgender Australians facing a 19 percent unemployment rate, more than triple the national average. It is safe to assume this is accelerated when intersectional identities are met with Indigenous rates of unemployment, and racial discrimination being embedded within the Australian workforce.

Despite these protections existing, what Crystal reminds us, like the many I spoke to for this interview, is that while protections exist, they at times fail to reach the people who need them most. So she lays it clear:

Crystal wants legislation.

•  She wants cultural programs for Sistagirls and Brotherboys.
• She encourages Elders to be trained in gender literacy.
• She wants governments to stop treating queerness as an “urban” problem.

She wants, in short, everything her community deserves. Safety with visibility.        

She continues:

“It’s like a new oyster opening, and inside it is the pearl. You eat the meat. But the pearl is what you want to keep. That’s what a Sistagirl is. The pearl.”

And yet, like the countless unnamed and hidden trans women doing the work and echoing the same truth, you still can’t take away what has always been there.

“And it’s beautiful. Like when you wear beautiful pearls, you adorn yourself with these beautiful things. People don’t realise that it’s still part of our culture.”

The work and the obligation that define who Queer people are, is the culture. She then speaks to the rest of our community stating:

“Make sure you are proud of who you are. If you don’t have a name, you’ll get a name… and if you don’t have a country, Australia’s still your country. And if you don’t have any spirituality, your spirit is free to roam.”

So show up. And roam. Because you can take away the T, but never the Pearl.

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Crystal Love Johnson.‍ ‍

Sistergirl. Mentor. Pearl.