Australian cleaning specialist Sandra Pankhurst has undertaken some of the toughest jobs imaginable.
Violent crime scenes, meth labs, and hoarder's houses are all in a day's work for Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services, the Melbourne business she set up more than 20 years ago.
Sandra Pankhurst Photo: supplied
She has used her own trauma, including an abusive childhood and experience as a transgender woman, to offer empathy and bring order and care to people who are often going through the worst experience of their lives.
Pankhurst was the subject of Sarah Krasnostein's successful 2017 book The Trauma Cleaner.
She says the positive response to the book has given her a new lease of life. She had never told her story before and agreed that the process had been a kind of trauma-cleaning in itself.
“The book has been absolutely fantastic for me. It’s been very cathartic. All my life I’ve worked solidly to do the best I can do with morals and ethics and whatever. No matter what job I did, whether it was cleaning a toilet, prostitution, or whatever, I was the best at it.
“In that way, if you had a problem with me, you had a problem with my gender and as far as I was concerned that was your problem.”
“I think I have a better understanding of myself and acceptance of myself and I feel I live a much more peaceful life, whereas before I was probably always tormented by my identity. That it would get out, or people would mimic me or give me a hard time or whatever.
“But I don’t even give it a second thought anymore, because I’ve learned to accept people will either love me or hate me and it doesn’t really affect me... I just enjoy being me. I’m probably the happiest Sandra I’ve ever been.”
Pankhurst says being invited to remember the sometimes painful and complicated moments and phases of her life had brought tears to her eyes.
She wasn’t the only one who became emotional. Her birth mother became sick with the thought of the book's release, possibly reminding her of the fact she felt compelled to give Pankhurst up for adoption.
Pankhurst doesn't know if her mother has read the book. She has only corresponded with her through an adoption agency. But she acknowledges it would have been upsetting for her knowing the misery she suffered at the hands of her adopted parents.
The family rejected her after they had children of their own, with those children receiving stark preferential treatment. Her stepfather was also a violent drunk.
“She would probably feel very upset, but I don’t want her to feel upset, I want her to enjoy the rest of her life and that’s the reason why I pulled the pin to pushing further to get to meet her," she says.
“I was a child looking for love and I couldn’t get it. What you are given, is what you get and you don’t really know any difference."
Pankhurst developed a serious lung condition during her time as a cleaner, the harsh chemicals damaging her health.
“I never said no to a job, working around the clock and that’s how I built the business, not realising that the chemicals I was breathing virtually day and night were affecting my lungs.”
Overuse of hormones when she was transitioning over 30 years ago also affected her liver. A benign brain tumour has added to her health problems.
Helping people through their own trauma and difficulties had been a hallmark of Pankhurst. She says she employs others who have similar life skills and similar understanding of what life throws at you.
Pankhurst isn't a poster woman of the LGBT community, pushing back against what she sees as counter-productive and repressive political correctness in society.
“I’m not into the gay rights and that sort of stuff, because I think they push the message too hard and it’s getting to the stage where these voices that on the end of an email ‘Sandra relates to she / her’, or something like that. I think it’s all bullshit.
“I think it should be ‘regards Sandra’ or something like that. We’re making the language too hard for people to understand and accept. Plus, we are highlighted as people as being different. I just don’t get it. I think we should just drop the façade and all this business about male and female toilets and now all-one. I know I prefer to go to a ladies’ toilet and not to men’s.”
Instead she champions a kind of communitarianism, where everyone is accepted and cherished for what they have to offer and where everyone has freedon of expression. Pankhurst says she has found her true self after torrid decades of angst and is now content, comfortable in her own skin.
“I just like being me. I don’t understand this sexual fluidity, being male one day and female the next. That doesn’t float my boat, but maybe I need to learn to be a little bit more tolerant in that area.”
Photo: Supplied
Her marriage to George, a conservative Australian businessman, is touching and shows that love conquers all and acceptance can be found where least expected.
Her husband was very accepting from the outset, never seeing gender reassignment as an issue. The couple started seeing each other after George’s wife died. She choose a favourite spot where to tell him about her sex change.
“I said ‘well George, how I appear to be is not always how I was’. He says ‘don’t tell me you want to be a lesbian’ and I thought, ‘oh God, this is going to be harder than I thought’.
“In the end, I said to him I had to be surgically enhanced to be the Sandra I am now. I wasn’t born Sandra’. I went very quiet and it might have only been a minute, but it seemed like an eternity as I was waiting for a smack in the mouth…
“He said ‘well, I met Sandra, I fell in love with Sandra and I’m going to marry Sandra’. It was like a weight had been instantly taken off my shoulders. For the first time in my life someone had accepted me for me.”
