The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice Is Justice for All

by Shon Faye

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.

Instead, we are invited on television to debate whether trans people should be allowed to use public toilets.

This is a good thing: the framing of trans people as ‘the transgender issue’ has the effect of cutting us off from solidarity and making us the ‘other’. A new conversation, then, must necessarily start to undo this estrangement and consider what we share and where we overlap with other minorities or marginalized groups. It is only through solidarity, compassion and radical reimagining that we can build a more just and joyful world for all of us.

one in four trans people have experienced homelessness.

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.

if activism is just liberal, it’s just all marketing ploys and it’s all about increasing capital and nothing is actually to benefit the community.’

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 British media conversation about trans women and ‘women only’ domestic violence services has been instrumental in blocking legal gender recognition reforms and has prevented genuine engagement with the reality of trans women’s experiences of domestic abuse – which are, as a result, simply erased.

This manufactured controversy over trans inclusion is a deliberate distraction: the bitter debate over trans women makes political solidarity and organizing among LGBTQ+ people and cisgender straight women more difficult.

While many modern clinicians refute the idea that they are gatekeeping, the nature of gender identity services – with its continued emphasis on assessment and diagnosis – nevertheless ensures, as the sociologist Ruth Pearce points out, that ‘they do play this gatekeeping role, thereby exercising power as “gender experts”.’

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.

It is clear that trans people of colour’s experiences of systemic racism in healthcare and surgery are still woefully under-investigated and under-researched and that the accounts of transphobic medical discrimination which receive most traction are likely to be those of white people.

Whatever GIDS’ policy, it is clear that only trans children with parental support may once again be able to access treatment; those without parents onside cannot.

Seeking to diagnose, the clinician does not always prioritize explaining the purpose of their questions to the patient.

Nevertheless, as a society we understand that we should not have a death penalty because it would violate human dignity. Similarly, we cannot have a society in which a general principle of respect for trans people’s autonomy to determine their own gender socially, legally and medically is only given in return for good behaviour. There are no easy ways out.

But this is an artificial split, imposed on us by those people who seek to isolate us and deny our identities.

they care more about the sexist ideal of the perfect untouched female form, than about the people whose bodies they actually are.

Anti-trans feminist rhetoric about female spaces tends to rely on the false premise that it is always possible to detect a trans woman on sight and challenge her access to the space.

The existence of trans people ought to make everyone take a long hard look at their own dearly held ideas about gender, and wonder whether these ideas are quite as stable and certain as they once thought.

There can be no trans liberation under capitalism.

We are not an ‘issue’ to be debated and derided. We are symbols of hope for many non-trans people, too, who see in our lives the possibility of living more fully and freely. That is why some people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of our freedom. Our existence enriches this world.