A typically astute piece by Dr Ruth Pearce on trans lives and trans visibility in the past and present.
For decades, the trans liberation movement has fought to change the world. We found new ways of being, and created language, art, and culture to name and explore these possibilities. We won new civil rights. We achieved incremental improvements in the provision of healthcare and education. We have made it a fair bit easier for many people to exist in the workplace, and to survive on benefits. We have built community: feeding each other, housing each other, and providing advocacy for each other, and partying together.
As the UK enters a new era of state-mandated segregation, I find myself asking: was it all worth it?
These are dark times for trans people; yesterday the government implemented the inconsistent and unlawful EHRC code of practice, a code so incoherent that the EHRC’s own head – appointed against the recommendations of multiple MPs, who judged her as utterly unsuitable for the role – couldn’t give any coherent advice to service providers when asked simple questions by Parliament’s equality committee recently and by Channel 4 News last night. Like all current anti-trans activism the code is based on the bigoted belief that there’s no such thing as a trans person, and that it’s therefore necessary to make trans people’s lives so difficult that we either detransition or kill ourselves.
Dr Pearce:
Today, the trans liberation movement faces off against vicious foes and their allies in the Labour government, who would see us eliminated altogether. Trans people of all ages and backgrounds are forced to navigate laws and policies designed to make our lives more difficult and more dangerous.
It is all too easy to think that the trans activism of the past has failed, that every gain has been reversed in an orgy of hate and bigotry. Yet this is simply not true.
As I wrote in Carrie Kills A Man:
Trans and non-binary people are not a fad or a phase, a lobby or an ideology, a cult or a conspiracy. We’re your sons and your daughters, your sisters and your brothers, your friends and your colleagues.
The genital-obsessed weirdos are correct about one thing: there really are people being infected by a social contagion that’s harming women and children. But it’s not us; it’s them.