SO MAYER: Being perceived, being heard: we often think about the painful aspect of that as being misheard, being criticised, being deliberately misunderstood, being shouted down. And I've experienced all those things, of course I have. But the possibility of actually being heard is equally as painful. Because it also asks what would be the result of that, that if someone said, "Okay. I've taken on what your book is saying. What now? Back to you." And that's what a good therapist does: "I've heard you. Now what are you gonna do about it?" And then going: oh, supposedly through my educational privilege, I've been taught to take power from using language. And here I am using language and I don't feel powerful. I feel afraid and I feel ashamed, and I feel like someone's gonna hit me in the mouth.

ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.