I’m trans. British politicians, journalists and sports regulators say I don’t exist. But my 81 year old Mum disagreed.
If you are cisgender - that is when the gender you were assigned at birth fits you just fine and you've never questioned it inside - you're possibly going to be struggling right there.
Certainly, if you live in Britain or in many parts of the Mid-Western or Southern US you're going to find plenty of people around you (perhaps you are one yourself?) who'd respond to what I have just written by saying 'Wait, that's just rubbish. That notion of being a gender inside that isn't what got written on your birth certificate isn't even a thing is it!?'
Perhaps they - or you - think it's some sort of ideology - a web of lunatic theory that some pseudo-academic came up with about 20 years ago - into which I have plunged? An 'ism' of some kind? I could point out that the experience I went through has been experienced in various ways by countless others, documented through centuries in all cultures (some of which welcomed us, some of which venerated us, some of which hated us, some of which killed us, but none of which we derailed or damaged or threatened), but I might just be doing so to people who have their fingers in their ears. It often feels that way - listening is a lost art these days.
Perhaps they - or you - are going to double down next with some version of the words, 'This nonsense! Trans people don't even exist. It's a delusion, an illness, a pathology, or a perversion. It's something that's been created by Big Pharma, or a Shadowy Conspiracy. It's against the laws of God or the Natural Order. It's a plot by men to invade women's sports so women can never win anything again, or predatory men to invade women's changing rooms, to rape them and kill them, even to empty the whole meaning of the term 'woman' of meaning...'.
I hear those words, in some form, in some newspaper, on some tv or radio channel, on some social media site, from some politician or 'commentator' or from self-appointed 'expert', literally every single day. Every day. And it's not like I go looking for it. Though I create defences, it routinely punches through. Last week, UK Athletics told people like me that I didn't exist as I know myself to be and I will never be allowed to take part in a competitive track or field event with women. Bizarrely, tellingly, I can join the men's events, they added. And if I have already entered a competition, they've said that I may continue, but I will have my time or performance erased, I will not be eligible to hold any records, nor have my placing in the event recorded, nor win any medals. I will become air, an empty space, like I wasn't there at all.
Today the British Swimming authorities have introduced a ban even more draconian - with trans women and girls vilified and stigmatized at every level, from changing rooms to overnight accommodation to the pool, with insinuations about the 'danger' we pose sexually* It's no surprise perhaps when swimming seems so influenced by anti-LGBTQ figures like Sharon Davies who have been campaigning for the total elimination of trans women from women's swimming for years.
It is very likely to get worse in Britain. Also today, news has emerged that hard-right Kemi Badenoch, the most trans-hostile (and frankly all woman-hostile) 'Equalities' Ministers that this country has ever seen, has received advice about changing the 2010 Equality Act, from the UK's gleefully bigoted Equality and Human Rights Commission. If she follows it, it will moreorless tear up the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. The EHRC is keen to replace references to gender as the bedrock of trans people’s protection with ‘biological sex’ (just as hardcore Republicans in the US are doing). This will drive public bodies like the NHS and local authorities to introduce anti-trans practices in hospitals and school. Trans women, irrespective of legal status or surgical history, will no longer be able to be housed on women's wards. Given the fact that the NHS is out of resources, money and staff already, the reality of enforcing an entirely unnecessary and punitive piece of prejudice on a small group of trans women who need hospital treatment, for ideological kicks and because of a fictional threat, is repellent. In education, trans pupils will be forced to use changing rooms or toilets that accord with what's written on their birth certificates, with all the attendant risks, or funnelled off into 'special' facilities that mark them out as targets another way.
Other organisations may - if the government goes ahead with such an approach - follow suit on all this, egged on by the British press (government agencies, councils, public universities might be obliged to by law.) It would be legally allowed to force trans women to use men’s toilets (or indeed to force trans men into women’s ones). Some sort of policing of this arrangement - relying on the production of a birth certificate is perhaps envisaged (which must be inspected to check it was issued ‘at birth’)? Longer term the government has been salivating about replacing the Equality Act in its entirety. Once it tears up all EU law later this year, it can.
The disconnection with actual reality and the resulting erasure deepens every day. The Tories might be able to stop replacing the Prime Minister every twenty minutes but the incoherent policy chaos, in which decisions are driven by ideology alone and not actual facts, sustains.
Increasingly, according to the powerful and the loud in British society, I don't exist. At one level, it's possible that my physical safety will come under threat as hate crime continues to rise whilst the government dog-whistles and its newspapers fuel the hate. Or my need for hospital treatment will result in me not receiving it at all (never mind the 7 million plus long waiting lists, there will be no facilities for me unless I agree to be housed as a man, which I will never, ever, do).
Even assuming that I manage to stay alive, within the context of gender - something that for good or ill operates as a bedrock for society - the erasure goes on.
Let's look at reality, as in my actual life? I know that I don't exist as a man, because phenomenologically, in my actual life, I am not one. I don't live as one, see myself as one. From the external perspective, I don't get treated as one, I don't look like one (whatever that means, but cisgender society seems to obsess about it), I don't speak like one. I am full of oestrogen and legally I am not a man. That's my list, and there are other things on it that are no one's business but my own. Others will have theirs by which they actually live as women.
Yet despite all this actual reality in my life, I am increasingly told that I don't exist as a woman. I am not to be allowed to take part in women's sports, should not be allowed to enter women's spaces like changing rooms, or toilets or women's hospital wards. I should not be allowed to join all-women shortlists, the same activists say, and I am not to get help from women's refuges if I am raped. Indeed, when it comes to rape and violence, the voices that crowd the newspapers and government benches and social media obsess over my (entirely fictional) apparently built-in predisposition to want to do the raping and the violence to other women, rather than the (factual) reality of the increased chances of it happening to me. Remind you of theories behind racial hatred much?
So let’s summarise. What am I then?
I am a woman but the politicians and the newspapers say that I am not.
I am a man say the politicians and the newspapers but I say that I am not.
It's a zero-sum game. I become nothing. I cannot, will not, live my life or see myself as a man, no matter what efforts are made to make that happen. But if the government will not acknowledge me as a woman either (though I know I am, but for the practical purpose of staying alive that doesn’t matter), I vanish from society. I don't exist.
Those who hate trans women know this. Re-read what I wrote about how trans women currently competing in athletics events are to be treated and imagine a whole society that operates like that in respect of trans people.
And of course, to not exist means to deserve no rights, no consideration, to not even be classed as human. Read the history books and look at how various minorities were first deprived of the societal ‘place’ they’d previously enjoyed, and then the worst happened. Societies often don’t care much about killing people who are not ‘part’ of that society, so groups to be scapegoated are lifted out of society first (see also British government policy on asylum seekers - whom they wish to physically lift off British soil en masse for these reasons. It’s so depressingly transparent).
But there's a big problem with the narrative of those who wish me gone.
I do exist. We do exist.
I know it, because I live my existence and the meaning I give it.
Someone else knew it too - someone ultimately more important than every pompous politician, cynical journalist or sports body Chairperson - though grasping that knowledge required of her a monumental reevaluation of everything she thought she knew, in an instant. Going back to 15 years ago, I recall and now hold on to the strength she gave me in the face of all this.
I am talking about my mother - the woman in the bottom left corner of the photograph at the top of this page.
My mum was 81 when the news of my inner self dropped. Living alone, having been widowed many years before, she'd been long haunted by depression plus a loss of direction and meaning in her life. A dose of breast cancer around the time my dad died almost killed her too, but radical treatment saved her life at a time when the odds were stacked against her. I tried to support her in the ensuing years but she was often joyless, emotionally demanding and self-absorbed. Physically, though frail, she was in reasonably good health as she entered her 80s.
Though somewhere inside my mother she was liberal-minded and tolerant, it had become very hard to find that part of her beneath the sedimented bitterness and I was dreading her reaction the day in 2007 when I went to give her my news. As I sat with her in her lounge that day and told her that I was getting divorced - and then told her why - I was expecting to add the loss of my mum to the very painful loss of a 19-year marriage.
She was, predictably, stunned when I showed her a photograph of the 'new' me (to her at least). "Who's that?" she asked. Then the penny dropped like an anvil from the roof garden of a skyscraper. "It's you isn't it?" she said. I'd done my work of hiding it all over the years very well and she'd had no idea. I could see her processing an internal question, "How could I not have seen this?" Because I was too frightened to show it to you I would have said.
We talked. She asked questions. She was anxious for me, anxious about how the world would treat me. I didn't have an answer for that but said that ultimately that couldn't be the issue. I simply could not go on without allowing my true self to come into the light.
She couldn't understand, she said, but that didn't matter. It wasn't the point and she said so. She accepted me - that day. She accepted my existence as me, as Jo, her daughter, a woman, that day. Then she asked me what Jo was short for. Strangely perhaps, I'd never really thought about it. I'd always just used Jo. 'Er, I don't know", I said. "Joanne?" I ventured. My Mum didn't think much of that idea, and I will always remember her Cork accent in my head as she said "I don't like Joanne. Josephine. You're Josephine!".
And so she named me too. Which is what a parent is supposed to do isn't it?
For the next six months, my divorce was on then it was off, for some complex and dreadful reasons. Through that time, my previously difficult and cantankerous Mum became my rock. She suggested that I bring clothes around to her house to store and when I visited her I'd transform myself into my genuine self and we'd go out, shopping or for lunch. She'd never had anyone to help her choose clothes before and she loved it. She seemed a changed woman, confiding in me in completely new ways and advising me on makeup and jewelry.
I gave her the picture I had shown her and she framed it for the sideboard. "What will you tell the neighbors?" I asked, wondering about how she'd manage the sudden arrival of a photo of a daughter she'd never mentioned before, but she seemed completely unfazed by that possibility.
For six months, my Mum told me that I exist. That I am real. That my understanding of myself, despite all the years that had gone by, was, and remains, absolutely enough. It needed no qualification and it did not need to be 'understood', less still denied.
And then she died, very suddenly, just after Christmas. Taken ill on the day after Boxing Day, she died 36 hours later. Her body had been weakened by a brush with shingles a few weeks earlier and though she had seemed more or less to have come through, tests revealed a pervasive and deadly pneumonia.
There's one more thing to add. About a week later I went to see her body in the Chapel of Rest at a Funeral Director near her home. I rang before and explained that whatever the paperwork said, my Mum didn't have two sons, but one son and one daughter. They couldn't have been nicer, and so I arrived, as me, as she had taken joy in seeing me, to say goodbye. I had written her a long letter, which I read to her. I could feel her bristle when I brought up times when it had been hard between us. But I thanked her for her love and for what she had done for me in the last few months, from a place deep inside me, and I felt it again in the room. I put the photo that she had liked in the coffin with her.
There could be no other way for me from that point than to follow the path I knew I had to take, to become fully myself, all the time, to the world, and that's exactly what happened. A few months later, with her house sold, I received enough money to help me through the medical and legal journey on which I had embarked and to keep me going when, largely alone, I had to remake my life. Her final gift to me.
I think of my Mum often. Her memory and her unequivocal acceptance give me strength when I look at the small-minded, fear-driven intolerance, the inability to flex, to change, to include, that has emerged in British society now. I can see in the muddled, nonsensical, and bigoted reactions of British sports authorities, politicians or columnists to trans people that they do not understand our experience. That their lack of understanding inspires their fear.
But I can also see that you do not have to understand to accept or to love because my Mum taught me that in those six months. That's a strength that is embedded in me deeply now.
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The full policy really is something to behold and I'd urge you to read it, such is its depth of prejudice. Has anyone there ever even met a trans person?
A few highlights from its FAQ section include: "I am a membership secretary and I am unsure an athlete is being truthful about their gender, what do I do?"
Meaning: A trans person's gender is not valid but do make sure you do not insult a cisgender person by suggesting that they might be trans. You don't want to smear the cis person or suggest they might be a cheating trans person.
"I am a team manager and an athlete who identifies as female wants to room share with other females, what do I do?"
Meaning: Trans women are thus assumed to be a safety risk to cisgender women. But it will presumably be fine for a trans woman to share a room with cisgender men.
"My child wants to identify as female, how do I ask the Club to respect their wishes?"
"In an unlicensed competition, can a trans male athlete wear jammers only?"
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