Why The UK’s Bathroom Bill Is Wrong

An open letter to Liz Truss MP, the Minister for Women and Equalities in the UK Government.

Dear Ms. Truss,

The image you see is a photograph I took in 1999, at my then home in Kennington, London. A short walk from the Houses of Parliament. It is of my housemate’s bedroom window, broken by a large rock that somebody threw at it. Fortunately, she wasn’t in the room at the time; she could have been seriously injured otherwise. Notice that the pane didn’t shatter completely, because she installed special glass after the last time this happened, and the time before that, and so on.

I want you to see this image, and know what it represents because after reading the news on Sunday about your plans, I am afraid of experiencing this again. My ex-housemate and I are trans women. During the time I lived in that house, local youths would regularly throw stones or bricks through our windows, paint abusive graffiti on the house, kick the front door in, or push lit fireworks through the letterbox. Not once in a while. No. All the time. It happened in the evenings when they had the cover of darkness. It was personal terrorism. Strangers decided that we should spend our evenings in terror, then made it so.

We called the police so frequently that they installed a radio in our house so that we could summon them faster. It became rare for a day to go by without using it. Sometimes I would arrive home from work, and then spend the evening alternating between being terrorised and giving witness statements to the police. On the streets near our house, we were pelted with stones and broken glass, when they were to hand, angry verbal abuse otherwise. These people hijacked our lives all because they hated trans people, and they could torture us effectively with impunity.

Someone recently asked me how I coped with that abuse. The fact is that I didn’t cope with it. I survived it, but it left invisible scars, that I don’t think will ever truly heal.

Other people will undoubtedly tell you about how impractical your “bathroom bill” will be. How it will cause people to bully and challenge cis (i.e. non-trans) people when they go to a public toilet if their gender presentation is atypical. They will tell you about the bathroom bills in the US that have since been repealed because of this. So I will not labour the point.

I want you to think again because the signal you will send to the kind of people who broke that window is that their actions are justified. They will feel free to manifest their hatred by throwing rocks at innocent people.

To people like me; you are sending the message that we don’t matter. Both of those are terrible messages for someone in your position to send.

Do not do this. It is wrong.

Sincerely,

Anna Langley