I'm in Galway City plotting self-deportation from the UK. How was your Jubilee?

Perhaps I'll soon be calling myself a Galway Girl. But it's not something I planned...

I am sitting in a café in Galway City on the West Coast of Ireland, spreading blackcurrant jam on a croissant while my partner works her way through a vegetarian fry-up that I wish I had ordered too. Above us, on several walls, large screens are showing Sky News coverage of the Queen’s Jubilee, live from The Mall in London.   Appropriately, the Irish Guards, a regiment first formed when the country in which I am now sitting was still part of the United   Kingdom, is parading with its enormous Irish Wolfhound mascot. The dog looks placid enough. I wonder in passing if a dog can have a   sense of conflicting loyalties and split heritage?

Questions of loyalty, heritage and belonging are ones about which I have been thinking a lot since our plane touched down in Shannon last weekend. I am here in this café because I wanted to get out of the UK   this week and I wanted to do this because I am a trans woman. I live in England - a country in which I was born and where I have lived for 56 of my 60 years - but this week I am spending time traveling Ireland researching possible places to live, if – as seems possible quite soon – it will no longer be an option for someone like me to live in England. Ireland is no nirvana for trans people; the cost of living is very high and specialist healthcare is well known to be a disaster. But the British culture wars within which hatred of trans people is a prominent part haven't taken hold here in anything like the same way, and despite numerous attempts the so-called 'Gender Critical' voices that have aggressively hounded trans people in the UK for years have found it much harder to gain significant traction, yet at least. And then, of course, there's EU law - the framework that gave trans people their legal protections in the UK and which the post-Brexit British government is now intent on dismantling. Ireland isn't leaving the EU anytime soon. 

Meanwhile in the UK, the evidence is mounting. The trajectory of the populist, opportunistic government, fuelled by a poisonous ideology of the hard-right increasingly merged with a marginal and exclusionary version of feminism is snowballing its way towards making life intolerable for trans people in the UK. Amongst the recent moves, guidance has been released by the government’s Equal Opportunities body, the EHRC, actively encouraging blanket bans of trans women, under all circumstances, from women’s changing rooms, toilets and hospital wards. Court action is underway – with high-powered trans-exclusionary feminist lawyers at the helm - to prevent rape crisis centres from helping trans women. Plans seem to be on the table to make the lives of trans children (often subject to bullying and highly prone to self-harm and suicide as a result of it) much more difficult, denying them the right to be treated in their lived gender in school, or to be medically supported outside. Fears of a new ‘Section 28’ – the legislation in place from the 1980s until 2003 which outlawed the mention of gay or lesbian identities in schools (Florida has just introduced it too) are very real. This time, the focus may be on trans identity.

Beyond this, (and having reversed a previous commitment to reform the outdated Gender Recognition Act), the British government has stated that Conversion therapy for trans people – the practice of coercing them to become cisgender – is to remain legal, despite a decision to criminalise the same practice when inflicted on lesbian or gay cisgender people. The police are being instructed to gather ‘sex assigned at birth’ data from trans people who are victims of crime (something almost always completely irrelevant to events); a decision that will at a stroke cut the likelihood of trans people reporting crime (to a widely transphobic police force) and thus making them even more vulnerable, more hidden. An obsession with penises – their presence or absence, their meaning – is everywhere in the media and in Parliament. The decrepit, dishonest, Conservative government, having seemingly identified the question of trans rights as a ‘wedge’ issue with which to split the opposition Labour Party, looks like it has briefed its MPs to make hateful statements about trans people at any opportunity, without regard to their accuracy, legal or otherwise. In 2022 so far, bigoted and hostile statements have come from Ministers of Health, Education and Equalities with a truly shocking recent contribution about no longer "pandering" to trans children from The Attorney General. Plus, of course, there's the Prime Minister himself, who increasingly dogwhistles anti-trans tropes in the House of Commons to embarrass his opposite number, to distract from his own dishonesty and incompetence, or to glean supportive press coverage.

And about that coverage... month after month, year after year, the British press piles on the lies and monsters trans people with a hatred that seems to grow all the time. Led by The London Times, a paper widely read by MPs and the Judiciary, headlines have become increasingly deranged and blatant, with hostile non-stories about trans people appearing on front pages even whilst Europe is at war with the possibility of global starvation, whilst energy prices double or triple, whilst ordinary people in the UK suffer a generation-defining drop in living standards, whilst climate change destroys our planet and whilst the Prime Minister lies and lies. Or bleats on about reintroducing pounds and ounces. 

To top it all off, last night a Jubilee present to the UK trans community. The founder of a wildly trans hostile group, Transgender Trend, (which works to remove the rights of trans children to be recognised or supported in schools - the clue is in its name) has just been given a medal in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. That’s the British State signaling its intentions. And on the second day of Pride Month too.

Which brings me back to the screens above me as I finish my croissant, deep in the West of a country whose citizens fought and died to become independent from the brutal hand of British imperial control. The layers of it all are not lost on me, because all that is part of my personal story too. My mother was Irish, bequeathing me the chance at an Irish passport, something I took up when Britain made the catastrophic decision to leave the EU. But she was a Protestant – one of the 5% who grew up in the Free State initially and then the Republic. Desperate to get out of an impoverished theocracy, like so many in her early twenties, she went to England to find a job. 

Before then, my Anglican English Grandfather, living as a middle-class middle-manager in Cork during the Civil War, had been condemned to death by the IRA and ‘court martialed'. He stayed alive because his Catholic friends went and argued for him on the night. I grew up hearing stories, from my Irish Protestant Mum about how her Irish Protestant Mum had had to attend the local police station day after day to extract a maid or a housekeeper who had been picked up – again – by the brutal and violent Black and Tans (a force inserted to ostensibly protect the interests of her family, with its English Head of Household) but who were widely seen as mindless, dangerous thugs). 

On then a few decades...to my Mum's arrival in Nottingham to take up a training role as a physiotherapist in 1949, and her meeting with the cocky young Army officer who became my father. He had spent much of the preceding decade putting himself in harm’s way on behalf of the country from which I have this week run (first on the anti-aircraft guns of Bristol and London, then in Italy, and later in Palestine). I reflect on this as above me, on the television, the British army parades on the screens in full ceremonial dress – bearskins and scarlet with braid and medals. Later, there will be a 4 ton gold coach on the Mall and Spitfires and Hurricanes in the sky – the age of these icons and the reverence with which they are always deployed silently symbolic of an unsayable national grief that Britain is not that country still - with its exceptionalism and its Imperial might on which the sun never set. Or perhaps there's a deeper delusion still, that we are still somehow that country underneath - if only we could be free of the confusing cultural distractions (racial equality, immigration, multiculturalism, sexual and gender identity, societal compassion?) that have messed things up since the Americans and the Russians completed a victory against Hitler that we still like to tell ourselves was entirely ours? Perhaps the delusion explains why a gold coach built for a King who still ruled America can take part in a contemporary ceremony and be considered relevant to now in some strange way? Perhaps its why the flight of propeller-driven fighter aircraft shortly to appear, planes that helped defend Britain's skies in the years of her father’s reign not Elizabeth’s (a time when my own father risked his life for Britain and when two of my uncles, on each side of the family, lost theirs) are somehow understood as symbolic of current Britain, when in fact they are machines built for a Britain of 80 years ago?

Whatever it is all about, here I am now, my father’s daughter, in my mother’s country – a place she was desperate to leave and for which the British showed centuries of contempt – wondering if it might give me sanctuary. 

Emotions start to flow within me as I watch the screens. I recall the excitement of being a seven-year-old, taken to a Trooping of the Colour. Now, sitting here, I feel regret, sadness, isolation, fatigue, anger, loss, relief and fear for the future. I didn’t want to be in England this week. But much as I like my mother's country of birth and its people, I didn't want to have to be here this week either. Because that's how it feels - our trip to Ireland was carefully planned to coincide with all of this, the perfect excuse to avoid having to try and excavate a dead sense of belonging or come up with some sort of cheery patriotic small talk at the street party that my oblivious, royalist neighbours were arranging.

So that's it I guess. Here I am, in Galway, wondering what now, wondering why the country of my birth is doing this to me, wondering why it thinks that I deserve it, why it doesn’t want me to feel part of what is happening today?

As I finish my croissant and pack up for the Dublin stage of our reconnaissance trip, I sense that Britain – the country in which I have grown up and called home for almost my entire life - is trying to not just take my future from me, with its plans to isolate and remove people like me from society, but my past too. I can feel tears inside somewhere but I am going to restrain them. I have a train to catch.