The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

by Shon Faye

The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society. I say ‘liberation’ because I believe that the humbler goals of ‘trans rights’ or ‘trans equality’ are insufficient. Trans people should not aspire to be equals in a world that remains both capitalist and patriarchal and which exploits and degrades those who live in it. Rather, we ought to seek justice – for ourselves and others alike.

The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people. They are radical demands, in that they go to the root of what our society is and what it could be. For this reason, the existence of trans people is a source of constant anxiety for many who are either invested in the status quo or fearful about what would replace it. In order to neutralize the potential threat to social norms posed by trans people’s existence, the establishment has always sought to confine and curtail their freedom. In twenty-first-century Britain, this has been achieved in large part by belittling our political needs and turning them into a culture war ‘issue’.

It’s also worth pointing out that ‘trans’ is a twentieth-century word used to describe a Western way of thinking about gender variance, which assumes that there is a neat binary. Other cultures and societies have had different ways of understanding the relationship between genitalia, reproductive capacity and social role, and do not have the same Western tradition of rigidly forcing people into the two categories of man and woman.

But we can surely say this: in the final months of her life, when she must have been experiencing a degree of mental anguish, Lucy Meadows was bullied, harassed, ridiculed and demonized by the British media. Her death remains one of the darkest chapters in the British trans community’s history, and one of the most shameful episodes in the long and shameful history of the British tabloid press. Even if she was struggling in other ways, Meadows had not been a public figure or a celebrity, nor had she ever sought to be.

In December 2011, a year before the Christmas newsletter announcing Meadows’ transition, the Leveson Inquiry – the judicial public inquiry into the British press following the News International phone-hacking scandal – had received written submissions by Trans Media Watch, a charity founded in 2009 to encourage improvement in media coverage of transgender issues. The submissions detailed how the British press systematically misrepresents and maligns trans individuals, or makes them figures of fun. They would be chillingly prophetic in the case of Lucy Meadows. ‘Members of the press would not deny that they can be a force to shape society for good,’ the submissions state, ‘yet, in the case of transgender people, they have largely acted as self-appointed moral police. The defence the press uses in situations such as these is that they are simply reflecting public unease – downplaying its role in creating and shaping that unease to begin with.’

Britain is in the midst of a heated national conversation about the ‘issue’ of transgender people. Perhaps no topic – other than Brexit and, latterly, the coronavirus pandemic – has received such a consistently high and recurring level of popular media coverage in the past few years. In 2020 alone The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times between them ran over 300 articles – almost one a day – on trans people. The free Metro newspaper accepted a full-page ad in 2018 from a campaign group urging the public to resist reform to the Gender Recognition Act, a piece of legislation designed to make the process of changing your legal gender less costly and invasive, in line with other European countries. The previous year, the tabloid Daily Star ran an entirely false series of stories claiming that the notorious child murderer Ian Huntley was transgender, before – two years later – finally admitting the story wasn’t true. At the same time, televised debates on the topic became a staple fixture of daytime TV shows

I almost always turn down such invitations. Here’s why. The media agenda with respect to ‘the transgender issue’ is often cynical and unhelpful to the cause of trans justice and liberation. Media coverage of the trans community rarely seems to be driven by a desire to inform and educate the public about the actual issues and challenges facing a group who – as all evidence indicates – are likely to experience severe discrimination throughout their lives.

Today, the typical news item on trans people features a debate between a trans advocate on one side and a person with ‘concerns’ on the other – as if both parties were equally affected by the discussion.

It turns out that when the media want to talk about trans issues, it means they want to talk about their issues with us, not the challenges facing us.

At the time of writing, despite the media myth of a powerful trans lobby, in the UK there are no openly trans newspaper editors and no trans staff writers at any major newspapers, no trans television commissioners, no trans High Court judges, no trans MPs, no trans members of the devolved legislatures of Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, and no trans chief executives at major charities.

Now, those with media platforms were no longer able to publish misinformation with impunity: they could be challenged and publicly held to account. Some of the British commentariat adapted to this new accountability more easily than others: for most of us under the age of 35 working in the media, it is all we have ever known. Others, though, responded with hostility to such public challenges: trans people active on social media platforms were condemned as angry activists, as a mob that were trying to silence debate, or simply, as The Times had it, as ‘bullies’.

The report made several wide-ranging recommendations for legislative and policy changes to improve trans people’s lives, in a number of areas: from healthcare and schools to hate crime and the care of trans prisoners. To date, however, none of these recommendations have been implemented, and none of them seem to have any prospect of being realized in the foreseeable future. What’s more, since the report was published, the situation for trans people has in many respects deteriorated.

Trans people have now become one of a number of targets in right-wing media, alongside, for instance, Muslims, immigrants generally, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, Black Lives Matter, the fat acceptance movement, and feminists challenging state violence against women.

I believe that forcing trans people to involve themselves in these closed-loop debates ad infinitum is itself a tactic of those who wish to oppress us. Such debates are time-consuming, exhausting distractions from what we should really be focusing on: the material ways in which we are oppressed. The author Toni Morrison once spoke about how precisely this tactic is employed by white people against people of colour: ‘The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction,’ she told students at Portland State University in 1975. ‘It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being … None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.’ In much the same way, the public discourse over trans people’s experience is distorted and derailed.

It is only through solidarity, compassion and radical reimagining that we can build a more just and joyful world for all of us.

Such attitudes are encouraged and bolstered by ongoing misinformation about children and transition surgery. The reality – and it needs to be clearly and emphatically stated – is that children under 18 never have genital surgeries in the UK. That many people I have personally encountered believe otherwise is largely due to a hostile press and sensationalist headlines: one such, published in The Sunday Times in June 2019, referred to Mermaids, the UK’s leading charity supporting families of trans children, as a ‘child sex change charity’.2 Apart from anything else, this is entirely erroneous. Young trans children, prior to puberty, only ever transition socially – that is to say, changing names, pronouns and, in some cases, clothes or hairstyles.

It quickly dawned on me that the discussion wasn’t intended to inform the public about the rights of trans children and the responsibilities of adults to safeguard their wellbeing, but rather to entertain viewers by means of confected controversy and debate. I turned the invitation down.

To date, though, the national media has more or less completely failed to explore the ways in which such egregious incidents form part of a wider pattern of abuse of trans children. According to 2017 research by the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, 64 per cent of British trans schoolchildren report being bullied for being trans or for their perceived sexual orientation (sometimes trans young people are instead perceived as gay); 13 per cent of trans pupils experience physical violence as part of this culture of bullying.5 Any connections between the prevalence of bullying and mental health issues among trans children (a shocking 84 per cent of British trans young people have self-harmed6) remain woefully under-examined in the media or in education policy.

As the couple read up on the subject, they came across hundreds of accounts of families with a young child identifying as a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth. They were surprised to find how close these accounts were to their own experience. ‘It can be spookily similar, even with quite diverse stories, among the kids who feel really, really strongly and are able to vocalize it at that young age.’ Kate points out that these similarities between the various accounts of parents with trans children attract criticism from those commentators who argue that trans children do not exist or should not be affirmed in their gender. ‘That’s why some of the haters don’t believe it,’ she says, because they think families are following ‘the script’, whereas we know we experienced it long before we’d read it in anyone else’s account. And now I’ve read it and I’ve talked to tons of people and the story is similar! This gender identity that just seems to be there with a three-year-old as the thing that matters to her more than anything else.

One theme in Kate and Joe’s story, which recurs in many accounts of trans children attempting to express a variant identity, is the initial reluctance of most parents to fully affirm that their child is another gender. This reluctance is in stark contrast to a widespread misconception that parents of young trans children might have helped them affirm too quickly in what might have otherwise been ‘a phase’. In reality, many supportive parents acknowledge that, if anything, they tried to resist their child’s happiness for too long because of their own ignorance or fear.

Parental acceptance is the most crucial factor in the future wellbeing of any trans child. A 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that parents allowing trans children to transition socially virtually eliminates the higher rates of depression and low self-worth trans children experience compared to their cisgender siblings and control groups. Another study looked at trans young people who had chosen a new name to better reflect their gender identity. It found that, compared with peers who were not able to use their chosen name in any context, trans young people who were allowed and encouraged by parents and other adults to use their name at home, at school and with friends experienced a 71 per cent decrease in symptoms of severe depression, a 34 per cent decrease in reported thoughts of suicide and a 65 per cent decrease in suicide attempts.

Todd insists there’s a crucial difference between shaming bad behaviour while continuing to affirm that the child is loved, and shaming a child’s innate characteristics – such as flamboyance in little boys – for making them a bad kind of person: it’s not a choice or thing we’ve done, it’s a natural part of us, so we can’t correct the thing perceived as the problem … It’s as if receiving the love of our parents is conditional on changing the colour of our eyes. As children we are not equipped to understand that it is just the actions and beliefs of other human beings – our parents – that are wrong. We internalise the negative feelings and believe it is we that are wrong.

A 2018 review by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that training for child and family social workers on transgender issues is ‘largely deficient’ and that social workers’ knowledge was ‘very mixed’.9 All of which, I’d argue, speaks of the enduring societal prejudice against trans people, and staff-training modules alone won’t fix the problem. In this cisgender worldview, being trans is always considered an undesirable – if sometimes tolerable – result for a human being. Certain unfortunate individuals may wish to transition as adults, such a belief goes, but innocent children risk being too easily encouraged into this potential disaster and will grow up with bitter regret at what has happened to them. The irony of this prejudice is self-evident: it utterly disregards the harm involved in not supporting a trans child who is certain of their identity and who vocalizes it.

If we want to do right by trans children, we must first understand that attempts to suppress trans children who persistently express their identity can be the greatest source of lifelong harm. By contrast, parents who support their child’s exploration of gender – in whatever form it may take – should be praised for fulfilling their responsibility to create a secure and loving home for their child.

When I relay these experiences now, I find that non-LGBTQ+ people assume this bullying took the form of name-calling (homophobic slurs like ‘queer’, ‘batty boy’ or ‘faggot’) and, sometimes, being physically intimidated or even assaulted. What people tend not to realize as instinctively was how sexualized some of this harassment was. If I was gay, the assumption was that I must be sex-mad: I was publicly taunted and humiliated by being graphically told how much I wanted anal sex, or to ‘suck my cock’ by boys a few years older than me.

It’s a sad indictment of the widespread homophobia and transphobia in schools at the time that I actually consider myself lucky: some of my friends and many of the trans people I’ve met in my work spent their school years in total misery, being terrorized daily.

My own experience made me acutely aware of the complex web of shame that homophobic and transphobic bullying can instil. It was confusing to be taunted and harassed by people who had formed conclusions about my sexuality, when even I wasn’t sure what my orientation was. Furthermore, I didn’t feel like I could discuss the situation with anyone, either at school or at home, because doing so would have only drawn more attention to my queerness and provoked questions from adults that I didn’t feel prepared or safe to answer.

Most teachers, whatever their personal beliefs, were silent on these matters; worse, a minority were as prejudiced as my bullying peers. On more than one occasion I was advised to ‘tone it down’: a victim-blaming euphemism for repressing the femininity that was attracting negative attention. When, on a school trip to London, we walked through Soho, the deputy headmaster, no less, quipped, ‘Keep your backs against the wall here, boys.’ The shadow of Section 28 fell heavily: the effect of suppressing education about LGBTQ+ issues was not only to prevent LGBTQ+ children existing openly at school but, just as perniciously, to create a culture of silence that allowed prejudice among kids and staff alike to flourish unchallenged.

Section 28 must be remembered and condemned for what it was: a staggering dereliction of duty on behalf of Britain’s policymakers towards the country’s young people.

Anti-trans groups like Transgender Trend are strangers to research – precisely because, exposed to research, their assertions evaporate. Rather, they rely on unevidenced myths, speculation and insinuation: that trans people are a new phenomenon, for example, or that there is a social prestige attached to being trans which must be discouraged.

research reveals that the reality for trans pupils in British schools is starkly different from the one imagined by anti-trans campaign groups. Seventy-seven per cent of LGBTQ+ pupils say they have never received any school-based education about gender identity and what being ‘trans’ means; 33 per cent of trans pupils are not able to be known by their preferred name at school; 58 per cent are not allowed to use the toilets in which they feel comfortable.

Between 2015 and 2020, 10,478 children (defined as under eighteen) were referred to England’s Gender Identity Development Service. The total child population of England is approximately 12 million. So, even with the increased numbers of children who are presenting to the NHS with gender issues, and even if all of them are persistently identifying as trans, these referrals would constitute at most approximately 0.09 per cent of the total child population of England.

The influence of LGBTQ+ organizations over schools – almost invariably portrayed as nefarious – is also exaggerated (the UK’s largest LGBTQ+ charity, Stonewall, works with around 1,500 of the UK’s 32,770 schools);

It’s also notable that anti-trans theories can trade in negative stereotypes about autism as much as transphobic stereotypes.

44 per cent of trans people avoided being open about their gender identity at home for fear of a negative reaction.

27 per cent said they had experienced verbal harassment from someone they lived with in the past year; 5 per cent said they had experienced physical violence at the hands of someone they lived with. Shockingly, the most frequent perpetrators in both cases were parents.

‘The numbers have increased significantly’, akt’s CEO Tim Sigsworth tells me at the charity’s head office in London. ‘When I started at akt twelve years ago, less than 5 per cent of our service users identified as trans. Now, we are looking at around 35 per cent.’ Later, I speak to Dawn, a regional services manager for akt in Newcastle, who says that in the north-east of England about half of the young people accessing akt’s services are trans. The reason for this dramatic increase in a little over a decade, Tim and Dawn both suggest, is that more people are coming out younger, but family and community attitudes aren’t evolving fast enough

Despite the gravity of his situation, Rudy found that existing provision for victims of domestic abuse wasn’t designed with someone like him – a transitioning trans man – in mind. Indeed, the domestic violence provision was heavily gendered. ‘I was given three options,’ he continued: ‘a woman’s shelter, a man’s shelter, or presenting myself to the council as homeless. It should tell you all you need to know about the fear that British trans people live in right now, in 2019, when I tell you I chose homelessness.’

According to his November 2019 speech at Cymorth Cymru, this difficulty in finding him somewhere to live stemmed directly from his trans identity: the available hostels, shared housing and temporary accommodation were either gender segregated or had specific age requirements. ‘I was too old for some places, not woman enough for some, not man enough for others. I was in a state of limbo. My existence as a transgender man who was a victim of domestic violence was not part of anybody’s protocol’. Some of this will be about appearance: a trans man currently transitioning may feel anxious about going to a women’s shelter while presenting as male, but also fear being subject to hostility if they are identified as trans in a men’s shelter.

Yet, for those working in frontline community services, there’s often neither the time nor the resources to consider the intersecting vulnerabilities facing those trans young people who have been rejected by their families and are consequently struggling to find somewhere to live. For instance, trans young people from certain ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds are more likely to need help. Tim tells me that, in London, 80 per cent of akt’s service users are BAME and that, even outside London, the overall proportion of BAME service users is 58 per cent.

One of these volunteers – who was previously supported by akt – is Robyn, a twenty-seven-year-old non-binary trans person, whose identity is trans feminine (meaning that she was assigned male at birth, but her gender identity now sits closer to feminine/female on the gender spectrum and she consequently uses feminine pronouns).

Speaking about how race has shaped her experience of being trans, Robyn says a key problem is that she feels she fights bigotry on both fronts, having to deal with transphobia in her family’s community and racist assumptions within the trans community from which she seeks support. ‘I have tried really hard to socialize with trans groups, and it’s super white; to the point almost where it feels intentional. It’s really difficult to feel like I finally found my people, they understand what I’m going through. And then you see that they’re all white and they understand such a small part of what I experienced as a trans woman of colour.’

Robyn’s description of a trans movement conceived as being for and run by white people, when in fact it is predominantly trans people of colour who are experiencing homelessness at disproportionate rates, raises the question of priorities in the political movement for trans liberation. In the media, much of the focus on ‘trans rights’ in recent years has been on legislative rights (such as streamlining the process for legal gender recognition or having a gender-neutral passport), and on social conduct, such as checking a person’s pronouns. This emphasis stems in part from a media agenda set by cisgender people, often – as we’ve seen – for the purposes of creating controversy and fuelling a culture war.

Besides the time and energy trans people have to spend defending civil rights and social courtesies, there’s a pretty straightforward reason for this. In any minority group, those who have the time, resources and political access to lead the charge for recognition and better treatment tend to be the middle-class members, who don’t appreciate the urgent issues of poverty and homelessness that for many can impede participation in activist movements.

Trans politics is no different. Poverty and homelessness are rarely framed as ‘trans issues’ in the media – or even by large LGBTQ+ lobby groups. Yet the introduction of Universal Credit by the Conservative-led coalition government in 2013, as part of its wider programme of austerity measures, had perhaps the most damaging impact on vulnerable trans people of any policy in recent memory.

The stories of both Anna and Jo highlight the violence to which homeless trans people are subjected. Despite this, many feel forced to remain on the streets because of transphobia in mainstream homeless shelters. ‘They need to set up an LGBT hostel. They won’t put me into a male hostel because I’ll be attacked, and other things could happen. But they won’t put me into a woman’s hostel because I’m still “equipped”,’ Anna told the Bristol Cable, describing once again how the gendering of services allows many trans people to slip between the cracks.

The slogans on the project’s placards are unabashedly radical: solidarity with LGBTQ+ migrants and abolition of borders; demands for housing and an end to capitalism. Earlier that day, I had watched Harry on national television arguing that Pride had become too commercialized: the Pride in London organizers, he said, seemed more preoccupied with the Outside Project’s radical image than the important work it does.

In particular, activists at the Outside Project see themselves as offering a critique of mainstream LGBTQ+ campaigning, which does focus on corporations and the middle-class experience. ‘We can work from the grassroots up and look at the needs of the guests,’ Harry tells me. ‘I think the movement at the moment is all about workplace inclusion policies, and the celebration of workplace inclusion, and that’s great, but it’s completely overlooking people that have been left behind in the movement – like trans people and those who are homeless. Our line is that we don’t need a workplace inclusion policy, we need housing. That’s what we say when anyone says, “Don’t you think it’s great that this organization has gender neutral toilets?” Yeah, sure, but that should be a blanket rule anyway.’

The invisibility of domestic abuse among trans people is in large part due to the invisibility of trans people’s romantic and sexual lives in the wider culture as a whole. The most commonly referenced figures in the media, whether Caitlyn Jenner in the US or the former boxing manager Kellie Maloney in the UK, are late-transitioning trans women who, prior to transition, had heterosexual marriages with women. Yet trans people’s romantic lives are much more diverse than this, especially as the visible community has grown and people are coming out younger.

Trans men and non-binary people who were assigned female at birth may be nervous about accessing support services that are targeted at women, despite the fact that their abuse pre-dates their transition or their abuser still perceives and treats them as a woman, so making their experience different from that of other male survivors. Faced with disavowing their identity as men in women’s services or fearing transphobia in men’s services, many trans men are left without access to specialist support.