The public show trial of trans people in the UK.

Edit: February 22nd, 2023. 

I wrote this in January. A couple of weeks later, a 16-year-old trans girl, Brianna Ghey, was knifed to death in a public park in the north of England. Two days ago, India Willoughby, who is trans and recently appeared on the BBC's Question Time programme to a volley of panelist and audience abuse that left her shaken, received a written death threat from British neo-Nazi group 'National Action'. In the face of a rapidly deteriorating situation in the UK, created and exploited by the British government and the British media, my hope is that readers can pay particular attention to the final paragraph of this piece and then follow some of the links. 

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In the fifteen years since I transitioned, I have felt many things. Initially, the expansive, sudden joy of finally being able to present myself to the world as me. In the metaphor first used by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, my ‘false self’ – the mask I had put on to stay safe and to function in the world (something many of us develop in our own ways) – had been torn off. It wasn’t a ‘choice’ to do that, at least in the way that some might understand the word. Increasingly over the years, that mask had been very painful to wear, but it did its job. For decades I had put up with the distress of wearing it, terrified that its disappearance would expose the raw flesh of a true me to the world. It was a vital protection, or so, at some level, I thought. 

That fear-based strategy could never last though. The mask began to loosen. Eventually, a series of personal crises ripped it away like magma blowing thousands of tons of rock off the top of an ancient volcano long thought extinct and I stepped out into a kind of caldera to feel the breeze on my skin properly for the first time in my life. It was exhilarating, but it was a caldera in the midst of an eruption. Around me, rocks and ash were falling. My family fell apart. I lost my marriage, my home, much money, many friends, my business, and, for some years, my children. In the time immediately following, I felt a loneliness like I have never felt before or since and was, occasionally, suicidal. One night, the Samaritans were probably all that stood between me and a local railway bridge. That and the inescapable knowledge that to do it would detonate even more devastation amongst those I loved than I seemed already to have caused.  

I have always accepted that the process I went through brought with it the necessity of readjustment by others. I had lived for years with the fear that they would just refuse to do this, and so it proved amongst many. The way to handle all this healthily – for us all - would have been to grow through a period of change, helping each other to come to terms with what was happening. For reasons that are to do with the disgust and rage in some of those close to me, I was powerfully prevented from helping others to engage with my journey and to take their own. 

Yet I began to rebuild and reintroduced myself to the world. I had much to do to survive – psychologically, emotionally and financially. There were complex and expensive legal and medical questions to face. I tried to find people who could help me and, luckily, I did, in a trans community that understood very well what I was going through, plus new friends, mostly cisgender women, who welcomed me as a woman and who held my head above water. From some I found a kind of support that I had never encountered before - a sisterly depth and intimacy of which most men are, I think, completely unaware. I was also buoyed by the hope that the time in which all this was happening seemed to be one when progressive and inclusive politics were visible. The Gender Recognition Act had been passed, the Equality Act was about to be, and a few years later, the Equal Marriage Act came into force. The media – the tabloid press especially – remained a toxic cesspit of smear and ridicule for people like me (launching witch-hunts and phone lines to ‘out’ trans people), but even that seemed to be slowly changing as Editors detected a shifting public mood and looked to monetise it. 

Beneath it all, though, I couldn’t shake a sense of bewilderment about how some had reacted to me when they heard the news of my transition. That bewilderment has grown in the years since, especially in the last six - though I have begun to assemble a painful answer of sorts - as the attitudes I hoped were beginning to take root in my country have lately been slammed into reverse in Britain. The last few years have brought back for me the hurt and bafflement when so many people simply walked away. When it all happened, friends of old (with a tiny number of important exceptions) wanted nothing to do with me. Work colleagues ghosted me. Clients wouldn’t pick up the phone from me. A few of these cases might be explained by the inevitable consequences of the car-crash divorce I was going through. But when, one night, I lay in bed and counted fifty people to whom I had reached out to share my news and who had subsequently not responded or even made clear that they wanted no further contact, I knew the divorce alone was far from the whole story. I could understand surprise or shock, but the rush to erase me from their lives was something I felt completely blindsided by. In 2023, it's not friends and colleagues, but - or so it feels to me - the country itself that’s walking away.

In a grim sense, it’s actually been the parade of hatred against and lies about trans women in the British press in the last few years that has helped me understand why that all happened to me, back then. It seemed, for these erstwhile friends and colleagues, that my news had meant I'd turned into something else on the spot. Something that, despite the deepest explanation I could offer them, often in a long email or letter, with which many simply couldn’t deal. I was perhaps betraying an unspoken set of certainties, becoming alien and strange - or worse, something frightening or delusional.  

In 2008, I was naively baffled by this rejection. It didn’t square with my inward sense of myself at all. I was still me, just living more authentically. The caterpillar and the butterfly have the same DNA. Despite the pain of family fragmentation, inwardly I was much more at ease and less angry with myself. Not waking every day with a deep, tinnitus-like feeling of sadness and confusion. No longer looking in the mirror and vaguely wondering who the person looking back was. For the first time since I had been a child, moments of unmistakable joy started to appear in my life, especially as I reconstructed my life and started to live it - thankfully able to rebuild at least a few close family relationships. I still held the same values. The same deep love for my children. My talents in my job remained unchanged. My career experience hadn’t disappeared. I had the same politics and the same sense of humour. I liked the same foods. I still loved the Greek islands, South West France, poetry, red wine and photography. I still paid my taxes, ate too much cheese and the half-written novel I had tried to write remained unfinished though my interest in one day completing it hadn’t changed either. 

These were some of the many things by which I understood myself. Yet it seemed that in one single moment, others had decided that these things (many of which had been the basis on which I connected with others and created friendships) counted for nothing anymore. I felt bewildered. What had caused this sudden and total re-evaluation of me into something that they couldn’t position in their lives, something for which couldn’t quite find a definition for (my explanation, one that I held dear and meaningful – woman – didn’t resonate for them)? At best, I think, some parked the whole question in their mental long grass, unable to engage, yet quietly pestered by this nagging and unclosed gestalt. 

A simple and convenient answer eventually came for them (and for others who had started to hear of this strange term 'transgender'), on a national scale, in the newspapers. Not in the early years of my new life, as the press and broadcasters briefly flirted with a retreat from bigotry, but soon after, as the political and social zeitgeist pulled a handbrake turn of terrifying speed. The answer to the baffling question of what trans people really were started to take shape for national press readers. Like something never actually seen but awful, hiding beneath the country's bed, we were monsters. This idea, offered to a public largely unaware of the real lives of trans people (a tiny part of the population, so few cisgender people were able to draw upon actual experience to call out this new wave of prejudice), also chimed well with a larger cultural narrative driven by anxiety and an insecure national identity. 

In the years since 2016, hatred of trans people has become the Swiss Army Knife of Hatreds. Attitudes did not harden along political lines (as they also hadn’t done for LGB people at least into this century), meaning a coalition of prejudice could emerge in a way impossible for most other issues and the trans community was (and is) left without a reliable political home. Transphobia has been given intellectual cover on the left via the outlook of a small but highly influential group of trans-exclusionary feminists (in politics, the media, or the legal profession) who’d formed their opinions in the 1970s and 1980s and who slotted trans women straight into a narrative of male violence towards women and oppression of them. On the political right, a new generation of nativist, xenophobic, conservative Christian and/or racist politicians saw trans people (and especially trans women) as a gift that could keep on giving; a largely unknown minority, framed as strange, challenging to the natural order and ripe for exploitation as predators on the vulnerable. 

The right was fast to exploit the theories of the anti-trans left, a group whose political views on literally every other issue they held in contempt. These views offered some sort of intellectualisation which served well to gloss their instinctive prejudice, creating for it arguments and seeming substance that could be repackaged to sound ‘reasonable’ much more effectively than their more traditional play of lies, fear and hatred. Suddenly right-wing MPs or Tory Members of the House of Lords were adapting the arguments of Marxist feminists. The Daily Mail was inviting hardened socialist female journalists to write for them. And the ‘Gender Critical’ lobby began to expand from its left-wing fringe roots, to welcome bigots of the right from almost anywhere, including well-resourced anti-abortion, LGBT+ hating, Christian evangelical think tanks and groups from the US. The result of it all is a national ‘debate’ which blends untruth and smear with the faux intellectual substance of a tiny extremist group of feminists into a toxic swamp. The recipe can be - and is - tweaked depending on the audience. The New Statesman, Times or Guardian? More conceptual and hidden behind faux-reasonable language to speak to a university-educated audience. The Daily Telegraph? More choleric rage. BBC Radio 4? A bit of both maybe. Though in truth the lines are blurring and pieces appear across the board that, taken together, are a cynical, dishonest mess. And the volume of those pieces seems to rise every month.

The sweet spot around which the grim coalition of anti-trans interests could all group has been the notion of trans women as a ‘sexual threat’. In public parlance, this term means rapist, groomer, or paedophile and each concept has a long and disgraceful history within discrimination against minorities. Black men, gay men, immigrants and asylum seekers, Jews, and other groups have all had to deal with being defamed in this way, smeared with the most primal of lies. And, like clockwork, trans women - as a group - have taken their place as the latest to be painted in these colours, to the point that the press and the BBC routinely use a new compound noun: transgender rapist, leaving the impression that the two terms sit locked together, (choosing to avoid the simple, accurate, alternative of rapist, as cisgender offenders would be described.)*  

As a trans woman in Britain, increasingly watching my country become unrecognisable, I know that I am not alone in my fear. Many trans people, myself included, are making detailed plans to get out of Britain – the country of our birth – if we can. I would need to leave my family and a rebuilt career. I make those plans because I can open almost any British newspaper of whatever political complexion on almost any day, and find its answer to the question inwardly asked by those who walked away from me fifteen years ago: What am I? The media and the government have answered it for them, and the country, with the easily graspable lie; I am dangerous, to be isolated and shunned simply because of the group to which I belong. My individual self, my real life, my real character, my real nature, or any evidence unrelated to my gender identity is irrelevant now. Not that the government, especially certain hard right figures within it, or the British newspapers, seem in any way interested in my personal innocence, or that of the thousands like me who are not and never will be the monsters, predators or threats that we have been portrayed as. Nor are they even slightly inquisitive about the measurable reality of trans people's lives, as hate crime against LGBTQ+ people in the UK is now climbing each year at an astonishing rate (no prizes for guessing why of course. They caused it.) 

The government and the media’s rhetoric, the conflation of trans identity per se with predatory criminality, moves to eliminate the very concept of the trans child (I was one), even the notion of being trans at all, and the wrapping of all this into an unchallengeable, politically bulletproof cover of wanting to ‘keep women and girls safe’ (in the name of God, something we all want, myself included!) or 'sex-based rights' (a term that doesn't actually exist in British law), feels terrifying. I find myself mentally having to defend myself, like an unrepresented defendant in a dock, in some nightmare, accused of the worst of crimes. And when I stand to speak in response to the insults of the prosecution to that previously jammed courtroom, I find that it has instantly emptied out. There's no one to hear me speak. I am not a journalist. I don't host The Today Programme. I am not an MP. 

It often feels like I'm living through some kind of never-ending national Show Trial in which I and all other trans people are guilty, whatever we say or do. If the law actually defends me by saying the opposite, by stating that I do not represent a threat unless there is evidence relating to me specifically (and not just implied by my being placed into some 'dangerous' group by others), then the Prime Minister talks of changing the law to introduce a presumption of danger from me and others that it categorises with me. This smells of ‘precrime’; codified legal assumptions of guilt about broad groups made without evidence and before offenses even take place. Trans women are placed together and assumed to be dangerous (see: changing rooms, toilets and women’s prisons or hospital wards), or cheats (see: women's sports), or there only to hurt women in other ways (see: all-women shortlists) and excluded. Beyond this, trans children or young people are placed into a category named, 'Confused' or 'Exploited' or even (from a senior Tory frontbencher), 'Abused'. Anything but 'Real'. Individual life stories, circumstances, innocence or guilt become irrelevant, it is enough that they are trans. And when an individual who is, or who claims to be trans, is apprehended for genuine wrongdoing, as is bound to happen within all sections of society, the conflation loop is neatly connected. Here is evidence of what 'they' are all like, and what 'they' will all do! The assignation of guilt is collective, the consequences must be too. So much of this is doubtless depressingly familiar to black people, immigrants, Muslims, refugees, or asylum seekers. The only extra, uniquely British, aspect that we can maybe add is that these days, bigotry towards the trans community is embedded in both sides of the House of Commons, and in pretty much every mainstream British newspaper. You’ll find regular and energetic misrepresentation or thinly concealed hatred in The Guardian or Observer and The Times or Sunday Times (though Hell will freeze over before the UK trans community will ever forgive Times Newspapers for their fanatical witch hunt.)

Trans people in Britain matter now only as a political pawn, a largely defenseless community that’s so small and so irrelevant to the failures over which the government has presided that it can be used as a zero-cost distraction. There's further to go until they are finished with us.  There is a strong likelihood that the Conservatives and their press will attempt to weaponise all this even more, to damage its divided political opponents over the coming months. As the country dies on staggeringly long NHS waiting lists, as its standard of living drops further, as its schools fall apart, as sewage pours into our seas and as the climate crisis deepens, expect trans women to be a major 'election' issue. 

I have read stories of how in the early 1930s, some German shopkeepers who had fought in the German army in the First World War and who were now faced with government hatred and violent mobs on the streets, put up signs to declare their allegiance and their military records. Some even displayed their medals - evidence of their loyalties and their connection to the country; a connection they felt deeply enough to have risked their lives for it. They did this because they were Jewish.

It made no difference. They had their windows smashed and 'Juden Raus' scrawled on their doors anyway. I have no medals to display, but the image stays with me as I think about where this country is going for trans people. If you are a cisgender person living in Britain and reading my words here, I'd like to ask you the question, do you want this? If you do not, time is now running out.

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* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64413242 The Daily Mail, inevitably, takes a similar approach https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11688293/amp/Trans-double-rapist-Isla-Bryson-demanded-5-000-BT-getting-letters-dead-name.html 

It's not so long since the British media was of course fond of grotesque headlines like 'Black mugger found guilty of assault' or, maybe going back a little further, 'Jewish fraudster charged with embezzlement'. I have yet to see 'White man commits mugging', or, more specific to the LGBT+ (particularly trans) experience in Britain; 'Cisgender woman guilty of sexual abuse', or 'Heterosexual man sent to prison for rape', despite each year hundreds or even thousands of such cases passing through the courts. There are even cisgender women in prison for rape. I await calls for blanket bans of cisgender women from women's prisons, toilets or hospital wards on the basis of the risk they as a group represent...

Want to know more about actual trans lives? Try this TED Talk or read this book or watch material by this woman or listen to this one or follow this one, or just get some actual facts here 

What can you actually DO? Some guidance is here and here