Endgame? Being trans and running out of hope.

I'm a trans woman living in Britain. I once hoped that my country might learn to treat us with acceptance, dignity and understanding. It feels now like I was wrong. As the hate has mounted I have watched much of the country turn away from us; many complacent, others frightened to engage, others joining a bandwagon of fear-based bigotry as they hurl social media or legal threats at us.

It's all part of an accelerating project to eliminate us completely from society.

The world of 2007 seems long gone now. There are of course the headline differences. The impending World Financial Crash was still just ahead of us, in Britain stimulating 14 years of brutal Tory rule. The disaster of the Arab Spring and the refugee crisis that wealthy Europe was to face had not yet happened, nor the catastrophe of Brexit with its self-inflicted, deranged, rightward lurch for a lost national meaning that never existed and its perma-platforming of hatred, bitter grievance and ethnonationalism under the banner of ‘free speech’. Putin still looked containable, in the United States the first black President was still two years away and few had even conceptualised the idea of a global pandemic that would kill tens of millions and then stimulate distrust and misinformation on an epic and uncontainable scale. Social media was in its infancy, the algorithm-for-immense-profit model of dividing people into warring and mutually suspicious groups for the benefit of advertisers or politicians just getting started. No-one had heard of Elon Musk and Donald Trump was a self-parody; a cartoonish character on a reality tv show.

For me, I recall 2007 for a very different reason. It was the year my poisonous marriage, and a lengthy period of humiliation, psychological and emotional abuse I had suffered, came to an end. After clinging on, trying to save it, the relationship finally collapsed, and I started the journey towards...me. My gender transition, 46 years in the making. 46 years of denial and of desperately trying to conform to the requirements of others, of pushing my inward knowledge away and, again and again, putting others’ needs ahead of mine. Was I a coward too, in not accepting the writing on the wall? A fear of isolation and the bleak unknown that I couldn't face? Probably some of both.

That collapse was explosive and the scars are deep within me still. But alongside it was a release, a hope, a sense of finally acknowledging something within myself that was fully, recognisably, me. My femaleness. It changed everything. Though times were hard for a few years (particularly around family relationships that left me feeling frightened and often very alone), part of me was full of energy and self-belief. Society seemed, slowly, to be coming round to noticing people and accepting people like me. There was a way to go, but the direction of travel felt positive. Media and political ridicule of trans people – trans women particularly – began to look unfashionable. Building on a little-known Act of Parliament in 2004 giving trans people the right to change their legal sex (into which the British government had been forced by the European Court; we might have done better to note the implications of that enforced change), society was starting to hear our voices, starting to reflect on what it had been doing to us for years. There was even some shame for that from journalists and editors, an apology of sorts. I know that because, stunned by some of the newspaper narrative I was seeing post transition, I was part of a group that spent a lot of time in that world, working to create more understanding, and I heard it from some.

How long ago it all seems. A lost dream. 

I have written before about the endless diet of hatred and prejudice to which the UK (and US) trans community is now subjected. Press and tv coverage is one part of it - it appears every day, often many times a day. A casual look at almost any prominent news site - any of the British newspapers or the BBC for example, will likely produce some story that either insinuates or directly casts us as a danger, as predators or extremists. Some newspapers remain obsessed with us at almost a visceral, even psychotic level (The Daily Telegraph comes to mind), despite the fact that we comprise less than 1% of the UK population. Political hatred of us is cross-party and acceptable, the product of a well-financed, professionalised and committed anti-trans lobby which has spent years developing connections, and has merged its interests with a right wing, anti-human rights bigot-filled political movement that has infected both major parties in the UK. 

From a time in which change and acceptance seemed possible, back then, trans women in the UK are now constantly publicly attacked and humiliated in the political, media and legal discourse. A brief, and incomplete list of actions taken against us include the continuing and relentless campaign to have us completely removed from many spheres of life. These range from public and single sex spaces like toilets or changing rooms (leaving us with nowhere to urinate or to change, shutting down access to vast parts of public life for us), to hospitals (where actual segregation of us is now a policy preference for the transphobic Health Secretary), to education (where trans girls - the term isn't even used any more in policy documents - are cast as a sexual threat and are effectively being eliminated via guidance produced by the last government), to already completely inadequate healthcare (where affirmative services are being calculatedly destroyed, most recently with the publication of the deeply biased, political stitch-up that was The Cass Review), followed by a complete ban on puberty blockers for trans young people only, in the face of widespread international criticism (and now a hostile new 'review' announced into adult trans care), to women's sport (from which trans women have now been more or less completely eliminated at all levels from cycling to sailing to fishing to...wait for it... women's international chess). Meanwhile, Conversion Therapy remains legal, even after a change of UK government and in the unlikely event that Labour bans it, trans people will - I am certain - be somehow excluded (indeed, in the psychotherapy community there's now renewed interest in pathologising trans people out of existence). Add to this the myriad personal aggressions against us, from the explosion in hate crime, to the increasing wave of GPs who are now refusing to treat us with the hormones we need, and a grim picture emerges. 

Legally, those who wants us gone have been tireless*. The Crown Prosecution Service has been hardening its advice around so-called 'sex by deception' recently and is now (likely illegally - but who cares?) guiding the legal profession that any trans person who doesn't disclose the sex written on their original birth certificate to a potential sexual partner before having sex is breaking the law (even if they have legally changed their sex). Apart from the grotesque insult, there are those who might wish to keep such a thing private for fear of being abused, attacked or killed (it has happened). But, again, who cares? The 'right' of the other - to be able to access their bigotry or prejudice with whatever consequences for their partner, irrespective of the bodily reality that just a few moments ago they may have genuinely, really, really wanted to fuck them - supersedes the right to privacy, basic dignity or even safety of their trans date. And the implication is clear - the sex or gender in which the trans person actually lives their life is and always will be 'deception', no matter what process they may have been through, no matter how many humiliating hoops they have negotiated to gain what they were told would be robust legal protection. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 allows an individual to change the sex by which they are legally known "for all purposes". More and more, the British legal community is behaving as if this was not true - as if it can be simply set aside and ignored as a principle. Strangely (or not given the agenda at work) someone who has recently been released from prison after a crime of sexual violence is not required to disclose their past before you go to bed with them, nor is someone with a sexually transmitted disease, nor any of a myriad of genuinely dangerous details of their lives. The bigotry is just for us - that's what makes it bigotry I guess. So many things are just for us now.

Elsewhere on the legal front a group of hardcore, well-funded anti-trans activists were recently in The Supreme Court. The details of their original case are arcane - but its the type of case where a ruling could have very wide ranging effects. Having lost in court twice before, funding of a kind completely unavailable to the trans community (including a very sizeable contribution from JK Rowling) has meant that they were able to take their appeal to the very top. Should they win, that win could effectively decimate the legal recognition of trans women in the UK. Their barrister - targeting the trans community's jugular (the tiny number with full legal protection because they have been through the demeaning process of getting a Gender Recognition Certificate) casually and consistently referred to such women (a group in which I am included) as "men with a certificate"; a strategy designed to ensure that no trans woman feels safe and aimed bluntly at those who might have felt that they had some safety through the law. More confident now than ever, these extremists aim to get that law changed; ultimately meaning the Gender Recognition Act 2004 repealed or, for now, rendered legally meaningless. With that done, and a few adjustments to the Equality Act 2010 (step forward the Equality and Human Rights Commission and its Tory-appointed 'Gender Critical' Board and Chair, who are recommending exactly that and issuing guidance around it to that effect), trans women may be effectively legally redefined as men, no matter what their previous legal protection. Pre-emptive, blanket bans of all trans women from women's public facilities could follow (a major aim) and it could become almost impossible to move around in society in the UK as a trans woman at all. 

So comes to fruition an ambition first articulated by the one of the founding figures of the modern anti-trans hate movement, Janice Raymond, who wrote in 1978 that ‘the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence’. As law follows a society's prevailing morality (see also the United States of course), it looks like it could happen. And that none of it could have happened before 2016 - when Britain abandoned not just the legal framework but the shared ethics and aims of a European Union that through European law protected the rights of minorities from potentially brutal national governments - is just my community's private tragedy amongst a massive list of self harms caused by Brexit.

Each week, sometimes each day, there's something new for trans women to read, something about which to be scared. With Trump's coronation in January, the whirlwind will be unleashed onto us in the US (in many states it already has been), and shoestring organisations trying to evacuate trans people from countries in which they are under dire threat have been inundated with new requests from America. But the bitter hatred of a new US Administration run by a narcissistic psychopath towards trans women will find many sympathetic ears in the UK too.

I could go on - there's so much more - but I'll stop there, because the purpose of my writing this piece isn't particularly to note how prejudice against a group that occupies about the same percentage of the British population as Jews did in Germany in 1933 has reached such levels. I have already written about that, many times, here and elsewhere. If you are cisgender (a word that free speech warriors who enthusiastically defend the right to insult us with impunity say is a 'slur' - just as their forebears might have once said heterosexual was one) the next bit is for you.

You have either read about the hatred we are facing...or you haven't. Whilst a small number have spoken out, for most of you, it didn't make the any difference whether you have read it or not, because you did nothing. And you do nothing. 

As this has been happening to us, we have reached out over and over. Seeking allies. We have asked others to come along side us - with anything from contacting MPs, to signing petitions, to marching with us, to organising with us, through to simply checking in with one of us to say, "How are you doing? I know that times are hard for you and I was thinking of you.'

But the very large majority of cisgender people didn't do any of those things. I have completely lost faith that most of you ever will. 

I have always known that without cisgender allies, without your voice alongside ours, without you demonstrating acceptance of us in words or actions, then the field would be left open for the attacks of those who hate and fear us. And so it has proved. I have also known that without cis people reaching out to us and sharing that they do care about us, even if they don't know how to change the world, then the only things we will hear will be the attacks and insults from the columnists and the social media personalities and the politicians. Some in our community have put their trust in our own power to advocate for ourselves. I get that. 'Nothing about us without us' is an admirable ambition, and trans voices must always always be prominent, even the leading, part of the telling of our own story. But when it means putting all our faith in tiny trans-led groups, courageous and dedicated though some are, it means leaving the work to sometimes inexperienced, politically unconnected and often unfunded outfits who are always under huge pressure from abuse themselves. 

Paradoxically, there's one sphere of all this in which some cisgender people seem to have no difficulty in getting involved. That's when judgements or opinions on the so-called 'trans debate' or 'the trans question' (echoes again of course of 1930s Germany and its grotesque, sanitising phrase; 'the Jewish question') are required, when 'experts' who have never worked with trans people or sometimes even met one are needed, or when hostile and condemnatory opinions are sought by Editors or public bodies to fit a pre-created stance. 

This goes right to the very top. The Cass Review into the care of trans children and teenagers deliberately excluded the views of trans people, or of clinicians working with us. It was run by a retired paediatrician with no experience in the field, supported by similar others. It claimed to be doing this to be 'impartial' (leading a friend of mine to bitterly joke about the obvious need for an 'impartial' review of care of the elderly or of social services led by a bricklayer and supported by a professional footballer and a landscape gardener). Further, Cass collected 'evidence' from many trans hostile groups, including prominent Florida policy-makers, foregrounding it (even presenting as 'evidence' material with no substantive foundation at all) whilst ignoring or holding reams of other data which supported affirmative care of trans young people to impossible clinical standards, standards invented only for the review but not used elsewhere in medicine. A foundational point it made about the volume of presentation of trans young people to clinics was based on a GCSE-level statistical error and was ridiculed by academics widely. Trans voices, or those of groups advocating for us, do not appear in the report. 

The fact that despite all this Cass has all been instantly adopted by both Tory and Labour parties, the NHS and the entire British press (the left-leaning Guardian and Observer well to the fore) as the final word on the matter, with no dissent brooked, says everything. The proudly bigoted Tories, who effectively dictated what the review should say, in their choice of authors and its lead, in their setting and manipulation of its remit and in their ferocious public management of its result to unleash a torrent of abuse on trans people immediately on its release (here's the Review's founding minister saying the quiet part out loud) got everything they wanted from Cass. Craven Labour on the other hand simply looked delighted that at last they had a get-out-of-jail-free card, a Beard behind which they could hide their prejudice and thus avoid actually having to support a beleaguered minority whom most of their MPs neither understood nor cared about...and the speed with which Keir Starmer rushed to uncritically line up behind the review's findings was nauseating. 

In a similar example of the Establishment closing ranks, The Supreme Court in October didn't hear from a single trans voice as it pontificated about the possible dismantling of our rights, but it did hear from five anti-trans groups. The only High Court Judge in the UK with a trans background was forced to resign after a campaign against her earlier this year and whilst she applied for standing in the case as a legal expert and someone with a personal interest, she was refused. Meanwhile, the outgoing Tory government boasted of deliberately appointing trans-hostile figures to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, another body, which, obviously, contains no trans representation at all. 

What's the effect of all of this? 

Well, it's exactly what those who seek to hurt us intend it to be. 

Firstly fear. The threats and the public abuse have created in the trans community a dread of the future. Already facing levels of hate crime that are skyrocketing as the media discourse inspires violence against us, mental health issues amongst trans people are at epidemic levels, with depression and anxiety now vastly higher than in the general population according to recent research. 

Second, the destruction of a sense of belonging - one of the most basic of human needs - isolation and loneliness. Being told that you are not welcome in society, that you are an aberration, or worse, seeps into the consciousness, gets internalised. If you are a trans girl at school, likely already being bullied, you are at real risk of being isolated and marked out as a danger to other girls - by government policy. Being separated in hospitals will say it clearly to trans women too - you do not belong. Even at a less immediate level and speaking as no more than a spectator - the almost total ban of trans women from women's sport (ex-Tory MP and transphobe-with-plenty-of-form-on-this, Lord Coe has said that if he becomes IOC Chair he will look to ban all transgender people from all Olympic sports) means that every women's sports event I watch is now rinsed with a sense of sadness. I was never going to be a world class runner, swimmer or field athlete, but I know now that these sports and all the others wouldn't permit me to take part at the highest levels even if I was. When the country gets behind The Lionesses in football, my mind goes to the knowledge that I wouldn't be allowed to play for them, not allowed to represent my country. As the country cheers them on in international tournaments, I simply feel lonely and separated.  Before my transition I used to enjoy getting behind the national team, in all sorts of sports. There's that small part inside that always wanted to grow up to be one of those sporting heroes on the tv perhaps, no matter what your realistic prospect, and that exists still in the admiration we give to those who reach the sporting peaks? Knowing that my country absolutely doesn't want me (this is simply one of so many iterations of that fact) reaches back into childhood and uproots that memory, that assumption that I was part of something.  

For trans girls and women who do have a notable sporting talent, the situation is dire. A typical new rule is that trans women cannot join a women's team if we have gone through any part of male puberty. Simultaneously, the UK government has banned the drugs which can suspend puberty whilst a young person makes choices about their future - thus forcing trans girls to go through that male puberty. The ban only applies to trans kids (though the word 'trans' is now being less used in government guidance in favour of 'gender questioning' or 'gender confused', another step in eliminating the reality of this experience). Cisgender (or, 'non-trans' as the new orthodoxy demands) young people can still be given the drugs for conditions like precocious puberty. The drugs of course work the same way across both groups, the human body reacts similarly irrespective of the gender identity of its occupant - yet one is allowed them, the other not. It's not medicine. It's cruelty. And as someone wrote about the actions of the last Trump administration in the US when it caged refugee children, the cruelty is far from accidental. It's the point. 

So how do I conclude? Much of my writing over the past few years has been from the heart. I guess that it's also contained a hope that by bringing the reality of one trans woman's experience to a wider audience I might be able to make some small contribution to changing hearts or minds. I had hope. 

I don't have that hope now. Many people in my community have said and done much more than I have been able to (though until about ten years ago I played my part in trying to change the narrative, before retiring from it, burned out), and it hasn't worked. Trump won in the US. Here, the Tories pursued their loud, vicious vendetta against us, to almost no public outcry. They and their newspapers completely changed the public conversation. Labour gained power, and it has continued those Tory policies. Public figures line up to condemn us, some to claim that they never really supported us anyway, now that the wind has changed (though some may find that they're not accepted as true believers even as they now kiss the Gender Critical ring - because they didn't do it sooner. Oh, and because of misandry or homophobia.)

If not to inspire you, cisgender reader, to speak or act for us - because I no longer believe most of you ever will - why am I writing this? I write because it helps to expel it a little I guess, to express my anger and my disappointment with my country, and yes, with most of you. To put it out there, and out of me, for a while I guess - at least until a new initiative against us comes onto my radar via the media later today or tomorrow (it certainly won't take longer). I'll watch the view count on this post as it builds, rarely to a number of any significance whilst hostile, self-important newspaper columnists, tech billionaires or children's authors collect the attention of millions. I'll reflect on how these words - all our words - seem to be falling on deaf ears and how we seem to be about to run out of road completely in Britain. I'll try and figure out what to do and when to do it.

Will these words make a difference to anyone? It doesn't feel like they have before.

I guess I write them because I just do not know what else to do. 

***

Edit: Minor additions about Cass Review added, Jan 9, 2025.

* Update Jan 13, 2025. The lawfare continues and deepens all the time. I could write blogs about them every week. Prominent right now is a Scottish Employment Tribunal case which - just like the Forstater case a few years ago (which established legal protection for 'Gender Critical' views) - has the potential to be catastrophic for trans women in the UK. 

It revolves around a complaint made by an NHS nurse who objected to the presence of a trans woman doctor in a changing room with her. She has launched action against her employer, and the doctor in question. The nurse is being represented by Naomi Cunningham, a barrister who has been at the forefront of seeking to destroy trans women's lives for some years. Cunningham co-leads the virulently and energetically anti-trans group Sex Matters with Maya Forstater, and acts with the fervour of a seventeenth century witch-finder in her drive to expose and destroy trans women (naturally she has referred to us as "men" for years, even before many other haters felt publicly confident to do so and long before it became legally fashionable again). 

The nurse's legal claim is that the mere presence of a trans woman in a women's changing room constitutes harassment of her, as someone with 'gender critical' beliefs, under the Equality Act. There seems to be no question that this particular trans woman did anything - undressed, for example, or was abusive (though she did refuse to be thrown out of the changing room). 

She simply occupied space in proximity to the claimant.

It's a legally ludicrous argument, attempting to characterise the very existence of a trans woman in such a space (something that the law has long permitted) as an offensive and violent act to those with this particular 'belief' (and it's no surprise that they are trying this, as the aim of eradicating the existence opf trans women is an article of faith described back in the early days of the creation of TERF ideology, by Janice Raymond, Sheila Jeffreys and Germaine Greer.) In the toxic climate of 2025 Britain, legally ludicrous doesn't mean anything however - this is an attempt to effectively create a bathroom bill in the UK via a highly influential interpretation of the Equality Act that then enters case law - achieving something that anti-trans activists have been seeking for years without the tedious problem of needing to get the entire Act changed in Parliament (with all the attention that would create). Forstater's victory had precisely this effect, with deep ramifications for organisations' requirement to allow GCs to hold and to express prejudiced views about trans women, including in their presence. 

Importantly also, Cunningham and her team are not just pursuing the local Health Authority but the Doctor personally - and have succeeded in getting the Court to publicly name her, thus knowingly stimulating a media dogpile onto the latter. Mental health professionals who spoke for the trans woman and pointed out the scale of abuse she would face with the potential risks for her safety, were completely ignored by the judge who was unselfconsciously keen to feed her to the newspapers. 

The cruelty as they say is the point. 

No surprises that the Court - instinctively hostile to trans women, as all UK courts now are - has just produced a preliminary ruling that favours the nurse, despite the legal and moral absurdity of her case and its attempt to twist the provisions of the Equality Act out of all recognition.

I await further developments, sensing very clearly what they could easily be.

*****

Photo by Sapan Patel on Unsplash