Shon Faye Quotes

The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people. They are radical demands, in that they go to the root of what our society is and what it could be. For this reason, the existence of trans people is a source of constant anxiety for many who are either invested in the status quo or fearful about what would replace it. In order to neutralize the potential threat to social norms posed by trans people's existence, the establishment has always sought to confine and curtail their freedom. In twenty-first-century Britain, this has been achieved in large part by belittling our political needs and turning them into a 'issue'. Typically, trans people are lumped together as 'the transgender issue', dismissing and erasing the complexity of trans lives, reducing them to a set of stereotypes on which various social anxieties can be brought to bear. By and large, the transgender issue is seen as a 'toxic debate', a 'difficult topic' chewed over (usually by people who are not trans themselves) on television shows, in newspaper opinion pieces and in university philosophy departments. Actual trans people are rarely to be seen.

The shadow of fell heavily: the effect of suppressing education about LGBTQ+ issues was not only to prevent LGBTQ+ children existing openly at school but, just as perniciously, to create a culture of silence that allowed prejudice among kids and staff alike to flourish unchallenged. Queer young people, for their part, were forced to internalize a constant drip-feed of humiliation, often (like me) not wanting to speak out for fear of making a horrible situation even worse. Having to absorb such humiliation in childhood is, unsurprisingly, something associated with a range of negative mental health outcomes later in life. Section 28 must be remembered and condemned for what it was: a staggering dereliction of duty on behalf of Britain’s policymakers towards the country’s young people.

Gender dysphoria is a rare experience in society as a whole, affecting about 0.4 per cent of the population, which can make it hard to explain to the vast majority of people, who have not experienced it. To get around this, we often rely on metaphors. The clumsy phrase ‘born in the wrong body’ has become the favoured soundbite in popular media. Clumsy because – and this must be stressed – many trans people do not think this describes dysphoria at all well. To my mind, the trans writer expresses it more accurately: ‘Dysphoria,’ she says, ‘can feel like heartbreak.’ Heartbreak, its incapacitating grief and the sense of absence and loss which activate the same parts of the brain as physical pain, can be so all-consuming it interferes with your everyday life. So, too, dysphoria. For me, at least, this is a much richer way of describing how many trans people experience distress with their bodies – indeed, how I felt until I medically transitioned.

It is the adult world, though, that instils and nurtures prejudice.

For those who need them, medical transition and contraception or abortion are – or should be – about the bodily autonomy of the individual, their right to mental well-being and the freedom to carve out their own destiny in defiance of prevailing gender roles. (These roles, should we need reminding, frame women as vessels for reproduction and trans people as threats to the strict separation of male and female sex roles on which patriarchy depends.) Access to abortion and access to trans healthcare are often attacked in similar ways: principally by overstating the incidence and likelihood of regretting either process, and an intense, disproportionate focus in the media on the stories of individuals who do regret their personal choices, as a way to undermine the principle of choice generally. Only about 5 per cent of women experience any degree of regret over their abortion. Multiple studies show the regret rate for gender reassignment surgery is even lower: about 0–2 per cent. Despite this, the fear of regret has become a powerful tool used to justify the delay or withholding of treatment. Little wonder, then, that it is conservative politicians who attack trans healthcare and women’s in the same breath.

The simple moral case for resisting transphobia as a form of cruelty should be enough for anyone who has been similarly victimized by society (as cisgender lesbians, gay men and bisexual people have all been in one way or another) to stand with us in solidarity. Yet it should also be a matter of self-interest. The world in which trans people’s rights are restricted relies on narratives of dehumanization and myths of sexual predation. Restricting trans people’s rights relies on policing other people’s gendered appearance in toilets and changing rooms by arbitrating on who looks male or female enough, and by punishing deviation from rigid norms with intimidation and violence. It involves kids following the examples of adults and harassing their peers in the playground for being different. It relies on parents either beating into submission the child asserting their identity, or psychologically breaking them with conversion therapy. These traumatic experiences affect all ‘queers’, whether trans or cis. Advocating for them in any form for any letter will inevitably normalize their use against everyone judged queer. Politically, it is a gift to fascists at a time of growing far-right sentiment in Europe and North America alike.

First, one of the most important – and, for many, confusing – questions: why do some trans people need medical intervention at all? Dysphoria, the antonym of ‘euphoria’, is the clinical term now used to describe the intense feeling of anxiety, distress or unhappiness some trans people feel in relation to their primary sex characteristics (genitals), their secondary sex characteristics (breasts, facial hair, menstruation, face shape, voice) or how these physical traits cause society to interact with them, by perceiving them as a male or female. Previously called ‘gender identity disorder’ and, before that, ‘transsexualism’, gender dysphoria is the name given to an experience many trans people struggle with, which can be helped by medical intervention. Although the term is widely used within the community, different trans people can experience dysphoria in very different ways, and so might have different clinical needs.

Dysphoria, it should be said, is not a precondition of being trans. According to some research, as many as 10 per cent of those who positively identify as trans men, trans women, non-binary people and various other terms do so without any feelings of dysphoria. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed that trans men and women experience dysphoria and non-binary people do not, when in fact some non-binary people feel themselves to be in great need of medical assistance, and some trans men and women seek none at all. Nevertheless, most trans people experience dysphoria to some degree.

The murders of trans women sex workers are not rare. This is a recurring phenomenon and we regularly try to alert public opinion and the authorities to this violence. Unfortunately, as always, we find ourselves alone.

Many homeless trans people stay off the streets by ‘sofa surfing’: either staying with friends or, in some cases, exchanging sex for a place to stay. Inevitably, some end up sleeping rough. For trans people on the streets, life can be brutal.

Conversations around domestic abuse and the dwindling provision for survivors usually focus on the most common scenario: heterosexual couples with a (cisgender) male perpetrator and a (cisgender) female survivor. Yet trans people face extraordinarily high rates of domestic abuse at the hands of their partners.

Being trans, of course, is not a consciously adopted political position, just as claiming a trans identity is not, usually, an expression of a consciously held ideology. A trans person is just a person. We see our daily lives through the same everyday lens as most human beings; after all, we are simply trying to live. However, as with all stigmatized social identities, the very ability to articulate being trans, or to work, seek healthcare, or participate in civic life while trans, is political.

Moral panics rely on an inherent paradox: that the rights of a small minority of the population wielding little institutional power are in fact a risk to the majority. This is achieved by inciting in the population a mixture of moral disgust and anxiety about contagion. The problem group may be small now, but they will grow. They will grow by encouraging confused young people to join. For sexual minorities, this narrative of recruitment lends itself to the language of seduction and abuse, which helps direct the moral disgust society feels at paedophilia on to an innocent group. It is a shameful but highly effective propaganda tool. Despite the obvious parallels and analogous struggles that trans people have had with the wider queer movement’s struggle for sexual liberation, the claim that trans people are not only actively different but substantially harmful to the LGB movement has been readily embraced and promoted by extreme political conservatives. This includes even politicians who would themselves traditionally oppose lesbian, gay and bisexual rights.

Family rejection and estrangement have devastating long-term health implications. They also have a material impact. For some kids, the only option is leaving home. Others have no option at all: their parents kick them out. As a result, trans teenagers and young adults in Britain are much more likely to experience homelessness than their cisgender peers. [...] A minority within a minority, trans young people are disproportionately over-represented in the homeless population: one in four trans people have experienced homelessness.

To this end, much of the mainstream media exists to entertain people, for which purposes it clings to tried and tested formulas and conventions, to avoid any risk to its revenue streams. In the case of trans people, it tends to focus less on what wider society might recognize as familiar about our experience, instead foregrounding what makes us different, peculiar, titillating, aggravating or freakish. Cisgender people, media bosses conclude, do not want to watch a news item about a trans call-centre worker talking about his poor pay and how his shift patterns make medical appointments difficult – because it is depressing and, arguably, familiar to many low-paid non-trans people with medical conditions of their own. [...] Trans bodies when objectified are entertainment; trans bodies when at work in the service of profit are not.