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The problem with activists

  • Posted on January 20, 2018 at 10:37 pm

In 2004 I walked into local council offices for a conversation with local officials and advisers. Somehow I had come to speak on behalf of local residents about a concerning issue. It was the first time that I realised that to show concern and act on it turned you from being ‘a concerned person’ into ‘an activist’.

‘Activists’ always sounded like a nuisance, a busy-body, an intrusive person who disturbs the peace. I didn’t like it.

But I was an activist nonetheless for five years until the argument (which I still stand by) had been made so many times against such powerful interests, that I realised I had no more to contribute. I am not an activist in this area any more. In some ways I feel I betrayed the cause by falling silent; after all I had been analytical, measured, informed and articulate. What I really wanted to do was proper research, to follow a thread that I felt was intriguing and possibly important.

Benefits of being an activist

Being an activist brought me to meet and know a wide variety of people I would not otherwise have met. A hugely diverse crowd from a number of countries, we had a shared concern, and supported each other. Sometimes it was a bit of a bubble, but even the bubble had rainbow colours, and I learned a lot, and to widen my view.

Maybe this is why, three years after that came to a close for me, and I knew I had to respond to understanding myself as transgender, I decided to be very open, honest and proactive about the whole business of being trans, transitioning, observing being trans in the world (my strap line to this blog is still this), and how the world responds. And yet I am not an activist – am I? I don’t take days off to go to London marches, I don’t join trans pride committees, and six years on, I don’t deliberately associate with trans groups. In a recent post here, I discussed choosing how visible to be, Should I make it a point, so that I increase the number of people who knowingly know a trans person, and find them ordinary? Or does it stop me being ordinary by declaring my transness?

Problems of being an activist

Just as I recoiled from being referred to as an activist in 2004, when all I was trying to do was help people find a voice, so trans people find it difficult today. We speak up for ourselves, and sometimes we need to do it robustly, because no-one else does. But as soon as we do, there are those who say we are a ‘trans lobby’, that we have an insidious ‘trans agenda’, and that we are all ‘trans activists’ – simply because, like me back then, we have very pressing and legitimate concerns.

In 2004-5, I, with a few others, was knocking on lots of doors, talking, performing a well-structured survey and getting some meaningful analysis on it. My work was cited in Hansard for my pains. I took my concerns to council meetings, public meetings, judicial review, around the country, to Scotland, to Germany, corresponded with international scientists, joined a government agency committee, and considerably outside my original comfort zone, I tried to do what I could for a fair hearing. I feel I didn’t do much; many did so much more. But I learned a lot, and I hope I pushed conversations wider. I didn’t just learn; I opened up my whole scope of understanding.

And I was a nuisance. I felt the power of money, how justice could be bought, and how public consultation is so often a lie. I felt just how powerful corporates can be.

Reluctant activist

Transitioning inherently takes you out of your comfort zone. In fact you leave it entirely in order to remake a new one. Along the way, like a lizard changing its skin, you feel incredibly vulnerable, your new skin very soft and thin. And you do get attacked, and accidentally trodden on. To be robust, you have to stand up for what it means to be trans, you find yourself associating with people very different to yourself, people you may not otherwise choose to be friends with, people you disagree with, or even not like as people.

If you explain yourself, you are an activist.
If you defend yourself, you are an activist.
If you fight back you are an activist.
If you suddenly start standing up for trans rights, you are an activist.
If you refuse to accept transphobic humour and slurs, you are an activist.

Am I an activist because I am transgender? Is it inevitable? The quieter I become, the less activist I feel – until the conversation is public, until there is antagonism in the media, until I hear people taking us down, until I don’t hear ordinary people joining in against discrimination, bigotry and bias.

Right here, in the middle of #metoo, the real atmosphere is #notme. LGBTQI inequality and discrimination has nothing to do with me because either I am not personally affected by it, or I am not LGBTQI so it’s none of my concern. And this is writ large when it comes to trans equality.

#notme and the GRA

As I write, amendments to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (it was an important year!) are under discussion, It’s all about depathologising gender. Did I really need a psychiatrist – or four – to tell me I am trans, not mentally ill? Did I really have to undergo gender confirmation surgery in order to know my own gender? Did I really have to go it alone for two years ‘trying out’ my true gender before I could have even hormone treatment? And get sworn legal documents, gather a large wad of proofs that I had been ‘living as’ a woman, and pay a fee, so that I could be ‘certified’ legally in my gender? Surely you do know your gender when you wake up in the morning, and no-one else can tell you … That’s why the Act needs updating.

And this is why there is a strong backlash (mainly feminists of a particular kind, and conservative religious bodies) who say that the size and appearance of genitalia at birth can only and forever mean you are decisively in one of only two categories. And consequently that trans does not exist, only confused men and women.

And of course, to them, that means trans women are potentially dangerous men. These people will insist that trans men use women’s loos. (And that vulnerable trans women use men’s.) Because falsely (and more easily?) claiming that you are trans in order to legitimise perpetrating violence is a thing? Yes, really. Here in the UK, we are as vulnerable to inadequate law as ever. In the USA it is far, far worse and potentially retreating decades. Stonewall currently has a campaign Come out for Trans Equality that illustrates the harms done in all aspects of life to large proportions of trans people. This is real. Transition, claiming your gender, is not easy, even if you make no effort to legalise your position (and many object to the demeaning process).

Am I sounding like an activist? Because there are powerful groups who have a view that we are simply delusional, aggressive, dangerous and undermining society? What else should I say?

What I do want to say, is that leaving this nonsensical ‘debate’ about gender identity to trans people, when such deep-seated bigotry is seeking resonance with religious cultural roots in society and calling on ignorance rather than learning – is a betrayal of our humanity. We need you, dear ordinary cis (non-trans) and thinking reader, to be more than just kindly towards us. We need your voice, we need your concern, we need you to call out the transphobic humour when you hear it. We need you to express our equal humanity with yours, because we are not the dangerous ones.

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Paradox of visibility

  • Posted on December 20, 2017 at 10:21 pm

I wrote a great deal during the years of transition, and whilst it felt like forever, suddenly I am realising that this is the sixth Christmas without my family. I have grown a significant distance from the urgency of transition, and it it quite difficult to actually remember life before. I do sometimes come across photographs of that former existence. It isn’t a former self, not a separate former life, just me before I found peace with myself and the world. I hardly recognise it as me, and yet I am very much the same inside. And so it is that I find myself at times caught between not wanting to need to tell my story, and understanding how important it nevertheless is.

I know that my life marks me out forever, and that in places, or in future times, it may almost become an important secret to keep. There are places in the world, where politics, religion and culture are becoming better educated, and others where science and knowledge are becoming subservient. This lengthy blog will remain to inform and help, even if I add little to it beyond some poetry and occasional comment like this. It will turn some away from people like me too, because it invites challenge to preconceived ideas.

But is this blog, this story, just ‘thought-provoking’?

I do want to provoke thought, but I also want to change it. I was in a situation recently where a topic of discussion was a third sex option being offered for intersex people in Germany. The language presents difficulties, because whilst in English ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ have become differentiated in use, there is only one word in German. ‘Social sex’ more or less means gender presentation, but already suggests something optional rather than innate. And so the conversation came to include transgender people as well. Ah, but how comes I knew so much about a topic others were new to? There is only one honest answer, so I gave it, and passed on the URL to this blog. I can digest the experience of transgender, or the research, by way of explanation, but I think people have to find their own path, perhaps with story that touches, rather than facts that educate.

I don’t think anyone will ever say they read all of this. I guess it’s actually tedious. But I hope it invites a bit more reading and thinking, not just a first dip.

Meanwhile, at work, I still don’t know who knows my back story. If they do it doesn’t matter. But if they don’t, I still feel some concern that I could be accused of being deceptive for not saying.

I still think that very few non-trans people really grasp what it is and what it means, and I still wonder what my lost family and friends think and feel now. There has been so much opportunity in the media to see different perspectives, from trans people of all ages, in documentary, comedy and story, but I wonder whether those who chose never to meet me ‘like this’, or who resented it so much, or who could not adapt their own ideas – or who simply needed me not to be trans – even want to move on in understanding.

And so I need to be both visible but also not visible. I want to show that someone as ordinary as I am, represents a majority of trans people; that we are not dodgy, suspect, something to be uncertain and unsure about. We are just people whose biological make-up has been deliberately suppressed in the interests of social conformity and for particular reasons. Being invisible proves that, but doesn’t tell it. And it doesn’t make fellow human beings nice, kind or just towards us, especially towards those who find it hard, or just don’t want, to conform to one gender anyway.

I will never know the minds and the changes in those who wanted me to go on living and looking as I used to. I hope they do change, and forgive the desperate need I had to change myself. I was a ship that crossed a treacherous reef because that’s the way the wind blew. I had no choice. But they did, and still do.

As a life experience for me, it has been pure gold in terms of the enrichment. But it came from ore. And I understand that some cannot face smelting and would rather keep a rough rock on the shelf.

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Biological Sex

  • Posted on November 12, 2017 at 11:07 pm

What does ‘biological’ mean? As far as I can determine, it hasn’t changed recently: it is simply ‘relating to living organisms’.

I raise it again, only because it keeps rearing its head as a reason why it is so important for human beings to be named male or female. Or intersex, of course, if it isn’t clear to the observer (not the person concerned). It’s a normal distribution among most species, including hominids all the way to us, heavily weighted towards bilateral division. So if an observer makes an assignation at birth, it is pretty straightforward in most cases.

What I find problematic about this, as so many others have, is that this naming of ‘biological sex’ is so superficial. If we really are going to talk biology, then we have to embrace the whole organism. My brain is part of my biology, as are my genes, not just my chromosomes, not just my organs, as is the way my particular ‘biological body’ responds to this interplay of factors.

The actual fact is that sex is not simplistic, and that it isn’t neat, even in humans. What you see is not the whole story. Rather, a full descriptor of the physiological body will provide a matrix of characteristics. And yes, most of the time, that matrix will not be sufficiently paradoxical to make the person themselves disagree with the more casual observer.

What you cannot say is that what the casual observer (or even clinical observer) decides at birth is absolute or exact. It may well be good enough, but it doesn’t make it right. Therefore, to say that you will always be the sex assigned to you at birth (e.g. a transman will always ‘really’ be a woman) is precarious to say the least. What was assigned is not based on the biological matrix of determinants of sex at all. That is rarely done.

Of all the characteristics a human can possess, sex is almost alone in being more a determinant than a descriptor. The reason we want it to be a determinant, is that we are still living in a pre-scientific, pre-biology mindset. We have moved on from seeing left-handed people as sinister who must be forced to become right-handed. They never did, of course, they just learned fine motor skills with their less-dominant hand. In this mindset, being a man or being a woman is a vital social discriminator. Accordingly, we have male names and female names, attire, roles, expectations and privileges, in order to divide us.

I have a growing sense that the separation of sex and gender is not quite what I thought it was. You know you are not a man, or not a woman, or indeed not either, because of the way your whole body is configured – not just the bits you can see, whether easily or by a scan or DNA test. I said it this way deliberately: how can anyone describe what it means to be a (man/woman)? There is no single set of perceptions. But I think we all know much more clearly what we are not. Generally, if we agree with someone else what it means to feel like a (woman/man) then we are more confident that is what we are.

We all know that whatever we feel we are (gender/sex) it isn’t altered by the parts of our bodies that may not be present (but perhaps should), that are present (but perhaps should not), or are dysfunctional, or are lost to injury or disease. Losing your primary sex characteristics does not change what you know you are. So why does having them?

I read that a mother of a transgender child explained it to others as being like handedness. You might want a child to be right-handed, but they know when they are not, and your label disables and harms them. By looking at the hands, you cannot tell which way the brain is configured. We don’t box people into R or L on every form they fill in through their lives, and we don’t ascribe it by cursory observation. Socially, it is no longer important.

M and F are not important because they are determinants by themselves. They have been used for so long solely to discriminate. We have different sets of names for M-ascribed people and F-ascribed people, and that too has become important. It tells other people how to treat you. Why do new parents, their parents, fellow parents and friends all want to know M or F? Why, when it is less clear, is everyone so afraid of the consequences?

What name shall we give them, what colour clothes, what kind of clothes, what stories, what toys, and will they help mummy, or daddy? And what will they do when they grow up? This is all about what we do, not about who the baby/child is, or their capabilities (comprising a thousand non-sex un-boxing characteristics).

So it seems that not only is ‘biological sex’ a matrix of easily and less-easily observed determinants, but the importance of ascribing M or F is very unhelpful. Why is M or F on any of my documents necessary? When I visit a doctor, go into hospital, apply for a job, take a partner, run a company, lead a platoon, become a parent or anything else I might do, it is not the M or F label that should matter. I should be treated as a whole person, according to my needs and capabilities, and with respect and equality.

Ancient writings of any source, written long before biology existed as a study, cannot supersede what we know about the complex determinants of sex. We so often hear that ‘God created man and woman, Adam and Eve.’ Why is primal incest OK in this story, but later same-sex love is not? Is every intersex person God’s accident? That’s a deep philosophical rabbit hole if ever there was. (And so we return to my scribblings about religion and the patriarchy from my previous post.)

I’m just asserting that the arguments from ‘biological sex’ are no more sound than ‘the Bible says’. People are people, with wide-ranging and very different characteristics. Even our sex is fascinating and complex, and that includes our brains, not just our minds. If anyone says your visible sexual characteristics determine anything much – let alone the first opinion about them, for life – then they simply haven’t read enough. Humans are but one species requiring complimentary gametes for reproduction, but that is where the importance of sexual dimorphism ends.

So what is the ‘biological sex’ thing all about? Protecting women from men? Or giving privilege to men? Or both? We have laws about treating each other fairly and with respect, and social norms about who gets first bite. The first is a consequence of human behaviour, and the second shapes it. But both seem to require that M or F in the box, and neither has much to do with biology.

This is not about political correctness for the sake of trans people, rather just a reminder that individual sex or gender is not something to be handed out as a permission and enforced as any kind of belief or tradition. If the big fear is that it will lead to an abuse of identity, well just use common sense and law to look after bad human behaviour.

M and F won’t be scrapped any time soon, but they shouldn’t be used where they are not needed.

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Patriarchy

  • Posted on October 22, 2017 at 11:06 pm

It’s the cornerstone of feminism, and a simple enough question. How comes men seem to rule and dominate the world, how comes they always seem to have done so? For what reason? It’s the one item in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens (do read it, it’s excellent for many reasons) that defies his analysis.

There really isn’t any single justification among all the superficial traditional arguments such as muscle strength, child-bearing etc., so if you are still stuck in these, do read the Sapiens chapter. The question remains as stuck itself, with continued inequality in treatment and reward between a strong binary of men and women. Why, in so many respects, is femininity seen to weaken a man and masculinity strengthen a woman?

And it is patriarchy that has sustained the silence and tacit moral support of the immoral that has been so clearly thrust into view by Harvey Weinstein. It is patriarchy that keeps a groping, abusive man in the US presidency.

A tsunami of #metoo may have shocked, but surely not surprised. Maybe the greater surprise has been the sudden collegial willingness of women to speak out. Their silence was surely because of the power relationships that exist, a patriarchal view that women are somehow the possessions of men, maybe not always individually, but certainly collectively. But #metoo names victims, not perpetrators. ‘It happened.’ No; it was done.

Men have responded online; the better have been to say ‘shut up and think; this is for us to work out’. (Example here, from Mike Morrell – it is a start, but will not, I think, spark a revolution.)

But ask: in what sense is it still business as usual? When will it not be time to call this out and change the way things are? Men will be men? No; there is responsibility here. Men are more than the passive subjects of a powerful hormone, and their sense of privilege and entitlement is learned.

Is there a trans perspective on this? I think there needs to be for several reasons.

First, trans women are viewed by too many commentators and self-opinionated people, and certainly by TERFs, as fundamentally men who like to wear different clothes and pretend. With simplistic narratives of biology and what a man/male and a woman/female are, they refuse to understand the nature of a trans woman. They underpin all their arguments with the safety of women’s spaces, predicated on the fallacy that men want to disguise themselves as women, give it a stamp of approval called transgender and do things that are already illegal.

In other words, women should always fear every man, because therein lies the seat of violence against women. Men have the power. Patriarchy sustains it. Don’t let the enemy in.

Second, trans women have uniquely experienced being among men who believe no women are present; they have heard it, unmoderated by apology. It isn’t just locker room talk, it’s any room talk. This is not just watching a hidden camera, but being invited into the conversation. They have also experienced being among women when no men are present, and know what men do that is not spoken about. In other words, we have seen the true nature of people from both points of view. Yes; we know what men really think, but more importantly what they say amongst themselves, which ratifies, encourages, condones, and gives them some shared permission.

What men really think about who has precedence, and whether they truly believe all women are of equal value as all men and due equal respect, may have improved in recent years. But I know, and they know, that women are still there to be imprinted upon. Even nice men mansplain, and talk over women and steal their ideas.

Third, trans people, male and female, know more than anyone else what it is to switch others’ perceptions of their gender. Trans men, after the effects of testosterone have masculinised them, see the world differently, and importantly, the world receives them very differently. Suddenly they have male privilege, passports to inclusion they have not had before. Trans women, conversely can be branded traitors to the male cause, and are diminished. They can be deemed to have lost their academic ability, skills and authority, simply for being women. Expectations of advancement or simply of qualified opinion are reduced: it doesn’t matter any more, you’re just a woman.

Male is the default, male is authority, men are in charge, men get the opportunities. That isn’t a resentful thought, just the experience that we have. It is there, maybe no absolutely, but it is there.

The trans perspective includes this understanding as well: that we confuse people who believe (and it really isn’t a simple biological analysis and conclusion) that there are only men and women and that we are all born incontrovertibly one or the other. And if we don’t confuse, we are inconvenient, because we intervene in the arguments of both feminists and patriarchists. The real problem with transgender issues is not trans people, but the invention of patriarchy that makes men a problem to women.

We therefore threaten patriarchy, and we thereby unsettle some forms of feminism that require men to be immutable. The main reason trans people and how they express their experience, are not understood, is because fixity in the binary is a necessary condition for propping up both male privilege and male threat. But can men in power (any kind) in sufficient numbers, change where we are? Or is patriarchy too structural?

If so, why isn’t it blindingly obvious that the patriarchy is a falsehood to be shattered by every woman standing up and saying ‘me too’? Or do we really not see it?

I do. And I don’ think many men do. It’s there in whose idea is best, who talks loudest, who has most entitlement (is it just confidence?), and who concludes the conversation. That men today can still joke about the casting couch, shows how normal it still is to think this has an element of inevitability and acceptability.

As a background to this, I am always reminded that four out of five of my teen/twenties girlfriends suffered abuse from men, and that since then I came to know just how many women around me suffered everything from rape, marital rape, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, domestic abuse and attempted murder. That is not true of the men I have known, on anything remotely like the same scale. This is still a fact of life – not in an overtly patriarchal society where women are covered, walk a distance behind men, cannot drive, be educated or socialise freely – but in 2017 European culture.

What sustains patriarchy

A friend asked me this morning why this has persisted, why patriarchy is so old and still has such an implicit grip today. I feel quite strongly that it lies with patriarchal religions, which have shaped cultures, and stained almost every civilisation for thousands of years. Once you have a supreme deity who is male, you can use that deity’s voice to justify the supposed order set in place by that deity. Yes, the argument is circular but no more than that of the bible saying that it is the inspired word of god. There is no other external reference for giving primacy to the male (or indeed to the female). Once you give a supposed deity authority to declare that its gender is to rule, you can then impose that authority as has been invested in you. Who dares argue with the deity, the natural order, the way things are?

Tell me I am wrong, by all means, but I see many women’s voices from religious and conservative bases supporting the patriarchy as divine order, and blaming only individual men for gendered abusive behaviour. How can women stand up within their patriarchal religions and declare the end to patriarchy? I don’t think they can, not without structural resistance.

And our post-religious cultures too are so often shaped by that past. Women have come to believe that they need to accept, respond and even be flattered by male attention in order to be wanted, approved of, or seen to be included – because of that natural order. There is nothing ‘natural’ about it. The delusion of male protection and chivalry is not derived from anything other than male behaviours, arrogance, violence and privilege, based on a false primacy, whether to be lord of the manor, cardinal or knight. Economy, religion and war are tightly intertwined in a tapestry of male order to act as they wish in order to shape the world the way of their god-given entitlement.

Maybe now we should require that this natural order be debunked in our religions and cultures, because the way patriarchy has always played out is so far from divine, so far from right, and we are staring it in the face.

Summary

Trans people suffer from patriarchy as much as anyone, but we see things non-trans people cannot in the same way. Patriarchy goes beyond sex and gender and is increasingly absurd in non-binary environments, as if we need the binary to keep it and to hate it.

Men are not all bad, and we have all been cultivated into a patriarchal society. But men being good is not the point.

Patriarchy has deep roots in places that may never revoke the concept, because it defines patriarchy as divine, or a natural order.

It’s simply time we all saw patriarchy for what it is, what it causes, and why it must end, whatever has to change in order to do so.

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Process and Protest

  • Posted on July 24, 2017 at 10:09 pm

I didn’t go. Again. The first year, it was the day of my surgery, so I wasn’t processing anywhere – or protesting. It would have been a good year: the first Trans Pride, and Brighton taking the lead. But whilst I did manage to do my bit at Brighton Pride one year (in the literary tent), and I did enjoy the relief of acceptance in public, I haven’t felt especially drawn.

I think it boils down to a range of ambivalences. For one thing, I imagine a whole bunch of men and women walking through town, singing, shouting, clapping, making music and noise, with pink and blue banners, looking just like, well, women and men, boys and girls, and plenty of completely indeterminate androgynous people. Like we see every day, everywhere. I would belong there. I just am not one of those trans people who feels a personal need to celebrate my trans-ness, and I love just being myself, as the woman I am comfortable being, looking like I do every day. Gender dysphoria was just something I sorted out.

Another ambivalence is whether it is a procession for visibility or a protest against invisibility (or rather, erasure). Many of us would have no problem with being invisible, but a lot of problems with erasure. And many of us have some problems with not being able to be unnoticeable, and that noticeability making us a ‘problem’ to other people. Reading comments under the press reports shows how much people would like us to disappear. Almost always, I feel, it is because anything to do with gender must be ‘about sex’, in the sense that sex is a secret pleasure and anything un-missionary must be dirty. Here I do want to protest: against ignorance and unwillingness to find out.

I protest ignorance

And yet, when on the same day as Trans Pride 2017, the government announces a review of the tardy and incomplete Gender Recognition Act of 2004, I do start to get animated. I went online to fill in the government survey and it brought back a lot of memories, things I have tended to forget since gaining my own Gender Recognition Certificate. Aside from not being a LGBTQI survey (itself a lot of erasure) it was reasonable, if a bit thin. I understand that everything was asked about experience in the past 12 months in order to avoid things that may have improved, but I don’t see that they have a lot, and especially not in the past three years.

Immediately we have a small move (by a lesbian politician) towards finding out about LGBT lives, we have the backlash by those who think that it’s only about ‘dubious sex practices’, and in such a way that families and marriage will be destroyed. Rooted almost exclusively in religion and religious cultural history, these are groups and individuals whose social structures and religious beliefs are so fragile that they dare not learn or grow. I imagine their confusion if Trans Pride did just look like ordinary men, women and androgynous folk. Maybe celebration by deliberately dressing up in carnival helps sustain their bigotry. And yet this is precisely why we must protest, not with violence, but with fun and provocative banners.

Our biggest enemy is, and always has been, ignorance. But ignorant people (about anything, and I’m sure it includes me too) find their favourite ignorances difficult to destroy. If by learning this, you have to let go of that, it will be embarrassing, awkward, lose you friends, shatter your world view, or knock a corner off it … We love stability, and yet constant change is pervasive and inevitable. It is what the world is made of. There is nothing in the universe that is not merely a rearrangement of the basic stuff everything is made of.

Think of the children, don’t scare the horses, god made only man and woman …

Predictably, after the launch of a review of the GRA, in order to make process easier for people born transgender, the ‘family concerned’ groups got on the media to scare the easily-afraid that predatory men will have their birth certificates changed on a whim so they can get into women’s spaces and attack them. And again it soaks into the headlines and the summaries that people read most, and often no further. Anyone and everyone, suddenly will be able to ‘change their gender’ or ‘swap their sex’ and it all becomes so easy, too easy. The sky will fall in. And again, trans people are pushed back into psychiatric scrutiny, invasive enquiry, withheld treatment, long and purposeless queues, years of unsupported transition, and finally a bill for accumulating a mountain of paper to go before an anonymous panel who are assembled to judge whether you are right about your own gender.

We do not change our gender. We only change what you say our gender ‘should’ be.

This is what fuels the powerful, conservative, mainly male, mainly religious right in the USA that insists on trans men having to go into female locker rooms and loos. Because trans women must be male predators. It just doesn’t happen, folks. But it could happen here too, and the arguments are already being rehearsed on Channel 4, reporting the government proposals to review gender certification.

I always ask why it is that I can be a lesbian without scrutiny, examination and certification, but not a woman. And why does it matter? If, as a lesbian, I am aggressively propositioning women, or if a gay man is acting similarly, that is no different from a man invading women’s spaces (or it it were likely) the reverse. Harassing or criminal behaviour is just that, and is covered in law. A man dressing as a woman to be a peeping tom is just that, however trans people are treated or respected. Few non-trans people really appreciate what it means to have your essential identity erased, belittled, or simply disbelieved. The transition process is cruelly flawed, and so long as we are not seen, proud or otherwise, we must process and protest.

I wave my little flag here, but even in filling in this latest government survey, I am reminded that there are places where I cannot casually say, ‘yes I’m trans’ without that diminishing my status as woman. There are many places where I cannot risk being spotted and outed, because I would be attacked, at least verbally, and my life would be reduced in scope and comfort and ability to take part socially or in work. And I am one who normally wouldn’t be spotted in a crowd. I am careful with my words, careful with my history, even sometimes careful with partner pronouns, just as my partner is careful holding hands or kissing.

The whole point is, I should not have to be. Nor to worry whether I ‘should’ be marching, processing or just being at Trans Pride. But I am glad that 2,500 people were this year, and that it isn’t going away.

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