I was a trans child. I am not a "contested issue".

Another day, and now a move by a powerful British institution against transgender people. A piece of erasure so naked and stark that it barely seeks to conceal the prejudice contained within it.

The BBC runs a service called Action Line - essentially a website to which it directs viewers and listeners who are dealing with particular problems, or who might be affected by the issues discussed in programming. It contains resources and links. Until a few days ago, it contained a section on gender identity, with links to three organisations which support trans people, including trans kids and their families. I have plenty of knowledge of two of them, Mermaids and GIRES. They are respected, respectable and caring organisations. I have known Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids, for years. I know Bernard and Terry Reed, who founded GIRES, and who were both given OBEs for their work. All three started working in this field years ago when trans people were pretty much entirely ignored or just laughed at by society. They have supported thousands of people, and without any question, helped to save many lives.

The page that directed people to their organisations has now been removed, without consultation or announcement, by the BBC. This, it seems, comes after a series of complaints made, possibly following a particularly grim and biased Panorama programme some weeks ago burying the hatchet into the only NHS clinic in the UK that supports trans children and their families (I use the word 'supports' cautiously as the waiting lists to be seen are absurd). This exercise in bias, untruths and ratings chasing by the Panorama team led some - I am guessing the 'usual suspects' were well to the fore - to complain that organisations mentioned darkly in it (Mermaids - the bete noire of haters - specifically) were still appearing on the BBC's Action Line page. The consequence of this was that the BBC removed their entire page on the subject and with it a chance for kids who need help and advice to find it from some people who can offer compassionate support.

When challenged over this, the BBC issued a statement. This is an extract:

It is, of course, the phrase "increasingly contested issues relating to trans issues and children" that says everything.

I am not "an issue". Trans people are not "issues". Trans children are not "issues". Their families are not "issues". I, and they, are people, with real, lived, authentic, lives. Truths that are ours. Experiences and understandings that are ours. Trans people's claims to be able to exist as we are, knowing who we are, being given access to society and the chance to live our lives, to meet our potential, to contribute, to simply be, is not an "issue". It is, in a decent society, a right; one blindly enjoyed by the cisgender people who wrote this othering, insulting statement, every day.

Worse, the BBC would have that we are not simply an issue, but a "contested" one. What is this suggesting? That those who would wish to deny the right for me to even exist - and there are plenty - have a moral equivalence to me in this "debate" (another favoured word)?

Because here's the thing. I was a trans child. With nowhere to turn, no information to find, no understanding that there was anyone in the world like me, I didn't even tell anyone at all until I was 20 - when one night, I told my girlfriend how I felt, haltingly and with only a hazy understanding myself. She told me years later that she felt she knew better than even I was what saying. I cried that night, in our top floor bedroom in a shared house in Leeds, for three hours. It was like a dam bursting.

But still I had nowhere to go with this knowledge. The news had been revealed, but where could I take it? There was literally nowhere. So I worked hard to push it down, to make it not true, for years. But it could never be not true, because it was true. I married, started a career, and a business, and had children. Tried to negotiate with it, tried to fight the depression that started to overwhelm me. Tried to avoid it, horrified and scared of the consequences of self-acceptance. But I still couldn't make it disappear. Still had nowhere to go with it. I was required never ever to share my knowledge with others by the person to whom I was married, such was the awful shame of it all. I internalised that shame - brutally weaponised it against myself, renewing my attempts to crush this thing once and for all. Almost to the point of eliminating myself entirely. But its clarity only grew.

Eventually, in my mid-thirties, I found someone to talk to; a therapist. I started to face myself and reality. I began to reconcile and understand myself. Eventually - though not for another ten years - I transitioned. I had plenty more misery and fighting with myself (and my spouse) to go through. The shame was rooted very deep, the ridicule in the media was obvious, the implicit threats made to me, the situation at home, all weighed powerfully. It took a long time.

Eventually, of course, the whole edifice gave way. My marriage collapsed in acrimony. A group of lives woven together were thrown into a sea of pain for a few years (now mostly healed, over a decade later, with one quite tragic exception). I transitioned.

And...the pain and the shame went away. Gone. A kind of dragging, deafening, psychic tinnitus...just stopped. I could feel a deep sense of joy, for the first time. A sort of calm replacing the strange panic.

Now I just live my life. Being who I am,  making my way, I face many issues that others face. I need to make a living. I love and care about my now-adult children. I am scared about Covid 19, and about those I love getting it, especially my soon-to-be elderly Mother in Law.

I look back on almost 60 years of life and see my crowning achievement as having helped bring into the world three beautiful daughters. I have also found love again, with someone who fully accepts me, my story, who I am, and whom I love very much. I am profoundly grateful for these things.

But I cannot avoid the knowledge that I have spent almost three-quarters of my life trying to run from myself. I wonder about the life I could have had, the teenage years I could have had, being able to live as myself as a young woman in her twenties, charting my course from a place of reality and self-love, not fear and shame. I wonder where that course might have taken me, and I wonder about the distress and the self-hate I might have avoided. And yes, the pain caused to others too.

The BBC might want to hide behind the coward's language of 'complexity', but I am no-one's "contested issue". Nor are the young people and their families who need support and compassion. I will not be forced back into that shame and fear again, not objectified, not made to feel that I don't exist because of an upsurge in toxic and fanatical moral panic. There are organisations out there now who can help people like me, as we navigate our early years and who can provide balanced and unbiased support. The BBC has no place trying to erase them, and with them, us.

************

[Image credit; https://64.media.tumblr.com/bf83fb0da70ab6bc2e2ff5a1dd87715f/tumblr_mvfogrMK4I1rq3b5ko5_1280.jpg]