The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

by Shon Faye

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. As a result, like many movements formed around an aspect of personal identity, class politics and a broader critique of capitalism have become sidelined in the trans movement. 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. This representational imbalance leads to ‘single issue’ priorities, which emphasize the personal freedoms of the individual over the economic liberation of t...

‘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.

struggles faced by BAME, lesbian and disabled women.31 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.

experiences and championing enforced segregation.32 There is also a lack of practicality in the idea of these hypothetical ‘third’ spaces, often touted as a specious solution to the ‘problem’ of trans women accessing women’s services: the trans population is so small and geographically disparate it would be difficult to provide a specialist service in every location where a trans person is in need of help. The choice can’t be between tailored services or no provision at all: accommodation in mainstream services will always need to be an option.

trans people can be found within all of these groups). This overlap between the needs of different marginalized people must be stressed because the illusion that trans people’s concerns are niche and highly complex is often a way to disempower them. The emphasis on the ‘minority’ status of minorities keeps them focused on explaining their difference in public discourse, so that they can be continuously batted away as an aberration or minor concern.

the current political panic about trans teens’ clinical treatment in Britain is neither scientific nor focused on outcomes; it is purely ideological.

In the 2020s, timely access to transition-related healthcare will be the most pressing issue facing trans communities in Britain.

Cisgender women, disabled people, fat people, black people, HIV-positive people and trans people are all groups that experience high degrees of medical discrimination and abuse, historically and currently. Our struggle is, then, a shared one – and it should not be left to us alone.

people working in the media are likely to move in the same social networks as those from similar backgrounds across ‘the Establishment’ and, as a result, are more inclined to defer to and collude with these systems of power.

This must be said: corporate diversity schemes can never guarantee the safety, dignity and prosperity of the transgender worker – or, indeed, any worker – in the way that a strong and robust trade union movement and a properly funded welfare state can.

trans people and their political demands are acceptable only insofar as accepting them allows better participation in the capitalist system.

social justice movements that cede their ability to decide priorities and direction to wealthy corporations and media outlets also grant those groups the right to determine which political demands are acceptable and which are not.

In particular, Black and Asian trans communities in Britain remain completely under-represented in LGBTQ+ sector organizations; these are the same communities experiencing the brunt of systemic anti-LGBTQ+ oppression in the UK. Trust in NGOs is often very low among trans people and communities of colour, who are rightly critical of these organizations’ uncritical proximity to, for example, policing and the Home Office, despite the entrenched racism of both institutions

In a society that is both patriarchal and capitalist, men’s misogyny towards women sits comfortably alongside their desire to extract women’s sexual labour. This does not change because the woman is trans.

while the Nordic model is commonly positioned as a feminist solution to male violence, sex-worker activists argue that its adoption by Western governments is less about eliminating male violence than it is about a broader agenda to restrict migration.

Yet it is highly likely that, as more legal rights are won for trans people in the ‘respectable’ employment market, middle-class trans people will be induced to abandon trans sex workers. The latter, it will be implied, taint the trans movement by association or reinforce the negative stereotypes of Love Actually and Sex and the City.

Trans people are emblematic of wider, conceptual concerns about the autonomy of the individual in society. Their rejection of dominant, ancient and deep-seated ideas about the connection between biological characteristics and identity causes a dilemma for the nation state: whether to acknowledge and give credence to the individual’s assertion of their own identity in law and in culture; or to mandate that it, the state, is the final authority on identity, and to assert its power over the individual – by force if necessary.

Any protection and allegiance the police offer, Glasgow Pride showed, is dependent on satisfactory cooperation with the state – any dissent may still be punished with violence. Such episodes serve as a reminder that, ultimately, the new-found relationship between the police and trans people in the twenty-first century is based on supplication, not solidarity.

Criminality is sometimes distinct from questions of ethics or harm, despite the fact that we are encouraged to see them as one and the same.

I believe that trying to adapt the present prison system for trans people, while leaving that system otherwise intact, is an abdication of moral responsibility. Trans campaigners, activists and allies should be bolder and move towards explicitly anti-prison politics.

Yet while the Karen White case was used as the basis for many comment pieces in the media on keeping ‘men’ (trans women) out of women’s prisons, and in campaign messaging against gender recognition laws, it’s notable that the Cocks case did not translate into the same feminist arguments against the presence of male guards in female prisons.

The mechanism of the prison industrial complex is clear: as it builds more cages it also finds more people to put in them.

The effect of both division and consumerism is to encourage individual identity over and above commonality.

That is why some people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of our freedom. Our existence enriches this world.