Fighting the last war. The ultimate failure of trans activism in the UK.
Trans women must now be segregated into ‘third spaces’ like disabled facilities or gender neutral ones, and if these aren't available (as they often are not), the men's toilet. Trans men must likewise use the disabled toilet, the gender neutral one, or the women's. Vigilantism is expected, as has happened in the states of the US where similarly draconian laws have passed, and cis (non-trans) women especially will be caught up in it if they don't look sufficiently ‘feminine’. Equally, we can expect concerted efforts by anti-trans hate groups like Sex Matters to pressurise service providers into energetically enforcing the most punitive, regressive, unnecessary piece of discrimination against trans people, a group comprising less than 1% of the population, anywhere in the Western world.
My MP makes it all clear
As trans people in the UK sit with this new disaster, many of us feel utterly broken. The country in which we thought we lived has betrayed us completely. It has handed the reins of public opinion and political direction to a small group of dedicated fanatics whose hatred of trans people - trans women especially - is visceral. It has let them create the narrative, which they have shrewdly filled with lies and poison for the uninformed minds of millions of Britons who knew little of the trans experience and, given that we are a small minority, had never knowingly met a trans person.
Time and time again, trans people faced the same reality: that to create understanding in a baffled world, for an audience which had never once questioned their own gender and largely couldn't conceptualise doing so, was extremely difficult. It needed time. It involved a deep restructuring of assumptions which, for the vast majority, had lain unexamined their whole lives. By contrast, the task of those who hate us was simple - land some easily digestible lies around two or three easily exploitable themes and repeat it over and over. Lies which, unlike our narrative, didn't unsettle anyone's prejudice. Didn't require anyone to look again at anything.
As Jonathan Swift said over 300 years ago: "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect." And Swift's world contained no Twitter, no Facebook, no MailOnline, no TikTok, no GB News, no BBC, no Telegraph, no Times, no Piers Morgan, nor any of the rest of them.
They won.
For me the final realisation of this came not with the Supreme Court ruling of April 2025, which overturned two lower court rulings and - out of a clear blue legal sky - destroyed the protection trans people had relied on for, well, forever. That day I hyperventilated for about two hours after watching the ruling being delivered and ever since have carried a sick feeling of having taken a punch to the stomach around with me. Meanwhile, that morning, my partner had an incident of breakthrough Atrial Fibrillation and needed medication. My beginning to understand how the state had landed something so catastrophic, so bitterly unfair, on us came later - after an exchange with my local MP just a few weeks ago.
My MP is a Liberal Democrat. If you are reading this from outside the UK, the LibDems are a small, uninspiring party on the soft left of British politics. Not known for having many political lines in the sand, they destroyed their credibility sixteen years ago by going into coalition with the Conservatives and allowing themselves to be steamrollered by the latter's austerity politics - politics that ruined the fraying remains of Britain's social consensus and laid the ground for the Brexit disaster. But lately, with the governing Labour party under the unlamented Keir Starmer accelerating rightwards too, the LibDems have had a brief moment in the sun as the only party of any size in Parliament recognisably on the left at all.
For over a year I had been emailing my MP about the deteriorating situation for people like us. His initial response after the Supreme Court ruling was a platitudinous brush-off. He then offered a meeting which, due to an administrative mess-up, didn't happen - and after that my emails went unanswered and further requests to meet were ignored.
In these emails, I adopted a time-worn strategy, based on an idea called Contact Theory. It's the idea that has run through much trans activism of the last thirty years and has been a dominant theme for at least the last fifteen.
And it failed.
Contact Theory
Contact theory comes from Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Its core claim is that prejudice is sustained by ignorance and anxiety, and that direct interpersonal contact dissolves both.
It was Contact Theory that informed the creation of Trans Media Watch and the work we did to build connection between media organisations and trans people. That work spawned a whole range of initiatives – starting in 2009-10. Articles, human interest stories, television documentaries, even a Memorandum of Understanding from Channel 4 about treating trans people with some decency and respect, the launch of which was attended by a government minister (a LibDem, in fact, from that ill-fated coalition).
TMW's work blossomed in a number of directions, including the arrival of noble initiatives like the All About Trans project, which recruited small groups of trans people to meet informally with editors and journalists so the latter could get to know us as people rather than as faceless abstractions. The resulting change of attitudes would, we hoped, show up in more positive coverage – this speaks to a later addendum to contact theory, the notion of parasocial contact, where media representation substitutes for real contact when real contact is scarce. As it is, for a community as small as ours.
Essentially, the idea that once you know us you won't be scared any more was baked into so much of what I and many others did. It remains central to Trans Day of Visibility. It's central to actions like the Trans Solidarity Alliance lobbying of Parliament, in which trans people plus families and allies seek to physically meet MPs and - amongst other things - demonstrate our normality and our lack of threat.
But Allport was careful. Contact only works reliably under four conditions, he added: Equal status between the groups within the contact situation, shared goals, cooperation rather than competition, and the support of authorities, law and custom.
We need to set these four conditions against what we were actually working with.
Equal status within the contact situation. When All About Trans put six trans people in a room with newspaper editors, the status differential was total. They had circulation, column inches, lawyers and the absolute freedom to walk away at any point and never think about us again. We had our stories and our hope. We were there as material - interesting material, sympathetically handled by some genuinely decent journalists sometimes, but material, nonetheless. Equal status doesn't mean everyone is polite to each other. It means neither party can unilaterally set the terms of the encounter or unilaterally end it. We never once had that. Not with the press, not with broadcasters, not with government, and - as I'll come to - not with my own MP.
Shared goals. Contact reduces prejudice when both groups are trying to get to the same place. Ours was understanding, decency and respect. Theirs, at best, was a story; at worst, a stick to beat us with for circulation, and increasingly, for clicks. There was never a jointly held objective that required both of us to succeed together. There was our objective, which we hoped they might adopt out of decency. They had theirs which they were perfectly at liberty to pursue another way. Like turning on us, as they later did.
Cooperation rather than competition. This is where our opponents, the so-called and still strangely named, Gender Critics, did their most consequential work and they did it early. They took a question about a tiny minority's access to facilities and reframed it as a competition over a fixed quantity of safety. Once that frame was in place, cooperation became structurally impossible. Every gain for us could be presented as a loss for someone else. You cannot run a cooperative contact intervention inside a frame that has already defined the encounter as a fight over something scarce, be it goods or rights.
This speaks also to another model - the one in which societies make choices around abundance (there's plenty to go around; food, housing, wealth, rights, and we simply need to distribute it fairly) versus scarcity (all of it is in short supply, and groups within society must fight each other for access). As Tory Britain lurched towards Brexit, with its endless monologue about threat from abstract enemies – usually foreigners - being the root of declining living standards rather than home-grown austerity politics that made the poor pay for their own demise while enriching the wealthiest, the idea of scarcity and threat took hold. A perfect seedbed for what came next for us.
The support of authorities, law and custom. This is the one that undid everything, because we misread it completely.
From roughly 2004 to about 2015 we mostly had that support. The Gender Recognition Act. The Equality Act. A government minister turning up to launch a Channel 4 memorandum. Self-ID sitting uncontroversially in three party manifestos. Trans kids understood as a small group of children needing care. We looked at that landscape and concluded that our contact work was producing results, and that the way forward was to do more of it. As we did so, our reflection of the achievements of the preceding few years emboldened some of us to press for new rights – most prominently Self-ID. The door was open we thought and we should just walk through it. The Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons even supported the removal of all (the relatively minor) exceptions from the Equality Act that allowed trans women to denied access to any single-sex facility in parallel with the introduction of Self-ID, a position strongly promoted by Stonewall.
But our work on contact - very much the focus of English activism (in Scotland to be fair there was for a time a rather more sophisticated view of the strategic goals and attempts to bring an aim of influencing institutions within them) - was only ever delivering at the margins. The direction to be taken was always in the hands of power - conditional on the agreement of those who held it, and only for as long as it helped those with that power meet their own aims. Contact can decorate and support a direction of travel that institutional power has already chosen. It seldom creates that direction on its own. For a decade we mistook a tailwind for propulsion - a tailwind that had started in 2004, when the UK government was belatedly forced into recognising us by the European Court, through a legal process rooted in our EU membership. And because we thought we were generating the movement ourselves, we never properly asked the question that should have been asked around 2015: what happens to this strategy if the institutions start to turn?
We found out.
Eleven Emails
When the Supreme Court judgment came down in April 2025, I did the thing almost twenty years of activism had encouraged me to do. I made contact.
I wrote to my MP at length. I told him about my life. The marriage that ended. The business I lost. The years my children didn't speak to me. The money, the house, the friends, the ordinary scaffolding of a life, all gone. I told him how I rebuilt it. I told him I had done every single thing this country has ever asked of a trans person - legal, social, psychological, medical. Diagnosis. Real Life Experience. Humiliating psychiatric assessments. Waiting lists. Surgery, which I had abroad because of the delays here. Years of painful hair removal. Expensive voice therapy. A Gender Recognition Certificate and a new birth certificate. I told him about my GRS, which is nobody's business but mine, and which I handed to him anyway, because I thought that if I made myself human enough, specific enough, something would land.
I told him that for nearly twenty years I have lived entirely as a woman and used women's facilities without a single incident. Not one. Because that is what actually happens, and because the absence of incident is the whole point, and it is never reported. I sent him photographs of me with my daughters - reconciled, grinning, ordinary. I look like what I am; a woman. I told him precisely how the judgment would be weaponised, and I was right about every bit of it.
That was one email. Over the following fifteen months there were ten more.
What came back, a few weeks ago, was boilerplate. Warm, regretful, carefully constructed boilerplate, of the kind that with a bleeding heart acknowledged the ‘difficulty of the issue’ and the ‘strength of feeling on all sides’. But within it, the substance: this left-of-centre ‘liberal’ was keen to debate the question (he even somehow presented that to me as if I would be proud of his embrace of free speech) but intended to speak in Parliament in favour of the EHRC statutory guidance. In favour of the thing that bans me from the ladies' loo in Marks & Spencer. I had told him plainly that if the guidance was made law then I would feel compelled to leave a country I have lived in for over sixty years. He had that in writing and he supported the EHRC anyway.
I want to be precise about why this finally turned a light on in me, because it isn't simply that he disagreed. It is that I adopted the strategy perfectly. If contact theory works, it must work on that email. Maximum vulnerability, maximum specificity, maximum humanity, a named constituent with a face and daughters and a vote. I even encouraged others to do it, There was no better version of the intervention available to me. I had nothing left to disclose.
And it did nothing.
Here’s the part that took me a long time to accept, and it isn't simply cynicism. It's mechanism – how all this works in practice.
The research on contact is out there. There’s a famous 2016 study in which a ten-minute doorstep conversation measurably reduced transphobia in Miami, and the effect held for three months and survived hostile counter-advertising. I believe that could happen. I have seen it happen in rooms I was in.
But look at what that study actually moves. It moves affect. It reduces anxiety and dislike. It makes people feel warmer towards trans people. Nothing more.
My MP may well have felt warmer towards me. He may have read that email and been moved by it. I have no reason to think he is a cruel man. But warmth was never the currency he was operating in and it’s not how this country, or any country works.
Contact works, sometimes, on prejudice (if that prejudice isn’t too embedded and if the abandonment of that prejudice isn’t also associated with the loss of a deeper sunk cost - try talking a died-in-the-wool TERF out of their position and you’ll find yourself asking them to give up their social connections, their sense of self and the efforts they have made over the years to promote a particular view). It is very much weaker against what sociologists call a sense of group position - the belief that one group's gain is another group's loss. And that is precisely the frame that has been built, brick by brick, over the previous ten years by gender critical voices and the newspapers that platformed them (just as those same papers obsessively promoted an identical framing for much else in broken post-Brexit Britain: refugees, benefit claimants, asylum seekers, Muslims).
Inside that frame, "I find this constituent sympathetic" and "trans women should not be in women's changing rooms" are not contradictory positions at all. They sit together just fine. You can like me and still vote to exclude me and feel you have done something regrettable but necessary.
Don't believe me? Read it in any Guardian editorial on this. You can picture it in any Labour policy meeting, as the participants cling to their self-concept as empathetic and decent - and destroy us anyway, feeling ‘sad’ that they had ‘no choice’.
That email from my MP opened my eyes to what had really happened. The bigots and the haters I could understand. They had captured the political agendas of the right (I'm old enough to remember when Theresa May supported self-ID) and colonised the EHRC, but at one level at least that felt clear. GCs and right-wing bigots were, and are, an obvious, if increasingly powerful, enemy who explicitly hate us. But the arrival of Labour in 2024 was supposed to usher in a new zeitgeist. I didn't fully see the hollowness of any ‘support’ they might offer. I didn't see how they could throw us under the bus as energetically as any hate group and still claim compassion while doing it.
And beneath all of that: my MP was not, in that moment, deciding how he felt about me. He was deciding where to stand in a conflict, with a whip, a press office, a local party, the Greens snapping at him, and a clear read on which way the wind was blowing in his constituency and the country. Contact theory is a model for changing individual hearts. He was making an institutional calculation. Those are different machines and one does not feed the other.
They identified the levers of power
This is the thing I find hardest, and it is why I keep coming back to the phrase fighting the last war. The idea that first circulated during World War Two to explain how the French military were completely (and literally) outflanked by the invading Germans because the former had built a military strategy grounded in a set of circumstances that no longer existed. They tried to defend France as if World War One might restart. World War Two was very different. The idea continues to circulate in defence circles when people talk of building fancy aircraft carriers in an era when a bunch of Russian hackers can take out the UK’s electricity grid in ten minutes.
For us, it meant not seeing the change around us. Not seeing how the wind had changed. While we, especially in England, were making documentaries and banners, our opponents were making cases.
They went to court. Many times. To start with they often lost, but they’d priced that in. They were playing the long game. Eventually, they decided to take an arcane Scottish case all the way to the Supreme Court and won a reinterpretation of a statute that no election could ever have delivered them. They also went for board appointments at the EHRC. They went for professional bodies, safeguarding guidance, HR policy, school policy, sports governing bodies, party selection processes, NHS Trusts, the civil service, the Office for National Statistics, universities, select committee memberships. They produced model policies for employers. They cultivated a small number of highly placed journalists at every serious title in the country and gave them a steady supply of easily printable copy, full of headline-ready hooks. They nurtured the support of the world's wealthiest novelist and deployed her resources. They made strategic alliances with far-right benefactors in the UK and the US. They developed a highly professional, highly connected single-issue pressure group, Sex Matters, created out of the Maya Forstater's legal win in 2022 which put Gender Critical beliefs on the legal map and was one of the major turning points in the conflict - one which Sex Matters has relentlessly exploited in subsequent years.
None of any of this required Gender Critical actors to be liked. This is the entire point. Institutional power is indifferent to whether the public finds you sympathetic; it responds to litigation, appointments, statutory instruments and procedure. A judge's private feelings about trans people are irrelevant to how he or she construes a definition in the Equality Act 2010. My MP's feelings about me were ultimately irrelevant to the words he was going to stand up and read in Parliament ruining my life.
Certainly in England, where I was and still am, in the early years after the passing of the Equality Act, no-one could imagine a rollback of what had been won, ever. When David Cameron pushed Equal Marriage Act through a baffled Conservative Party that seemed to add to the overall narrative. Things were just going our way and progress - around Self-ID for example or the recognition of non-binary identities - was simply there for the taking. Somehow inevitable. So we largely focused on the other question – of getting the country to accept us.
Part of the strategy had always been to win hearts and minds, and it always played a role (the media of course feeds public opinion, which feeds opinion polls, and both feed politicians’ minds) but after 2010 it often felt like more or less the only game in town. Maybe we didn’t think we needed to do more, to build political relationships especially. We discovered too late that hearts weren't where the real levers were in Westminster or Fleet Street or Whitehall and that the institutional direction of travel was not forever set.
By the time it hit us - by the time the Good Law Project had come alongside us, by the time Trans Legal Clinic emerged, or, for example, the small group I helped launch, Trans Legal Project, had started up - we were facing an enemy that was deeply resourced, lawyered up, and already about four years into a focused strategy that had taken ownership of the press and knew how to deploy simple, terrifying framings of the issues.
Those framings, often toxic, we could never fully answer. In fact, the trans community, battered by endless media ambushes, largely withdrew from the mainstream battlefield - a key space - precisely because of the effect of Brandolini's Law (or the BS Asymmetry Principle) on us. It takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it, and we did not have nor the resilience, nor simply enough media-trained people, to stand up to the withering dishonesty.
Those framings, skilfully deployed by GC voices, created the anxiety and fear that funded their legal crowdfunders and solidified opposition to us. Consistent, simple, easy to understand and sticky, they moved public opinion against us, just as exactly the same approach had taken distrust of Europe from literally nowhere to the top of the polls by 2016.
Hundreds of Tiny Groups
And we were, structurally, in no condition for the fight that arrived.
There has never been a trans movement in this country in the sense that there was a gay movement. There was and is a scatter - dozens, even hundreds of tiny, unfunded groups, many run by young people who might be transitioning, dealing with day-to-day prejudice, working if they were lucky, or not, and organising simultaneously. On no money. With no legal advice, little experience of advocacy, no communications capacity, no institutional memory and little shared strategy. Each had its own priorities - all worthwhile in their own right - its own internal challenges, its own three-to-five-year lifespan before burnout. Passion and idealism often felt like all we really had, and for a while, when the wind was behind us, passion and idealism looked like they were enough.
Crucially, we had no litigation strategy. Our opponents had one from the start.
At Trans Legal Project we tried to inspire one. We do believe that we began to see what was coming, and we tried to say so. We said it because we thought hard about what the GCs, especially outfits like Sex Matters were doing and wargamed what we would do if we were them. My background is in marketing and market research - I know about strategy and communications, and I spent a lot of time thinking over what I would be suggesting to them to advance their cause.
TLP always thought that these people needed to be stopped early and ferociously (or as early as they could now be, given that we were all late to the party). We advocated for an early judicial review intervention against the EHRC, for example, when they sent legal advice to the government based on what was, at the time, an outlandishly extreme and exclusionary reading of the law. We took it to other groups and got no traction at all. The baffling idea that our powder needed to be kept dry was put. We pointed out that if the EHRC wasn’t tackled quickly then the amount of powder (meaning money and human resource) we’d need to achieve anything would rise exponentially. Unbelievably there were those still trying to reach out to the EHRC under Baroness Falkner. People who couldn’t see what was happening. A well-known legal mind of old, freshly emerged from retirement, was around that time still advancing the view that the EHRC could be reasoned with - that they would realise the error of their ways in this advice once it was pointed out to them. That advice, which the EHRC essentially invented at the time, later appeared again - quoted in the Supreme Court's FWS judgment.
And none of that is meant as an indictment of those involved. The efforts being expended by many were huge. People were burning out in real time, sometimes when GCs singled them out to hound them out of a role or to smear them, especially if they got near any actual results. I’m thinking of Susie Green and Steph Richards. And I have to add that TLP failed to change anything either. We tried. We failed too. We couldn’t scale and like many we were also dealing with the firehose of prejudice in the national discourse. We got exhausted. I’ll put my hand up and say that up to the very end we also continued to have some faith in the notion of contact theory, organising a mass email campaign after the Supreme Court and the EHRC’s draconian initial guidance. Write to your MP! we said and we supplied template legal arguments, encouraging people to be open and honest and real. Thousands did.
More fool us. It was too late.
Beyond all this, we as a community had no plan for consolidating the coalition with feminist organisations that had once simply been assumed. Some attempts were made – FGEN for example - but no serious answer could be found as historic support was prised apart, or as supporters, allies and potential allies were hounded. Nor had we capacity to respond at the speed of a rolling press campaign. And crucially, we had nobody whose full-time job was watching where institutional power was moving.
The consequence of all this is now self-evident. When the counter-attack came, the reasonable demands that had been sitting quietly in party manifestos – including self-identification, the mildest administrative reform imaginable which had passed without incident in a number of countries - were reframed within about three years as a rapists' charter. We tried quoting facts in response but the space in which many could hear those facts had been closed to us by the GC media takeover. When trans children went from being a small group needing compassionate care to the victims of an imagined conspiracy to transition them, we tried the same, referring to research and data. But the damage had been done. No-one was listening anymore.
We didn’t fail here because there aren’t answers to these challenges. We failed because answering required exactly the institutional machinery - the lawyers, the researchers, the media operation, the parliamentary relationships, the money - that we never built, because we had spent two decades believing that being known for who we really are would carry us through.
We were acting in good faith against people who were acting strategically and with determination. Good faith is not a strategy. It is a disposition. And it was crushed.
The Autopsy
I don't know how we come back from this. I have to be honest about that before I say anything else, because I've read plenty of pieces in the last year that arrive at these issues and produce a burst of defiance that nobody in the room actually feels.
But I do know where any recovery has to start, and it isn't with a campaign, or a hashtag, or a march. It starts with an autopsy.
Trans activism in the UK, as it was constituted between roughly 2010 and 2025, is dead. It did not merely lose a fight; the strategic model it was built on has been wrecked. Contact theory as an overarching strategy - the belief that being met, being known, being visible, being demonstrably human and real would eventually carry the argument - has been tested to destruction against institutional power and it lost. We need to open the body up of trans activism up and look at what's inside, we need to do it properly and soon, because the alternative is that we rebuild something with the same defects and lose again and again against a shrewd and powerful opposition who is not finished with us yet.
And I want to say very clearly what my analysis is not.
It is not an indictment of the people. I know many of these people. I am one of these people. I have watched activists give years to this - unpaid, unthanked, often while their own transitions were falling apart around them, while they were being doxxed and abused and made unemployable, while the press hunted for their photographs. Nobody in this movement was lazy. Nobody was insincere. The vast majority worked harder for less return than any activist I have ever encountered in any other cause. There was a great deal of work done that saved lives that would otherwise have been lost.
The failure was structural, not moral. That distinction is the whole issue. If we can't hold both ideas at once - that people acted with enormous courage and that the strategy was wrong - then we can't do the analysis at all, because every attempt at examination will be experienced as an attack, and will be met as one. That is exactly what happened after April 2025, and it is why so little useful thinking has been done since. It’s still going on. I saw it today on social media as someone who has done more than most to make some of these points was eviscerated by her own community.
So: be kind, but be ruthless. They are not in conflict. The autopsy has to cover strategy, structure, coalition, speed and money, and it has to be conducted by people who are prepared to say uncomfortable things about work they themselves did. I have tried to do some of that here about my own.
What Comes Next?
One thing, above all others.
We need a single, national, permanent, professionally staffed, properly funded, strategically literate organisation. One body with a mandate, a governance structure, a legal team, a research function, a press operation, and a leadership that is accountable and can be replaced without the whole thing collapsing.
I think about TENI in Ireland - the same language, an adjacent media market, and a Catholic constitutional history considerably less hospitable than ours - got self-ID in 2015 and has not suffered anything like our reversal. Talk to some of the people there and learn about the legwork they put in. Years of it. The careful gaining and nurturing of allies. I don't want to romanticise it; TENI has had its own lean and difficult years – it’s not got deep pockets, its been through an accounting car crash recently, and Ireland is not immune to what's coming. But the structural difference is not a detail. Ireland has one recognised national organisation that can be in the room, hold a line, maintain relationships across the political spectrum, and act as the address to which government, media and allies could be sent. TENI is good at lobbying. Good at making its voice heard. We had a scatter, and a scatter cannot hold a line because it has no line to hold.
That new organisation has to do the things we didn't do. Permanent litigation capacity, not crowdfunded panic after the fact. Standing research capacity, so that when a claim appears in a newspaper on a Tuesday there is a clear and plausible answer by Wednesday rather than a 20 page rebuttal three months later. Together with the gradual building of media relationships to get that information out there. Relationships with politicians in every party, including the ones that currently despise us, because that is what professional advocacy consists of. Serious, patient, unglamorous coalition work with women's organisations, on their terms, over years, without preconditions. And a time horizon measured in decades, not election cycles.
And it needs money.
I need to be blunt about this, because the movement has always been squeamish about it and the squeamishness has cost us everything. Our opponents raised millions. They had a billionaire. They had crowdfunders that filled up in days because fear is the most efficient fundraising instrument ever devised. We had exhausted volunteers and another ask of our drained and broke community. That is not a moral failing on our part and it is not a fact about how deserving we are (something we really, really need to deal with) - it is a resource asymmetry and resource asymmetries are the most fixable thing on this entire list.
There is money in this country that would fund trans equality properly if it were asked properly, by an organisation that looked like it could absorb and deploy it. Nobody was in a position to ask. Money brings governance, boards, audits, reporting, professional salaries and all the deeply unfashionable apparatus that the movement has spent twenty years regarding as a kind of betrayal of grassroots authenticity. It isn't. It is what power looks like when it's on your side.
None of this happens quickly. I need to be honest with younger trans people about that too. Rights that took thirty years to accumulate were dismantled in five. They will not come back in five. And don’t rely on the European Court of Human Rights digging us out of this one. Its determination will take years, and with the current direction of travel, the UK may well not even be part of it by the time its ruling on the Supreme Court and the challenge launched by Victoria McCloud is handed down. Even if Victoria and her team win, we must expect the UK government to appeal and/or ignore the ruling - and without institutional support for our cause within the UK, it will have plenty of political and media cover in so doing.
This is a generational project, and anyone telling you otherwise is delusional. The burn-it-all-down instinct is completely comprehensible - I understand the rage entirely and I don't judge it - but rage is not a strategy either. It is the same category error we made with good faith, just louder.
And Me
I am leaving the UK.
Some who read this blog, or who know me, already know this. For others, I guess there is no elegant way, so I'll just say it. After over sixty years in this country, and after fifteen years of fighting for the right to remain in it as myself, I am going. I told my MP I would leave and I meant it. I have decided that I am not going to spend whatever years I have left negotiating access to lavatories in a country that has decided I am a problem to be managed. Or eliminated. That is a choice about my own survival, and I am not going to apologise for it.
But I am also not going to pretend it is anything other than a privilege. I can go because I have a passport that lets me go, savings that make it possible, no dependants who now need me here, and a face that means I will, I hope, be able to live quietly somewhere in an EU jurisdiction that isn’t in the obsessive grip of this witch-hunt. I am also white and middle class. Many trans people in Britain have none of these things. They may be young, or poor, or caring for parents, or in the middle of a transition tied to an NHS waiting list they have already spent seven years on, or simply have nowhere on earth that will take them. They may be tied to a job, or to young children. They will be here tomorrow morning, and the morning after, standing outside a toilet door doing the arithmetic. My leaving does nothing for them. It is not a strategy, it is not a protest, and it is certainly not a model. It is an exit taken by someone who could afford one. My mental health has been wrecked by all this – I need to find a way to put myself together at least a little. It could of course all happen where I am going, I know that, but it's all I can think to do.
If you’ve got this far in this mammoth post, thank you. It’s not been written for me. It is written for whoever picks this up next - and there will be someone, because there always is someone. Do the autopsy. Do it honestly. Don't make the same mistakes we did. Build the thing we failed to build. Find the money and take it. Be single-minded. Be disciplined. Professionalise. Build capacity and scale. Learn where levers of powers are and pull on them.
I'm sorry I won't be here to help.
******
Edit: This post was edited on August 6th to take better account of the roles and approaches of Scottish and Welsh trans activism after 2010.
Image credit: Felix Bacher on Unsplash
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