Taz describes himself as a “brother boy”, a female to male Indigenous trans person.
“I guess growing up I had feelings of wanting to be a guy but I didn’t know anything about it so it was a bit pointless me trying to say something I didn’t understand,” he explains.
“I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it cause I didn’t want to tell them, ‘hey, I’ve got an issue with my gender’.”
When he first came out as same-sex attracted, the family he had been living with him kicked him out and he ended up living in a shelter.
Soon afterwards, he found out his mother had died in a car accident.
“I felt like my whole world was falling apart,” he said.
He is one of so many young Australians whose life has changed dramatically for the better after speaking to someone from Headspace, an Australian organisation dedicated to helping young people with mental health issues.
Through Headspace in Townsville, Taz found support and eventually a like-minded community of gender non-conforming young people.
“Speak to someone if you’re in a dark spot because there is nothing worse than bottling it up and feeling as though no one wants to hear you,” he said.
Headspace has close to 100 centres across Australia and over the past decade has provided almost 260,0000 young people aged between 12 and 25 from all over Australia access to mental health care.
Next Tuesday October 11 is Headspace Day, the first national Headspace Day launching to bring the importance of keeping a youth-friendly portal to mental health services open and available for young Australians struggling in silence.
