When I received an invitation to speak about my research at the University of California in Davis, my initial, instinctive response was “heck no”.
It was December 2025, and the United States was looking an increasingly dangerous place to be both trans, and to be a critical scholar. The last year has seen anti-trans legislation introduced at every level across the country, while the influential Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation and some in the FBI sought to brand trans activism as “violent extremism“. Meanwhile, attacks on academic freedom have resulted in massive funding cuts, the mass censorship of race and gender studies, and the kidnapping and detainment of students who protest the genocide in Gaza. One scholar seeking to flee the country with his family following death threats arrived at the airport gate to find their flights had been mysteriously cancelled.
Then there’s the international situation. Back in December, the US administration was beginning to escalate its rhetoric around Greenland. By January, I was genuinely concerned that a visit to California might coincide with a previously inconceivable outbreak of war between the US and its former European allies. It seemed that no possibility was off the table.
Don’t get me wrong, for all that Brits like to dump on Trump, I fear the UK is rapidly heading in a similar direction. While the dangers posted by the US administration are more blatant, thanks to its volatile and emotional rhetoric, the UK’s Labour government is pursuing a similarly authoritarian agenda. We can see this for example in deeply racist policies on migration and asylum, a crackdown on protest groups, attacks on equality and diversity policies, and the embrace of disinformation and pseudoscience in pursuit of an anti-trans agenda. And of course, our country too is entirely complicit in various conflicts and forms of state violence, including the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Nevertheless, I have the considerable privilege of being a white UK citizen. I own a passport that enables me to freely leave and enter the country. I do not fear being detained on the UK border. I live in a diverse community where I feel safe and held by my neighbours. I am still – for now – able to maintain a university profile that openly states my commitment to feminism and equality work. And while I am increasingly afraid of facing violence at work, at least there aren’t many guns in this country.
So while I felt morally torn about potentially travelling to the USA, I was also aware that my home country is not exactly a great place. Thinking through the idea of complicity, Mijke van der Drift and Nat Raha encourage us to find “the right relation to what your position is in the world”. This “entails attending to where one is, and what one can do from that place”.
The question, then, was one of getting to California safely, and then ensuring that the trip would be worth it. What could my in-person presence offer that was not possible in my writing, or over the internet? What could I offer, and what would be worth the risk?
The Trans Freedom School
It turned out that my colleagues at UC Davis really knew what they were doing. The event I spoke at, Vital Relations, was part of the Trans Freedom School. This is a series led by Ava Kim and Christoph Hanssmann, which brings together scholars to share knowledge and ideas on a range of extremely pressing topics.
Our event specifically addressed the past, present, and future of trans health and medicine. This included how trans healthcare might be defined, whose interests have shaped the development of the field, how to address threats to trans people’s health and wellbeing, and how all of this connects to wider struggles around the pursuit of truth and defense of free inquiry. The event format was a facilitated conversation, meaning that the speakers were in conversation with one another as well as the audience. This felt extremely generative given the range of knowledge and experience in the room.
I sat on a panel with Tankut Atuk, who is doing amazing work on pathogenicity: specifically, the social contexts and power relations which make minoritised people more vulnerable to illness and disease. Understanding these things can help us learn not only how and why people are disadvantaged, but also how we can organise against such disadvantage. We explored examples from Tankut’s research with trans sex workers in Turkey, my work on trans people’s experiences of perinatal care, and Glasgow’s strong community networks. A second panel saw Kadji Amin and Jacob Moses explore histories of trans healthcare, plus debates around identity and regret.
Importantly, these conversations are not limited to academic events. The panel discussions are bring professionally filmed, as are separate studio conversations with the speakers. The idea is to produce information and teaching resources for the long term. Other events associated with the Trans Freedom School take a wider look at current debates around gender and race, at a time when discussion on these topics is increasingly censored within media and scholarship, in the US and beyond.
In short, this was indeed vital.
Continuing to foster international dialogue and the free exchange of ideas is incredibly important, especially when these things are under threat. Teaching materials that challenge norms while tackling disinformation are desperately needed. I am grateful and honoured that I was invited to be part of this work.
I will of course be sharing materials produced by the Trans Freedom School when these are ready to go online. In the meantime, I was left with a great deal to think about, which will no doubt shape my own ideas and work going forward.
The right relation
As it turned out, the US did not invade Greenland while I was in California. Instead, as I flew home, the US and Israel launched a series of airstrikes on Iran. They killed the Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, along with members of his family, plus hundreds of civilians. This including over 170 people at a girls’ primary school, most of whom were children. This was an immediate reminder of how the world’s greatest superpower is also a rogue state, prepared to inflict death and suffering for seemingly little reason other than flattering the macho egos of its unchecked leadership.
Seeing sickening scenes of violence unfold across the Middle East in the following days made me feel extremely powerless. It is hard to know what to do, how to respond, in the face of such evil. I’ve had enough Iranian friends that I have no sympathy with the awful regime there. But the Iranian people will not be freed from tyranny by a racist foreign power murdering schoolgirls. I remember the slow, pointless horrors of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, with hundreds of thousands of people killed across the long years. I remember joining a million people on the streets of London to oppose this violence in 2003, only to be entirely ignored by the Labour government of the day.
In countries such as the UK and the US, what we do with our complicity in state violence depends on what tools we have, and options are in front of us. Here in Glasgow I will be supporting protests against war and arms dealers. I will be sharing information with my friends and neighbours. I will be teaching about power and its abuses in my day job. I will be voting to keep Labour as well as Reform out of Scotland in the forthcoming Holyrood election. It probably won’t feel like enough, but it does matter to do what we can.
The same goes for confronting other forms of state and corporate violence. I focus much of my research, activism, and writing on addressing discrimination and violence against trans people, because this happens to be where I have developed my skills and knowledge. The Trans Freedom School reminded me that the benefits of such skills and knowledge can cross entire oceans. It mattered for people in California to learn not only about my research, but also about the work of UK and Irish groups I spoke about, such as Trans Kids Deserve Better and Trans Harm Reduction. These groups are not working in universities or speaking to government. They are meeting with others in their community and building connections and resources, step by step, conversation by conversation.
“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.”
There are always things we can do. It is simply a matter of attending to where we are, and doing what we can from that place.
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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.
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 incendiarytakes. 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 criminaliseour 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 Rahaand 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 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.
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 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.
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 Conferencein 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.
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.
Dr Ruth Pearce 