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by
Shon Faye
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May 14, 2022 - December 7, 2023
The most noteworthy ally that British trans people once appeared to have in this fight was the Women and Equalities Select Committee Inquiry on Transgender Equality, a cross-party parliamentary investigation into the political realities of being British and trans, which published its findings in January 2016.
The ‘topic’ of trans has now been limited to a handful of repetitive talking points: whether non-binary people exist and whether gender neutral pronouns are reasonable; whether trans children living with dysphoria should be allowed to start their transition; whether trans women will dominate women’s events in the Olympics; and the endless debate over toilets and changing rooms. This book will not regurgitate these talking points yet again. 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.
As the feminist academic Viviane Namaste wrote twenty years ago: ‘Professional and middle-class norms determine not only what transsexuals can say and in what spaces. They also confer the right to speak to those transsexuals who will abide by the codes of a middle-class discourse.’3 In writing this book, I have tried to use these privileges as an instrument to amplify the voices of trans people who are not as routinely heard or discussed.
Now, for those unacquainted with trans people, it might seem that in the past decade there has been a huge rise in children expressing issues with their birth-assigned gender. 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.
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.
This approach to discussion of issues of any sort that can be thought of as controversial is very, depressingly common.
John Bradshaw, who makes a distinction between healthy shame – which we use to deter children from dangerous or harmful behaviour – and a more toxic kind of shame that is directed at children for being who they fundamentally are.
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 it’s fair to say there is a crisis in our education system around tackling bullying, violence, harassment and social exclusion.
just when greater inclusion, full commitment to anti-bullying practices and more robust safeguarding is needed, there emerges a false political narrative of trans children being disruptive to their peers, being extended privileged treatment, and carrying a risk of social contagion, converting other children to their ‘gender ideology’.
In their classic analysis of moral panics, sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda outline five key characteristics: ‘concern’, or the belief that the behaviour of the group in question are likely to have a negative effect on society; ‘hostility’ – fairly self-explanatory – to the point where the group in question are seen as ‘folk devils’, that is, a group of people who are portrayed in media as outsiders and deviant, and who are blamed for crimes or other sorts of social problems; ‘consensus’, or widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society;
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Sociologists broadly agree that moral panics can result in retrograde policy changes and punitive measures that impact significantly on civil rights; just as significantly, they can also make institutions – like schools – more hesitant in acting to defend the group being targeted.
A minority within a minority, trans young people are disproportionately over-represented in the homeless population: one in four trans people have experienced homelessness.
Rudy had come up against a common problem for trans people seeking crisis services: not simply a lack of specialist provision, but a lack of understanding of how trans people’s fear of highly gendered services can lead them to self-exclude – as Rudy felt he had to – because of the risk of further harassment and prejudice within those services.
‘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. This, Tim Sigsworth tells me, is a fundamental problem for vulnerable people with multifaceted identities: ‘Services will
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How can a service deal with the small percentage (which may be a of large absolute number) of exceptions, in the face of constrained resources.? By allowing discretion at the local level, with a pot of money held centrally?
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.
The Outside Project, launched in winter 2017, is the UK’s first dedicated LGBTQ+ homeless shelter.
‘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.
Globally, cis male intimate partners or ex-partners are the most common perpetrators of murders of trans people (particularly trans women).
There is a wider structural reality at work: the hostility and bad-faith discussion of trans inclusion in domestic violence services is in the interests of a right-wing government that does not wish to fund these services at all.
Gender dysphoria is a rare experience in society as a whole, affecting about 0.4 per cent of the population, which can make it hard to explain to the vast majority of people, who have not experienced it.
To my mind, the trans writer Andrea Long Chu expresses it more accurately: ‘Dysphoria,’ she says, ‘can feel like heartbreak.’3 Heartbreak, its incapacitating grief and the sense of absence and loss which activate the same parts of the brain as physical pain, can be so all-consuming it interferes with your everyday life. So, too, dysphoria. For me, at least, this is a much richer way of describing how many trans people experience distress with their bodies – indeed, how I felt until I medically transitioned.
When medical transitioning was first devised as a technology, its primary purpose was not to help the trans patient, but to control and manage gender variance in society while leaving the gender binary intact. Movement between the two sexes could be made possible by hormones and surgery, but the semblance of two mutually exclusive categories, male and female, would remain.
For those who need them, medical transition and contraception or abortion are – or should be – about the bodily autonomy of the individual, their right to mental well-being and the freedom to carve out their own destiny in defiance of prevailing gender roles.
Multiple studies show the regret rate for gender reassignment surgery is even lower: about 0–2 per cent.10
The two policy positions are linked: restriction of access to abortion and restriction of access to trans healthcare both emerge from conservative ideological positions about gender roles and the degree to which an individual is entitled to autonomy over their body.
I think the distress associated with unwanted pregnancy (which is not an illness but may require medical intervention) serves as a better analogy for explaining why trans healthcare is available on the NHS: to preserve wellbeing and prevent personal distress.
In 1942, he convinced a surgeon to perform a double mastectomy, and by 1944 he had had his birth certificate amended to reflect his new status as male. Given the British media’s recent pained wrangling with the very idea of gender affirmation as a potential ‘slippery slope’, the fact that more straightforward access to medical transition and legal gender recognition was available during the Second World War than is often the case today is astonishing. The mainstream media’s presumption that strict ‘controls’ on transition are and have always been necessary relies on the suppression, and
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Currently, adults in most of the UK who want to access specialist gender identity services need to approach their GP and ask for referral to one of the UK’s seven NHS gender identity clinics. The only exception is Wales, which has recently introduced a reformed, modern system. Regardless of where in the UK a person is based, the 2016 parliamentary Inquiry on Trangender Equality found that many GPs were not aware of their responsibility to refer patients to specialist services. Some, indeed, were actively hostile to the idea: the inquiry heard evidence of ‘persistent refusal of some General
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