So, after five long years in the trenches of trans activism in the UK I’m stepping back, probably permanently. The main reason is exhaustion, although there’s a fair element of frustration and anger in there too, and not just at the anti-trans movement in the UK.
Yes, anti-trans. I’m not going to dignify them by their chosen euphemism, ‘gender critical’. They’re bigots, plain and simple.
This might be a bit of a ‘stream of consciousness’ thing, but there’s a few things I really need to get off my chest.
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Trans activism in the UK is an utter shambles. There, I’ve said it.
In five years of fighting against the Tories, the most transphobic Government in recent memory, most of trans activism, and the Trans & LGBT orgs doing it, appear to have learned nothing.
It’s not surprising really, when you consider that most organisations are there to provide support, not do activism.
In many ways they seem to be lost, stuck between supporting a trans community that desperately needs help just surviving day to day and the media and political nightmare they find themselves in. Couple this with a lack of understanding of the current environment and how the anti-trans movement actually operates and what you end up with is a state of managed decline and despair, with occasional bright spots (Like Indigo).
Part of this is that none of the organisations have really put in the necessary work to understand the situation, let alone combat it.
Let’s take adult trans healthcare as an example. We’ve known for the better part of a decade that adult services in the UK are, frankly, abysmal. What have the orgs done? Did they gather the data to prove just how bad it is? Did they go to policymakers with hard data?
Nope. Mostly they relied on anecdotal, experience related information and good will, under the mistaken assumption people would do the right thing.
Did they investigate and analyse who the anti-trans players are in Government, medical community etc and share that between each other? No again.
Instead we’ve seen healthcare for young people replaced with a conversion therapy approach, on the basis of a scientifically fraudulent report commissioned by the NHS via a transphobic charlatan with zero experience and a lot of transphobia. We’ve seen the UK psychiatric practitioner community almost wholly embrace conversion practices to the extent they’re openly holding conversion therapy conferences on UK soil, cheered on by their colleagues and the press.
Let’s take another example — the politicisation of the EHRC. Back in early 2021, TranLucent (then Steph’s Place) approached a meeting of the UK LGBT orgs, via a trusted intermediary as they did not have the contacts within the LGBTQ+ org space (and that itself speaks volumes, with our ‘leaders’ inaccessible to those who can actually help, or have info or concerns), with a summary of our findings about the EHRC’s anti-trans agenda, and asking for a discussion.
The response?
Not one person or organisation reached out to speak with Steph’s Place.
(This is largely the same cosy little group of LGBTQ+ orgs that recently had a ‘meeting’ with Wes Streeting, by the way.
The same meeting where some orgs didn’t want to talk about trans healthcare at all, apparently. The same meeting they went into with no strategic plan, and as a result it achieved absolutely nothing for the trans community, but generated a huge amount of PR for the anti-trans bigot that now sits in the seat as Health Minister.)
Instead they ignored the problem, and it festered until it culminated in the cancellation of the ‘Safe To Be Me’ Conference. And let’s be honest about who really drove the work that made that happen. There were three key players in getting that cancelled.
- TransLucent, through constantly highlighting and making a lot of noise about the EHRCs anti-trans agenda and how it conflicted with ‘Safe To Be Me’, building a grass roots anger that forced others to take notice.
- Trans in the City, who spearheaded getting the corporate sponsors to pull out.
- Stonewall, pulling together the political and coordination strings that led to every trans & LGBT org pulling out of this sham conference, as well as adding political weight behind the campaign to shutter it.
What you won’t know is that one well known ‘activist’ almost destroyed the whole plan. At this point the UK Government were still planning on going ahead with ‘Safe To Be Me’, so the orgs were planning a rival conference essentially right next door to show them up.
Right at a crucial time, this ‘activist’ decided to target Trans in the City for the links with & support of the corporates, doing so across both the working group and wider social media. Chaos ensued and the whole thing fell apart, but thankfully not before the conference was cancelled. But the toll it took on people in that working group was horrific.
And this is one of the big problems with UK activism, it’s populated with far too many enormous egos and people who, flatly, refuse to listen.
Trans activism is too often used as a platform for those with other agendas such as political ambitions or more interested in building and maintaining political friendships, those who never want the fight to end because it means an end to their status as a big fish in a very small pond, those who have decided that all organisations need to follow their lead and their lead only, and those who can’t or won’t do anything until a consensus has been reached by everyone, meaning nothing actually gets done until its far, far too late, if at all.
And noone wants to share information.
Another example — there was ‘consensus’ among the Ban Conversion Therapy organisations to ignore the whole ‘transing the gay away’ thing being pushed by LGBA & Sex Matters, because the ‘consensus’ was they thought it wouldn’t get any traction.
A week later it was plastered over multiple newspapers, being pushed by Kemi Badenoch in Parliament, and being discussed by politicians as if it were fact instead of some fringe conspiracy theory. Ban CT couldn’t even be bothered to put out a simple statement of condemnation at the time.
Consensus is being held up as some sort of holy grail within the LGBTQ+ community. It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong, or that it means the time has passed to do anything meaningful, as long as everyone agrees and damn the consequences. Consequences that trans people pay for, in spades. In some ways they need to take the same approach as Israel did in World War Z (the terrible movie), in that if everyone agrees on something, a member of the group has to take the opposing view and work an alternate plan as if the consus view is wrong. Devil’s advocate, with teeth.
Some of this is kind of unsurprising though — trans people are fiercely independent, we have to be. As a community we are also deeply, deeply traumatised by living in a society that actively hates us. That does not translate well to organisational, collaborative working. The distrust is deep.
But ultimately this means that there is zero strategic thinking going on at organisational level, and all that happens is reactive, late, uncordinated responses, talking shops and a lot of ‘woe is me’.
What we really need is a combined, ‘National Trans Organisation’ to spearhead all of the crap going on, instead of hundreds of small groups, individuals and unsuitable orgs trying to constantly put out fires and dig up nuggets of info that’s being hidden or withheld by the UKs institutionally transphobic public bodies and organisations, and doing so alone.
That takes two things though, a committed leader with vision, and money, neither of which we have.
Press for Change managed in the early 2000’s by flying mostly under the radar, led by a very small group of people with a specific aim, which is nothing like the situation we have now — but people and organisations are taking the same approach.
20th century thinking trying to resolve a 21st century problem just won’t cut it, and the sooner people grasp that, the better.
A Lesson From the Past, and a Warning for the Future
Another big problem, and another one that’s being ignored, is ‘Labour will save us’ syndrome.
Let’s be really, really honest. The Tories were so fundamentally anti-trans, and so blatant about it that it was almost comically villainous. After five years they were so inept and it was so glaringly obvious that everyone just rolled their eyes when they rolled out their latest anti-trans statement, or attack vector.
Labour aren’t like that, which means they’re far, far worse, and a lot more dangerous, and too many people are willing to ignore what they’re up to because they have a veneer of respectability and competence, gleaned not from actually being any good, but by comparison with the previous administration.
They ‘listen’ but ignore, and too many in the UK activism space have ties to Labour meaning that they’re too willing to handwave away what’s going on as ‘Labour have more important thighs to be doing than listening to trans people, while at the same time watching Streeting carry on destroying trans healthcare, Dodds / Phillipson completely ignoring the human rights situation, and Nandy & Starmer refuse to deal with the press & media.
It’s the illusion of competence.
‘But we have more allies in Government’ they cry. The same allies who have done nothing to get Streeting to overturn the PB ban, which will become permanent in September outside of a highly unethical and deeply restrictive NHS research programme.
This Labour Government are going to be deadly for the trans community, and they’re going to do it while listening to the LGBTQ+ orgs & allies, smiling politely, and ignoring it all because it’s all for our own good.
Labour have a massive, massive transphobia problem that is being completely and utterly ignored, because it’s not their interested to deal with it. They’re going to be a one term Government under Starmer, and whoever follows (Reform?) will finish the job.
Where does that leave the UK trans community?
Frankly, completely fucked.
The UK is a deeply transphobic country at essentially every level, it’s deeply embedded in UK culture and institutions, and noone is willing to address it.
So it’s going to continue to fester until something gives, and that something will be the trans community.
In another 5 years trans healthcare in the UK will be near non-existent, and while we will continue to have rights on paper, appeasing the UN and international community, the reality will be that no one will be able to access those rights, because legal recognition will be inaccessible because healthcare is inaccessible.
Trans people are already second class citizens in the UK. In 10 years time we will probably cease to exist unless there is a fundamental change in the activism and LGBTQ+ organisation space, change that can force political and media change.
And I can’t see that happening, so I’m going to sit back and relax because I’ve nothing else left to give to a disorganised community that can’t see beyond the next twitter blow up to fight back, the same community that constantly spends all it’s energy promoting the anti-trans movement through outrage, rather than do the strategic thinking and planning needed to get things on track again. I’m sick of banging my head against a brick wall.
Respectable engagement no longer works, and nor does protest. Think different. Until that happens, and people get off their backsides, the future is looking utterly dark.