Making bigotry reasonable? Why the trans community in the UK is scared of Starmer (with appended section).

After some of the remarks made by Keir Starmer about trans women in the days leading up to the election, many in the trans community in the UK felt unable to celebrate the end of the grotesque Conservatives. Are his attitudes to us actually pretty close to those of the unhinged caricatures he replaced?

It's easy to hate the grotesques. The ones with their faces, or minds, bent in rage; who wear their prejudice like a badge, crowing about common sense or decency or national values, or whatever it is, and smearing their victims with theatrical lies. The British Conservative Party has over the last eight years or so developed a thriving wing of these deranged fanatics. Ex Home Secretary, Suella Braverman - increasingly the Marjorie Taylor-Greene of British politics - has not lost any of her zeal, it's clear. Despite her party ending up with the lowest number of MPs since 1832 last week, she's spent at least two of the four days since making speeches about how appalling trans people are. Again. Likewise, JK Rowling, a children's author, who seems to believe that she alone speaks for the women of Britain, and who revels in the status she has been given by the British media as Spokesperson for Feminism (despite the mainstream of feminism mostly abhorring her views), has barely missed a beat since the party she said she was voting against ended up with 412 seats and a vast majority. 

It's been a difficult few days for this crowd of haters. Denied their status in government or - for the bitter anti-trans lobby groups outside it - their Parliamentary sockpuppets, by the catastrophe that has befallen the Tory party, their efforts are now going into ensuring that Labour completes the mission. 

This requires a slight change of emphasis. The maniacal quasi-fascist hatreds of the Tory right may be less effective, as the Conservatives now publicly self-immolate (I hope). So step forward the Caring, Thoughtful, Terrifying Bigots of the centre-left. And if you are trans in the UK in 2024, you might be asking is Keir Starmer one of them?

Allow me to define the CTTBs. The ones we really don't like to hate. If these people were a newspaper column, think a Guardian, or more specifically, an Observer leader. Imagine it's essential reasonableness, the way it always starts by saying how it cares (good people on both sides), how it only wants the best for transgender people. If you can conjure a facial expression, imagine a faux-compassion, eyes set in a look of pretend-care, features arranged so as not to trouble the essential self-image of Niceness and Concern For All. Feel the self-deception and unacknowledged bias rigidly in place so as never to trouble these conceits. Imagine a cisgender person who doesn't know a trans woman, has never heard their story or what they have had to deal with just to get to a basic level of acceptance in British society (and then in the last few years have it piece by piece demolished, with chilling threats of much more to come) and who has little interest in changing any of that by educating themselves, because, well, you know, it's a bit challenging and difficult to their self-concept? 

But let's not dwell on that last bit. The New Reasonableness of the CTTBs just wants everyone to get along. 

So...calling trans women...

Enough of all this noisy fighting to be allowed to access the women's toilet, even though you might have been living as a woman - your authentic role - for decades, during which time you and never harmed anyone, and never would (though you might have been beaten up or insulted, or spat on in a public space), and you have literally no idea how you will exist in society if you can't use toilets.

Away with your extremist demands to be treated in a women's hospital ward, despite having had that de facto right in law for at least 50 years in the UK, without any issues arising at all, and no, even if you are one of the few who have managed to get through the demeaning gateways of the Gender Recognition process, that doesn't matter at all - any more.

Sit down and shut up about wanting kids who are asking questions about all this to be able to be sensitively taught about it in schools, or if it's a real experience for them (as it was for you) to be given social or (temporary) medical support, as they are in other countries.

And look, you're just causing trouble when you mention that at least 16 children have died waiting for support from gender services since the government withdrew that temporary medical support, despite the High Court saying there was no reason to do so, and despite a wealth of evidence of how important, even life saving, it is. And no we're not interested that this is being covered up, you're just restarting a culture war aren't you? It's not even in the newspapers is it? Where's your ITV drama with Toby Jones?

Has this country just elected a government that's so nice it could kill us whilst giving us a concerned, compassionate face and a smile, never even slightly moved from its smug, self-satisfied belief in its own reasonableness?

We have yet to see. But the initial signs do not augur well.

In the days before the election, Keir Starmer stated that trans women are not women, that trans women (including those with full legal recognition, a reissued birth certificate and those have been lucky enough to get to head of the 5+ years long NHS waiting list to have surgery) should not be allowed to use women's toilets, and that "gender ideology" (a term invented by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1990s to, amongst other things, smear trans people) should not be taught in schools (well, it isn't Keir, because it doesn't exist).  He has also supported moves to stop trans women being treated in women's hospital wards and to have them eliminated from women's sports (which the CTTBs in sport have almost succeeded entirely in doing, after demented attacks on us by Tory politicians in the last 6 years). 

When Starmer stood outside No 10 and spoke to the nation last Friday he noted that his new government would govern 'without doctrine', imagining, I suspect, that he was speaking to the national weariness at the unhinged ideological crusades of his predecessors. But a chill ran down my spine. I thought of the extraordinary play Good by CP Taylor, the story of Professor John Halder, a German Everyman who believes himself 'good' - a conviction from which he is never shaken, as he is drawn step by step into a web of Nazi evil. It was a role powerfully played recently by David Tennant, a man who has had the courage to stand alongside us and to speak out, as so many have not. The Guardian, a paper beautifully adept at seeing the moral blindness of others, but rarely in itself, said this: 

What Taylor shows, and Tennant conveys so unnervingly, is that a lack of principle and ideological zeal can in fact create the zealot. “I don’t believe in evil,” his lover tells him, but for Halder the bigger problem is belief itself. His slide into inhumanity comes about because of his not caring for others enough and not believing in anything enough.

Do I think of Starmer as a latter day Halder? Of course not. But Good makes the point that the opposite of bigotry is not to have no point of view of all. To fight evil requires you to believe in something, to have some kind of 'doctrine', not simply to abandon the idea of it altogether. All around the character of Halder in Good appear others who speak in the most reasonable terms. Each time they do so, the audience (though never Halder) uneasily notes how the meaning of the term has moved, and with each move, how the moral parameters within which it is defined have shifted. We see the dreadful direction of travel, but Halder, even as he, eventually, sends disabled people to clinics to be killed and later ends up in an SS uniform at Auschwitz, never wavers in his sense of his own compassion and decency, a frog gradually boiled in a vat of evil. 

Again - this absolutely isn't Starmer, or Labour. Though there are people in this country and elsewhere who want us to disappear from society completely, and attempts to 'cure' young trans people of the kind that the recent, repellent, Cass Review nodded to, represent the 'reasonable' face of that ambition, the biggest problem is the growing number of people who see moderacy as somehow about making an accommodation with bigotry and hatred, not rejecting it. As the new government gets screamed at by JK Rowling, by the well organised and deeply funded Gender Critical groups, by the press and the others who will line up to do so, we will see if they have the courage and the principle to protect us from the monstering, the seemingly never-ending hate.

I am aware that Labour has made some flimsy promises around revising the Gender Recognition Act (though their proposals seem now to be getting watered down, with new obstacles replacing old ones), without addressing the much, much bigger question (for trans women at least) of what is the point of being legally recognised as a woman if you are blanket banned from spaces created specifically for women, like the toilet, or a women's' hospital ward? 

I want to be wrong in the words I have written in this post. I really do. I want to believe that we may have moved into a world in which the British trans community can start to live without a sense of despair and fear. But given what Starmer has said in the last few weeks, the perma-dread that the Conservatives embedded in me has not lifted. I fear that Labour will not protect us. And if they do not, and we lose the rest of our basic human rights, if a new form of apartheid descends and we are separated from the rest of society, their decisions will of course sound very reasonable. 

*******

Addendum: July 12th: Moral Cowardice Already On Show? 

Today sees The Good Law Project in court trying to overturn the last, vindictive, move by the Conservatives, who - seeing that they were going to lose the election - embarked on a spree of well-poisoning activities to hurt trans people in the UK.

The very last was Victoria Atkin's final-day-of-the-Parliament legal ban of puberty blockers for trans teenagers - not just of puberty blockers prescribed within the UK (already banned for new patients by her government though they remain legal for cisgender young people, if indicated for various conditions) but those that might be sourced privately from clinicians abroad. Atkins was only able to pass a bill that would last three months, as Parliament was ending, but it seems that the new health Secretary, Wes Streeting (another who has emerged as no friend of the trans community), wants to make it permanent.

Puberty blockers are prescribed, sparingly, thoughtfully, to trans kids across Europe, Australia, New Zealand and in much of the United States (except those areas now in the grip of Trumpist Republicans). They suspend the appearance of secondary sexual characteristics, temporarily, for trans kids, thus 'buying time' for them as they explore their identity and their options. They have been used, without evidence of significant side effects, for several decades, and they help a tiny number of young people avoid what is - for them - sometimes the  psychologically disastrous consequences of puberty (breast growth, voice breaking, facial hair, muscle mass developing etc). These young people may seek to have some of these issues medically or surgically corrected, if they can (and of course, should they want to proceed to full transition), after they are 18. Some may never be overcome.

Puberty blockers have been a core part of treatment for years, and remain on the list of recommended options as recommended by The Endocrine Society and World Professional Association of Transgender health (WPATH; which contains hundreds of clinical experts and has been running for 40 years). I know of a number of children whose lives have likely been saved by having access to this treatment. Equally, as noted above, there is evidence that the withdrawal of blockers for teenagers (and with it the collapse of their last hope) has contributed to the death of at least sixteen young people since the Conservatives first removed the right to them from UK clinics, and then from those elsewhere. 

Meanwhile cisgender young people continue to be prescribed them, for conditions like precocious puberty. Hysteria about their possible side effects does not for some reason extend to this scenario, thus driving a bus loaded with disingenuous bigots through any claim that this is what is behind so-called 'concerns'.

Streeting's position - he also favours segregating trans women in hospitals - illustrates the nature of the Labour's party's new interest in a 'negotiation' that essentially solidifies and affirms the hatred that it inherited. Like a deal with Putin to perhaps give him a third of Ukraine, after he took it by force, the narrative of 'reasonableness' that is emerging seems to be a commitment to not reverse any of the violence done by the Tories to trans people in the UK (another is to ban discussion of trans people in schools) but to claim that the 'moderate' position is now to simply not do more. 

The trans community may be thus left broken in the hurt that has been done to them already with no hope of redress and facing the prospect as being smeared as 'wanting to restart the culture war' should it raise its voice against this morally-empty and cowardly position. To stretch the earlier metaphor, in the same way, someone who might be outraged by gifting Russia swathes of territory in another kind of war might find themselves being told to be quiet and stop 'wanting to restart hostilities'. Naturally the people who are most in favour of these kinds of 'compromises' are the aggressors.  

The Tories knew exactly what they were doing, and for the last six months of their tenure were working on legacy policies that they knew Labour, no matter what its impending majority might be, would not have the courage to reverse. As Starmer stood outside No 10 Downing Street on July 5th and talked about the end of 'doctrine', my deep fear was, and is, that he was articulating the embedded moral cowardice of the government he was about to lead. 

We shall see. 

Meanwhile, The Good Law Project, who for so long have fought against Tory corruption during Covid, and against Tory cruelty and venality, and who have stood alongside trans people throughout, are now advising that trans children and their families should consider leaving Britain.

One week into a new Labour government.