Summary
"We must speak up for our transgender siblings" discusses the author's experiences with and observations on the growing acceptance and subsequent rise of anti-trans activism.
We must speak up for our transgender siblings
Early Encounters and Growing Acceptance
I met the first person who told me they were transgender in the early 1980’s. Of course I may have encountered other trans people before then without knowing.
Indeed I had already read some of the travel writing of Jan Morris without realising she was a transgender woman. Jan, an award winning author, was the only journalist to accompany the 1952 Everest expedition, the first to summit the world’s highest mountain. Jan accompanied the climbing team to 22,000 feet. She transitioned in 1964.
Thinking back to that first conversation I am struck by the immense courage it must have taken to tell us she was having, what was then referred to as, a “sex change” to live openly as a woman, and by what must have been the overwhelming power and urgency of the inner sense of gender identity propelling her to take this action.
So the ideas, prevalent across social media, that being trans is somehow new or a fad to be picked up and put down on a whim, are simply nonsense.
Was I surprised? Yes, even shocked at first, as this was something entirely new to me and I knew nothing about what being transgender meant.
Did I tell the person they were wrong or try to dissuade them? Of course not. It was none of my business. Did I use their new name and preferred pronouns? Yes once it was explained to me of course I did because that’s just being respectful.
I continued to meet transgender people from time to time over the next 25 years both through my paid and voluntary work and in my social life.
During that time acceptance of trans people was growing in the UK and in other parts of the world too.
The work of trans rights campaign groups like Press for Change, challenging case law & social attitudes, helped bring about legal and human rights changes in the UK.
The book Trans Britain – Our Journey from the Shadows
Is well worth reading to discover the story of trans people in the UK and their fight for human rights and equality.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trans-Britain-Our-Journey-Shadows/dp/1783524715
Legal and Social Milestones
In 2004 the Gender Recognition Act (GRA} was passed enabling trans people, subject to certain requirements, to get a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) to change their birth certificate to reflect their gender identity. It was already possible, and remains so, for trans people to change the gender marker on other documents such as passports and driving licences. A GRC is not required for this.
To find out more about the GRA, GRC’s and gender changes to official documents see:
https://transactual.org.uk/the-gender-recognition-act-2004/.
In the same year, Nadia Almada, a trans woman, won Big Brother UK. In 1998, Dana International became the first transgender person to win the Eurovision Song Contest.
In 2O10, Gender reassignment became one of nine protected characteristics in a comprehensive UK Equality Act protecting those in transition.
Personal Connections and Stories
A year before the Equality Act I met and became friends with Charlene, a trans woman, when we were both clients at a recovery treatment service.
Charlene was welcomed and accepted as a woman by staff and clients. When therapy sessions were split into gendered groups she took part in the women’s groups.
Charlene told me about her life. She knew that her birth sex didn’t match her gender identity from age 6 and that knowledge never wavered. She didn’t know the word transgender then, but she knew with absolute certainty that she was in her words “a girl”.
There was no internet then and no one told her that there were other transgender people like her in the world.
She didn’t learn that it was OK to feel this way. No one told her that gender affirming hormone treatment was possible, and that transgender people could live happy, fulfilled, productive lives after transition. Most adults told her she was mistaken and confused, that she just had to accept that she was a boy.
So she struggled on with loneliness, guilt, shame, misery and pain. Yet however hard she tried to repress being trans she couldn’t.
At 15 in desperation Charlene ran away to London. She found Madame JoJo’s a club popular with the London Gay and Trans community. I can still picture the smile of absolute joy on her face when she told me:
“For the first time in my life I was home”.
Charlene stopped trying to repress who she was and lived openly as a trans woman from that point on. She sought medical help to support her transition.
It was a long and complicated journey with lots of barriers to accessing support and care. Like many trans people Charlene saw no other option but to source the hormones she needed from outside the system and self medicate.
Charlene was determined to tell her story to the wider public, as she wanted every young trans person to know it was ok to be their authentic self. She didn’t want anyone else to have to endure the ignorance, pain and hurt she had.
She appeared on the Pete Price Show on Radio Merseyside in an in depth interview and phone in. The response was overwhelmingly supportive. In 2010 we published Charlene’s story in a local magazine, Recovery Rising, which I helped edit and again the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and supportive.
I kept in touch with Charlene until her untimely death in August 2020 during the COVID pandemic. She was intelligent, warm, witty, and outspoken. A strong advocate for Liverpool’s LGBTQLGBTQ LGBTQIA+ is an inclusive term that includes people of all genders and sexualities, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex, asexual, pansexual, and allies. While each letter in LGBTQIA+ stands for a specific group of people, the term encompasses the entire spectrum of gender fluidity and sexual identities. https://abbreviations.yourdictionary.com/what-does-lgbtqia-stand-for-full-acronym-explained.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT community and above all kind, generous and loving. I’m looking at the lovely statue she bought me as a housewarming present as I write this piece.
The “Trans Tipping Point” and Shifting Attitudes
Time magazine declared 2014 a “Trans tipping point” and American Vogue named 2015 “Trans year of visibility” In 2017 India Willoughby became the first transgender newsreader in the UK. She also became a regular member of the loose women panel. At the General Election that year all the main UK political parties, including the Conservatives, supported GRA reformGRA Reform Gender Recognition Reform Bill - Scotland https://www.gov.scot/news/gender-recognition-reform-bill/ Published 03 March 2022 09:34 Part of Equality and rights Simplifying how trans people apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate. See Also https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/mermaids-manifesto-for-gra-reform/ https://www.stonewall.org.uk/what-does-uk-government-announcement-gender-recognition-act-mean to make it simpler and less intrusive for trans people to get a Gender Recognition Certificate.
The Republic of Ireland had introduced similar legislation, sometimes inaccurately referred to as Gender self ID, in 2015 and is now one of more than 20 Countries to have done so covering approx. 750 million people. There is no evidence that these changes have had any negative impact on any other group’s safety.
As a straight guy, supportive of LGBTQ rights, I had witnessed during my adult life a growing visibility and acceptance of both Gay and Trans people and a significant improvement in their human rights in the UK. All that was about to change, seemingly out of nowhere.
The first time I came across this hostile aggressive anti trans activism was in the summer of 2020 on social media. I “liked” and replied to a post from the Supermarket ASDA saying they had introduced a voluntary scheme so any member of staff who wished to could wear a pronoun badge. My reply just said something like:
“Thanks ASDA for being inclusive”
I thought nothing more of it and went on with my day.
When I next looked at my social media it had exploded. I had hundreds of replies calling me a homophobe and a misogynist and dozens of abusive Direct Messages (DM’s). None of them from anyone I knew or had interacted with on Social media before. All in response to an innocuous Thank you to a supermarket!
I was shocked, confused and upset.
I even contacted some of my LGBTQ and feminist friends to tell them about the reaction to my post and to “check” with them that I hadn’t somehow inadvertently said something offensive.
That sounds crazy right? and obviously I hadn’t, but I don’t think people understand the emotional and psychological impact on someone of this kind of co- ordinated social media “Pile on” unless and until it happens to them.
I should make it clear that the response I got, upsetting as it was, was nothing compared to the level of cruel mockery, hate and abuse experienced by trans people themselves or by women who are trans inclusive allies.
I decided to try to find out where this reaction had come from and why.
How had we gone from that growing acceptance to this level of coordinated online abuse in response to a Thank you post?
What I found made me both angry and more determined to stand up for LGBTQ rights.
After the US Evangelical right lost their battle against same sex Marriage, with the 2014 Supreme Court ruling in Obergafell V Hodges, they determined to regroup and find a new strategy to undermine and roll back all LGBTQ rights. They knew that they could no longer be successful by attacking gay rights directly anymore.
That strategy was to:“ Separate the T. ” (Transgender) from what they disparagingly described as “…the rest of the alphabet soup.” See for example:
They identified transgender people as the smallest, least understood and therefore the most vulnerable and easiest group to attack and to demonise.
They adopted the deliberate strategy of stoking false fears of trans women as a group as predators. This predator myth was specifically aimed to recruit women to the anti trans cause. They identified female survivors of sexual abuse as being particularly fertile ground for this tactic to be effective.
This is just as reprehensible as the tactics used by the UK far right to target female sex abuse survivors to recruit them to racism by falsely claiming that Muslim men, as a specific group, are a particular threat to them and their children.
Although there had been from the 1970’s a tiny fringe group of feminists who had a problem with accepting trans people mainstream feminists, and in particular Lesbians, were and are overwhelmingly trans inclusive. In fact Lesbians are the group most accepting of and least prejudiced against transgender people.
Huge sums of money millions and millions of dollars have gone into worldwide anti trans campaigns to “Separate the T”.
The biggest funders of these are the US Evangelical right, Putin’s Russia and the Catholic Church. None of these have a good record on either LGBTQ or women’s rights to put it mildly.
https://globalphilanthropyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/MTM-Summary-.pdf
The myths, memes, slurs and tropes used by anti trans activists today and the portrayal of trans people in the media bear no relation to the trans people I know in real life or to any trans person I have ever met.
I’m old enough to remember the anti gay moral panic of the 1970’s and 80’s and all the homophobic myths “Predator” “Paedophile” “ They’ll turn your kids Gay” “It’s a lifestyle choice” which were used then. They have all been repurposed and deployed against trans people & specifically trans women today.
They weren’t true of Gay people then and they aren’t true of trans people now There’s no more a “Transgender ideology” now than there was a “gay agenda” then.
The people this anti trans moral panic hurts most are trans women but the group who will be affected in the largest numbers are gender non conforming women. That’s because there are many many more women who don’t conform to white western gender stereotypes than there are transgender women.
The relentless demonisation and scapegoating of trans people has been been horribly effective in poisoning public discourse as trans people have become the seemingly “acceptable” scapegoats in a dangerous culture war:
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/09/09/transphobia-uk-press-media-negative-coverage/
In the whole of UK media in 2012 there were 65 national articles about transgender people most of them positive.
In 2022 that had exploded to 7,500 almost all of them negative.
None of this is based on evidence of any increased threat from transgender people as a group
Some people are afraid of, or don’t want to contemplate things which they don’t understand or which initially repulses them.
The best way to understand and learn about trans people is to listen to and to meet them.
When people actually take the time to get to know trans people as individual human beings the myths and fear evaporate.
However when Graham Norton made this simple logical suggestion a couple of years ago he was driven off social media.
Transgender voices have been excluded from mainstream media while social media allows anti trans hate to go unchecked.
The UK trans community is about the same size as the Jewish community c 300k people Yet there are no trans newsreaders presenters journalists or even guests on TV or writing for newspapers. Just a relentless torrent of negative stories as part of a culture war in so called “woke”.
The Realities and Needs of Transgender People
What is it that Trans people and their allies are asking for? To live their lives in peace as fully participating members of society. It’s that simple.
Transgender people will continue to be born, grow up, find and express their authentic selves and manifest that through transition. Nothing anti trans hate campaigns or governments do can stop that.
A survey of 90,000 trans people in 2022 found that 94% were happier after transition. We know that this healthcare works yet there is a 13 yr wait for a first NHS specialist gender service appointment:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/07/trans-survey-transition-gender-affirming-care
So our choice as a society is whether we make transgender people’s lives easier or more miserable.
Whether we drive people back into the closet, just like we did in the past with gay people, and cause more unnecessary pain, loneliness, mental ill health, self harm and sadly death or whether we welcome trans people as equal, valid and validated members of society.
It’s a choice between love and hate.
I choose love.
