Ask yourself what it means to live, for instance, ‘as a woman’. Lots of women like to wear jeans or trousers, go to football matches, drink pints, work in manual jobs etc. But trans women worry that these things will make them seem too masculine to judges.
If you are turned down by the judging panel, there is no right of appeal.
If you live in England or Wales and you’re married, your spouse can veto your gender being recognised. This is particularly problematic in relationships where there is domestic abuse, which trans people are additionally vulnerable to due to low self esteem.
Intersex people are, at present, expressly prevented from using the act. I have friends who have had their official gender changed by doctors as much as three times in childhood but who are unable to change it themselves as adults.
Gender recognition has no impact on access to toilets because toilets are not segregated by sex in law. They are simply segregated by custom. If somebody goes into public toilets looking to cause trouble, there are other laws for dealing with them.
Trans women have been using women’s toilets for years. There is no evidence that this creates a risk to women and girls, as this recent study shows: link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Of course, women may still feel uncomfortable, but discomfort is not a reason to exclude people. Trans women who feel forced to use men’s toilets are at risk of assault. Many other women who have encountered hostility when there by mistake or out of desperation will know this.
Trans people have elevated rates of urinary infections, as a group, because they’re often fearful of using public toilets. And please don’t ask them to use disabled ones. There are too few of those already and it just puts the burden onto another disadvantaged group.
On the subject of fear, I’ll tell you something else that’s scary. Being an intersex person sitting in a toilet stall hearing someone just outside screaming transphobic abuse, and wondering if one’s own humanity is measured in nanograms per decilitre, or inches.
What about men who might pretend to be trans to access women’s spaces? On wonders why a man would do that – and risk transphobic abuse on the way to and from – when he could just don overalls, pick up a mop and pretend to be a a janitor.
Men go in women’s toilets all the time - to clean or unblock them, to fix the plumbing, to take their young daughters to the toilet or because they are carers for disabled people who need support to get around but don’t need to use adapted toilets. There’s no panic about this.
In fact, if a law were introduced to segregate toilets by birth gender, it would be even easier – a man could wander in with no excuse needed and say he was a trans man. Who’s going to to check? Would they even know how?
Do you want to live in a society where you have to produce your birth certificate and photo ID every time you need to pee? It reminds me of the fascist Bottom Inspectors from Viz. And it wouldn’t make anyone safer.
In places where toilets are segregated by law, it’s not just non-passing trans women who are excluded. It’s any woman who looks ‘too masculine’. Butch lesbians are particularly vulnerable, as are tall women and women whose sporting activities give them impressive muscles.
So onto another issue. Prisons. Of course it sounds scary that a trans woman – or a man pretending to be a trans woman – could be locked up with other women and assault them. But there are existing mechanisms for dealing with this.
Under prison policies throughout Great Britain, any woman who is assessed to be a serious danger to others is segregated – often in a secure area of the male estate. This happens whether or not she is trans.
Obviously this assessment process failed in one recent, highly publicised case. But trans people as a whole should not be punished for a failure in the system. Even inmates affected in that case have said that they have no problem with other trans women living among them.
The biggest other emotive issue that comes up in these discussions is the issue of children who question their gender. So let’s look at some of the issues there.
Firstly, the NHS does not provide surgery or cross-sex hormones for anybody under the age of 16. If a child goes to a Gender Identity Clinic, the first thing they will get is counselling aimed at helping them to figure out what’s right for them.
Transitioning, for children, is social – it’s about changing name and presentation so that the child feels more comfortable. It’s fully reversible and there’s no need to worry about stigma attaching to kids who change their minds if we work to do away with stigma.
On the subject of changing minds, that’s not as common as you might think. Many of those who attend clinics are never diagnosed as trans. Others who drop out of the system don’t necessarily do so because they’re not trans.
Some children decide that they need time to deal with other things in life before approaching transition as adults. Others become comfortable with non-binary identities, which are currently invisible in official records.
Puberty blockers are sometimes used to give children more time to grow up and make choices that are right for them. Going through puberty as a trans person can be extremely traumatic and is strongly associated with self harm: stonewallscotland.org.uk/sites/default/…
A trans girl who has gone through a masculinising puberty may never be able to look like other girls without facial feminisation surgery. This starts with breaking her jaw. Sure, it’s done under anaesthetic, but those who go through it still report a lot of pain afterwards.
Puberty blockers can contribute to bone demineralisation but this is reversible (it happens in pregnancy too), it’s closely monitored and they are rarely used for long. There is a long history of using these drugs to treat children who start puberty unusually early.
Educating children about the existence of trans people can’t make them trans. The only supposed evidence that it can comes from a study based on reports made by parents (not the children themselves) with a non-representative sample drawn heavily from anti-trans groups.
What education can do is encourage kids to be kind and to think beyond gender stereotypes. It also means that kids who would benefit from counselling about gender can say so, rather than trying to repress their feelings with all the damage that can do.
And that’s it, in the end. Trans people are not monsters or tyrants seeking to destroy the fundamental pillars of civilisation (all things that newspapers have accused us of). We don’t want to take away your rights. Most of us would rather sit down with a nice cup of tea.
As a non-binary person, I’d like to have my gender recognised so that I don’t feel forced to lie when I fill out forms, and I want to enjoy the same respect as other people for who I am. I’m not trying to make everything gender neutral. I have no problem with others’ genders.
So if you read all this and you still think that you should be writing to the government to make other people’s genders your business, fair enough. Perhaps you’re worried about an issue I haven’t covered or perhaps you’re comfortable with your prejudice.
In closing, I just want to remind you that this isn’t an academic issue to those of us directly affected. It impacts our lives every day. That fear of walking down the street is real and trans people are abused and assaulted all the time.
Please don’t forget that we’re human. Life is tough enough. And as Kurt Vonnegut said, “God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
#ComeOutForTransEquality
#ComeOutForTransEquality
