One of the weird things about being trans – and it’s one thing from a long list – is that if you’re male to female, you move from a life of great privilege to one where you’re among a minority. That’s not to say pre-transition you live a life of great power and glory, but in everything from career assumptions to how safe you feel walking home from the pub you inhabit a very different world from the one women do and the one you’ll come out into.

That can cause dissonance sometimes, or at least it does for me.

Here are two examples. One, a friend asked me to do a talk to some students. And two, I signed up for a mailing list dedicated to music.

These are things I’ve done before, but this time they were different. In example one, the person organising the talks has a policy to always look for lecturers from minority groups (it’s a field dominated by straight white guys). And in example two, the group is for women in music.

It’s very strange. In both cases I’ve been specifically included – my friend invited me partly because she knew I’d be up for it, and partly because as a trans person I’m part of a minority; the mailing list says it is for women and “people who identify as women” – but I still feel as if somebody’s wired my impostor syndrome to the National Grid. I’m worried that in the first case I’m taking the place of someone more deserving; in the second that I won’t have anything valuable to offer and that I’m going to be viewed with a certain degree of suspicion due to my previous life as a bloke.

More than anything, I feel embarrassed by privilege I don’t have any more.

A lot of this is internalised transphobia, I know: today, like every other day, national papers have run pieces suggesting that trans women are just men trying  to fraudulently gain access to women’s spaces. Even though I know it’s bullshit, four decades of that stuff means that a lot of it sticks.

But I think it’s also that to be trans and transition as an adult can leave you in a strange place. It certainly did for me. I was never any good at being male, but I spent too long living in that identity for me to ever feel comfortable being female or to feel that I deserve to be included in anything affirmative. It may say Great Britain on my passport but I’m a citizen of nowhere.

A bit of light Friday reading for anybody interested in trans rights: the Scottish Government has published its analysis of its consultation over possible reforms to the Gender Recognition Act.

It’s interesting for all kinds of reasons, including numbers: the anti-trans hysteria hadn’t really got into gear in time for this one, so there were just under 16,000 responses compared to more than 100,000 for the English consultation. Despite that, the (small) majority of responses were from people and organisations outside Scotland who would not be affected by any changes.

A phrase that comes up again and again in the analysis is that a particular point of view – inevitably, an anti-trans one – was largely put forward by respondents from outside Scotland.

Nevertheless, sober voices prevailed.

This is wonderful. The TIE Campaign on Twitter:

We did it! @JohnSwinney has announced that @scotgov has fully accepted the recommendations of the LGBTI Inclusive Education Working Group.

This is a monumental victory. LGBTI-inclusive education will now become a reality in all of Scotland’s state schools #EducatetoLiberate pic.twitter.com/sLgYikCANw

— TIE (@tiecampaign) November 8, 2018

It’s not perfect. Private schools are exempt. But if you aren’t LGBT and didn’t go to school in the era of Section 28, it’s hard to express just how incredibly big a deal this is.

When I went to school, 70% of people thought LGBT people were abominations. The Government, aided and abetted by the tabloids, deliberately fostered anti-gay prejudice of the “they are coming for your children” variety. I’ve written more about that era here.

Section 28 made it illegal for local authorities – who ran state schools – to “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” By “promote”, the legislation meant “describe”. LGBT kids didn’t get proper sex and relationship education and many in-school support groups shut down fearing prosecution.

And now, we have our government vowing to protect LGBT kids and putting measures in place to do just that.

As David Jamieson reports for Commonspace: (the site’s been having some issues so it might not load)

Tie Campaign co-founder Jordan Daly said: “After three years of campaigning, we are delighted that LGBT-inclusive education will now become a reality in all of Scotland’s state schools.

“This means that all young people will learn about the LGBT community; their contributions to our society, the history of our equal rights movements, and the impact of homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic prejudice and bullying.

“The implementation of LGBT-inclusive education across all state schools is a world first, and in a time of global uncertainty, this sends a strong and clear message to LGBT young people that they are valued here in Scotland.

This will save lives. I love this country so much sometimes.

I’ve written many times about the “detransition myth”, the oft-repeated and thoroughly debunked claim that most trans kids who go through medical transition then change their minds. The short version: anti-trans groups tell you that 80% of trans kids detransition; the actual numbers show that 80% of gender non-conforming kids aren’t trans. Those kids aren’t given any medical treatment whatsoever.

It doesn’t stop the bullshit, unfortunately. The weekend papers were full of it once again this week, prioritising scaremongering nonsense from anonymous “concerned parents” over actual facts.

Wouldn’t it be great if the newspapers had some real numbers to work with?

Over the weekend, the various medical experts that comprise the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) had a conference. This is important, because it’s the WPATH guidelines that (eventually) inform the healthcare trans people are given. They’re a serious bunch.

One presentation analysed detransition rates in the Nottingham gender clinic, a very large provider of trans-related assessment, counselling and healthcare. Of the 303 trans kids studied, how many do you think detransitioned?

It should be easy. If there’s an 80% detransition rate, you’d expect to see 242 people detransitioning.

The actual number?

One.

From the study:

Only one person of the 303 reviewed made a detransition (0.33%). They later transitioned again.

There were two other detransitioners, but they withdrew before ever attending the clinic. But even if you take them into account, the real world detransition rate was 0.99%.

The “why” is as interesting as the “how many”. Detransition wasn’t because the patients realised they weren’t trans. The patients said they couldn’t continue because their families were unsupportive: things were just too difficult.

Unlike the newspapers, I’m going to point out the flaws in the numbers I’m using to make my point. It was a study over one year, it’s just one gender clinic, and over time you’d expect more people to revert to their original gender presentation because as I’m the first to admit, this shit is hard. Forums are full of stories of people who came out and attempted transition only to retreat because their lives were so spectacularly shit due to lack of familial acceptance and the prejudice of others. Eventually they re-transition, but it’s often many years later.

I would expect the actual numbers over a longer period to be higher than 0.99%.

However, the numbers do correlate with others: the numbers from private trans health providers, many of whom can’t name a single case of permanent detransition; the surgical regret rate of 2% among gender confirmation surgery patients (that’s the kind of regret rate many surgeons can only dream of. It’s much higher among, say, cosmetic surgery providers); the many studies that show trans kids with supportive families living happier lives and the ones with unsupportive families living miserable ones.

One of the reasons detransition rates are so low is because we already have a cruel but effective way of weeding out people who aren’t serious or who aren’t strong enough to cope. It’s called the NHS. The system is so overloaded and waiting lists are so long that the supposed “fast tracking” you read about in the papers is a process that can take two or three years just to get to an initial assessment, with another couple of years of assessments.

What’s fast about that?

Law.com:

Dozens of companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and The Coca-Cola Co., pushed back against recent attempts by the Trump administration to reduce protections for transgender people under federal civil rights laws. They instead stressed the importance of equality in a public statement released Thursday.

The 56 companies include major financial institutions, tech companies and retail giants, among other household names, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank, IBM Corp. and American Airlines.

It’s notable that Twitter and Facebook are on the list: their support doesn’t seem to extend to doing anything about the widespread, vicious abuse of trans people on their services.

Still, it’s good to see such important organisations making such public support – although in the long term, we’ll see it as a “well, of course they did” thing because despite what you might read online, the science is firmly on our side.

It’s hard to see many positives to the Trump administration’s war on trans people, but one little bit of sunlight is the horrified response from the scientific community.

At the time of writing some 1,642 scientists, including 8 Nobel laureates, have written an open letter to politicians about Trump’s anti-trans plans. The list includes “Biologists, Geneticists, Psychologists, Anthropologists, Physicians, Neuroscientists, Social Scientists, Biochemists, [and] Mental Health Service Providers”.

They are not a lunatic fringe. More:

Scientific American: The Trump Administration’s Proposed “Redefinition” of Gender Is Scientifically Absurd
Nature: US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science
Wired: Trump’s plan to redefine gender makes no scientific sense
The Union of Concerned Scientists: Trump Administration Proposal on Gender is Discrimination, Not Science
Center for Biological Diversity: Statement on Reported Trump Memo Targeting Transgender People
STAT: Scientists see a problem with Trump plan on defining sex: biology
STAT: CDC’s Redfield on Trump’s transgender proposal: Stigma is ‘not in the interest of public health’
New Yorker: The Trump administration’s plan to redefine gender recalls an earlier rejection of science
TIME: The Idea of a ‘DNA Test’ for Transgender People Is Part of a Long, Dark History
TIME: If the Government Redefines Gender to Exclude Trans People, It Could Worsen an Urgent Public Health Crisis
NYT: Anatomy does not determine gender, experts say
The Scientist: Trump Administration’s Definitions of Sex Defy Science
Mashable: The Trump administration says there are two sexes. The science says they’re wrong
Psychology Today: Trump administration’s definition of gender is not science
Healio: Rolling back transgender protections would endanger patients, experts say
Washington Post: The Trump administration is trying to tell people they aren’t who they are
Washington Post: Powerful gay rights groups excluded trans people for decades — leaving them vulnerable to Trump’s attack
Kaiser Health News: Defining A Person’s Sex At Birth And Making It Unchangeable Would Be ‘An Insult To Science,’ Biologists Say
Truthout: Right-wing fantasies about gender are killing trans people
Esquire: Trump’s new attack on transgender people is another sign it’s about the cruelty itself
Philly.com: With lie-filled ‘nationalist’ war on caravan, transgender people, Trump moves US toward tyranny

It’s interesting to compare the UK and the US. In the US, the politicians are scaremongering about trans people and the press is largely pro-science. In the UK, the politicians are largely pro-science and the press is doing the scaremongering.

Two years ago today, I began coming out as trans. I say “began” because while the initial announcement is an event, it’s merely the beginning of a process. I come out all over again every time I walk out the door, every time I pick up the phone, every time I meet someone new.

Not everybody chooses to come out. On a forum I frequent, one trans woman has decided not to come out. She fears losing her relationship with her family, fears her ex making it hard to see her kids, works in an environment where she has reason to believe coming out would cost her her job.

“It really feels like a step too far,” she says, “especially with attitudes towards trans people being what they are in the UK at the minute. I’m not sure I could take the abuse if it came.”

Her decision is the opposite of mine: better to live a miserable life than to lose family, friends, job and everything else. And for her it’s clearly the right decision.

I can understand that. In very many ways the last two years have been the worst two years of my life. They’ve definitely been the hardest. I lost my marriage, moved out of the family home and see much less of my children. I lost most of my friends and have had many close relationships stretched to breaking point. Maybe beyond breaking point. I spend two hours a week getting stubble torn from my face in an ultimately futile attempt to make me appear more feminine, my face sore and swollen for days afterwards, while the hormones that make me feel better have made me put on so much weight I can’t bear to see myself in photographs. People stare, and talk about me. Some days I’m so sad I can’t function. I have no doubts that I’ll die alone.

I was asked the other day: was it worth it?

And I honestly can’t answer that, because I don’t feel it was a choice. I didn’t come out because I wanted to. I came out because I had to. I’m certain that if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here. And sometimes I wish I’d taken that option instead.

Don’t worry. I’m fine. I have good friends now, reasons to be cheerful. But sometimes I think we need to stop fixing a smile for just a little while and say: you know what? Being trans is incredibly, unbelievably shit sometimes. I’m amazed that so few people detransition (that is, go back to living in the gender they were assigned at birth): to be looked at and often stared at every time you go anywhere, to be constantly misgendered, to be attacked by politicians and pundits, to see a body you didn’t want in the mirror, to spend a significant amount of your time feeling scared… who would choose that?

I chose that. But it wasn’t really a choice.