The twenty-first century has seen wider acknowledgment of the fact that human sexuality is much more complex than the rigid and unchanging categories… - Shon Faye

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.

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.

Labour itself is innocent of transphobia, both within its membership and from some of its key figures, who have failed to show full and public solidarity with trans communities. Anti-trans discourse is very much alive on the left in Britain, in trade unions and in local party branches.