The trans community must face this crisis and act.
The situation is serious. Here's how it happened and three things we must do urgently.
It wasn't always like this. It wasn't always like this even when it was bad. And believe me, back in the day, it did feel bad. I transitioned 13 years ago, but the process leading to it had been going on my whole life. It gathered pace in the decade before I eventually began my firewalk, but had been held up before then by fear - of the possible reaction of my family, of friends, neighbours, work colleagues, and of society as a whole. The climate in which I went through my process was one of bafflement and routine media belittlement. Trans people were a joke - trannies (the term was in widespread use in the papers) could be ridiculed with impunity, with punning headlines and insulting copy. They could even be hunted - The Sun once published a confidential phone line for people to call if they knew the whereabouts of a trans man who had recently given birth and who'd fled into hiding to try and escape the media pack.
And yet, horrendous as it was then, it's worse now. Gandhi's famous lines resonate...
First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
We'd been ignored for decades. The first real evidence of our emergence into society had begun in the 1990s and early 2000s. True to Gandhi's model, that's when the laughter really started. Not the safe Dick-Emery-Danny-La-Rue laughter at the parody of womanhood by an unthreatening male drag performer, but a crueler, bullying laughter, mostly led by the tabloids. By the time I had to face my own truth, that laughter was in full flow - a key reason why I became involved in trans rights activism shortly after my transition, helping to set up and run Trans Media Watch. We set about challenging this ritualistic humiliation, firstly by bringing it to the attention of parts of the media that had hitherto given zero attention to what their phone-hacking, law-breaking tabloid colleagues had been up to. Which was shitting on a community about which they knew literally nothing for laughs and money.
Slightly to my surprise, we actually achieved a lot. We had conversations with regulators, with newspapers, with the now-defunct Press Complaints Commission, with Ofcom, the BBC, Channel 4 and others. Initiatives were launched, spin-off projects emerged. We made a major submission to The Leveson Inquiry and received a highly supportive hearing.
The five of us, with others, worked hard and with clarity and purpose. But strangely, it mostly seemed easy. Doors kept opening. The community seemed grateful for the work we were doing and we did manage to change the climate of coverage - to a point, and for a time. I remain sanguine about some of the reasons. After decades of childish abuse directed at trans people, in a saturated media environment where new angles on issues are much sought and highly prized, some broadcasters and journalists began to see the editorial opportunity of not being vicious. Though to be fair, in some quarters, there was literal incredulity at what had actually been going on. I remember making a presentation to senior people at Ofcom, in which I showed a 10-minute edit of tv 'comedy' all of which used trans people as the butt of the joke. It totaled perhaps 30 clips, all from within the preceding couple of years. Mouths literally fell open. "You should talk to Channel 4", they said. "They'll want to take up your story". So we did.
Out in the country, it did seem that the climate was beginning to shift bit by bit.The Equalities Act became law.More sensitive editorial started to appear, supportive programming on tv as well. Stonewall, led by the formidable (and much missed) Ruth Hunt, reversed its previous ambivalence towards trans people and came powerfully onside. The coalition government had the strongly supportive Lynne Featherstone, a LibDem, in the Equalities Office who championed trans equality. She even came to an event we set up. We watched, slightly wide-eyed, as Cameron pushed through Equal Marriage - an initiative that Lynne had done much to drive. An out trans woman got a job welcoming visitors to the 2012 London Olympics, despite the hysteria of the tabloids which splashed her story all over their pages The following year, Paris Lees became the first trans woman ever to appear on the BBC's Question Time, making an instant impression.
By about 2013, I recall thinking that things were actually changing. Of course, reactionary knuckle draggers (Richard Littlejohn and the heartbreaking case of teacher Lucy Meadows comes to mind) remained and marginal voices from the ideological fringes were beginning to appear, but it seemed that intelligent, open-minded opinion had come round to a new way of thinking and that thinking seemed to be consolidating. And yet it was hard to shake a vague sense of unease. I remember thinking that we hadn't had to do the hard yards, the explaining, that I'd foreseen. Be clear - not that explanations should be necessary, I thought, then as now, but I really did not expect the cisgender world to be able to move from ridicule to the beginnings of acceptance without more of a struggle. As I hung up my activist boots around 2014, I was encouraged, for the most part, trying to tell myself that maybe it was going to all work out. As I stepped away, the tv comedy Boy Meets Girl - the first ever such programming that foregrounded a trans person sympathetically and actually starred Rebecca Root (who is trans) - was going into production, after a process we had started with Channel 4 but which had later been adopted by the BBC came to fruition. But the concerns lived on. For the most part I, like many of us, pushed that nagging feeling aside. We had made progress and it was looking like our rights were finally beginning to be recognized, even baked into society's direction of travel.
Alas not. The much-quoted Gandhi knew what was actually going on. It was a pause. The laughter had diminished but the real fighting had just begun. In the last seven or so years, it has left the British trans community bewildered and terrified. And it's getting worse.
The backlash always needed a more solid intellectual basis than just ridicule to gain real traction of course. Whilst reactionary newspapers have long made easy money by crudely attacking minority groups for being different, headlines about mechanics losing their nuts (poisonous and highly damaging to the victims though they were) were never alone going to cut it if opponents of the trans community wanted to win actual arguments or get the ear of government, not then at least. What they needed was a theoretical model, with principles, into which they could slot the emergence of trans people and which could frame that emergence as not simply laughable but dangerous. Despite the progress we had made, wider understanding of the trans experience remained very slim. As those who wished to fight us gathered their thoughts, they decided that their opportunity was to provide that understanding. And the explanation they came up with was grounded in a very simple idea - threat.
The creation of threat changed everything. It was articulated by radical feminism, (hitherto mostly a backwater of feminism, grounded in revolutionary Marxism of the 1970s and 1980s) and the increasing prominence of Trans Exclusionary (TERF) figures. This group argued that transgender people could be seen as yet another attempt by the patriarchy to eliminate womanhood (a term usually defined by reference to a varying set of essential, biological characteristics - except, bizarrely, for those who argued that the very concept of gender itself was a male-inspired power move designed to subjugate women). The 'threat' was simple. Rape, violence, or murder, committed by men masquerading as women. Further, a pre-meditated attempt to erase the very idea of a woman itself. This was what trans women (in particular) were really all about.
Though bubbling under for years (with the occasional breakout of toxicity in print somewhere), by 2014 these voices had started to gain traction. Some British newspapers, after a lucky escape in the Leveson Inquiry, realized that if they wanted to keep selling copies or driving clicks by exploiting trans people, they would need to find something more sophisticated than playground headlines. Others who had flirted with human interest stories about people's transitions, seeing in them an unmet journalistic opportunity, were beginning to feel that they'd run out of mileage with this approach as similar features popped up everywhere.
From whichever direction it came, the British media had grown tired of being nice to this weird but financially exploitable group that no-one had really got their heads around. A new angle was needed and luckily a source of copy was readily to hand. More and more Editors turned to TERF journalists and academics who were only too pleased to provide it. Never mind that hitherto some of these so-called left-wing figures would likely have rather died than write for class enemies like Rupert Murdoch or Paul Dacre.
The notion of threat was well to the fore in the words they wrote, but as the narrative matured, transphobic activists began to realize that to engage with a more moderate, less politicized readership, the more extreme meta-theories would have to be mothballed. Radicalisation of the centre always involves sounding reasonable. The mainstreaming of anti-trans sentiment has thus meant that those promoting fear and threat have learned to speak the language of the reasonable concern. This is the I'm-not-a-bigot-but narrative. It enfolds hatred but, critically, insulates its author from unsettling worries (including to her or himself) of being a hater.
As they filed their pieces, intolerance of difference was growing in the UK, fast. Populist Brexiter politicians and newspaper owners ruthlessly managed the news cycle to drive fear of outsiders. Muslims, refugees, asylum seekers, even Europeans all got the treatment. We all know where that went and how it culminated first in Brexit in 2016, then later in all the political consequences the country has lived through. Plus of course, the meteoric rise in hate crime against minority groups, foremost amongst them LGBTQ+ people.
Slotting trans people into this new and lucrative media landscape of hate was straightforward. As cisgender people continued to find the trans experience somewhere between strange and entirely incomprehensible, and as hardly anyone actually knew a trans person still, sowing the seeds of unease in people's minds was easy enough. Most cisgender people, then, as now, have huge difficulty in imagining the trans experience, their perception of the trans person either a set of cliches or an empty space. Even those whose instinct was to be more welcoming rarely did so on the basis of an innate comprehension, but usually on the basis of decent human values. As the Overton Window in Britain began to shift, trans people's hopes about being able to rely on these began to disintegrate.
And whilst all this was going on, what was the trans community doing?
Whilst a few parts of the community - the ones that had created some organisational structure by then (for example Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence) - were able to build on the progress established before 2014, for the most part, trans people looked on in horror and shock. We should have seen all this coming, but few of us really did. The shock deepened as the attacks multiplied, fueled soon by the faux-centrist, actually hard-right, Times and Sunday Times newspapers - small in circulation but massive in political influence amongst government and the Courts. Suddenly, arguments were being launched against trans people's human rights, reasons were being given - often specious and dishonest - but wrapped in the constructs of logic and reason.
This was new. Strangely, we had never really had to argue our case in the popular culture. We hadn't done so, for four reasons.
First, for years we simply hadn't been able to. Invisible, then ridiculed, no one was interested in listening. We had no voice at all.
The Blair years, for their many faults, with its creation (at least to start with) of an optimistic progressive zeitgeist in much of society offers the second reason. A dynamic of social progress had begun to build, of growing equality and human rights. Gone, for example, was the much vicious state victimisation of LGBT people, characterised by Thatcher's Section 28 (though statutory prejudice did remain). As the economy did well, an abundance mentality rather than one of scarcity infused the culture, one in which the sharing of rights didn't somehow mean their removal from others. We weren't really asked to explain our right to rights. History was On Our Side.
Chiming with this, and third, we believed that we shouldn't have to argue our case. We believed, and we still believe, that the right to be who we are is an inalienable one. To be the person you know you are and to have that assertion accepted is something that a civilised society should not force the individual to fight for. With respect to gender, cisgender people claim this right without question - why not us? We also knew that to engage in an argument about our rights, even our actual existence, could mean to sign up to the belief that these things are negotiable at all. Should Jewish people be forced to make arguments about why they should not face discrimination? Should black people? The idea is morally ludicrous. So why us?
As the climate became more toxic, we increasingly declined to debate our own right to exist. Ethically that made perfect sense and still does. But in so doing we left the field of 'debate' open to those who would make arguments against us, to an audience who knew so little about us that they were often unable to detect the bias. Suddenly, broadcasters - notably the BBC - started to stage confrontational set-piece ambushes on Newsnight or The Today programme, conscious of the viewer or listener-increasing potential of live conflict. Trans people, baffled over being invited to participate in their own television show trials, complete with ludicrous charges, started refusing to take part. We became tired of dishonest, staged confrontations in which the stakes were our actual existence and in which ready-to-air soundbite lies could be fired at high speed at a trans guest, with never the time provided to laboriously refute them all. One time, Paris Lees and Freddy McConnell even walked off the set of Newsnight moments before it went on air, after it emerged that the programme had secretly lined them up for the treatment. (The very final straw probably came for most in 2018 at the live Channel 4 Genderquake fiasco when trans panelists were abusively heckled with shouts of "Penis!" by a crowd of TERFs who had infiltrated the studio audience.)
But it was Catch 22. We failed to understand that, like it or not, our existence and our rights were (and are) contested. Whilst other minority groups suffer prejudice and abuse in the UK, there are few whose very right to exist is constantly called into question. Some disabled people face something similar perhaps as their lived experience is denied by the state whilst it takes support from them, but only the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community seem to suffer something directly analogous (though they get the abuse principally from the political right.)
The fourth reason was perhaps that we also knew deep down how hard it could be to explain. The intrinsic nature of being trans often (not always) means feeling a deeply distressing disconnect between the gender assigned us at birth and the gender we deeply know ourselves to be - male, female, both, or neither. It's an experience that is often even for ourselves difficult to put into words. And it's one that for many cisgender people remains so incomprehensible that we can't usually depend on actual understanding (something that often drives empathy and inclusion). Far more logical to fall back on basic ideas of dignity and human rights. 'You don't have to understand us', we essentially said, 'but you do believe in fairness and equality, we know. We are speaking to those values within you'.
All well and good, until Britain began to change.
As the hostility built, we were often blindsided, frozen. And we have, in my view, made mistakes.
The well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful campaign for reform of the Gender Recognition Act was one. There is no question that the demeaning, bureaucratic, and inaccessible GRA needs reform. But the idea to do so was framed in the cultural setting of one era, took no account of how the wind was changing, and then collapsed in another, toxic, one. The worthy but naive campaign was derailed by our blindness to the political moves of our opponents, failing to neutralise the influential connections they had been and were exploiting. We should have been more agile, more responsive to the inbound attacks.
The decision last year by a group of trans or trans supportive organisations (led by Stonewall) to drop their focus on a basic assertion that underpinned everything they were doing - that trans women are women, and that trans men are men - was, for me, another. Their argument - that the real focus should be on achieving real-life improvements in trans people's lives rather than endlessly refighting a war with TERF opponents that sucked all the oxygen from every room - seemed to make some sense. Except (and I said so to anyone who would listen at the time), that by seeming to cede this vital philosophical point, these groups were now leaving the very centre of the issue wide open to those who endlessly shout that trans women are not women and who intended to base every attempt to destroy trans rights on this view. Left unchallenged, the way becomes clear for TERFs, 'Gender Crtiticals' and their opportunistic allies to use this position as the essential intellectual starting point for all the demands that follow (about single-sex spaces, etc) - directed at government ministers, judges and civil servants. They are already doing it, in the courts (see below) and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, our opponents have become organised and energised by a populist government that even researched weaponising prejudice against trans people as policy (September 2019), by plentiful newspaper commissions and increasingly funded by hard-right donors (often American) who gleefully exploit the culture war even whilst they despise the 'feminists' who are fighting it.
So that's a view on how we got here. What are we going to do? So many of us are walking wounded now, it's hard to try and get out there again and again, to wade in the poison. But if we don't, we will be spectators to our own demise. Take a look at the Southern United States. At Poland. At Russia. At Hungary.
I believe that we must do three things.
1. ORGANISE
This has never properly happened in the UK. There have been a number of attempts and I have been involved in some. Meanwhile, our opponents have made strides, creating dedicated and active groups with resource and determination to which supporters, from the most fanatical, to the yet-to-be radicalised, look. An online meeting place - Mumsnet - operates as a nexus for the anti-trans community.
Conversely, the trans community remains (with a few exceptions) poorly organised. Historically, the coming together of any number of trans groups (the term has often meant not much more than three people, a laptop and website) has resulted in at best a fairly chaotic reiteration of everyone's disparate priorities, then their pain, then a factional falling out. Trans people have often been badly wounded - by abuse, isolation and prejudice. We are not always good at holding it together in a room for a greater purpose. But we must try and come together in some form - a Congress if you will - to which the few real organisations in our community together with individuals can sign up - creating some kind of greater entity that can speak for us on the basic issues that matter for us all - to government, to the media, to the cisgender world. Which can draw on the skills and experiences of the many within our community, but be disciplined, professional and results orientated. I think of Stonewall or, in the US, GLAAD perhaps, but we should build our own structure.
2. BE PREPARED: MONITOR AND UNDERSTAND
Every day another hit piece, more hate speech. Every week a new court case. We feel bruised and ruined. We lurch from each gut punch to the next, reacting if we can, often just shrugging, shutting the web page and hoping that tomorrow will be a better day. Some braver souls - I know a few - get out there each time, and fight the fight, at a huge cost to their mental health.
Whilst the need to fight fires is not going to stop, we need to think differently and much longer term. We need to bring an end to the dominance of this ad hoc, disconnected, emotionally catastrophic approach. We need to carefully and formally record, to research, monitor and to understand. We need to see the strategies, the tactics and follow the initiatives taken against us. Who is acting against us, where and how? We need to learn about the approaches they take, or might take next - becoming better prepared, sharing information amongst ourselves and better able to shut down avenues that those who hate us try to follow.
If we need money, we can crowdfund it - if we can see the threats coming.
If we need resource or expertise, we can find it - if we can see the threats coming.
3. INCREASE OUR STRATEGIC LEGAL CAPABILITY - URGENTLY
Much of the progress the trans community in the United Kingdom has made since the 1990s has been through the creation and use of the law. From protection against discrimination (1) to forcing the British government to enact legal gender recognition for trans people (2), to The Gender Recognition Act of 2004, to The Equality Act of 2010. Campaigners from years past knew that, whatever the press did, no matter what state of public understanding , without legal rights and protection we would achieve nothing.
Sadly, in the last few years, those who wish us ill have woken up to this truth in a massive way. They have entered the legal system in strength in a concerted and planned way to try and undo the progress we have made.
Prominently, recently, there's been Bell v. Tavistock, a ruling that effectively destroyed the availability of puberty-blockers for the trans young people who desperately need them. In Scotland, For Women Scotland has been in court trying to get a law that actually benefits all women struck down because it includes trans women (the wider aim was to establish in law the idea that trans women should be legally treated as men). A few weeks ago, TERF campaigners (having sourced public money to lobby Parliament) humiliated the ONS in court, forcing them to abandon trans inclusive terminology in the 2021 census that it had spent four years researching (another trojan horse; this was an attempt to erase trans identity more widely as the ONS is highly influential in framing data sets more widely). Even more recently 'The Authentic Equity Alliance' (aka Ann Sinnott of the anti-trans LGB Alliance) attempted (and failed) at The High Court to get the Equality Act's Statutory Guidance changed to force trans people out of single-sex spaces altogether. And right now, Maya Forstater is in a legal process to establish that 'Gender Critical' views (ie denial of trans people's existence) is a belief that qualifies as a 'Protected Characteristic' under the Equality Act. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, an organisation charged with protecting minority rights but now staffed at senior levels with reactionaries and prejudice-deniers by the current government, is supporting her.
There are other campaigns underway too. To pressurise companies who currently allow trans people to use single-sex facilities to stop doing so by twisting the meaning of The Equality Act, for example - some of these will likely end up in court. Stonewall Diversity Champion companies are top of the TERFs target list, part of an objective of ruining Stonewall because it continues to support trans people.
There has been some pushback against this avalanche. The excellent Good Law Project, run Jo Maughan, has managed to reverse the worst of the Bell v Tavistock decision in a ruling in another court (though unsurprisingly the media ignored this). GLP is an ally but has its fingers in many pies (notably taking Boris Johnson's government to court for corruption just now). But sadly most of the trans community, still staring in disbelief at this whirlwind of hate, has been asleep at the wheel.
We need lawyers. But equally importantly, we need strategy. We need joined-up thinking that can assess threat, understand the law in-depth, and act. Again, this needs to be undertaken by a bespoke group, properly organised, funded and dedicated to the task, with the time and the commitment. It needs to be professional, not some kind of chaotic talking shop, with agreed priorities and focus. Some of us hoped the Trans Equality Legal Initiative might be such a thing - sadly, it has been largely invisible.
I am worried. We all are. But remember the final piece of Gandhi's prophecy. Then you win. We win if we fight back - and we know how to fight because so many of us have had to all our lives. To that knowledge, we must add clarity, discipline and determination. If we want to defeat this threat, these lies, this river of poison, I believe that we have to do these things, starting now.
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Being a Trans in the UK is tough, we need trans representation in parliament, but can you see a trans candidate even being selected by a party never mind winning a seat!
ReplyDeleteWe certainly do need trans people in Parliament. In fact both Labour (Emily Flowers 2015) and the LibDems (Helen Belcher 2019) have fielded trans women candidates. Neither got elected but both put in very credible performances. Helen has subsequently been elected a Councillor on Wiltshire County Council.
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