State Violence

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Supreme Court auto-reply: 2026 anti-segregation edition

What if every person who emailed you faced the reality of the UK’s segregation regime?

Last year I created an internal auto-reply for my work email, in the wake of the 2025 Supreme Court judgement which redefined sex for the purpose of the Equality Act and undermined the civil rights of trans people in Britain. I explained the logic for this in a blog post about it:

“It is impossible for me to forget what is happening to trans people and especially trans people in the UK, so I will ensure it is impossible for my colleagues to forget this also. Equally, my intention is to transform bad feelings into understanding, and practical action.”

One year on, and the auto-reply is still there. It’s come and gone a bit, been amended and updated, and now goes to every single person who emails me, internally and externally, be they a colleague, a student, a community collaborator, a journalist, or anyone else who might be in contact. It has been impossible for me to experience any kind of normality at work during this time, so I do not believe that anyone contacting me should expect me to act as if nothing significant is happening. Most recently, I updated the auto-reply to respond to the EHRC’s new Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions and Associations, which provides a formal framework for the segregation of trans people in most areas of public life.

I know the auto-reply has been actively useful. I have received messages from people thanking me for it, and from those who have adopted it for their own purposes. The most surprising response was a hand-written letter sent by air mail from a scholar based at George Washington University in Washington DC, who had originally been in contact about peer review for a journal I edit. She very kindly thanked me for “providing background, advice regarding how to respond proactively, information regarding further reading as well as resources for those who need support“.

I was deeply moved that she took the time and care to contact me in this way. This reminded me how when we share ideas and information, it can reach and help people in unexpected ways, often without us ever knowing about it.

With this in mind, I am sharing the full text of my current auto-reply. In addition to drawing on the resources I have shared, please do feel free to copy, use, and amend the material for your own purposes if relevant.

Thank you for your email. While I have your attention, I wish to highlight the UK government’s plan to introduce a new segregation regime by 30 June 2026. This will likely have severe implications for the wellbeing of women and trans people, and will impact my ability to work safely at the University of Glasgow. 

As an expert in trans studies, I outline further information and potential actions below, as well as spaces you might seek support.

–

Background

In June 2025, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) consulted on proposed guidance for the mandatory segregration of trans people from single-sex spaces in all areas of public life. The EHRC recieved 50,000 responses to their consultation. These were not read by human beings, but instead analysed by AI, enabling them to ignore calls for a different approach.

The consultation took place against a wider background of rising hatred and intolerance towards all minoritised groups in the UK. Two of my friends died due to transphobia and transmisogyny in September 2025 alone.

In May 2026, a new draft Statutory Code of Practice Services, public functions and associations was put to Parliament, drafted by the EHRC. This provides explicit provisions for the exclusion of trans people from public life, through means that are also likely to disportionately impact women and disabled people. Simultaneously, the UK government has introduced new guidance insisting that institutions collect and report data on every person’s sex assigned at birth, which has significant privacy implications for intersex and trans people.

You can read more about these changes, including their causes and wider implications, here:

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Act now

Any one of these actions could be helpful:

  • If you live in the UK, write to your MP, asking them to reject the EHRC code of practice and support Early Day Motion 240: https://equalrecognition.eaction.org.uk/rejectthecode.
  • Write to senior management in your workplace, asking what they will do to support women and trans staff and/or service users, including through actively lobbying the UK and/or national governments, and ensuring continued access to women’s and men’s facilities as relevant.
  • Write to your line manager and ask what action they will be taking to protect women and trans staff, and what pressure they will be putting on senior management to do the same.
  • Write to your political representatives (e.g. MPs, MSPs) more generally. Explain exactly why you are concerned, and demand action to protect trans people’s civil rights. For example, you could ask for new primary legislation to protect trans people, ask why the UK is no longer complying with the European Convention on Human Rights, or demand the dismissal of openly transphobic commissioners from the EHRC. You do not have to write a perfect letter and it is okay to be emotional and express sorrow or anger, so long as you are not aggressive or mean. If you live in the UK, you can find contact details for your representatives here: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/.
  • Support trans people materially, through providing time, resources, and/or money to community initiatives. Examples include: Glasgow Trans Collective (fundraising for emergency support to people facing an immediate danger of threat to life, https://www.gofundme.com/f/glasgow-trans-collective-emergency-fund); Trans Harm Reduction (supporting safer practices for people self-medicating in the absence of NHS treatment, https://transharmreduction.org); and Five for Five  (donating money every month to a range of trans women’s causes, https://www.fiveforfive.co.uk).
  • Check in on your trans friends and colleagues. Make sure they are okay, and do what you can to be there for them. But do your own research on what you can do to help: don’t put this burden on us. Some good places for information include the websites and social media channels for TransActual, What The Trans, QueerAF, Trans Safety Network, Scene Mag, and Trans Writes.

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Further reading

You can read more about the EHRC proposals and recent Supreme Court judgement that inspired them here:

Women and trans people across the country, including my own friends, have reported increased abuse and street harassment, as the ruling is seen to position trans women as legitimate targets for misogyny and violence. Trans people of all genders are already even more likely to experience public harassment, sexual assault and rape than cis women (see e.g. https://bulletin.appliedtransstudies.org/article/3/1-2/3/). If the EHRC’s proposals are implemented, this will likely get worse.

Realistically, the EHRC segregation regime probably will be implemented in the immediate term. The UK government has demonstrated a clear commitment to hate and authoritarianism, and Labour MPs have little appetite for rebellion. It is important that we – you – do not lose hope as a consequence. I hope this moment helps you to focus on the struggles that lie ahead, and the collective strength we hold in the face of those struggles. With this in mind, I also recommend Josie Giles’ funeral prayer for EDI:

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Mental health support

If you found the contents of this email distressing, I urge you to look after yourself first and foremost. Resources for this can be found below.

Additionally, I find hope and power in community organising. You can read about that in a 2025 blog post I wrote following the death of two of my friends, and a recent article by Juliet Jacques.

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Education as the practice of freedom

This auto-response is inspired by bell hooks’ comments in her book Teaching to Transgress:

“When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess […] empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks. [Lecturers] who expect students to share confessional narratives but are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a way that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share. […] It is often productive if [lecturers] take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding[.]”

I will not necessarily respond to any replies you send to this automated message, as I am trying to stay focused on teaching, admin, and research while the world burns down around me. But regardless, thank you. 

Photo of British landscape with rolling green hills and distant mountains, with sheep in the fields and clouds overhead. Faint reflections can be seen, indicating the photo was taken from inside a vehicle.

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Reject Trans Doom-Posting

This week I took the long train down to the south of England for my friend Robyn’s funeral. She died very suddenly three weeks ago, aged just 32.

Robyn gave so much love to the world, and was so loved in turn. Around a hundred and fifty people crammed into a small building for the service. There weren’t enough seats for everyone, so many stood at the back and sides of the room. I sat on the floor. More attended online.

We shared stories from Robyn’s life, learned from each other, cried together. Like many funerals, especially for young trans people, it was absolutely gutwrenching. It also helped move us towards closure. It was good to be in community together, to think and speak not just of Robyn’s past, but of our collective futures. Robyn lived life to the absolute maximum. Surely we could take inspiration from her example.

Photo of a punk crowd having a good time. In the centre of the image, a white butch woman exclaims and points with delight.
Robyn at Manchester Punk Festival 2024. Photo by Chris Bethell for The Guardian(!)


After the funeral, I stayed the night with queer friends in rural Surrey. We went for a curry, toasted Robyn, caught up about our lives. We talked about work and about books and about art and about holidays we wanted to take. That evening I felt tentatively more at peace with the world.

And then I looked at my phone. And I learned that another young friend, Jessica, had also just died.

***

It’s a shit time to be trans. Many people are saying this.

But then again, when has it not been a shit time?

Eight years of moral panic have taken an enormous toll. In the UK, as in many other countries, our civil rights and our access to public services, public spaces, and public life are all being rapidly rolled back. Politicians and influencers fall over themselves to promote anti-trans violence and praise one another’s incendiary takes. We are less safe at work, at home, in hospitals, in schools, and in the streets.

Trans people often die young, including too many of my friends. Sometimes (all too often) we die by suicide, driven to despair in a world full of hate and malice. Sometimes (mercifully less often in the UK) we are murdered, usually in incredibly violent ways. Other times, it’s more complicated. I think of Denise, who died a sudden death from melanoma. I think about Elli, who died of Covid-19. And now I also think about Robyn and Jessica, who each died suddenly of apparently natural or accidental causes.

These days, the high rate of untimely trans death can feel like a consequence of the trans panic. Certainly I believe it’s making things worse. However, this phenomenon pre-dates the current political situation. Trans people disproportionately died young in the 2010s, at the time of the so-called “tipping point“. Trans people disproportionately died young before this too. Sociological theory can tell us why.

A decade or so ago, I worked for a couple of years in Warwick Medical School. I was there to teach medical students about social determinants of health. The basic concept is that our general health is affected enormously by the context in which we live. This includes factors such as the resources and services we do and do not have access to, and barriers we might face in attempting to access healthcare services or otherwise look after ourselves

So, it’s not a coincidence that – for example – life expectancies are shorter in poorer neighbourhoods, or that Black women are more likely to die in childbirth. There is nothing inevitable or biological about any of this, something intrinsically different about poor people or Black people. The issue is that entire groups of people are more likely to experience particular kinds of illness, and more likely to die of things others might survive. This is because of the social disadvantages they face, and because of the discrimination they experience at the hands of bigoted doctors and nurses.

There is a massive scientific literature on social determinants of health. I’ve contributed to it myself, co-authoring a recent study showing an association between transphobic microaggressions and poor mental health among trans people. For this reason, I know it’s no coincidence that so many of my trans friends have died untimely deaths. Trans people are more likely to have worse health because of transphobia. They are less likely to receive timely and effective treatment because of transphobia. This means when trans people are seriously ill, we are on average less likely to survive. I see this when I look at the academic literature, and I see this every day in the lives trans people I know.

I see the impact of transphobia when I look at Robyn’s life and death. Her health deteriorated significantly in her final years. She was afraid to seek help from doctors though: and for good reason, given the discrimination she and many of her friends experienced in NHS services. I wrote my entire goddamn PhD thesis on this problem.

Things were even worse for Jessica. I witnessed so many organisations and institutions in her home city of Coventry failing her time and time again. I could fill whole books with accounts of the violence done against her. She was failed by her school, her church, a political party she gave so much energy to, the council, the local hospital, the psychiatric ward, the housing association. Just last year I sat helplessly on the other end of the phone while she attempted suicide, doing the best I could in this moment to ensure that she was not alone.

The institutional failings experienced by Robyn and Jessica and so many others are the result not just of ignorance, but of actively malicious transphobia and transmisogyny. I believe these factors contributed significantly to their untimely deaths.

How can any of us expect to find hope and purpose in the face of such violence?

***

In recent months I have noticed an uptick in trans doom-posting. By this I mean trans social media posts, blog posts, and videos which dwell entirely on negative feelings and convey a sense of hopelessness.

A prominent example is Shon Faye’s recent essay, well, it’s over, which she describes as “a brief eulogy for the ‘trans rights’ movement”. Shon observes that powerful transphobic movements in the USA and UK are succeeding in many of their aims. They have spread fear and disinformation far and wide, made allies of mainstream politicians and media platforms, and enacted bans on trans healthcare. Now they are attempting to criminalise our very existence, as part of a campaign to eliminate us altogether.

Shon’s conclusion appears to be: well, that’s it. We’re all fucked.

“Today I doubt I will see another progressive measure (either in legislation or healthcare policy) put in place for trans people in my lifetime. Who knows what may yet be taken away.”

I very much empathise with her account of trying to talk about this in any way with cis friends and family:

“their instinct is to try and generate hope or minimise despair [which] typically minimises the gravity of the situation and the depth of my grief and exhaustion and fear – increasing my resentment.”

Shon concludes that she doesn’t want to hear “fucking platitudes” – “there’s time for hope later”. For now, she wants time to grieve. I’ve seen similar sentiments shared by other authors on various social media platforms, including posts from extremely popular trans meme accounts.

I understand intimately where all of this is coming from. Just look at everything I said earlier about social determinants of health. I recognise the violence we are subject to, and its costs. This post too is written from a place of deep grief.

But there is also the question of where and how we grieve. We do need space to vent and to despair. But we also need space to process, and figure out what happens next. Ideally, we need places and times we can do this collectively, rather than just being isolated as individuals. Robyn’s funeral offered this.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about what is happening to us. What I am concerned about is the individualising effect of public platforms, and the parasocial relations we hold with high-profile accounts. We tend to consume doom-posting on our own, on a phone. We often have no-one to process it with, and little context beyond the content in front of us. In this way, doom-posting offers only a partial account of reality, and no way out from despair.

And there is a way out. We find it in community.

***

Look, I have a great deal of respect for Shon Faye. I have a hard enough time navigating the consequences of my own very minor microcelebrity. Shon has to tackle a great deal more attention: from trans people looking for someone to idolise and/or tear down, from cis readers who project heroic expectations onto her, and from haters who see her as the antichrist or something. She’s great on camera, and a brilliant writer. I would recommend her book The Transgender Issue to literally any cis reader. I also recognise that her blog post comes from a place of incredible pain.

At the same time, I am concerned that many trans people and allies are putting way too much energy into engaging mainstream institutions and liberal systems on their own, individualistic terms, rather than looking to the alternative power and support we can build in our communities. Notably, a lot of Shon’s post talks about civil society, legislation, lobbying, and the role of organisations such as Stonewall. This is definitely a realm in which “trans rights” face a seemingly terminal decline. But it is also not the first place I would look for real, grounded hope.

You can find a similar energy in Jules Gill-Peterson’s dire essay Reject Trans Liberalism, which is referenced by Shon. Jules’ piece simultaneously criticises the trans liberation movement for being about more than transition, while also insisting that preparing ideologically sound documents for the US supreme court is a radical act. It posits a false and ahistorical dichotomy between transsexuals (good, pure, radical) and transgenders (bad, elitist, liberal). The essay does not consider how gender diverse people might work together or support one another across our differences. This contrasts with existing critiques of trans liberalism already advanced by activist-scholars such as Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. Again, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Jules’ previous work. But as trans people, and especially as trans women, we owe each other so much more than this.

Now, I’m hardly without fault. This very blog is replete with examples of myself and others putting untold hours into lobbying politicians, participating in public consultations, advising the National Health Service and so on and so forth. In her post Stepping Over The Line, Josie Giles, who once again I admire greatly (look, I just fucking love trans women) argues that:

“Theoretically, an army of well-resourced energetic activists could simultaneously engage in state-centred advocacy and also do grassroots politics. In practice, it doesn’t happen. In practice, state-centred pseudo-organising dominates the social media feeds and the limited energy reserves of an already depleted community, and absorbs what little money is available to pay for the salaried self-licking ice-cream cone of the lobbying profession.”

Sick burn!

Meme depicting two femme white women. One is labelled "trans NGOs", and is holding the other woman firmly by her hair. The second woman is labelled "broke trannies facing a highly funded segregation movement". The first woman is force-feeding the second woman a bottle of milk, labelled "email your MP".
Meme acquired via one of them social media platforms we’ve all heard so much about.


I do disagree with Josie a little. Unlike Shon and Jules and also Josie, I transitioned in the early 2000s. This was well before the tipping point, and before most trans civil rights even existed in law. I remember how we fought successfully for changes that genuinely improved many people’s lives. I feel it will always be worthwhile to use what levers we can to minimise the harm caused by those who have power over us. Lobbying is the most accessible form of activism for some people. I still have an auto-reply on which encourages every damn cis person who emails me at work to contact their MP.

But Josie is completely right that many if not most trans people can and should be putting a lot more of our energy into grassroots politics. This must necessarily involve re-imagining what our worlds could look like, using what we already have as a basis from which to build. I know from lived experience that we can not only survive in the absence of certain civil rights and recognition, but also see material improvements in our lives when we come together. I met Jessica because we built trans-led community services in Coventry from the ground up.

Similar points are made by Roz Kaveney, who first came out over 50 years ago. In her criminally underrated 2022 poetry collection, The Great Good Time, Roz does reflect on the violence faced by young trans women in her youth. However, she also details the vibrant lives they lived together, the joys they experienced, how they shared housing and clothes and had each others’ backs. In a short forward to the book, she notes:

“I observed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things have been, if not worse, then at least as bad in different ways”.

As Josie states in Stepping Over The Line, white, middle-class trans people in particular need to understand in this current moment that we are as disposable to the ruling classes as any other minoritised individual. Our strength lies in practical solidarity with others subject to the violence of corporations, fascist movements, and the state. To once again reiterate the point, we need to be in community with one another.

Both Robyn and Jessica’s lives offered perfect models for this.

***

Every single speaker at Robyn’s funeral talked about how much time and energy she put into punk and folk music, building and fixing things, and caring for others. She was a loud, proud butch who was incredibly committed to sustaining community wherever she went. When she saw a need, she sought to meet it. Many of us only wished that she was better at asking for or accepting help herself.

If a trans person needed somewhere to stay, Robyn would put them up. If a trans person needed to move house, or was being evicted or was fleeing a violent relationship, Robyn would turn up with a van. If a trans person was having trouble at work, Robyn would show up online or in person with sensible advice. This attitude inspired Robyn to volunteer with groups such as Reading Red Kitchen, a grassroots project which provides a social foodbank and free community meals for asylum seekers experiencing food poverty. For Robyn, radical politics could never simply be about slogans and demonstrations: it was about cooking, connecting with others, and washing the dishes.

None of this is to say that Robyn was never found at a protest: quite the opposite. When I lived in the south we co-founded Trans Liberation Surrey, a collective which worked to oppose transphobia in a county hardly known for its activist movements. My most treasured memory of Robyn is from this time, when we attended a small anti-fascist demonstration in Wokingham. A coalition of neo-nazis, anti-vaxxers, and climate conspiracists descended on the town to protest a drag queen storytime event for young children. Robyn and I joined other locals outside the library to wave rainbow flags and play upbeat music, enabling families to attend the event without disruption.

Photo of people with placards around a banner labelled Trans Lib Surrey.
Trans Liberation Surrey, at Surrey Pride 2021.


Jessica was also extremely motivated to help others, in spite of her own difficult circumstances. Like Robyn, she was a committed trade unionist. For many years she was also involved in a small political party, before eventually being ejected for challenging the leadership. Her motivation for this was a genuine belief in the possibility of positive political change, and in the potential for people to come together and make that change happen. Later in life she would rediscover her Christian faith as alternative vehicle for community action.  

After hearing of Jessica’s death, our mutual friend Charlotte reached out, and we asked one another how we knew her. It turned out Charlotte had also been a member of that political party, and reconnected with Jessica several years later as they both sought new ways to make a difference in the world. In turn, I explained how Jessica and I met while lived in Coventry, and was myself involved in organising trans community social events, meals, and punk nights. Charlotte and I also both knew Robyn. “Christ Ruth,” said Charlotte, “trans lives are so entangled and we often don’t even realise”.

So it is. Right now, Jessica’s Facebook wall is replete with people thanking her for being there as a friend, for providing them with advice, for helping them come out.

In a hostile world, we are everything to one another. In the face of the most horrific hate, our love is so powerful. Such love survives death.

Selfie photo taken by a white woman with shoulder-length brown hair. She is wearing colourful clothes and a cross around her neck, and smiling at the camera.
Selfie taken by Jessica.

***

This is where I find hope. At protests and demonstrations, sure, but more importantly in the contexts where we give each other’s lives meaning.

I find hope in community meals, mutual aid, queer bars and queer bookshops and queer gigs. I find hope in small parties, in big Pride events, in quiet meetings at work, in food pantries. I find hope in housing projects and healthcare projects, and in the Glasgow Electrolysis Project, which has created actual jobs for trans women and a vital new service for hundreds of us across the city. We know we are failed constantly by mainstream institutions: rather than seek incremental change, is it not time to re-imagine the clinic, re-think the workplace? Our problems will not be solved by refusing to engage with existing services, nor by creating trans charities that replicate existing hierarchies. We need to find ways to build something new entirely.

I find hope in the fact there are more of us out than ever, more connected than ever. These collective endeavors are all so much more important than anything I personally might write, any research I might do, and certainly any “progressive” policy I might influence.

Doom-posting and finger-pointing cannot deliver any of these things. We need to take the time to connect with one another, especially outside the internet. Yes we need to grieve, but we need so much more than this. We need to actively look after one another, and provide space for rest and recuperation. We need to have each others’ backs. We need to connect across difference, and not (re)create hierarchies of oppression or need.

These are no fucking platitudes. This is my life. This is the lifeblood of our shared communities. This is how we create better social determinants for our goddamn health.

Long may we live together.  

Photo of a butch white woman playing a banjo next to a Scottish loch.
Robyn in the Highlands. Photo by Elaine O’Neill.

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Interview with Xtra: lesbians resisting transphobia

Even if the worst-case scenario occurs and the interim guidance becomes law, Pearce emphasizes that laws “only make sense if people uphold them.” People and organizations must be willing to fight for trans rights, and make the laws essentially impossible to enforce. 

As Pearce puts it, “We need intentional, aggressive, extremely homosexual non-compliance.”


Earlier this month I spoke with journalist Emma Bainbridge about lesbian community responses to the UK’s transphobic Supreme Court judgement. That piece is out now in the Canadian magazine Xtra. You can read it here:

U.K. lesbians are resisting state-mandated transphobia

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It’s a long hard revolution

Lesbian conspiracies in Lausanne

On the evening of Tuesday 15th April 2025, I was widely perceived to be a British lesbian, both legally and socially. By 11am the following day, that was no longer the case, following a ruling by the UK’s Supreme Court.

I was not actually in the UK for this momentous occasion. I was instead in the Swiss city of Lausanne, for a workshop on standards of evidence in sex and gender policy. I was there to consider the very questions the UK’s highest court, in their supreme ignorance, had effectively dismissed. Their ruling determined that the term “sex” in the Equality Act referred to “biological sex”, which in turn should be understood as “the sex of a person at birth”. But what do we actually need to know about when we make policy around sex and gender, and what is the role of evidence in this?

The Tuesday evening found me hanging out in a second-rate Thai restaurant with Professor Sarah Lamble, an esteemed criminologist and fellow dyke. Lamble and I spent some time talking about how conspiracy theories around “disappearing lesbians” highlighted the strange ironies inherent in British anti-trans discourse. The anti-trans movement has been extremely successful in raising “reasonable concerns” around supposed problems that are completely ungrounded in reality, to the point where that reality itself begins to warp.

Mainstream political discourse in the UK increasingly reflects anti-trans claims that lesbians are somehow threatened by trans people, or are even being transed en-masse in gender clinics and youth groups. The true biological attraction between two adult human females is disrupted. Young people are tempted away from lesbianism with promises of luxurious facial hair and male privilege; meanwhile, horrifically manly and/or confusingly attractive trans dykes are introduced to the dating pool.

If these claims were true, we might expect to see some kind of reduction in the number of homosexual females. Instead, the evidence we have indicates quite the opposite. Surveys such as the Annual Population Study show a rising number of lesbians over recent years, part of a wider increase of 1.2 million in the recorded lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) population of the UK. This is driven especially by young people coming out, with over 10% of people aged 16-24 identifying as LGB as of 2023.

But what about the lived reality of queer womanhood? Well, there’s great news here too: we are living in a truly historic time for sapphic culture in the UK. Proudly out lesbian and bisexual women can be found across the pop charts, on TV, and across social media. Queer bookshops are on the rise. Pop-up butch bars and new queer cafes can be found in major cities and small towns.  And, excitingly, even the much-maligned lesbian bar is making a comeback, with three permanent venues and numerous occasional nights now running in London alone. It’s all got so out of hand that in 2024 the Queer Brewing company sold a juicy pale ale named Dyke Renaissance, which conveniently listed an educational series of cultural milestones on the can.

If trans people are trying to disappear lesbians, we’re doing a really bad job of it.

Photo of a beer can. Text on the can reads as follows. The great Dyke Renaissance of Spring 24. The lesbian tapas riot of Broadway Market. Rapid increase in lesbian parties. Carabiner sales increase. Finally more than one lesbian bar in London. Leatherdyke night. Top shortage worsens. Bestie to lover pipeline shortens. Queer Brewing, pale ale, 4.4%.


Meanwhile, queer cis women tend to be pretty supportive of trans people. In fact they’re one of the single most supportive demographics in the UK – which is presumably why the Equality and Human Rights Commission is, right now, attempting to ban trans dykes such as myself from associating with any more than 25 biological lesbians at any one time.

On evidence

As lesbian conspiracy theories show, the very concept of evidence has had a bit of a hard time over the past decade.

In the UK, this was perhaps best encapsulated in 2016 by the Conservative politician Michael Gove. While campaigning for Brexit, he declared that the British people “have had enough of experts”. Gove’s claim is echoed in a growing anti-intellectualism across the globe. From the mass purge of universities in Türkiye, to the post-truth bizarro world of Donald Trump, to Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza, this trend manifests in blunt and brutal ways. Anti-expert authoritarianism doesn’t care about your facts or your feelings.

However, attacks on evidence can also be more subtle. Gove’s comments are widely quoted, but it’s less well-known that he singled out a particular kind of expert for criticism: “people from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”. While this was gloriously vague in a way that allowed the listener to project all kinds of things onto Gove’s words, in context it was nevertheless evocative of the kind of group that tends to advocate for social justice. LGBTQQIAAP groups, perhaps.

From academic thinktanks, to charities, to campaigning organisations, the implicit problem was any kind of challenge to conservative common sense. The UK’s political mainstream has since doubled-down on this approach. In the run up to the 2024 general election, Tory home secretary Suella Braverman criticised “experts and elites”, while the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Michelle Donelan, promised to “kick woke ideology out of science”.

One of Donelan’s targets was the “denial of biology” in research by feminists, social scientists… and biologists. The problem here is that supposedly common sense notions of sex and gender, which assume clean and tidy biological divisions between male and female, collide violently with the beautiful messy reality of the material world. At this point in history, it is well-established that sexual diversity exists throughout nature, that men are not biologically superior to women, that social advantage is not conferred or denied by chromosomes, and that queer, trans, and intersex people exist in the world. The evidence for this is gloriously multifaceted. We find it in laboratories, in systematic reviews, in surveys and questionnaires, in the way that men shout abuse at us in the streets, in how our sexed bodies shift and change under hormonal influence, in the way we feel when we finally have a language that describes our experiences.

Michelle Donelan decided to tackle the thorny problems of feminist science, intersex bodies, and trans existence by commissioning a research project by Alice Sullivan, a supposed sociologist who doesn’t care one jot for any of the evidence outlined above. Published in March 2025, the Sullivan Review insisted that data collection relating to sex and gender should rely on a very narrow definition of biological sex: one that ignores trans and intersex women’s real lives, bodies, and experiences of misogyny, while promoting a sexist model of essentialised womanhood. Her findings were echoed in those of the Supreme Court judges a month later, whose pronouncements on biological sex were made without any reference to relevant social, scientific, or philosophical research on how this might actually be understood or defined in practice. 

To position this as a wholly new trend would, of course, would be inaccurate. Western jurisdictions have long used and abused pseudoscience to oppress minoritised groups, especially in colonial contexts. This can be seen for example in the British state’s shameful embrace of “race science” and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries. What we are now witnessing is an example of the imperial boomerang, in which the logics of colonialism are turned inwards, resulting in increasingly fascist domestic politics.


But did you have a nice time in Switzerland, Ruth?

On that fateful week in April, I joined a group of feminist, trans, and lesbian researchers and activists for the workshop at the University of Lausanne. In the face of increasingly ill-informed policymaking across multiple contexts, it provided us a space to think together about the lessons we might learn collectively from our very different work on healthcare, sports, and prisons.

One overarching theme was the importance of evidence in understanding human experience, in terms of rigorous data collection, careful analysis – and accounting for the lived reality of actual people’s actual lives. A powerful account of the latter point was provided by Dinah Bons, a veteran campaigner for HIV prevention. She pointed out that if a sex worker repeatedly attends a community clinic for her STI tests, this provides evidence that the clinic feels safe enough for her to return regularly, which is far from a given. Such matters are often highly evident to service users and providers on the ground, without any need for a survey or interview.

Another key theme at the workshop was the extent to which various principles of evidence are increasingly abused by politicians, journalists, and institutions.

The concept of evidence has not been rejected wholescale by sexist, transphobic, and lesbophobic policymakers. Rather, “evidence” is increasingly a buzzword to justify particular approaches or points of view, rather than something grounded in a commitment to scholarly standards or an acknowledgement of lived experience. At the workshop, we explored how flawed notions of evidence have been used to support misleading statements or outright lies about human bodies or human experiences. We heard about the use and abuse of evidence in justifying invasive sex-testing for woman athletes, misrepresenting research on young people’s ability to engage in informed decision-making, and defending conversion practices. Notably, while most of these abuses arose from a specifically transphobic politics, they have far wider consequences: especially for women, intersex, and queer people, but also for scientific processes, community consultations, and informed advocacy more broadly.

You can see an example of this in the Cass Review. Through successfully performing the aesthetics of acceptable expertise and science to the satisfaction of the British public, the Review has become what one workshop participant described as a black box. By this they meant that it has become an abstracted justification for policy and practice, handily replacing any ongoing discussion of evidence regarding young trans people’s health and wellbeing. You don’t need to know what the Cass Review actually says or how rigorous it actually is, only that it exists. Well-documented criticisms of the review from healthcare practitioners, academic experts, trans community groups, and (most importantly) young trans people themselves are been rendered irrelevant. The Cass Review is the evidence, and no other systematic review, original research, or personal testimony can henceforth count against it. Not, at least, until 2031 at the earliest: the official end-date of a single £10 million study, based on the Cass recommendations and featuring precisely zero trans researchers.

The British establishment is now attempting to repeat this trick with the Sullivan Review – never mind that projects such as MESSAGE have conducted more extensive and nuanced work on the same topic with a far wider group of experts – and, of course, with the Supreme Court judgement.

Beyond doom

As with Cass, as with Sullivan, it is difficult to capture the sheer enormity of harm caused by the Supreme Court’s pronouncement on biological sex. The consequences are still playing out, and will no doubt continue to do so for many awful months and years.

At the time of writing, the Equality and Human Rights Commission have proposed a programme of mass segregation, designed to discriminate against trans people in the workplace, in public services, and in social groups. The guidance they have written is just that: guidance, not law. Nevertheless, major organisations such as the Football Association, the British Transport Police, and Barclays Bank, all of whom shamelessly paraded rainbows through their social media profiles last Pride season, are falling over themselves to comply. We are witnessing the attempted complete exclusion of trans people from public life, in the latest culmination of a transparent attempt to eliminate us altogether.

In such moments, it can be easy to despair. This is in part because it is easy to forget the strength, resources, power held within trans communities and by our allies. That includes the knowledge and evidence we have access to.

Don’t get me wrong. The people who want to eliminate us are better-funded, better-connected, and now have the Labour government on-side as well as the UK’s traditional right-wing parties. We are not going to win trans liberation overnight.

But then, again, we never were.

Everything I said about lesbian culture earlier is true of trans people too. There are more of us publicly creating art and culture, more of us creating events and running nightclubs and playing in bands and writing essays (hi). There are more community groups providing mutual aid and support when charities and state bodies fail us. And, importantly, we are not alone.

Trans women and non-binary people are a part of the dyke renaissance. We are at the butch bars, and bemoaning the top shortage. We are dancing to Le Tigre and to Chappelle Roan. We are reading Gideon the Ninth and watching We Are Lady Parts and having all the feelings. My partner of the last decade was probably the most surprised of all to learn from the Supreme Court that I am not, in fact, a lesbian, as every bit of evidence from our shared personal lives points to quite the contrary.

I will concede that some trans people are not in fact lesbians, or even queer. Nevertheless, there are so many other places to find us in community with others. Trans people are in trade unions. Trans people are in workplaces. Trans people are in schools and colleges and universities. Trans people are in the streets. Trans people are on the bus. Trans people are in families. Trans people are making families. Trans people are playing football (suck it, Football Association). Trans people are eating pizza. Trans people are restoring the countryside. Trans people are hanging out beside Lake Geneva in the glorious sunshine, enjoying a much-needed break.


There are more of us than ever, and it is too damn late to put us back in a box.

Resistance is fertile

I was honoured to present the keynote presentation at the Swiss workshop. I spoke about the findings of the Trans Pregnancy Project, a study that produced enormous amounts of evidence on the experiences, needs, and perspectives of men and non-binary people who conceive, carry, and give birth.

No matter how much our findings are slammed by the media and billionaire children’s authors and washed-up comedy writers, our peer-reviewed work has demonstrated the lived reality of male and non-binary pregnancy over and over again. Most importantly, it has helped people. We are part of a far wider movement of parent groups, midwives, and researchers who are collectively building knowledge. I am constantly hearing from people who describe how much this knowledge has resulted in better care for them and their child. This kind of story drives everything I do.

Towards the end of my talk, I discussed the anti-trans moral panic, and the Supreme Court judgement. I then showed the below table of findings from the National Maternity Survey. This annual survey involves those who have recently given birth every year in many (but not all!) English hospitals, over the course of a few weeks. Since 2021, they have started asking whether the person giving birth has a different gender to the sex they were assigned at birth – i.e. are they trans?

Table showing data in response to the question, is your gender different from the sex you were assigned at birth. It shows a statistically significant increase in the proportion of people answering "yes", which rises from 0.56% in 2021, to 0.65% in 2022, to 0.77% in 2023, to 1.58% in 2024.


Two things leap out from this table for me. Firstly, the 2021 data shows a very similar proportion of people indicating they are trans when compared to the 2021 censuses in Scotland, England, and Wales. This suggests that, contrary to assumptions around trans infertility or undesirability, trans men and non-binary people may well be just as likely to give birth as cis women are to become birth mothers.

Secondly, the number of trans people giving birth has risen dramatically over four years. Even as the anti-trans moral panic has deepened. Even as attacks on even recognising the existence of trans people in perinatal services have increased. As Del La Grace Volcano once it put it: “resistance is fertile!”

In the face of growing oppression, trans people are simply refusing to disappear. In fact, we are doing the opposite.

This, then, is the power that the anti-trans movement, the Labour party, and the Supreme Court cannot possibly take away from us. The more trans people are out and visible to one another, the more trans people come out and become visible to one another. Sure, we will unfortunately need to think more carefully about where and when we are out, and where and when we are visible, if this is something we even have any power over in our specific lives. I am sure that more trans people will be going stealth in future years, if they can. But regardless – there are more of us in community, more of us organising protests, and more of us than ever in the lives of our friends, families, colleagues, and allies, showing that it possible to have a good life while being trans.

In this context, it is important to know that people from many parts of the world gathered in Lausanne this April to pool our knowledge and skills and experiences. It is important to know that we have each returned to our home countries to share what we gained. It is important for people to know that similar meetings are happening across the world, in community centres and on university campuses, in board rooms and in bedrooms, involving trans people, and feminists, and yes, lesbians. We are constantly building a movement for positive change, and you do not have to be an academic or veteran activist to be a part of it. Trans power is for everyone.

There is much to say what needs doing in the current moment. We need allies to continue fighting alongside trans people for our collective liberation. We need to be demonstrating in the streets, funding mutual aid and legal action, actively resisting complicity in Labour’s eliminationist agenda, and encouraging every public body under the sun to do the same.

Evidence will be helpful for this. Evidence from academic research, sure, but also – as Dinah Bons pointed out – testimony from the everyday reality of trans people’s lives. And oh boy, do we have that evidence.

More of us than ever are producing evidence of trans existence, and trans persistence.

And this is how we win.

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Supreme Court auto-reply

Last week I attended a workshop in Switzerland on standards of evidence in sex and gender research (more on that soon!) During my trip, I had my standard out-of-office auto-reply set up for my email account, informing people of my absence so they wouldn’t expect any immediate engagement from me.

I would typically switch off that auto-reply on my return to work as normal. However, in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court judgement, there is simply no more “work as normal” for me or any other trans person living in the UK.

As such, I have written a new auto-reply, which will be sent to everyone internal to my workplace who emails me. It is impossible for me to forget what is happening to trans people and especially trans people in the UK, so I will ensure it is impossible for my colleagues to forget this also. Equally, my intention is to transform bad feelings into understanding, and practical action. We have always been powerful when we work together and build movements.

I am sharing the text of the auto-reply here in case it is of use to anyone wishing to do similar.

You may be aware that the UK’s Supreme Court has initiated a mass rollback of trans people’s civil rights. In light of this, I am uncertain if it will continue to be safe for women and people like me to continue working at the University of Glasgow.

You can read more about the judgment and its implications here:

UK Supreme Court Rules That Trans Women Aren’t Women under the Equality Act 2010
https://www.wearequeeraf.com/uk-supreme-court-rules-that-trans-women-arent-women-under-the-equality-act-2010/

Illegally Female
https://www.autostraddle.com/uk-supreme-court-ruling-anti-trans-women

While the judgment itself does not require organisations to act in a prejudiced manner, numerous politicians and policymakers have indicated that they intend to make discrimination mandatory. My friends have reported increased street harassment, as the ruling is seen to position trans women as legitimate targets for misogyny and violence. Trans people of all genders are already even more likely to experience public harassment, sexual assault and rape than cis women (see e.g. https://bulletin.appliedtransstudies.org/article/3/1-2/3/), and this is likely to get worse.

The Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Baroness Falkner, has promised to revise guidance to encourage employers to discriminate against trans people in the workplace. For example, she told Radio 4: “if a service provider says we’re offering a women’s toilet, that trans people should not be using that single-sex facility.”

If you are concerned about the safety, wellbeing, and continued access to employment and education for women and trans people such as myself, you can take one or more of the following actions:

  • Write to members of the Senior Management Team at the University of Glasgow, especially the Equality Champions, and ask what they will do to protect trans staff and students, including through ensuring continued access to women’s and men’s facilities as relevant. Find their contact details there <link removed for blog post>.

  • Write to your Head of School and ask what pressure they will be putting on the Senior Management Team to do the same.

  • Write to your MP and MSPs. Explain exactly why you are concerned, and demand action to protect trans people’s civil rights. For example, you could ask for new primary legislation to protect trans people, ask why the UK is no longer complying with the European Convention on Human Rights, or demand the dismissal of biased commissioners from the EHRC. You do not have to write a perfect letter and it is okay to be emotional and express sorrow or anger, so long as you are not aggressive or mean. Advice on writing letters is linked here: https://bsky.app/profile/whatthetrans.com/post/3lnf4sadrjs2p. You can find contact details for your representatives here: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/.

  • Support trans people materially, through providing time, resources, and/or money to community initiatives. Examples include: Glasgow Trans Collective (fundraising for emergency support to people facing an immediate danger of threat to life, https://linktr.ee/glasgowtranscollective); Trans Harm Reduction (supporting harm reduction for people self-medicating in the absence of NHS treatment, https://transharmreduction.org); and Five for Five (donating money every month to a range of trans women’s causes, https://www.fiveforfive.co.uk).

  • Check in on your trans friends and colleagues. Make sure they are okay, and do what you can to be there for them. But do your own research on what you can do to help: don’t put this burden on us. Some good places for information include the websites and social media channels for TransActual, What The Trans, QueerAF, Trans Safety Network, and Trans Writes.

This auto-response is inspired by bell hooks’ comments in her book Teaching to Transgress:

“When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess […] empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks. [Lecturers] who expect students to share confessional narratives but are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a way that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share. […] It is often productive if [lecturers] take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding[.]”

I will not necessarily respond to any replies you send to this automated message, as I am trying to stay focused on teaching, admin, and research. But regardless, thank you.

Photo of a lake and mountains.

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Puberty blocker consultation: my response

In early September I recieved an email from the Department for Health and Social Care, inviting me to participate in a closed consultation on the Labour government’s proposed extension of the Tory ban on puberty blockers. The deadline was 1st October 2024.

September was already extremely busy. I started the month at the International Trans Studies Conference in Chicago, and ended it at the WPATH Symposium in Lisbon. In the meantime I was faced with various writing deadlines, administrative tasks, and the start of a new teaching semester. The small number of other academic experts and voluntary organisations who were also invited to respond no doubt faced very similar challenges with the short notice and unforgiving deadline.

Nevertheless, I scrambled to respond. Like Cal Horton, I regard government consultations on trans healthcare to be inherently abusive at this stage; as I wrote to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 2018, “we respond not with hope or optimism, but in fear. This is the power you wield over us”. Given the turgid vibes found in recent political discourse, I also held little hope of a long-term ban being prevented. However, it seemed worth using what little prestige I have as an academic to at least try to encourage the government to listen to actual evidence.

Trans Writes are now reporting that an extension of the ban until 2027 is on the cards for Britain, following a unanimous vote on the same by the Northern Ireland Assembly. With this in mind, I am now publicly sharing the evidence I provided in the closed consultation, plus slides from an oral presentation to the Commission on Human Medicines, who advised the Government.

I don’t think for a moment that sharing these materials will change anything in the short term. However, I feel it is important to put them in the public realm now for the sake of transparency.

[PDF] Puberty blocker consultation – response from Ruth PearceDownload

[SLIDES] Commission on Human Medicines – Pearce presentationDownload

Going forward, I hope the work that many of us have done in building and sharing an ethical base for the ethical provision of trans healthcare will make a difference. In the meantime, there is an important lesson here about relying on existing, unequal systems of power and control. As Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift argue in their new book Trans Femme Futures, making demands of institutions leaves the power in their hands. It is more important than ever for trans people to build power and knowledge within our own communities, in collaboration with others.

We have survived worse in the past by sharing information, ideas, and life-changing medication between us, and we will do so again.

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Conference report: International Trans Studies Conference, Day 1

REPENT.

The messages greeted me as soon as I left the ancient, rattling commuter train from central Chicago, chalked onto the sidewalk all along Church Street on the walk to my hotel. They seemed oddly out of place in Evanston, a leafy college suburb with an extremely chill vibe; a strange contrast to the low-key cool of the bars and restaurants, and turquoise blue calm of the inconceivably vast Lake Michigan.

At first I misread the final word of every message as “repeat”, as in (for example): “Praise the Lord – repeat”. I thought someone was simply very enthusiastic about sharing their values. “Repent”, however, feels a lot more aggressive and also quite pessimistic, assuming the reader’s guilt and their urgent need to make amends.

I am here for the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference, held at Evanston’s Northwestern University, in the original homelands of the Council of Three Fires (the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa peoples). In the opening plenary of the conference, the political scientist Paisley Currah argued that we are living in a crisis moment for trans politics: not because we are necessarily facing more discrimination than ever before, but because more people are paying attention to our existence. Many of these people hope we might repent our trans identities, our gender deviance, our very existence. And yet, here we are, gathering from around the world to discuss trans knowledge and trans ideas, and to imagine trans futures.

Over the course of the conference I am attending numerous talks and meetings across a dizzying array of topics and themes, taking in both theory and evidence from researchers based in the humanities, social studies, and physical sciences. I plan to blog regularly, sharing information I have learned as well as critical reflections on the event. There are literally hundreds of talks taking place over up to 11 simultaneous sessions at any one time, so please do not expect an exhaustive account! Still, I hope these posts will be of interest to people unable to attend the conference, as well as fellow attendees.


The opening plenary: ‘The State of the Post-Discipline’

The conference began on the evening of Wednesday 4th September, with a two-hour opening plenary titled ‘State of the Post-Discipline’, reflecting the official theme of the event. Across four talks, this session aimed to set the tone for the conference and introduce a series of key ideas for consideration in the coming days.

I felt the plenary very much reflected the ambition, the importance, and the limitations of this conference. Each of the speakers emphasised the importance of a materialist approach to trans studies, in which our research can speak helpfully to the reality of people’s lives. This necessarily involves grounding our work in practical examples of trans realities, and understanding our histories in order to better tackle the challenges of the present and future. The speakers were perfectly blunt about the enormous harms that trans people have faced across time and in many places, while maintaining an optimism for how we might productively learn together.

At the same time, it felt strange that together, these four opening commentaries reflected a very limited geographic perspective, with three of the speakers being based in the United States. Similarly, it was disappointing to see just one trans woman on the stage, the Mexican biologist and philosopher Siobhan Guerrero Mc Manus.

This unfortunately reflected the wider dynamics at play within trans studies. As conference organiser TJ Billard noted in their opening comments, trans studies has historically been dominated by US and (to a lesser extent) European voices. Moreover, all four of the field’s major journals are effectively based in the United States. The 2nd “International” Trans Studies Conference is inevitably dominated by US scholars and perspectives, even as there are an impressive range of people present from the rest of the world. I’ve also frequently observed the minoritisation of trans women with trans-oriented conferences and research projects, even given the enormous influence of key figures such as Susan Stryker (who will be speaking in a later plenary) and Sandy Stone.

Nevertheless, the conference couldn’t have found a better opening speaker than queer Indigenous historian and literary scholar Kai Pyle. I have long admired Kai’s written work, so it was exciting to finally see them speak.

North American conferences frequently open with a land acknowledgement, in which organisers and/or invited elders of local Indigenous communities recognise the role of Indigenous peoples as the original stewards of lands taken by settler colonists. However, land acknowledgements rarely offer deeper understanding, let alone any form of reparation for the enormous damage wrought by colonialism.

Pyle themself rightly noted that a single talk could not possible begin to account for the violences and erasures of the past and present, and they observed also relative absence of Indigenous academics from the conference space. They further comments that “although I’m speaking on a panel titled ‘The state of the post-discipline’, I’m barely concerned with the discipline at all”: instead Pyle is concerned with a future where indigenous trans people can live.

Nevetheless, it was powerful to begin the event with a talk specifically about the oppression and resistance of Indigenous peoples in the Great Lake region. Pyle also argued that this history is necessary for properly understanding the history of trans studies itself.

Pyle explained that the lands of the Illinois or Inoka people were first invaded by the French in the 17th Century. Subsequent European accounts and travelogues widely reported the presence of gender roles in Inoka society that did not align with European norms: examples included the leadership of women in agriculture, and genders that could not be easily categorised as female or male. The subsequent projection of European understandings and desires onto Indigenous North American peoples informed early pathological accounts of gender ‘deviance’ as physical and mental sickness, which in turn would inform inform diagnostic categories from the 19th century to the present day. Indigenous people themselves, meanwhile, were subject to immense colonial violence, including coercive conversion to Christianity, removal from their homelands through forced marches such as the Trail of Death, and cultural destruction through the Indian residential school system.

Turning to the early 20th century, Pyle told the story of Ralph Kerwineo, an individual of Potawatomi and Black heritage who successfully ‘passed’ as a man and married two women while living in his ancestral homelands. While Kerwineo might today be understood as a trans man, there is no evidence of any engagement with the traditional gender roles of his people. Pyle noted that this stands as evidence of both enormous alienation but also resistance: Kerwineo successfully lived a gender ‘deviant’ life in the Chicago are a hundred years of attempted elimination of his people.

Finally, Pyle reflected on the emergence of the two spirit movement in the early 1990s, in parallel with the emergence of the contemporary US trans movement, as well as trans studies.

The second talk was by Paisley Currah, who argued for theorising “trans rights without a theory of gender”. He posited that trans studies has been increasingly “stepping aside from just doing theory” over the last decade, as seen for example in the creation of the journal Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. In this context we can potentially separate questions of social justice from questions of what sex and gender might actually be.

Currah illustrated this argument with the example of campaigns around sex classification policies in New York City. Attempts to introduce a system of self-declaration in the 2000s and early 2010s were complicated the fact that some city bureaucrats supported the proposed changes, and others opposed them. This was summarised by a legal argument made by the city government: “the existence of difference approaches to similar problems does not render an agency’s rule irrational”.

In this context, Currah argued that sex/gender is in practice a “decision informed by law”, and by the needs and interests of lawmakers. For example, in many jurisdictions it is fairly easy to change a sex/gender marker on a driving license. This is because in practice driving licenses are used by the state primarily for tracking and surveillance, and it is therefore in the state’s interest for the license to reflect what people look like and how they live. By contrast, it has historically often been more difficult to change sex/gender for the purpose of marriage: that is because this would entail a disruption of the heteronormative biological logic for property transfer across generations.

Currah concluded by arguing that when we argue for changes to these policies, the existence and diversity of trans people “is enough”. We exist no matter what your theoretical position on sex or gender, and “a world without us cannot be willed into being”. The focus of policy advocacy should therefore be on what we need to flourish, rather than abstract theorisation.

I found Currah’s arguments extremely helpful and well-framed. However, I was surprised to his insights framed as novel, as the approaches he described feel well-established in the UK. Unlike in the US, materialist approaches have been central to trans studies since the 1980s, in the work of key scholars such as Dave King, Stephen Whittle, and Zowie Davy. Meanwhile, the focus on trans people’s practical needs is embodied in the work of organisations such as Trans Safety Network and Trans Kids Deserve Better, who very intentionally centre questions of harm rather than any theorisation around gender. My own PhD thesis (published in 2016!) and later book Understanding Trans Health deliberately set aside the question of sex/gender to focus on how trans healthcare services operate and are experiences in practice. The feminist philosopher Katharine Jenkins has done important work on how what is important about gender varies according to context, and the legal scholar Chris Dietz has extensively considered questions of governmentality in terms of how and why differing aspects of trans people’s lives are managed by different agencies of on the behalf of healthcare systems and the state.

I make this point not to try and undermine Currah or big up UK trans academia specifically. Rather, I want to note how this kind of awareness of what is already being done in different parts of the world highlights why a truly international approach to trans studies is so vital.     

The next talk was by Siobhan Guerrero Mc Manus. Unfortunately I – and many other attendees – missed much of her talk due to an apparent failure by the translation company hired to support the conference. This was an enormous pity given what I did catch felt extremely important, and built on the critiques of Currah that were bubbling away in my brain during his talk.

Guerro Mc Manus emphasised the importance of organising across borders, with the example of taking successful trans liberation strategies from Mexico, adapting these in a Colombian context, and then again in Peru. Conversely, she described the example of how work on reforming the criminal code in Colombia informed trans activism in Mexico. In this kind of organising and exchange of ideas, reflections from the Global South might be combined with insights from the North, without simply reproducing Global North theory in a way that is not necessarily applicable to countries such as Mexico.

I wish I had heard more of these presentation! I feel the International Trans Conference’s investment in both live translators and translation through transcription software is an incredibly important move, and should set the tone for future events in the field (or “post-discipline”, if you prefer). At the same time, it is important to get this right lest non-Anglophone perspectives are further marginalised through technical error. While I just missed large parts of this one talk, attendees who were not fluent in English may have missed much more from the other speakers. I definitely felt for the organisers, speakers, and fellow attendees, and hope these problems will spur future work to further improve our communication across languages and borders.

The plenary closed with a short address from TJ Billard. Billard explained how the choice of conference theme was informed by the “first” International Trans Studies Conference, which took place in Arizona in 2016, “riding the high of the transgender tipping point” just months before the election of Donald Trump. An enormous amount has changed in the last eight years, and the time is ripe for a re-appraisal.

Billard’s use of the term “post-discipline” draws on the work of John David Brewer. Brewer describes post-discipline thinking as knowledge about a phenomena that is detached from disciplinary allegiances, instead emphasising theoretical and methodological pluralism, political investments, and ethical values.

The emphasis is therefore less on academic siloing, and more on real problems facing contemporary society.  This couldn’t be more appropriate for trans studies, especially in the context of the insights shared by the other speakers.


Some final thoughts

The first “day” of the conference was really just an evening: the opening plenary, plus a reception where the in-person attendees got to spend time meeting and catching up with one another (some of the most important academic work!) I am finishing this monster post at the end of the second day of the conference, a true marathon which ran from 8:30am (when registration opened) to 9pm (when a reception and 10th anniversary celebration hosted by the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly theoretically wrapped up). It’s difficult to capture the sheer scope of this event: indeed, this series of posts can only possibly touch upon the vast amount of knowledge and information we are discussing at the conference.

For all that I (and others) have shared several critiques, I am hugely grateful this event is happening, and feel very privileged to attend in person. I couldn’t be happier to be a gender deviant, and hope to repeat the value-based work of resistance over and over.

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Amplify trans youth

This morning I logged into instagram and watched, transfixed in amazement and worry, as a young person scaled the walls of the Department for Education.

The aspiring spiderman is part of the activist group Trans Kids Deserve Better. At the time of writing they are staging a multi-day protest at the Department for Education building in London, for the right to a safe and inclusive education.

Watching the video, I fear for Squirrel, the anonymous activist who is genuinely risking their life to stop government employees from taking the group’s banner. It’s very apparent that Squirrel is a skilled climber who knows what they are doing – equally, one wrong move could result in a deadly drop to the concrete pavement. This is not safe.

But of course, the entire reason this protest is happening is because young trans people are not safe.

Trans Kids Deserve Better launched their campaign for youth autonomy, safety, respect, and inclusion in July, from a dramatically high ledge of an NHS England building. In an interview with Jess O’Thompson for Trans Writes, the emergency doctor and children’s TV presenter Dr Ronx Ikharia argued that “our young people deserve better than suffering, and shouldn’t be scaling walls”. But they added that for this to happen, trans kids must be “believed, supported, affirmed, and loved”.

And this is the crux of the issue. Under the Conservative and Labour governments, we have seen a policy environment in which teachers, doctors, therapists and parents are actively discouraged or prevented from believing, supporting, affirming, or loving young trans people. Instead, families face prison sentences for supporting young people’s continued access to medication, NHS England is expanding the provision of state-funded conversion clinics, and a growing number of schools are refusing to allow even the discussion of trans experiences.

Trans kids are not safe because they have been entirely failed by the adult world. They have been failed by politicians, failed by civil servants, failed by the NHS, failed by the voluntary sector, failed by researchers, and in many cases also failed by their doctors, teachers, and parents or carers. This is why the activists from Trans Kids Deserve Better are literally scaling walls in their fight for an actual future.

Looking at the challenges facing young trans people, it can be easy to lose hope. But the actions of Trans Kids Deserve Better show that there is a better way. Doomerism helps nobody. The successes of successive liberation struggles have come about because people have continually dared to believe that a better world is possible, and fight for it. The young people currently sat outside the Department of Education are not bemoaning what they have lost: they are insistently demanding change.

Image from Trans Kids Deserve Better

What can we do? In their conversation with O’Thompson, activists from Trans Kids Deserve Better explained that while trans adults often want to “protect” trans youth, they would rather we “amplify” them: “we don’t need sympathy, we need support”. This is a call to action, with a focus on solidarity, rather than trying to speak for young people or bemoan their situation.

Many adult trans people and allies have complained about the lack of mainstream media coverage for the actions of Trans Kids Deserve Better. But we should not simply wait for the papers or news programmes to start caring. It’s up to us to talk about what’s happening. Today’s queer and trans communities only exist at scale because we made our own media, told our own stories, and forced the mainstream to catch up.

So I encourage everyone who reads this to share the story of what is happening. Share it on social media, share it with friends and family, share it in conversations at work and in bars and in cafes and in parks and at gigs and festivals. A few days ago I was at a pub in Bath, fresh from Pride, still holding a placard that read “Ban Wes Streeting” (copied shamelessly from someone else in Glasgow a couple of weeks prior). Someone asked what Wes Streeting had done, so I told her. She was appalled, but grateful to have learned what is happening, and better informed to act. Information spreads when we spread information.

Trans Kids Deserve Better are also hoping that more people will contribute to their actions. You can sign up as a supporter, stay updated from their Instagram account, or contribute to their fundraiser.

If you, like me, would rather not see young people risking life and limb by climbing public buildings, it is time to fight with them, not “for” them. Together we can build a safer world.

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Community Development Journal: Issue 59(3) out now

One element of my work I don’t talk about as much on this blog is my role as co-editor of the Community Development Journal. We put out four issues every year featuring amazing research from across the world, so I’m hoping to highlight this a bit more in future posts.

Volume 59, Issue 3 is out now and features articles on a range of topics from violent protest, to public art, to academic/voluntary partnerships – with contributions from South Africa, the Philippines, the UK, India, Canada, Vietnam, Mexico, Portugal, and Italy. As ever, it’s been hugely exciting to work with and learn from such a broad range of insight and expertise.

In addition to overseeing the peer review process, myself and co-editor Kirsty Lohman write an editorial for every issue. This editorial – one of five freely available articles in the latest issue – celebrates the launch of the new CDJ Plus website and reflects on the privileges and limitations of academic publishing. In particular, we discuss the importance and limitations of using our platform to speak out about the ongoing colonial violence in contexts such as Gaza and Ukraine.

You can read that editorial here:

Academic publishing and the privilege of a platform
by Ruth Pearce and Kirsty Lohman

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My speech on the Cass Review and Scotland’s trans healthcare ban (with footnotes!)

This post shares a video and transcript of my speech at the emergency demonstration in George Square, Glasgow, on 18 April 2024, against the decision from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to ban endocrine treatments for trans people aged under 18. The speech was unplanned and made without notes, so I have made some small corrections in the transcript, plus minor amendments for clarity. I have also added references for some key points. Thank you to @transprotestglasgow for the video.

Readers seeking more detailed evidence and academic critiques may find my previous blog post helpful: What’s wrong with the Cass Review?

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Ruth Pearce.

I’m a Lecturer in Community Development at the University of Glasgow, and I’m a researcher on trans healthcare.

And I was a trans child.

I want to talk about that for a moment. Because I came out to myself circa 2001, when I was 15, when not many people did that. And it was hard for us. And there was trans community, and there was information, but it was very difficult because we felt very, very alone. I was mostly only able to connect with other trans people my age through the internet, through blogs, and they were mostly Americans. The Brits were there; a lot of us connected later as we grew older. But we were so isolated.

A really important thing to remember, in a moment like this where we are seeing a return to the kind of medical policies that were in place when I was a kid: there are so many more of us, and we are so much more powerful than we have ever been.1 Never forget that strength we have together.

One of the things Hilary Cass says in her report is that the meaning of the word “trans” has changed since 2020.2 She says, and there is no evidence for this, that “trans” in 2020 meant something quite rigid and specific, and only now in 2024 it’s become an umbrella term for lots of identities. Tell that to me coming out as a trans teenager in 2001!

So here’s the thing. We’ve always been here, and we are more powerful now, but we are seeing this backlash. That’s been a long time coming and transphobia changes its face over time. One of the things I wanted to do to deal with my loneliness and the experiences I had was that I wanted to become an activist. And when I started doing activism, when I got into meetings with people in government, and with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, they said “there’s no evidence” for the discrimination we faced. So I was like, “fine: let’s see what evidence I can find”.

So I did a PhD in trans healthcare.3 And I found what you often find when you do research; you often find things you don’t expect. So I did find some things I expected to find. About waiting lists and how hard they are. About how hard appointments can be when you’re meeting with sexist and transphobic clinicians who are asking you, as a young person, how you masturbate and who you’re attracted to. But what I didn’t expect was the sheer level of pain from the waiting. And I talk about that in my work. And the anticipation, where we are anticipating all the time. When is it going to happen? When are we going to get to live our lives? And that happens on every level of our lives.

I was also shocked by the level, and detail, and complexity of the ignorance of healthcare practitioners. It ranges: it’s not just that they all hate us, right? It’s that some people are trying to control us, some people want to help but don’t understand how, and some people don’t want to know. There’s different kinds of ignorance.4

So I published my work, and other people have followed. Other people were there before me of course, because “trans” was not new, and trans research wasn’t new either. There is now a lot of published research on what it is like to go through a gender clinic, and what it is like for a young person to go through a gender clinic. There’s people like Cal Horton5 and Natacha Kennedy6 who are writing on this, and Harvey Humphrey7 who works here in Glasgow. There’s a lot of people doing work on this.

We are saying, time and time again, “we need services that meet our needs”. For some people, that is access to puberty blockers, and that is access to hormones. For other people, that is access to counselling, and therapy, and community support. What we call “trans-affirmative” or “gender-affirmative” care is flexibility, meeting a person where they are at, and based on what they want to do with their lives.8 You don’t have to change your body – but you can.

It’s our body, it’s our right: we can do what we want with our own bodies.

This is what is disgusting about the decision by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. They have not addressed the years and years of mistreatment and abuse in their child and adolescent clinic at Sandyford. It is not a great place that we are trying to save. It is a clinic that has repeatedly refused to treat young people, and made people hold on for care. It has helped a handful of people. Dozens of people – only dozens – have accessed treatment in the last few years.9 Now they are proposing to stop doing the very little they are doing to support young trans people.

People who get a referral to a child and adolescent gender clinic are not necessarily seeking access to counselling and therapy, because you can get that elsewhere.10 They are not seeking access to community, because you will find no community at Sandyford. They are most likely seeking access to endocrine treatments: puberty blockers and hormone therapy. And that’s what they are going to stop doing.

Sandyford say they are still accepting new referrals. But what is the point of a gender clinic that does not offer people medical treatment?

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde have based their decision on the final report of the Cass Review. Let’s talk a bit about the Cass Review.

I’m an academic researcher. If the Cass Review was submitted by an undergraduate student, the first thing I would say is: “That’s nearly 400 pages long! No-one’s going to have time to mark that”.11 And you’ll notice that all the people in the media, all the Labour politicians, all the Tory politicians, all the people saying we should immediately implement the findings of the report: none of them read nearly 400 pages in one day. Neither did the journalists at the BBC, the Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Observer, the Independent. We expect better! And now the Scottish media: it’s all over the Scotsman, the National, the Herald. None of them have bothered to read the report, or think about it critically.

So here’s a bit of information about the Cass Review. The Cass Review was undertaken by a group of people who, from the very start, excluded trans people from oversight of the project. That was in their terms of reference.12 They didn’t want people who had experienced services having a formal part in the report. They excluded healthcare experts. If you were someone who had worked in a gender clinic you were excluded from being part of that.13 You know, I have lots of disagreements with many people who work in gender clinics, but you would have thought they might get a say.

You can see that ignorance, that intentional ignorance, playing out in the final report of the Cass Review. You can see, if you read the Cass report, that they looked at over 100 studies, most of which show that puberty blockers and hormone therapy can help young trans people. And they just ignored them.14 Intentionally. They say that the majority were not “high quality evidence”.15

What else is not high-quality evidence in healthcare? Paracetamol for back pain.16 There is no high quality evidence for that, in the terms of the Cass Review. Anti-psychotics.17 ADHD medication.18 All these medications that are in regular use. You know what else? Puberty blockers for young people with precocious puberty – if they’re cis.19 That is direct discrimination. 20

The thing is, that’s the Cass Review being serious. Let’s think about when it gets weird.

There’s a graph in there, where they show referrals to a gender clinic (the Gender Identity and Development Service in England) rising year on year, with “an exponential rise in 2014”. But they cut the graph off at 2017. But if you look at 2017-2020 the referral rate flattens off. It’s deliberate removal of evidence.21

We know why this is happening. Experts – medical experts, and experts by experience have been cut out of the Cass Review process. If you are trans, that’s you. You are an expert by experience. You know what it’s like. We have been cut out the process!

And the NHS have done that here in Scotland. There was no consultation on the ban that’s come in.

Who did they consult? We know there are people who are proponents of conversion therapy who were on the Cass Review team.22 That is what they are proposing.

They are proposing conversion therapy. Not just for trans kids, because they want to deal with all gender-questioning and non-conforming kids. This is going to be conversion therapy for queer kids. Little boys who want to wear a dress, they might not be trans, but they deserve to have the space to explore. That is not going to be what happens in clinics where people are referred which are being informed by conversion therapists.23

So consequently you have other weird stuff in the Cass Review. They’re dismissing all the evidence about why puberty blockers and hormones can benefit people within particular contexts, but they’re relying on other evidence for their recommendations. Let me give you one citation. “Thoughts on Things and Stuff, 2023”. That is a citation from the Cass Review: Thoughts on Things and Stuff.24

What is “Thoughts on Things and Stuff”? It’s a right-wing Youtube channel run by anti-trans bigots,25 featuring contributors such as “Gays Against Groomers”.26 This is the level of evidence that is informing NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

And I’ll tell you what else is in the Cass report. They say that little girls are likely biologically inclined to play with dolls. It’s right in there, in the Cass report.27 And little boys are probably biologically inclined to play with trucks. Why is this? It’s not just an anti-trans agenda. It’s an anti-feminist agenda. Its an anti-woman agenda.

Why is this happening? It’s happening because trans people are an easy target.

If you want to stop young people accessing contraception as teenagers, you remove trans people’s right to consent to care as young people. If you want to prevent young people – teenage girls – from having abortions, and you’re failing time and time again in the courts, you instead target puberty blockers, because that way you can set a precedent for preventing people from being able to make decisions as young people. You are undermining the idea that young people might have the capacity to consent to care and make an informed decision about their own bodies.28

So I will end on this. I’m a woman, I’m a trans person, and I think it’s really important we think about allies. I had the parent of a trans child contact me and say, “thank you for being an ally”. I want to think her for being an ally. The thing about allies is, we talk a lot about an “ally” being someone who supports somebody else. But no: allies are people who stand by each other and work together.

That’s why we need a trans feminist movement. A trans feminist movements gives people autonomy over their own bodies, space to make their own decisions, and enables people to stand together when we are all at risk.

So I’ll leave you with a chant I want to hear more of at protests:

“Trans rights, women’s rights: one struggle, one fight”.

FOOTNOTES

  1. My statement here is intended to highlight that more people are out as trans than ever before. Contrary to narratives of “social contagion”, there have always been people with gender diverse or sex nonconforming experiences. What has changed is that there is greater access to information and community, which makes it easier for people to come out. ↩︎
  2. “During the lifetime of the Review, the term trans has moved from being a quite narrow definition to being applied as an umbrella term to a broader spectrum of gender diversity. This clearly has implications for conceptualisations of detransition” (Cass et al., 2024, p.187). This claim is demonstrably false, as “trans” (and before that, “transgender”) has been used as an umbrella term for decades. This is shown in my own previous work as well as writing dating back to at least the 1980s by individuals such as Leslie Feinberg. ↩︎
  3. https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/88285/ ↩︎
  4. For an excellent, more recent and more detailed analysis on this topic in the context of trans youth healthcare, see Magdalena Mikulak’s (2021) article “For whom is ignorance bliss? Ignorance, its functions and transformative potential in trans health“. ↩︎
  5. https://growinguptransgender.com/evidence/ ↩︎
  6. https://www.gold.ac.uk/educational-studies/staff/kennedy-natasha/ ↩︎
  7. https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/staff/harveyhumphrey/ ↩︎
  8. “Our stance, as gender-affirming practitioners, is that children should be helped to live as they are most comfortable. For a gender-nonconforming child, determining what is most comfortable is often a fluid process, and can modify over time. Therefore, in a gender affirmative model, gender identity and expression are enabled to unfold over time, as a child matures, acknowledging and allowing for fluidity and change” (Hidalgo et al., 2013). ↩︎
  9. “Since 2018, around 1.77% of young people who are referred to the gender care services at Sandyford have gone on to be prescribed puberty blockers”: https://www.thenational.scot/news/24262271.many-young-people-scotland-given-puberty-blockers/. ↩︎
  10. Although in practice, trans people are often also turned away from mental health services due to “trans broken arm syndrome“. ↩︎
  11. In my original speech, I inaccurately stated that the report was “500 pages long”. However, my point about requiring time to carefully consider its contents remains. ↩︎
  12. “The original published Terms of Reference (ToR) for the Cass Review’s assurance group explicitly excluded trans expertise, stating that it “deliberately does not contain subject matter experts or people with lived experience of gender services” [Report 1, version 1]. The current (updated) assurance group ToR is worded less clearly, yet still conveys exclusion of those with expertise or lived experience, as such individuals would naturally be expected to have an interest in the outcome of the review” (Horton, 2024: p.7) ↩︎
  13. One former gender clinician was involved in the research process: Tilly Langton, formely of England’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). Langton’s recent activities include promoting conversion therapy materials in training for NHS psychiatrists and lobbying Kemi Badenoch about the UK government’s conversion therapy ban, alongside proponents of conversion practices. ↩︎
  14. Hilary Cass has contested this claim in reporting for the BBC. Her argument is that of the 103 studies analysed for the review, 60% were included in the synthesis of evidence. However, my argument here is specifically that the findings of these papers were broadly ignored in the writing of the report’s recommendations, while less robust material was instead prioritised. As Simon Whitten argues, “The majority of moderate certainty studies were included in the results section but then arbitrarily ignored in the conclusion entirely”. ↩︎
  15. I have removed a statement I made about randomised control trials from the transcript here as my point was unclear and therefore potentially misleading (as can happen when you do an unplanned speech on a complex topic!) Unlike the Cass Review team, I am keen to correct my errors. See the links in the above footnotes above for more detailed information on inclusion/exclusion criteria for the Cass Review. ↩︎
  16. See e.g. https://www.nps.org.au/news/is-paracetamol-effective-for-low-back-pain. ↩︎
  17. The landscape of evidence anti-psychotics is a complex one. There is “high-quality” evidence that anti-psychotic drugs work better than placebos in addressing various conditions, but the evidence for use of multiple drugs, reducing or increasing doses at particular junctures in treatment, or taking one drug rather than another in treating specific conditions is often of a similar (or lower) quality than the evidence for benefits of endocrine interventions assessed by the Cass Review (see e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890856716319992). ↩︎
  18. Specifically in the long-term, see e.g.: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/adhd/adhd-medications-effective-safe/. ↩︎
  19. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cen.14410 ↩︎
  20. At this point, somebody stuck their hand up in the audience. I responded: “Someone stuck their hand up and might give me a footnote on that! I totally approve of that. I might invite you up later because I like evidence and I’m obsessed with it. [person indicates they were just waving to their friend, crowd laughs] Oh that’s grand! There we go, we haven’t even had a footnote.” Well, here is the footnote. ↩︎
  21. p.24 of the Cass Review final report. The rationale for this within the report is that the figure is adapted from a 2018 paper published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour. However, as Trans Actual observe: “The number of referrals to GIDS is known until 2020/21 […] the last 3 years for which data is available, shows that the number of referrals has recently plateaued. Such data is inconvenient for a narrative that relies on an inexplicable explosion in need[.]” ↩︎
  22. https://transsafety.network/posts/gender-exploratory-nhs-training/ ↩︎
  23. A historical example of treatment that “tries to make the child comfortable with the sex he or she was born with” within a gender clinic context can be found here: https://www.npr.org/2008/05/07/90247842/two-families-grapple-with-sons-gender-preferences. ↩︎
  24. p.70, used to evidence the activities of GIDS’ research team at a WPATH conference. They could have instead cited the conference website. ↩︎
  25. A good summary of the channel can be found in this piece by What The Trans: “When citing a recording from the WPATH 2016 conference, Cass uses a YouTube channel called Thoughts on Things and Stuff. This appears to be the associated channel of a now-defunct blog largely focussed on criticising the Mormon Church. Why this was relevant to Cass is unclear, although titles of recent uploads at the time of the WPATH video include “Dr. Stephen Levine: 13 Untruths Behind Gender Affirmative Therapies for Kids” (Levine is an advisor to Genspect) and “Gays Against Groomers: stop the indoctrination and medicalization of children. 2023 Florida testimony.”, which perhaps provides a clue to how Hilary Cass ended up citing a channel with only 22.4K subscribers. It thus seems that, in addition to being advised by and networked with a variety of prominent anti-trans figures and organisations, Hilary Cass appears to be getting her professional news from homophobic and transphobic YouTube channels.”  ↩︎
  26. Anti-gay campaigners have long attempted to position LGBTIQ+ people as a danger to children. In recent years this tactic has seen a resurgence, through positioning trans and queer campaigners as “groomers”. GLAAD have described Gays Against Groomers as a group who intentionally use “ambiguous messaging about characterizing LGBTQ+ people as pedophiles falsely and maliciously with the absolutely clear intent of driving fear.” ↩︎
  27. pp.100-101 ↩︎
  28. https://transsafety.network/posts/bell-v-tavistock/ ↩︎