Trans people are not a burden to society or to the state. It ought to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around. - Shon Faye

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.

Ignoring colonialism allows British (or other Western) feminists to disregard how the imposition of the strict gender binary of man and woman, with the accompanying hierarchy of male over female, was itself a mechanism of colonialism. Many pre-colonial societies and indigenous peoples did not view gender as binary. Some, as we have seen, had more than two genders, while the social roles around family and childrearing varied widely. To take one among a multitude of examples: in the seventeenth century, , a Jesuit missionary to the Montagnais () people residing in (eastern Quebec and Labrador in Canada), described how the women held ‘great power’ and had ‘in nearly every instance … the choice of plans, of undertakings, of journeys, of winterings’. Often, Montagnais women would hunt, while men looked after children. Conversion to Christianity, encouraged by men by like Le Jeune, required the establishment of a new hierarchy and more rigid gender roles. Within ten years of colonial missionary activity and trading relations beginning, the Montagnais had started to insist on male authority and to inflict violence on wives and children. Such accounts of colonial domination show how rapidly a society’s understanding of gender can be changed as society itself changes. They demonstrate clearly that what it means to be a woman or a man (or neither) is not a fixed and stable entity, but a complex constellation of biological, political, economic and cultural factors, which may shift over time.

Theory is important: it shapes our society, whether or not we engage with it intellectually. [...] But theory should only ever play second fiddle to the practical work of movement-building, resource-allocation, care and solidarity. Political coalitions rarely achieve full mutual understanding of every facet of one another’s reality. Rather, they are practical collaborations based on shared goals.