In the final months of her life, when she must have been experiencing a degree of mental anguish, Lucy Meadows was bullied, harassed, ridiculed and d… - Shon Faye

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 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.

Above all, anti-prostitution feminism argues, men’s demand for the right to purchase sex should be condemned and criminalized. Given the extreme violence to which trans people, particularly trans women, who do sex work are subject worldwide, it seems tempting for trans politics to join with this condemnation of male violence and, consequently, with the condemnation of men who purchase sex. It is true that many sectors of the sex industry, from pornography to street sex work to managed brothels, rely on the exploitation of trans sex workers’ financial and social vulnerability by cisgender men for profit. Yet the converse argument – for pro-sex-worker trans politics – isn’t intended as a moral absolution of the client or unethical industry practices; it isn’t concerned with morality at all. Rather, it recognizes that trans sex workers exist in a society in which money is necessary for survival, and that sex work is one of a limited number of options available to the marginalized in this society – and so, regardless of any condemnation or criminalization of clients, trans sex workers will still need to sell sex. Accepting this reality turns the focus from ‘ending demand’ for sexual services, to harm-reduction for the worker. It is on this basis that full in all its forms must be a central tenet of the movement for trans rights.