Why Visibility Matters
Trans YouTuber Ruby Price on 4/1 Trans Visibility Day, and being a 90’s kid
By Ruby Price
Growing up transgender in a Northern, working-class town like Huddersfield is a bit like flying to space in a second-hand rocket made out of cardboard. You don’t really know what you’re doing, and neither do the people looking after you.
When I first went to my GP to tell him I thought I was transgender, he didn’t have a clue where to start with helping me along this process. In fact, his exact advice was for me to book another appointment in two weeks so that he could find an appropriate course of action going forward.
Maybe I should rewind a bit?
I’m a 90s kid and that means I didn’t grow up with access to the internet in my own home. The source of information for my childhood years was a battered encyclopedia which didn’t contain anything about anything that wasn’t straight and cisgender. It had two pages about dinosaurs but dinosaurs weren’t LGBT… Well, as far as I’m aware.
Worse than that, my first years at school were during the repulsive Section 28 period where the promotion of LGBT material was illegal. Teachers literally couldn’t talk about gay relationships without being sanctioned thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s bigoted ideologies. In the playground, gay was an insult. If you didn’t subscribe to the stereotypical image of masculinity from a young age, you were gay. You were a puff. You were bullied.
In our world, there was no such thing as being transgender. Boys turning into girls was something you saw in cartoons and on TV for comedic effect. Where there were examples of trans people in the media, it was rarely put in a positive light. The nostalgia-spoiling, trans-panic-puking ending of Ace Ventura Pet Detective did nothing more than imply that trans people were disgusting, vomit-inducing men who pretended to be women… and it certainly wasn’t something that was going to be offered to the awkward ginger kid who asked why they had to wear trousers when the girls were wearing dresses to school.
The first moments of positive trans visibility in the media I can remember were both ‘stories of the day’ in BBC TV shows Doctors and Waterloo Road. I use the term positive generously here given both episodes were full of stereotypes and ideas of transnormativity. But the thing is, they both tried! It wasn’t about being ‘funny’ or hitting a diversity quota, the trans characters in these episodes were there to educate the audience about what being transgender actually meant. The suffering of trans people wasn’t being played for laughs.
I often cite these two episodes of procedural British television as part of my trans awakening. They both showed me that transgender people exist and because of the portrayals of the characters, I saw aspects of myself. I finally knew who I was. I was Ruby Price and I was transgender.
These days, trans visibility is a discussion taking place all the way from Hollywood movies to children's books. Should trans roles be exclusively played by trans actors? Should LGBTQ-inclusive sex education be mandatory in schools? Should we be teaching children that trans people exist and they aren’t wrong for doing so? I’m no movie casting or school curriculum planning expert but given that a negative portrayal of trans experiences can give gender non-conforming individuals a harder time coming to terms with their own gender identity, it can only be a good thing.
There were 350 reported murders of transgender people in 2020 and hate crime reports have quadrupled over the past five years in the UK. Seeing trans people as real people, with real lives and relationships rather than only as sex workers or subjects for humiliation, could potentially change the world. For now, I’ll take making the world a safer place for those who are transgender.
