Awa Puna tells Scotty Stevenson about coming out as trans: ‘Accepting myself saved me’

Awa Puna as Gia Te Atakura on Shortland Street.

Kiwis pride themselves on their resilience, but how do we cope when the going gets tough? In new podcast series The Upside, Scotty Stevenson sits down with well-known New Zealanders across six episodes as they share their own personal journeys with their mental health and their tips for getting back on the up.

Whakawahine/transgender filmmaker and actress Awa Puna’s documentary Born This Way earned three New Zealand Television Awards in her final year of high school. Several years later, Puna has appeared on Shortland Street, Ahikaroa and feature film Whina, among other projects.

She’s been creating stories and characters since she was a child growing up on the Kāpiti Coast. Now, speaking to The Upside podcast host Scotty Stevenson, she reveals how she handled bullying in school and how acting helped her embrace her identity.

Puna’s given name is Te Awarangi, but she went by C.J. for most of her childhood. “When I came out in year 10, my mum just started calling me Awa, and that kind of stuck afterwards,” she tells Stevenson.

Growing up, Puna recalls feeling that she had “a girl’s heart and a boy’s body” from “as far back as I can remember”. “The older I got, the more noticeable it was because I wasn’t acting like all the other kids. It became more noticeable and that’s when all the bullying and stuff kind of started.”

At school, art and filmmaking became her escape from the bullying. “I always named my characters gender-neutral names”. But one particular incident left her crushed when a former high school friend outed her online at the age of 15.

“We had a falling out and she either logged into my Facebook or made a new one,” Puna says, recalling the moment she was getting ready to sing in her school talent quest when someone approached her.

“They were like, ‘Oh, by the way, what you said was real brave’. And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And they told me that I had apparently come out as trans and done a Facebook post about it. I hadn’t. I just immediately started bawling my eyes out, ‘cause I hadn’t told anyone apart from that person.

“So I was pretty broken.”

As she came to terms with her identity, Puna also recalls being hospitalised amid feelings that she “couldn’t really go on”. " I remember in the ambulance on the way in, I kept coming in and out of waking and I was crying every time I woke up,” she tells Stevenson.

More recently, she came face-to-face with backlash while protesting at UK anti-transgender rights activist Posie Parker’s speaking event in Auckland. “We went down there and I was actually quite terrified... I saw so many people not wanting our existence to be a thing.

“For a while after that, I was in a real bad place - just to realise there’s that many people who don’t want you.”

Awa Puna and Mitchell Hawkes at the New Zealand Television Awards. Photo / Matt Klitscher

Puna credits her “beautiful” partner for helping her cope in the weeks following the protest.

“I was a bit depressed for a few weeks ‘cause it was just so shocking, but he is such a lovely guy and I feel very, very lucky to have someone so kind in my life.”

The importance of treating others with kindness is a message she hoped to share through her documentary Born This Way.

“Kindness kind of just looks like treating other people like they’re human,” she says, adding of the doco, “I realised that maybe I was starting to not only talk about myself now, but about other people’s experiences in a way - everyone’s experiences are different, but maybe me telling my story could potentially help other people.

“The 9-year-old me might be like, ‘Oh, there is someone out there who feels the same way as me. I’m not the only person out of eight billion people’.

“I’m going to fight for Takatāpuitanga [rainbow rights] and Māoritanga and those values of being able to be free within yourself and accept yourself, because that’s what ended up saving me from not being here.”

All six episodes of The Upside are available on iHeart Radio now.