Trudy
Content Warning: These stories are about violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and may include references to suicide or self-harming behaviours. They may contain graphic descriptions and strong language and may be distressing. Some narratives may be about First Nations people who have passed away. If you need support, please see Contact & support.
‘Transphobia needs to be called out, it truly does. So, it’s not just about disability, it’s also about who you are as a person with disability. My gender should not come into it. But unfortunately it does.’
Trudy lives with spinal injury and complex post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD].
‘Since birth I’ve always just seen myself – I’m just a girl,’ she told the Royal Commission. My brain has never registered male anatomy, it’s only ever registered female anatomy.’
Trudy said from when she was five, her brother raped her. ‘Other people’ raped her as well, into her 20s.
‘There’d been a lot of physical scarring and trauma … and recovery has been very long, very hard, very slow,’ she said. For many years her PTSD was undetected.
Trudy became an NDIS participant about four years ago.
‘It was the hospital that signed me up. I didn’t know anything about it … So, I just got a plan, and for the first year of it, it was very rough.’
Trudy ‘didn’t understand things’ about her funding.
‘But there was no help or assistance … And it’s very hard for participants to get accurate information that actually helps.’
‘A whole year went by’ before she got support workers. Then a couple of years ago, Trudy ‘got a really bad plan’ and ‘the NDIS has been absolute fucking hell and a nightmare ever since’.
Trudy says a ‘huge problem’ is the support coordinators, who have discriminated against her because of who she is ‘as a person with disability’.
‘Just because I’m me, transgender, I – I have to live on edge … I’ve never had anyone in the NDIS actually talk to me or treat me like a person.’
She also feels coordinators used information she shared with them ‘to be antagonist’. After a review of her funding she ‘basically got the same plan, which is completely insufficient’.
Trudy finds it impossible to hold NDIS staff accountable. The only avenue is to lodge a formal complaint and ‘it goes nowhere’.
‘As a participant you get attacked by the NDIS … You have no rights. And we really need to give greater protections. There needs to be faster, more simpler avenues for help. There needs to be accountability.’
About a year ago, Trudy had ‘full [gender affirming] surgery’.
‘And when I woke up from surgery, everything matched. Life became truly perfect.’
‘There’s only one thing that was still in the back on my mind. I knew my plan would run out of funding early.’
She said her NDIS coordinator ‘out of the blue’ gave her ‘a plan that was fucked’.
Trudy is waiting on the outcome of another review. Her passion is interior design and she wants to go back to study, ‘but that had been really hindered by coordinators’.
‘I’m trying to grow, I’m trying to get somewhere. The NDIS won't fucking let me.’
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.