The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice Is Justice for All

by Shon Faye

The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people.

This disquiet is exploited by conservatives and religious groups whose aim is to undermine LGBTQ+ power by promoting in-fighting.

Some feminists reject the term ‘cis’ because they believe it implies that all cisgender women are comfortable with femininity, or that it minimizes the way millennia of patriarchy has imposed constraints on women in a sexist world. This is not my interpretation of the term. As I see it, a cisgender woman can be a gender-non-conforming woman who defies sexist norms but still wishes to be legally, socially and politically categorized as a woman.

Gender is one of the first things we look for, ask about or intuit in a person. Cis men and women have the immeasurable benefit of never being thought to be mistaken, deluded or deceptive about this very fundamental fact about their personhood.

‘I know the press offered parents money if they could get a picture of me,’ she wrote in an email to a friend on New Year’s Day 2013. In the end, unable to get their hands on such an image, media outlets lifted an old picture from the Facebook pages of Meadows’ brother and sister without permission.

Since the Sunday People outed the trans model April Ashley back in 1961 with the headline ‘ “Her” Secret Is Out’ – thereby instantly ending her modelling career – the media have tended to be less interested in informing the public about trans people and more interested in creating profitable cycles of mockery and suspicion.

Five years after Meadows’ death, the tone of even one of the country’s most respected broad-sheets, The Times, dripped with contempt: ‘A worthy movement to help a minority group has become a form of McCarthyism in bad wigs and fishnets, thanks to a bunch of bullies, trolls and humourless misogynists,’ one 2018 article on trans people read. ‘Feel too daunted to venture an opinion on anything “transgender”? Great! That’s exactly how the bullies like it.’1

In 2020 alone The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times between them ran over 300 articles – almost one a day

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.

In all cases, trans people have been dehumanized, reduced to a talking point or conceptual problem: an ‘issue’ to be discussed and debated endlessly. 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. (Jay Stewart, chief executive of the youth charity Gendered Intelligence, is the only trans person to head any of the British charities specifically campaigning on trans issues.)

Although visibility helps redress a representational inequality, it does nothing on its own to achieve redistributive justice.

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.’

You don’t have to know the intimate details of my private life to support me. Don’t worry about the ‘why’; act on the ‘what’. What does being a trans person in a transphobic society produce? At the moment, too often, it is still violence, prejudice and discrimination.

Though extreme, the sentiment expressed – portraying trans children’s claims about their own identities as absurd and deluded – is typical of much media coverage of trans young people’s lives.

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

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.

Media discussion of trans children frequently oscillates between seeing them as innocents to be rescued from the grip of a malign ideology, or as dangers to be feared.

‘blokes having a sex change going into girls’ changing rooms in schools’?3 When Lees challenged him on his choice of language and asked why he thought an adult would be in a girls’ changing room, Robinson replied, ‘No, not an adult. Could be someone at a younger age.’

conflation of young trans girls with (predatory) adult ‘blokes’ is precisely the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that impacts on healthy discussion of trans children’s experiences.

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.

October 1987, Margaret Thatcher bemoaned a society in which Too often, our children don’t get the education they need – the education they deserve … that opportunity is all too often snatched from them by hard-left education authorities and extremist teachers … Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.

in 1988 her government passed Section 28, a legislative measure banning schools from promoting ‘the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. The effect of the legislation was to gag teachers both from explicitly teaching about gay and lesbian issues and from offering support to individual LGBTQ+ pupils.

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.15

The narratives perpetuated about trans children, particularly in schools, by headlines like ‘Children Sacrificed to Appease Trans Lobby’ or ‘Cult of Gender Identity is Harming Children’,17 are intended to alarm the public –

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.’

‘My figure and voice [were] becoming more masculine by the day as the result of hormone treatment. I feared that if I tried to access a gendered refuge, someone would report me to the tabloids.’

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.

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 the entire minority group.

‘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.26

Globally, cis male intimate partners or ex-partners are the most common perpetrators of murders of trans people (particularly trans women).

Despite this, there are currently no LGBTQ+-specific refuge services in England, and there are only two refuges, both in London, that provide specialist support to LGBTQ+ survivors.

‘The reply from [the director of operations at the organization] and another senior staff member was, “If they sound like a woman on the phone, talk to them … If they don’t sound like a woman, it doesn’t matter if they say they are, hang up. We’re not supporting them.” ’

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.

School bullying, family rejection, homelessness, domestic abuse and discrimination in care services are major issues that continue to affect huge numbers of trans people, even as societal attitudes appear to be growing more tolerant. These difficulties affect trans people in their most intimate lives and shape their happiness day to day.

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.

Talking about ‘trans healthcare’ must also mean talking about the general physical health, sexual health and mental health of trans people. Failing to consider trans health in a holistic way will simply allow the dire state of trans people’s experiences of the health service in the UK to remain hidden.

Back in 1972, a group of transsexuals and transvestites, meeting regularly in Notting Hill, in London, as a branch of the new Gay Liberation Front, wrote a piece for the activist pamphlet Lesbian Come Together. As many as 60,000 people in Britain were taking cross-sex hormones, they stated; more wanted to do so but were refused by doctors. They described the stigma to which trans people were subjected by the medical profession when accessing hormone and surgical treatment, and their struggle for autonomy: ‘the psychiatrists who electro-shock us think we’re pathetic or tragic … one sister said that after six months of psychiatric treatment she discovered that no one knew her like herself.’6

In this sense, the development of trans healthcare is more analogous to that of women’s* reproductive health – particularly access to free, safe and legal abortion – than it is to the cosmetic-surgery Ponzi scheme dreamed up in the fevered minds of conspiracy theorists.

(These roles, should we need reminding, frame women as vessels for reproduction and trans people as threats to the strict separation of male and female sex roles on which patriarchy depends.)

There is an irony here: it is generally conservatives who make specious claims about money-making schemes preying on trans people, but, in fact, it is conservatives’ own policies of cuts and privatization that actually allow the private sector to behave vampirically.

It must be stressed that the non-consensual, coercive and violent use of hormones to interfere with the bodily integrity of LGBTQ+ people and those born with intersex conditions destroyed countless lives and should be considered a stain on the history of Western medicine. This shared historical experience is also a point of unity for trans people and cisgender lesbians, gays and bisexuals, demonstrating our shared struggle against our pathologizing and mistreatment over the past century and more.

his criteria for allowing medical transition were rooted in his own highly idiosyncratic, patriarchal ideas. He would, for instance, refuse trans women whom he considered too tall, or who would not consider taking up a more feminine profession after transition, to ‘pass’ as female. ‘I think if they are going to be ladies,’ he wrote of trans women in 1969, ‘they should be lady-like. Conformity … is surely what we are looking for.’16

However, it is important to realize that the framing of trans people as ‘parodies’ who reinforce stereotypes cruelly disregards the ways in which those same British trans people – whose gender expression, dress, hairstyles, makeup preferences and so on have, it clearly needs to be said, always varied as much as their cisgender counterparts’ – have spent the past fifty years being coerced into narrow gender conformity by their doctors, then mocked and derided as too stereotypical and regressive by cis onlookers. If it sounds like a catch-22, it’s because it is.

Ria Cooper, a trans woman, was described by the Daily Mail as ‘Britain’s youngest sex swap patient’, who now wanted to ‘reverse her sex change treatment’. In fact, Cooper did not fully detransition, instead stopping hormone treatment for a few years because of mental illness. She later told Vice, I’d never say that I made the wrong decision in transitioning because I didn’t, but I was going through so much. I was doing escorting and then I got attacked by a client. Everything just went wrong for me and that’s why I had a breakdown … the press will do anything for a story, they chat so much shit.26

To translate: trans people wishing to access surgery are tasked with demonstrating to doctors that they are actively seeking (and receiving) acceptance (or at least tolerance) from cisgender people within cisgender-dominated environments. This sense that you need the social consent of others to access surgery can be further intensified for trans people of colour or neurodiverse trans people, such as those with autism.

Again, there is a parallel with individuals who regret having abortions being used as a principle by which to judge access to abortion for all. It comes as no surprise, then, that Bell’s solicitor, Paul Conrathe, is a lawyer with a long history of taking anti-abortion cases.

According to GIDS’ published figures, in the financial year 2018–19 it received 2,406 new referrals; of these, only 230 (9.6 per cent) were aged ten or under at the time they were referred. This means that, even before the Bell case, over 90 per cent of children who were referred to GIDS had no practical chance of ever starting blockers before their puberty began anyway.

The reality, then, is this: the number of children receiving timely medical intervention was vanishingly small even before the legal challenge to its use in December 2020; the UK’s approach to puberty-suppressing treatment is highly conservative compared to other Western countries; and the waiting times, already almost unendurably long, are getting worse, with no plan in place to bring them under control.

As Giordano put it in a 2020 paper: Puberty blockers are not ‘novel’ treatment. They were recommended by prominent bodies of medical opinion in the UK and internationally over two decades ago and have thus been part of standard medical treatment for many years.37