The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

by Shon Faye

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.

This is a perilous misunderstanding of the reality; in fact, there aren’t greater numbers of children asserting a trans identity than there were in times past. There are simply more children who feel able to talk about it openly and seek support and advocacy from their parents.

The reality – and it needs to be clearly and emphatically stated – is that children under 18 never have genital surgeries in the UK.

(a shocking 84 per cent of British trans young people have self-harmed

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.

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

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.

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.8

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.

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.

When 64 per cent of trans pupils say they are bullied for being LGBTQ+ at school, almost half of those bullied never tell anyone about the bullying, and 46 per cent say they hear transphobic language ‘frequently’ at school,10