I am sometimes called heartless about the non-contributors in our society. Maybe I am.

Recently I got a lot of flak for saying begging should be outlawed and that non-contributors should at least do us the favour of not getting in the way.

A bit of bombast goes a long way in column writing but my point is that as a tribe we can afford only so many free loaders. Professional bleeding hearts, I find, are often good at talking about how society is lacking in compassion without having a clue about the complexity of problems like poverty and homelessness.

And there is never a word about how often the disadvantaged don't help themselves.

Coming face to face with the truly marginalised and getting to hear a bit about their lives gives you a different perspective, of course.

In this job you get used to going from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the tragic to the humorous and from the hero to the zero.

Last week I was sent out to do a bit of colour on the All Blacks, the closest to the conquering warriors of old as we are likely to get in our modern age. Next day I was following a story about a homeless transgender woman claiming blatant discrimination.

We found Victoria Karaitiana, whose given Christian name was Paul, living rough in a beaten-up, pop-up caravan next to a shingle road beside the Kaiapoi River.

She was wearing a long green dress, a cardigan and jandals. Her large feet did not sit squarely on the jandals so only her weathered toes got any protection.

Her long blond hair was tied back in an untidy pony tail and she hadn't shaved for a few days so a grey stubble was noticeable. Broad shoulders, solid arms, a lack of upper teeth and her height destroyed any last vestige of femininity. She spoke quietly and, although she said she was surviving on tins of spaghetti and baked beans, she didn't look malnourished.

She carried a bag with a brown-skinned, blonde-haired doll which, we would learn later, she liked to hold to her chest like she was breastfeeding.

Victoria's story was that she had began to live like a woman at 18 after many years of being sexually abused by her father. She was now 47 and had no idea where the rest of her family was.

She had lived most of her life in Auckland and come to Christchurch at the urging of a cousin who was going to pay for her sex change operation.

That hadn't worked out but she had got together with a Maori man who died in the PWC building during the February earthquake, she claimed. He had been a security guard.

She had moved often in the last year because of harassment and bullying wherever she lived. In the last few months she had again been forced to leave her accommodation because of nasty behaviour by other tenants. Her last abode, a camping ground, had evicted her solely because of her gender preference, she said.

She hadn't worked for many years but long ago worked in hospitals as a nurse despite struggling with literacy and numeracy. She had tumours in her head and a steel rod in her back.

Victoria said she had given up on the social agencies or maybe they had given up on her. She had received five bonds from WINZ this year and was not eligible for any more. Her living support allowance came to $232 a week but she thought social housing was too dear.

A 20 minute walk got her into town to charge her phone, do her shopping and have a shower at the swimming pool.

The pop-up caravan leaked when it rained and she used a gas cooker, and a portable loo for toileting.

"People don't want me because of my transgender but people have got to learn to accept me the way I am. They torment me, throw things at me. I've had bottles thrown at my head, eggs thrown at me.

"I just want to somebody to help and treat me as a woman and not as a transgender."

At night she lay in her bed thinking about things.

"I just want to be happy, not living like this."

A job perhaps?

"It really boils down to people not wanting a transgender but I'm not going to change for nobody. This is how I'm going to be. I'm not going to change.

"I want to live a normal life where people accept me for what I am."

In any event she was too sickly to work.

Key points of Victoria's story did not check out. She had been evicted from a camping ground but not because she was transgender. She had made a nuisance of herself, drank her rent money and broken rules.

Her partner had not died in the PWC collapse and she not been a nurse as claimed.

As a southerly hit on Wednesday I thought about Victoria in her leaky pop-up and it struck me that even though Victoria is not exactly a deserving case, she still has a claim on our better nature. And sometimes there are no answers and no neat endings.