Together, an LGBTQ+ coalition with class consciousness and anti-racism at its core must recover its radicalism and reaffirm its opposition to capital… - Shon Faye

The twenty-first century has seen wider acknowledgment of the fact that human sexuality is much more complex than the rigid and unchanging categories of heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual can express; the experiences of trans people are just one part of this increased sexual diversity. In the case of non-binary people – whose gender identities and expressions may sit outside of the categories of man and woman, or move between the two – the nineteenth-century categories of human sexuality make little sense – which is why the term ‘queer’ has risen in popularity.

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.