The shadow of fell heavily: the effect of suppressing education about LGBTQ+ issues was not only to prevent LGBTQ+ children existing openly at school… - Shon Faye

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.

The effect of both division and consumerism is to encourage individual identity over and above commonality. A person’s sense of their own identity is certainly important for psychological wellbeing – but as a political end point it leads to solipsism and detachment from others. From this perspective, identity is understood as a set of immutable and finite categories with particular criteria for membership. Yet the political justification for the LGBT coalition must begin with something different: the overlapping and occasionally muddled history that all four letters share.

‘Trans’ [...] is an umbrella term that describes people whose (their personal sense of their own gender) varies from, does not sit comfortably with, or is different from, the biological sex recorded on their birth certificate based on the appearance of their external . The standard view of how sex and gender manifest in the world is as follows. Babies born with observable penises are recorded as male, referred to and raised as boys, and as adults are men; babies born with observable vulvas are recorded as female, referred to and raised as girls, and as adults are women. To be trans is, on some level, to feel that this standardized relationship between one’s genitalia at birth and the assignment of one of two fixed gender identities that are supposed to accurately reflect your feelings about your own body has been interrupted. How the person who experiences this interruption reacts to it can vary hugely – which is why ‘trans’ is a catch-all word for a diverse range of identities and experiences.