Category: LGBTQ+

The first rule of being in a hate group is that you must never, ever admit that you hate the people you hate. A lot of effort goes into choosing the right euphemisms, coining phrases such as “reasonable concerns”, “family values” and so on.

So the anti-trans groups affiliated with Fair Cop must be pretty pissed off right now. In response to posts marking Trans Day of Remembrance, they proudly proclaimed their desire to #sayyestohate.

This is known on the internet as “saying the quiet bit out loud”. They did it repeatedly to organisations that chose to mark Trans Awareness Week:

David Paisley tracks the followers of various groups and how they intersect. The intersections between supporters of Fair Cop and the LGB Alliance, Woman’s Place, Transgender Trend, Fair Play for Women, the Safe Schools Alliance and For Women Scot are significant. As Paisley puts it:

They all share a huge proportion of the same followers. They are all anti trans hate groups.

They’re also all regularly platformed by mainstream media to lobby against protections for trans and non-binary people.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

PS. There’s also this.

It’s Trans Day of Remembrance today, a day when trans people and allies mourn the trans and non-binary people lost to acts of violence. So far this year 350 trans people, mostly trans women of colour, have been murdered worldwide, often in really horrific circumstances; those are only the reported murders, and the true number is likely to be considerably higher. And it doesn’t include the terrible number of people lost to suicide, which disproportionately affects LGBT+ people and trans people in particular.

There are still places in the world where it is illegal to be transgender, and places where “I realised she was trans and I was so horrified I killed her” is an acceptable defence for murder. In supposedly enlightened societies transphobia is the acceptable face of bigotry. The dehumanising and demonising of trans people by politicians and pundits has terrible consequences.

I’ve written before about misgendering and other microaggressions, things that individually don’t amount to anything but that collectively work rather like water torture. Here’s a good example of that.

On Sunday, I was out for a meal that for various reasons I was anxious about. After weeks of being alone and quite frankly, letting myself go, I decided it was time to make a bit of an effort. I put on some cute clothes and nice jewellery, did some proper makeup prep, used the good perfume and put on my favourite lipstick. And in every single interaction I had with the waiter, he called me sir.

Did I shout “did you assume my gender?” in a big booming voice and storm out? No, because that shit only happens in right-wingers’ social media posts. I did what I almost always do: nothing. I didn’t think he was doing it deliberately and I didn’t want to embarrass him.

So instead I let him embarrass me, repeatedly.

Do you remember the feeling of embarrassment you used to get as a school kid, the skin-crawling, nauseous feeling, the cold in the pit of your stomach? It’s that. It’s not just embarrassment about what happened; it’s also the extra embarrassment that comes from having people who know you see it. Their looks of awkwardness or pity amplify it.

I couldn’t finish my food, and afterwards I went home and cried.

I’m supposed to be going to one more restaurant this week, a birthday lunch with one of my dearest friends. It’s only my second restaurant visit in many months, and it’s probably the last social contact I’m going to have until we come out of the imminent Tier 4 COVID restrictions.

Last night the restaurant called me to switch my booking to its sister restaurant due to unforeseen circumstances. The caller had my name and pronouns in front of them, asked for me by name and heard me say “that’s me!” in response, and when they heard my voice they immediately started calling me sir.

So that’s two different establishments in the space of a couple of days deciding that my appearance and my voice don’t entitle me to the correct pronouns. And my brain, which is on a rather shoogly peg right now, is convinced that as trouble comes in threes I’ll be misgendered throughout my birthday lunch.

So now I don’t want to go.

It sounds irrational, I know. It is irrational. But so far this week the misgendering hospitality hit rate is 100%, and it’s against the backdrop of the usual anti-trans stuff online – which washed-up indie rocker is going to drink the anti-trans kool-aid and dominate my Twitter feed THIS week? – and some trans-related unpleasantness from closer to home, so why shouldn’t I expect it to continue?

So what’s supposed to be a happy occasion, something to look forward to, is something to dread. If it’s a repeat of Sunday I’ll be upset and embarrassed; if it isn’t, the prospect will still have cast a cloud over the whole thing because I’m so worried about it.

These misgenderings aren’t transphobia. I’m well aware of what that looks and sounds like, and God knows there’s enough of it around right now that I’m not going to forget its sound and its shape. This is different. Transphobia is thunder, all noise and fury. These little insults are raindrops.

Who’s afraid of water?

I am.

Raindrops don’t fall in isolation. Other drops fall, and they merge, and they can become a trickle, a rivulet, a stream, a river. And rivers are powerful, dangerous things.

I fear that one day, a river will wash me away.

A thoughtful essay by Jude Ellison Sady Doyle on staying in a relationship through transition.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s true — whether staying married is a sign of cowardice. Was I supposed to bust up my refuge just so I’d have battle scars? Do I need to have a second adolescence, sleep around, raise hell, to know who I am? Am I as real as I think, standing here in this bathroom, talking about male pattern baldness and being called “bud” and trading De Niro impressions because he just watched Heat, or does even he think of me as an eccentric straight girl? Does he love me, or is he humoring me?

When do I get to stop asking these questions? Which coming-out, which medication, which surgery, which friendship, which sex act, which relationship, which instance of survived bigotry, will ever make me feel like enough?

Like many – and I suspect most – trans people I’ve experienced transphobic abuse, both online and in the real world. And like many trans people I didn’t report the real-world stuff to the police. I gave up on reporting online abuse to social networks years ago.

A new survey by anti-violence charity GALOP suggests I’m not alone.

Just one in seven trans people who experienced a transphobic attack – be it physical, verbal, sexual or online – reported it to the police.

Seventy per cent said this was because they felt that the police could not help them. A third said they expected the police to be transphobic, while another third said they experienced too many transphobic incidents to be able to report them all.

This simply shouldn’t happen in a civilised society:

One trans person who did report a transphobic incident to the police said: “One officer said I left myself open to being abused because I ‘chose to be different’.

“Misgendering throughout the interview then told that the physical assault, death threats and threats of further violence against me weren’t strong enough to do anything about and maybe I should ‘go home, make a cup of tea, and dress “normally”‘.”

There’s an interesting story in The Guardian about a trans woman who’s had facial feminisation surgery. I’m glad it’s been positive for her, but I’m also glad that the piece also interviews Juno Roche about the reality for trans women like me.

Facial feminisation has allowed for the creation of “a kind of two-tier system where, on the whole, the most successful trans people are beautiful people that pass,” Roche continued. “People who are proud to be trans, and those people who can’t afford the surgery, fall into a separate category. That’s most people. And we have to create safety for everyone. It impacts on so many people, not just trans people.”

Roche understands the appeal of facial surgery for so many trans women. “If somebody wants to have an easy life, then boy, trans people deserve an easy life. This is a tough gig. But the truth is, if testosterone has shaped your face, it will have shaped your shoulders, your shoulder-to-hip ratio. It will have shaped your hands. Where does it stop?”

That’s exactly how I feel about it. If I had the money, and after dropping well over £10,000 on electrolysis and losing all my savings to COVID I certainly don’t, I don’t think I’d consider FFS. I consider electrolysis essential for me, because facial hair is the pumpkin in my particular Cinderella story: it limits where I can go and for how long I can go there. Hormones have made some worthwhile changes to my body. I haven’t ruled out other things. But I’m pretty sure that unless I win six figures on the lottery, FFS isn’t in my future.

I absolutely understand the desire for FFS. I’ve seen enough mockery of trans women’s appearances and experienced some of it myself to know that the people who claim to be “gender critical” are quite happy to judge trans women’s looks against the very same beauty standards they so deplore when applied to cisgender women. And the rest of the world judges us too.

A trans woman who is not conventionally beautiful (in a white, thin, cisgender, stereotypically feminine sense) will be reminded of this constantly through her life. FFS can make that much less likely to happen, and like cosmetic surgery generally it may make you more visually attractive to other people – something you’re going to think about if you’re single and fed up with people swiping left on you in dating apps.

But even if I could afford it, if I had the budget for the tracheal shave and the hair transplant and the brow reduction and the jaw reshaping,  I would still have these shoulders, this height, these proportions, this voice. And there would always, always be another thing to change.

Sophia, the woman in the story, looks pretty. But she’s still unsatisfied.

“On my face, I’m 75% there. I still have things I want to do on my body.” She nodded. “I’m planning other surgeries.”