Movements are taken out of the hands of the radical, angry, non-respectable, non-conforming people who did the years of unrewarded hard graft to make it all happen, then gradually they are overrun by small-minded career activists out to make a name for themselves. In other words, social justice movements that cede their ability to decide priorities and direction to wealthy corporations and media outlets also grant those groups the right to determine which political demands are acceptable and which are not.
British writer and activist
(born 27 March 1988) is an English writer, editor, journalist, and presenter, known for her commentary on LGBTQ+, women's, and mental health issues. She hosts the podcast Call Me Mother and is the author of the 2021 book .
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‘’ is a term sometimes used to describe this process, by which corporations and brands try to veil unethical practices or boardroom avarice by publicly claiming to support LGBTQ+ rights. Yet even if corporate cynicism is the motivating factor, surely if it can be successfully harnessed by LGBTQ+ organizations to improve conditions for some trans workers, then the net effect is positive? The problem is that such day-to-day improvements in some workplaces, beneficial though they may be, are piecemeal, isolated and entirely dependent on the discretion of individual employers. The bigger picture at a societal level remains unaltered – particularly, the ongoing problems that remain for the most vulnerable trans people – and no amount of employer-led diversity schemes can provide any progressive, structural solution to the oppression endured by trans workers. This must be said: corporate diversity schemes can never guarantee the safety, dignity and prosperity of the transgender worker – or, indeed, any worker – in the way that a strong and robust trade union movement and a properly funded welfare state can.
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.
A key tenet of the drive by trans people towards ‘visibility’ in mainstream media in the past decade has been the belief that, the greater amount of more accurate media coverage, the more chance trans people have of encouraging empathy in the wider population. This, it is hoped, will make people want to treat trans individuals better both in daily life and in policy. This strategy hasn’t worked – or, at least, it hasn’t worked sufficiently to materially improve the lives of the majority of trans people. The problem is that it involves a rose-tinted view of the media, which is imagined as some kind of benevolent megaphone, which amplifies our voices, uncovers truth and educates. This is an apolitical understanding of the raison d’être of the media in a capitalist society, which – as for any other industry – is first and foremost to make money.
The experience of being trans is shaped by social class. While there are trans people, the vast majority are working class – just as the vast majority of the total population is working class. Trans workers are often employed in lower paid and more precarious jobs, with a high risk of discrimination and bullying in the workplace. As a result, trans political struggle is part of a wider class struggle. Despite this, trans politics is commonly misrepresented as coddled, bourgeois and anti-working class.
Trans healthcare must be revolutionized urgently: it was created not to help us but to conceal that which is unpalatable to cisgender people and to erase the implications of our existence for the rest of society. That is why we were not permitted families in so many cultures and why authoritarian governments always attack our access to care. Yet in this we are not unique. Cisgender women, disabled people, fat people, black people, HIV-positive people and trans people are all groups that experience high degrees of medical discrimination and abuse, historically and currently. Our struggle is, then, a shared one – and it should not be left to us alone. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic especially, the 2020s and beyond will see us all struggle in a new era of recession and growing about who deserves healthcare investment. This is a daunting, frightening time, but solidarity between all of us who are pushed to the margins may yield new health activist movements and resistance.
Trans healthcare, then, is part of a wider political struggle for bodily autonomy that women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people and ethnic minorities have all been fighting – a struggle that intensified during the decade of austerity that was the 2010s. This political struggle has primarily focused on trans adults, growing societal awareness of whom has allowed for more robust advocacy and rebuttal of the myths about medical transition. Even transphobes and reactionaries in the media and in politics, uneasy and disapproving though they remain, have come to begrudgingly tolerate adult medical transition as a matter of personal autonomy. After all, as trans people have successfully argued, adults are entitled to do whatever they want with their own bodies.
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It is important to realize that the framing of trans people as ‘parodies’ who reinforce stereotypes cruelly disregards the ways in which those same British trans people – whose gender expression, dress, hairstyles, makeup preferences and so on have, it clearly needs to be said, always varied as much as their cisgender counterparts’ – have spent the past fifty years being coerced into narrow gender conformity by their doctors, then mocked and derided as too stereotypical and regressive by cis onlookers. If it sounds like a catch-22, it’s because it is.
Given the British media’s recent pained wrangling with the very idea of gender affirmation as a potential ‘slippery slope’, the fact that more straightforward access to medical transition and legal gender recognition was available during the Second World War than is often the case today is astonishing. The mainstream media’s presumption that strict ‘controls’ on transition are and have always been necessary relies on the suppression, and ignorance, of trans medical and legal history.
The same hormone therapies that today are associated with helping trans people – the use of feminizing oestrogen for trans women and masculinizing testosterone for trans men – were used by endocrinologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century in attempts to ‘cure’ sexual inverts and intersex individuals, by administering hormones to ‘remedy’ the imbalance which caused their ‘disorder’. Homosexual females, for instance, would be treated with oestrogen. Homosexual males were sometimes treated with testosterone and, in some cases, with oestrogen in order to chemically castrate them and prevent them acting on their desires. In the 1950s such hormonal ‘cures’ for sexual and gender variance diminished (largely because they didn’t work), only to be replaced by psychiatric and aversion therapies – the underlying belief in sexual inversion and disorder remained. It must be stressed that the non-consensual, coercive and violent use of hormones to interfere with the bodily integrity of LGBTQ+ people and those born with intersex conditions destroyed countless lives and should be considered a stain on the history of Western medicine. This shared historical experience is also a point of unity for trans people and cisgender lesbians, gays and bisexuals, demonstrating our shared struggle against our pathologizing and mistreatment over the past century and more.
Historical accounts of gender-variant people who lived in a social role different from the one assigned to them at birth occur in almost every recorded human culture. Sometimes, they lived their lives with the encouragement and licence of their community, which recognized the existence of a third gender – or even several other genders – beyond man and woman; sometimes, their perceived ‘transgression’ of gender norms was understood to merit punishment.
Both trans and cis patients alike have good reason to fear the increasing NHS reliance on the private sector, which drives up costs and introduces a profit motive to healthcare, including gender identity services and surgeries. There is an irony here: it is generally conservatives who make specious claims about money-making schemes preying on trans people, but, in fact, it is conservatives’ own policies of cuts and privatization that actually allow the private sector to behave vampirically.