Labour MP Nadia Whittome has a way with words. Today she said the government’s endless prevarication over gender recognition (GRA) reform was “fanning the flames of populist hate”.

She’s right.

We’re now going into the third “silly season” where it’s open season on trans people in the media and on social media. GRA reform is the tenuous justification for it.

What was only ever a minor administrative change (and a manifesto commitment of all the major political parties) has been blown out of all proportion and used to excuse a multi-year campaign of vicious demonisation of trans people, particularly trans women. And that’s having a demonstrable effect on real-world hate crimes. The government could and should have prevented this.

Liz Truss responded:

Let me be absolutely clear. We will not be rolling back the rights of transgender people. It is important that transgender people are able to live their lives as they wish, without fear, and we will be making sure that is the case.

I don’t believe her, and I certainly don’t trust her.

I believe she had every intention of announcing a rollback of trans rights today – her government briefed the political editor of The Sunday Times to that effect a few weeks ago – but was prevented from doing so because the government didn’t anticipate tens of thousands of cisgender women contacting them to say “not in my name”.

And I think she is still trying to find a way to reduce trans people’s rights without changing the underlying legislation, such as changing the current guidance around the Equality Act to make it trans-exclusive rather than trans-inclusive as it currently is. That would enable her to say that she hadn’t changed the letter of the law while undermining both its spirit and its practical application.

Whatever she decides to do, if she actually decides to do anything, her government is complicit in “fanning the flames of populist hate”.

Its ill-judged consultation became a referendum on an extremely marginalised group’s basic human rights, and even though the majority of responses were in favour of reform it has repeatedly refused to publish its response, let alone take any action.

Not only that, but it has refused to correct any of the misinformation and outright falsehoods that now circulate about what GRA reform means and what a GRC entitles the holder to do. It’s not as if accurate information is hard to find. It was in the government’s own consultation documents.

The longer the government refuses to say what it will do, let alone actually do anything, the longer it leaves a vacuum that bad actors are only too happy to fill.

Three years ago, the Tories painted targets on trans women’s backs and ran away. Whether by malevolence or incompetence, I don’t know. But I do know that their inaction now looks very much like cowardice.

I went to the optician yesterday. It’s a new branch so I’m not known to the staff, and as I had a mask hiding most of my face I wasn’t too surprised to be misgendered on the basis of my voice.

I was going to trick you by saying “You’ll never guess what happened next! They sure chose the wrong day to mess with ME!” but if you know me, you’re not going to be fooled.

What happened next is pretty much what you’d expect from me. I had a quick, friendly, quiet word with the person I’d heard misgendering me. I told her that it was no big deal, but with the whole being-a-woman thing I’d prefer it if she could use female pronouns.

You’ll never guess what happened next!

What happened next is pretty much what you’d expect too. She said oops, she said of course, I said really it isn’t a big deal, I said it’s just a bit embarrassing, I said I get it a lot because of my voice, and we chatted about other things that were much more interesting. Half an hour later she and a colleague were providing extremely opinionated and often very funny commentary on the various pairs of glasses I was trying on. It was a lot of fun, and there was a lot of laughter.

Unless it’s intentional, misgendering is no big deal. It happens all the time, often many times a day. Sometimes it gets me down – it’s particularly horrible when it happens on air – but I know that it’s almost always unintentional. People are busy and thinking about other things and tend to work on autopilot. As I’ve written before a lot of the cues we rely on aren’t so clear if you’re not presenting as stereotypically feminine, if you are but half your face is behind a mask, or if you’re just a voice on a telephone.

And we all have moments when our brain just goes blehhhhhhh and something flops out of our mouths. Last week I tried to thank a helpful guy in a hi-vis vest who gave me directions; torn between saying “cheers” and “thanks” I said “chanks”. I immediately went bright red, hit the window button and drove away in a state of extreme embarrassment, my kids giggling gleefully because they had a new in-joke to torment me with.

So when misgendering happens it’s no different from someone who hears my name as “Karen” or “Kerry” instead of “Carrie” because of the Irish in my accent, or if they get it wrong because like me they’re absolutely hopeless at remembering people’s names. It’s a tiny, honest mistake that’s the product of, y’know, growing up in a culture with a binary system of gender classification based on observing a handful of biological markers and stereotypes that doesn’t take into account the beautiful variety of human brains and bodies and identity and expression.

Yeah, that old thing.

I’m going for comic effect here but there’s still a sensible point in there. If you’ve ever worked in customer service or any kind of customer-facing role (and I have, so this applies to me too) you’ll have had it drummed into you that you call your male customers sir and your female customers madam (and the more difficult the customer, the more important that becomes: for example, the returns desk at M&S is one of the politest places on earth, at least on the till side of the desk). It becomes an ingrained habit: if you hear a male voice, you call him sir as a mark of respect. And that works really well unless the voice’s owner isn’t a him and she really would prefer it if you didn’t call her sir.

It’s going to take a long time before that’ll change, and in the meantime misgendering is a kind of ambient noise: it’s always there for me, like traffic noise in a city, so most of the time I don’t notice it let alone comment or complain about it.

Sometimes it’s self-correcting, such as when someone I’ve known for a very long time exclaims “what a guy!” – a term used to indicate grateful thanks for doing something awesome – before immediately adding “Oh! Fuck! Sorry! I didn’t….” I find that kind of thing quite funny, and I just wish my friend didn’t feel bad for saying something that doesn’t bother me.

Whether or not misgendering bothers me isn’t really the decider for whether I’ll say something or not. It’s more practical than that. If it’s a company or service – a bank teller asking me if my account is really my account, an insurance agent questioning whether I’m really the policyholder, a receptionist asking if Carrie is going to join me in a moment – then I’ll correct the mistake because if I don’t, it’ll happen again.

It’s the same with people. If I’ve never seen the person before and won’t be spending another moment in their presence, it’s a waste of energy – theirs and mine.

It’s only if I think I’m going to be misgendered repeatedly by someone that I’ll usually say anything, and I don’t make a big deal of it. I’ll gently correct the error in exactly the same way I would if they kept calling me Kerry – and in the same way I’d expect them to correct me if it was me getting their name wrong.

I try to treat other people with kindness and consideration, and I would like them to do the same for me.

Over the last couple of weeks, anti-trans activists have been targeting and bullying the women who work in various rape crisis centres. The Survivors’ Network, the rape crisis centre for Sussex, is having none of it.

predatory men are already able to enact their abuse with few repercussions, including entering changing rooms and public toilets – they do not need to pretend to be part of a marginalised community to break the law and to violate women, and suggesting that they would do so is entirely unsubstantiated.

There is no safe or survivor-centred way to police the anatomy of someone accessing a service or using a bathroom/changing room. This will impact on gender non-conforming cisgender people, particularly cisgender women, as well as transgender people. Policing gender expression and defining someone’s womanhood by her conformity to state-sponsored specifications is an archaic practice that should not be considered in 2020 and is certainly not a feminist principle or one that will protect vulnerable women.

This is lovely, and hit me hard. Mae Dean, a webcomic author, comes out as trans and has a conversation with herself.

This arrived yesterday.

Including obtaining medical reports, the process of getting my Gender Recognition Certificate took ten months and cost nearly £300.

I have mixed feelings. That’s partly because I felt I had to get the certificate: the messages coming from the UK government make me worried that it may remove some anti-discrimination protections from trans people who don’t have GRCs. So in that respect it feels like I’ve been forced to apply: “Nice human rights you’ve got there. Shame if anything were to happen to them.”

I also feel somewhat resentful, because the process is horrible, drawn out and stressful. One of my crucial medical reports – a very simple form – took three months to arrive, delaying my application, because the clinician said he was too busy to do it; some unclear language in a doctor’s hastily scribbled notes meant I had to provide a written statement about some extremely personal and upsetting things I didn’t want to think about, let alone go into detail about in a document that would be read by multiple strangers. And throughout the process I was aware that if my application was rejected there’s no right to appeal; I’d have to wait six months before having to start the whole process again.

Ultimately, it’s a lot of money and effort for something that won’t affect my daily life at all, let alone yours. It means I can now legally become another woman’s wife rather than her husband, it means HMRC won’t misgender me, and that’s about it. Misinformed and malevolent people have spent more than two years scaremongering about what’s ultimately a largely inconsequential piece of paper.

And yet, and yet.

My GRC still means something to me. It means something in the same way that my formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria meant something. The Gender Recognition Panel is a branch of the HM Courts & Tribunal Service. Its president is a judge. My application was assessed by a judicial panel consisting solely of legal and medical professionals, and I can promise you that they are very, very thorough and very, very serious.

Hence my mixed feelings. It’s a horrible process to go through and it’s been a weight on my mind for a long time. But I can’t help feeling that it’s also a form of validation.