sexism

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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/ ↩︎
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13 days to defend trans and queer kids

On 12 March 2024, the UK Department of Education consultation on draft guidance on “gender questioning children” for schools and colleges will close. Until that date, we have our best possible chance to fight for the safety and wellbeing of young people.

Last month I wrote a long blog post and zine about this draft guidance: New Year’s Resolution: Smash the New Section 28. I argued that the guidance resembles the notorious anti-gay law Section 28, in that it aims to both directly oppress LGBTIQ+ young people, and create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty around supporting them. This is to be done by reinforcing a strict sex binary. The guidance directly targets young trans people, but also threatens to enforce sexist and homophobic standards on all students, e.g. through stating that school uniforms should be allocated on the basis of “biological sex”.

I also argued that there are important reasons for hope, and many routes to resistance. One possible option is to take part in the consultation itself, but there are other approaches too, including noncompliance and resistance in schools, contacting politicians and unions to raise the alarm, supporting trans youth groups, and creative forms of protest.

Since I wrote Smash the New Section 28, the situation for young trans people has continued to deteriorate. In the UK, the Government has very quietly introduced a second consultation on proposals to segregate trans college students who are on trips or who would otherwise be sharing accommodation with other students. In the US, the murder of trans student Nex Benedict in a school bathroom shows just how dangerous the UK proposals would be in practice. I have updated my original post to reflect both of these events. Moreover, it’s emerged that the Royal College of GPs are hosting a conference for conversion therapy advocates in London, and the British public are more openly prejudiced towards trans people than they were just five years ago.

However, it’s also been really heartening to see how many people have read the blog post and shared the zine over the last month. I have particularly appreciated the support from the amazing independent Leeds book shop The Bookish Type, who have been giving away loads of free copies of the zine. I have heard from parents and bureaucrats who say they are using what I have written to argue for independent guidance that actually supports trans and gender non-conforming young people in schools and college.

Importantly, my writing is just one piece among many. Important critiques and consultation guides have been published by people and groups including The Diversity Trust, Just Like Us, Nancy Kelley, Gendered Intelligence, LGBT Foundation, Mermaids, Stonewall, and the Trans Learning Partnership. If you’re aware of any good writing or resources, please share in the comments and I will add it to this post.

You and the people you know have the resources to take action against the new Section 28. If the guidance is implemented, this will not be our only opportunity to fight back, but it is the best opportunity. Think about what you can do before 12 March: whether it’s writing to school governors or an MP, agitating in your workplace or union, or sharing information with others.

As ever, we can never win freedom alone, but have so much power when we act with others.

Photograph of a women holding a zine titled Smash The New Section 28. The woman is white and has shoulder-length brown hair, and is wearing glasses and a grey t-shirt. She stands in front of a large book shelf.
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New Year’s Resolution: Smash the new Section 28

This post is about the Department for Education’s December 2023 draft guidance on “Gender Questioning Children”. Advice on how you can take action can be found at the end. You can download a printable zine here.

The post was updated on 23 February 2024 to add information on the Further Education Residential Standards Consultation and the murder of trans student Nex Benedict in a school toilet.

Like many other young people, my first experience of sexual assault was in school.

I stood in the lunch queue at my school’s canteen, a boy my age behind me. Unexpectedly, he began to tenderly caress my back and my bum. Feeling extremely uncomfortable and vulnerable, I turned to confront him. He leered, laughed, then accusingly asked, “you gay?”

Sketch of an imposing school building

Like many queer students during the 1990s and 2000s, I was bullied viciously throughout my time in school. I was teased incessantly, beaten up, and on one occasion knocked unconscious in front of my entire year group. Later, since I started living as a girl, I’ve been groped by men many times in clubs and pubs. Yet that specific moment of abuse sticks with me especially.

So much can be said about it. I was a heavily closeted trans girl attending an all-boy’s comprehensive, and yet to admit I was also bisexual. I wonder of course about the sexuality of my harasser, who may have found bullying the only “safe” way to experiment with his own desires. But most important is the context of the wider school environment. Homophobia and ignorance about sexuality and gender was the norm; one that was not simply enacted between children, but also deeply rooted in policy and law.

Nothing was ever done about this sexual assault – in part because I didn’t for a moment consider telling anyone.

I attended school at the time of Section 28, a notorious anti-gay law enacted across Britain by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Section 28 was named for a clause in the Local Government Act 1988, in which local authorities (responsible for the management of state schools) were prohibited from “promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material”, or promoting the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. It was introduced following a major moral panic in the media over homosexuality in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, plus the publication of a handful of short books and leaflets with advice on teaching young people about the existence of gay and lesbian families or historical figures. 

Section 28 would remain in force for over a decade. It was eventually repealed by the first Scottish Parliament in 2000, and in England and Wales by Tony Blair’s second Labour government in 2003, although its effects would linger for years to come. In addition to directly barring local authorities from introducing affirmative teaching material about lesbian, gay, and bi lives, Section 28 had the wider impact of stifling any real discussion around sexuality or gender difference. Teachers were afraid to talk about the issue, and books were banned from schools and libraries. Meanwhile, “gay” was the ultimate insult in the playground, a go-to word for any person, action, or object that was undesirable or bad.

Section 28 did not have anything specific to say about acknowledging that lesbian, gay, or bi people exist, or about homophobic bullying in school, let alone about trans or intersex matters. It didn’t need to. The vague prohibitions of the law, along with a more general culture of ignorance, silence, and fear promoted by politicians and journalists, meant that many people were uncertain where the boundaries of legality lay. Instead, there was a widespread feeling that you simply couldn’t talk about it.

The impact on entire generations of young lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) people was horrific. Many of my peers talk about the traumatic impact of growing up during this time, of struggling to come to terms with their desires and experiences, of failing to receive protection from adult authority figures or being abused directly by them. You can read more about this in accounts such as in Kestral Gaian’s book Twenty-Eight.

The worst thing for me about growing up under Section 28 was the utter lack of information. When it came to my sexuality and trans experience, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I had no easy way into understanding my own feelings and changing body, let alone the quiet but immense impact of a law I’d never heard of. I wrote a diary across several years chronicling my self-hatred and feelings of being ill, broken, wrong, a freak. I was extremely unusual in coming out as a girl during my teen years, in part because I had the luck to stumble across supportive US-based internet communities when I was 15, circa 2002. I wonder what information and support my harasser in the lunch queue ever had available to him. 

The first adult I came out to outside of the internet was our Religious Education teacher, Mrs Richards. In retrospect, she was clearly a rebel, with a deep sense of Christian conviction about social justice which meant she was prepared to risk her job to do the right thing. At the time, I was vaguely aware she had been in trouble with the headteacher for telling a sex education class that, statistically speaking, at least some of us were gay and we needed to be okay with that. I told her that I wanted to be a girl, and asked where I could find help.

Mrs Richards did the best she could for me at the time – she sent me somewhere safer. She said she couldn’t speak with me, but recommended a free counselling service in town. This provided the first supportive, affirmative space in which I could explore my gender in person, laying the groundwork for my eventual transition. At the same time, I regret that even the most rebellious teacher in my school didn’t feel she could even safely listen to or reassure me in an extremely vulnerable moment.

sketch of several condoms, a bunch of bananas, and a condom on a banana

After Section 28

Following the repeal of Section 28, many teachers remained unsure about what the law said and whether they were allowed to discuss LGBTIQ+ issues in the classroom. Nevertheless, there has been a gradual shift towards the explicit acknowledgement and inclusion of queer lives in curricula and pastoral support structures. In 2005, Schools Out launched the first LGBT History Month resources for schools. In my mid-20s, now a proudly out trans activist, I attended an event in Coventry about moving on from the legacy of Section 28. It was supported by the city council and attended by many teachers. A few years later, attempts to reintroduce Section 28-style policies at some academy schools were explicitly condemned by the Department for Education. The world was changing.

Meanwhile, LGBTIQ+ adults and young people were more visible in society than ever before. We were increasingly present on TV, in movies, and in the charts. The emergence of social media meant we began to find one another and create our own content on Myspace… then Facebook, Youtube Tumblr, Twitter, Twitch, and Tiktok. It became more normal to have an LGBTIQ+ friend, colleague, sibling, child, uncle, or parent. This created a virtuous cycle: the more we were out and visible in society, the easier it was to come out. There are now more openly lesbian, gay, bi, and trans young people in the UK than ever before. I hear about this a lot from friends who teach in secondary schools. Queer kids are increasingly just a normal part of school life. For those who need more support – often young trans people – there are often clubs or groups facilitated by teachers: something that would have been almost impossible under Section 28. 

The new moral panic

Social progress is never linear nor guaranteed. We must therefore always be prepared to defend the gains we have made.

Since 2017, the UK has been gripped by a wide-ranging moral panic over trans people’s existence, as part of a wider backlash to social progress which has also affected groups including migrants, racalised minorities, and LGBTIQ+ people more widely. One element of this has specifically targeted educational, pastoral, and media support for young trans and gender non-conforming people. Prominent anti-trans campaigners have sought to raise fears over the growing number of out and proud young trans people, portraying trans experiences as a “social contagion” among children and adolescents, arguing that this should be addressed through the “elimination of transgenderism” or otherwise “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition”.

The violence of this language is reflected in the violence that too many young trans people continue to face from other children and adolescents, as well as the adults who are supposed to help them. But anti-trans campaigners continue to position young trans people themselves as the problem. 2020, Liz Truss (then Women and Equalities Minister) stated that trans people aged under 18 should be “protected” from “decisions they could make“, raising fears of a new Section 28.

That new Section 28 is now here, in the form of draft non-statutory guidance on “Gender Questioning Children” for schools in England, produced by the Department for Education at the behest of the UK’s Conservative government. This document, which is currently under consultation, threatens to significantly undermine the ability of young people to safely be themselves. And just like Section 28, while the draft guidance specifically targets one group, it threatens to cause harm far more widely.

What does the Department of Education guidance say about “Gender Questioning Children”?

I will not be providing a detailed breakdown of everything the guidance states – for this, I recommend alternative analyses such as Robin Moira White’s excellent commentary for TransLucent. However, key elements include the following:

  • Trans students are presented as an implicit danger to themselves and others. Schools are told to “safeguard” against young people coming out or transitioning, and the impact of this on other students.
  • Schools are told to out trans students both to their parents and to the “school community”. The guidance prioritises informing others over young people’s own right to safety, confidentiality, or self-determination.
  • Schools are encouraged to intentionally misgender students. Secondary schools are advised to consult parents and “only agree to a change of pronouns if they are confident that the benefit to the individual child outweighs the impact on the school community”. Primary schools are told that “children should not have different pronouns to their sex-based pronouns used about them”.
  • Schools are told to ban trans girls from girls’ toilets and changing rooms, and ban trans boys from boys’ toilets and changing rooms. The guidance advises that toilets access should be based on “biological sex”, with the possibility of an “alternative changing or washing facility” for individual students given special dispensation.
  • School uniforms should be worn according to “biological sex”: that is, trans girls are expected to wear boys’ uniforms, trans boys are expected to wear girls’ uniforms, and non-binary people are expected not to exist.
  • For sports, schools are told to “adopt clear rules which mandate separate-sex participation” where “physical differences between the sexes threatens the safety of children”.
  • The guidance entirely ignores legal protections for young trans people,most notably through excluding any discussion of “gender reassignment”, the category under which people who socially and/or medically transition are protected in the Equality Act 2010.
  • The guidance does not actually use the word “trans” once (let alone non-binary). The very language we use to describe our own lives is excluded from the document. Instead it refers to children being “gender questioning”, “gender distressed or confused”, experiencing “gender incongruence”, or “gender dysphoria”, or undergoing “social transition”, implying that this occurs as the result of a contested “ideology” or “belief.

In short, the proposed guidance aims to position young trans, questioning, and otherwise gender non-conforming people as a problem. If implemented, it would make it extremely difficult – if not impossible – for young people to be themselves in school, to trust teachers, or to seek support if they are subject to transphobic bullying from peers. As Gendered Intelligence observe, “What strikes us most about this guidance is the tone of cruelty and contempt towards children and educators throughout.”

sketch of placards, reading Fight Section 28, Glasgow Lesbian Avengers: we object!, and Don't Fuel Hate Scrap 28

How dangerous is the Department for Education guidance?

In this post, I invoke the legacy of Section 28 very deliberately. The new proposed guidance on “Gender Questioning Children” is of course a very different document, produced in a different time, with a different response from civil society. However, I feel that understanding the guidance’s similarities to Section 28 is useful for analysing why it is so harmful, and understanding its differences can help us to map routes to resistance.

Like Section 28, the draft guidance is most dangerous in its vagueness. It does map out numerous ways to directly abuse young trans people, for example, through intentional misgendering and seeking to block social transition. However, it is the more general refusal to engage with the humanity and agency of young trans people – for example, through failing to even use the word “trans” once – which is most chilling.

While young trans people are of course the main target of the guidance on “gender questioning children”, the impact promises to be wider. As my own story shows, while Section 28 only explicitly targeted “homosexuality”, teachers or bullies didn’t tend to draw any distinction between gay, bi, queer, or trans experiences. Indeed, the atmosphere of ignorance and uncertainty made it difficult to event come to term with those differences. Many of us who went to school at that time struggled to come out because we had very little context for understanding ourselves. At my school, like many, boys were punished for painting their nails or growing hair past their neck. Similarly, the new guidance threatens to make life more difficult for any gender-nonconforming young person, regardless of whether they identify as trans. The point is to shore up and reinforce traditional understandings of sex and gender, in line with hardline conservative ideologies. Teachers, administrators, governors, and academy sponsors who actively wish to reinforce gender roles and make queer people’s lives more difficult will gain a powerful tool to legitimise sexist and homophobic policies, as well as transphobia.

However, homophobic bullying and ignorance also prospered under Section 28 because teachers were unsure about the limitations of the law and afraid to overstep. The new guidance’s insistence on entrenched biological essentialism could make even sympathetic teachers feel afraid to acknowledge queer and trans lives in their teaching, or otherwise put them under pressure from headteachers and governors. The whole point is to make LGBTIQ+ and especially trans students an impossibility: to enable incomprehension, to make them feel unwelcome, to “reduce” them in number, to make them disappear.

Where young queer and gender non-conforming people refuse to comply with this imperative to disappear – through coming out, through transition, through stubborn persistence – the guidance aims to make their lives immensely more difficult. They are to be outed to their peers, to their parents, to their peers’ parents. They are to be banned from wearing clothes associated with the “other sex”, barred from toilets and changing rooms, discouraged from using their own name and pronouns.

If enacted, this intentional targeting of trans and gender non-conforming lives and wellbeing will send an important message: it’s open season on the queers. As with Section 28, the guidance risks empowering bullies through fostering an atmosphere of institutionalised disrespect. The guidance states that “bullying of any child must not be tolerated”, but that statement feels pretty meaningless when the same document encourages schools to identify some children as different to their peers, and refuse their self-expression.

Normalising transphobia is extremely dangerous. We can see this, for example, in the murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year old trans girl who was stabbed to death in 2023 by two of her peers from school. Like many transphobic killings, her murder was extremely brutal. Prior to her death, the murderers shared numerous graphically violent messages about Brianna, using transmisogynist slurs and referring to her as “it”. This language and dehumanisation directly reflects discourses in society promoted online and in the press by gender-critical activists, journalists, and politicians from every major party. Brianna’s killers may have held the knife, but others with more power have repeatedly called for the “elimination of transgenderism”, and continue to do so. 

Edit: 23/02/24 –

Two recent events have further highlighted just how dangerous the Department for Education “Guidance for Schools and Colleges: Gender Questioning Children” really is.

Firstly, the Department for Education has quietly introduced a second consultation. This consultation is on a proposed change to the actual law for Further Education colleges providing residential accommodation for students aged under 18. The law currently states that sleeping accommodation should “provide appropriate privacy for all students”. The Government is proposing to replace this with a clause requiring that “gender questioning students” either be segregated and made to sleep in a room on their own, or otherwise forced to share a space with students assigned the same sex at birth, as “different legal sexes should not be sharing sleeping accommodation”. This intervention shows how the main guidance is just one part of a wider attempt to undermine young trans people’s dignity and safety.

Secondly, just days ago Nex Benedict, a trans student in the US state of Oklahoma, was murdered by cis girls in the school toilets. Nex and another trans student were violently assaulted just months after their home state introduced a law requiring all students to only use toilets that match the sex listed on their birth certificate. This horrific killing reflects what researchers have been telling us for years: trans and gender non-conforming people of all genders are most at risk of violence in gendered spaces, and enforcing strict rules only exacerbates these risks.

The good news

It is difficult to feel positive in the current moment. After years of anti-trans campaigning and threats, the Conservative party is acting to intentionally make life harder for young trans people, in a move that has far wider implications for student safety as well as queer and feminist initiatives in schools. The Department for Education’s proposed school guidance is not simply being championed by the Conservative government – its publication has been “welcomed” by the Labour party, and supported by liberal media outlets such as the Observer as well as the Tory press.

However, the legacy of Section 28 is once again useful for understanding what is happening here. The Conservatives are once again showing us who they really are – this is not new. The Labour leadership were just as useless in responding to the original Section 28, and the UK Labour government was in power for six years (most of my time in secondary school!) before they bothered to repeal the law in England and Wales. The liberal media was somewhat more opposed to Section 28 in the 1980s than they appear to be now, but ultimately it was neither journalists or politicians who created the pressure for repeal. It was LGBTIQ+ campaigners and our allies: especially young people from groups such as Queer Youth Network who worked ceaselessly to change the conversation and create a better environment in schools and beyond.

Moreover, there are two major differences between 1988 and 2024 which are important to highlight.

Firstly, the legal situation is radically different. Section 28 was written into law, and applied across Britain. By contrast, the new guidance is “non-statutory”, and applies only to England. This means that schools are not legally obliged to follow it, especially in elsewhere in the UK. The government’s proposals can therefore be ignored. In fact, ignoring the guidance might even be the wisest option even for transphobes, given that the government’s own lawyers have warned that those who follow it risk breaking the law, as the recommendations appear to directly contradict both the Equality Act and elements of safeguarding legislation. Moreover, the guidance is yet to be published in its final form, as it is under consultation until 12th March – meaning that you can tell the government exactly what you think about it. Edit: 23/02/24 – however, since this post was written the government is now also seeking to change the law through the FE Residential Standards Consultation.

Secondly, there appears to be way more support for trans and gender nonconforming young people now than there was for young gay people in the 1980s, perhaps especially among teachers. The world has changed. For example, I learned about the government lawyers’ warnings from Schools Week. The very day the draft guidance was published, their main headline was Trans guidance: DfE lawyers said schools face ‘high risk’ of being sued. Individual teachers are speaking out across social media to voice their disgust and opposition to the proposals, and teaching unions have also expressed their concerns. Furthermore, headteachers such as Kevin Sexton from Chesterfield High School in Liverpool are going public with their opposition, noting that inclusive policies that centre actual safeguarding for young trans people have been working perfectly well for years. The school has no intention of scrapping its gender-neutral uniforms, mixed-gender sports, or all-gender toilets it provides to young people who need them.

As such, we are in a strong position to fight back against the new Section 28.

sketch of a table with an old-fashioned telephone, piece of paper, and pen on it

How you can take action

The original Section 28 was defeated because countless ordinary people took action. That can be the case again. Of course, some people are better placed than others to fight this particular threat to young people (for example, if you work in education in England). However, there will be things you can do regardless of who you are, how old you are, and where you live.

If possible, act with others, rather than alone. We are always more powerful together.

IDEA 1: Resist the new Section 28 in schools

If you are currently a student, a teacher, a parent or carer, a school administrator, a governor, or even working for an educational company or charity (e.g. in teacher recruitment) you are particularly well-placed to fight back against the new Section 28.

We can see inspiring examples of this in current protests by students and teachers in the US state of Florida, where the government has introduced a slew of anti-LGBTIQ+ laws, including a trans sports ban and a Section-28 style “don’t say gay” law. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya wrote in Autostraddle about the power of student-staff solidarity in one Florida school:

I know a high school walk out sounds like a small thing, but this is huge. It shows a two-fold approach to resistance happening in the state: First, the administrators and staff members who flouted the ban in the first place showed it’s totally an option to just…not enforce transphobic regulations. If more Florida school staff were willing to do this, it would make the ban difficult and maybe even impossible to reinforce. Second, the students showed their solidarity and support not just for this one trans athlete but all trans athletes, holding signs and chanting affirmations of support for trans lives everywhere and questioning the ban. It’s further evidence that the Florida legislation does not adequately represent the Florida people.

Here are some ideas for English and Welsh schools:

  • Non-compliance. As Upadhyaya observes, transphobic laws and guidance rely on people enforcing them. Headteachers, administrators, governors, and academy sponsors are of course in the best position to reject the new guidance should it be formally introduced following the government consultation. We can see this in the example of Chesterfield High School in Liverpool. But students and teachers can also take action, as can parents (regardless of whether or not your own child is trans). Anti-trans campaigners will be putting pressure on schools to enforce the new guidance, so every person who puts pressure on them to not do so will be important.
  • Implementing alternative guidance. Robin Moira White notes that examples of good practice already exist for supporting trans students in schools and colleges. These include the Scottish government’s guidance on Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools and Brighton & Hove City Council’s Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit, both published in 2021.  

Actions include:

  • Refuse to implement the UK government’s guidance on “Gender Questioning Children” if you are in a place to do so, and instead follow the advice of e.g. the Brighton & Hove guidance.
  • Write to the headteacher, Board of Governors, and/or academy sponsor, or ask for a meeting. Tell them that the school should ignore the UK government’s guidance and implement a better alternative. Highlight the danger posed to young people by the UK government’s proposed guidance, and the potential legal challenges the school may encounter if it follows that guidance.
  • Hold a meeting of your own with other students, parents, teachers, and/or administrators. Discuss how you might work together for non-compliance and/or introducing or defending a better alternative.

IDEA 2: Pile on the political pressure

You don’t need to work or study in a school to make a difference. Countless other organisations are in a position to make a difference, and you can put pressure on them to do so. People living throughout the UK are potentially in a good position to do this.

Actions include:

  • Write to your MP or councillor, or phone them up, or ask to meet them in person. Demand they put pressure on their party to actively oppose the UK government’s proposed guidance on “Gender Questioning Children”. This is particularly important for Labour representatives, as their party is likely to win the UK’s next general election.
  • Write to your union and ask them to take a strong stance on opposing the proposed guidance, for example through public statements and/or taking part in the consultation.
  • Write to local and national newspapers. Change the conversation by explaining why you think the government’s proposals pose a danger to the safe of young people.
  • Ban the Conservative and Labour parties from Pride. In this post-Section 28 age, politicians love to use events such as Pride to boost their public image. If you’re not already involved in your local Pride, consider getting involved, or hold a counter-protest within the parade to ensure that transphobic politicians feel unwelcome.
  • Stop giving money to transphobic media. Publishers such as the Guardian Media Group are always shilling for cash, claiming their journalism offers an important beacon of truth in a complex world. That’s not true if they’re constantly pushing hate. If a publication is publishing transphobia, don’t buy paper copies, don’t donate, don’t give them quotes or press releases, and at the very least install an ad block on your browser if you must keep reading.

IDEA 3: Take part in the consultation

I am less certain about this proposal than the others, but it is an obvious one to include. The UK government is holding a formal consultation on their proposed guidance for “Gender Questioning Children” in schools. Anyone can participate, and tell them what you think.

You can take part in the consultation here.

The upside of this is that it is an opportunity for us to speak back directly to the UK government and Department of Education. The downside is that there is a good chance we will be ignored. The past decade has seen more consultations on trans civil rights and healthcare than ever before – and overall, things have got a lot, lot worse. For example, a majority of respondents to the consultation on the Gender Recognition Act from both the UK and Scottish government supported reforms; those reforms are now thoroughly dead, at least for the time being. Trans communities have poured an enormous amount of time and energy into responding to malicious consultations when we could have been doing far more constructive things with our time.

However, in her post for TransLucent, Robin Moira White makes an important point. With the consultation closing on 12th March, the civil service may have little time to assess responses before a new general election is held. She therefore proposes that respondents request that the existing draft be “torn up and thrown away”, and new draft guidance be introduced, based on the Scottish and Brighton examples. If enough people and organisations argue for this, then it might put sufficient pressure on a new Labour government to do a better job.

A related approach was proposed by Edinburgh Action for Trans Health in response to an NHS consultation in 2017. They recommended “hostile participation in the form of direct submissions of demands that don’t react to the questions posed or restrict themselves to the scope imposed by the government”.

Actions therefore include:

  • Take part in the consultation yourself, demanding the government scrap the proposed guidance and introduce something better.
  • Encourage any relevant organisation you are part of to participate in the consultation (e.g. children’s and/or LGBTIQ+ charity, school, educational body, Pride organisation, university department) and ask for the same thing.

I won’t be producing any advice myself this time – instead, I hope this post will help people in thinking about wider routes to resistance. Edit 23/02/24 – However, the following guides have been produced by various organisations:

If you’re responding to consultations, don’t forget to also respond to the Department for Education’s deeply transphobic proposals regarding Further Education Residential Standards. This consultation closes 5 April 2024 so you have longer to respond.

IDEA 4: Support trans youth groups

Regardless of how things play out with the proposed guidance, young trans people are still having a hard time in schools.

There are a small handful of national bodies which support young trans people through advocacy and peer support: e.g. Gendered Intelligence, Colours Youth Network, and Mermaids operate across England. Perhaps more importantly, a lot of small, local youth groups exist specifically for queer and/or trans young people across the country. This was an unthinkable possibility when Mrs Richardson referred me to a local counselling service, so we really need to value and uplift these groups.

Actions include:

  • Find out what youth groups exist locally where you are, and how you can best support them. Some groups will benefit from publicity in the local area; others will want to keep a low profile given the current atmosphere of transphobic backlash. Many will benefit from volunteers – not just to work directly with young people, but also to do jobs such as fundraising, running social media, or designing websites. 
  • Donate money. Pretty much every trans-oriented organisation will benefit from donations, especially those working with young people. If you can afford it, consider setting up a standing donation.
  • Fundraise. If you can’t afford to donate, or want to do something more, you can do other things to raise money for trans youth organisations. Examples include: putting together a small gig, an art gallery, or a bake sale, or doing a sponsored activity.

IDEA 5: Plan a creative protest

Back in 1988, after the Conservative party introduced Section 28 and most Labour politicians refused oppose it, it would have been easy to despair. Instead, some extremely audacious actions took place in opposition to the law. Just after the House of Lords voted for the new law, members of the Lesbian Avengers abseiled into the debating chamber to protest it.

A few months later, another group of lesbian activists invaded a BBC studio during the Six O’Clock News, shouting “stop Section 28!”

While neither of these protests succeeded in blocking Section 28, they highlighted queer opposition to the new law, and inspired entire generations of new activists to fight back.

Actions include:

  • Get creative. Find or create a group of like-minded individuals and think about how you can protest against transphobia. Consider how your action might best attract attention to the cause or put pressure on a group or organisation to change their position on the government’s proposed guidance. Think also about how you will keep yourselves and others safe.

There are no doubt a whole host of actions and interventions I haven’t thought of. We are never powerless, even in the face of entrenched fear and hatred.

—

So now it’s your turn: how will you resolve to smash the new Section 28?

by

Open letter to Routledge on sexual misconduct

Cover image of the book Sexual Misconduct in Academia

I recently received an email from a colleague informing me of a very concerning case regarding censorship of feminist research by the academic publisher Routledge. I have signed an open letter to Routledge and encourage other academics to do so too.

My colleague kindly granted me permission to reproduce the contents of her email on my blog, which are as follows:

Some of you will be aware of an ongoing case involving the book Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an Ethics of Care in the University (2023).

The book was published by Routledge in March 2023 and contained several chapters by different authors, analysing the topic from a range of perspectives. One chapter, written by Lieselotte Viaene, Catarina Laranjeiro, and Miye Nadya Tom, analyses misconduct within an unnamed research centre, describing the culture and social norms that enabled the harassment to occur. Although no institutions or individuals were identified in the chapter, speculation about their identity led one professor to confirm that he was the “star professor” discussed in the book; he then threatened the authors in the press with legal action. Shortly after that, the book was temporarily withdrawn from circulation while Routledge – Taylor & Francis Group looked into “complaints” and a cease-and-desist letter it had received about the chapter. On 31 August 2023 the authors of Chapter 12 were informed that Routledge would no longer be making that chapter available. It is not yet clear what will happen to the rest of the book, but its page on the Routledge website has disappeared.

Colleagues across the world are deeply concerned with Routledge’s decision to remove from circulation a peer-reviewed feminist study of workplace harassment and sexual misconduct and have written, and signed, an open letter on the issue. The letter asks Routledge to:

  • publicly state why they have removed the chapter and the book itself from their website
  • reinstate chapter 12 and the book as a whole

The open letter can be found here:

We are inviting colleagues to sign the open letter. If you’d like to do so, click here.

Politicians and journalists want to remove trans people from public life. Fuck that.
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Politicians and journalists want to remove trans people from public life. Fuck that.

On 4th April 2023 the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) provided advice to the UK Government on “clarifying” the definition of sex in law. Specifically, they recommended the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010 be re-defined as “biological sex”. The proposals have been welcomed by the Labour party as well as the Conservatives.

If adopted, the EHRC’s proposals would strip trans people of numerous legal protections currently afforded by the Equality Act as well as the Gender Recognition Act.

This is made extremely clear by the EHRC. Their own examples include the argument that it is a problem that trans women may be protected from sexism under current law, and (as “legal lesbians”) from homophobia if we have female partners. Most worryingly of all, they have doubled down on previous attacks on our right to access gendered spaces. If implemented, the proposals may result in the trans women being barred by law from women’s toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centres, and book clubs (the latter is a genuine example provided by the EHRC).

I am not going to get into the weeds with these proposals. Others will no doubt provide deep legal analyses. I have already seen “gender critical” commentators claiming that this will have no real effect on our lives in practice. To which I say: fuck you.

I am done with being polite, and reasonable, and rational. These proposals represent a blatant attack not just on our civil rights but also on our rights to exist as human beings in public. In practice, banning trans women from women’s toilets means that many if not most of us simply cannot use public toilets.

Trans women use women’s facilities because we are women. And when I say “trans women are women” I am not merely making some kind of abstract metaphysical claim. I am saying that we are structurally disadvantaged under patriarchy, and experience sexist violence every day from men. That is the material reality. Insisting that trans men use women’s toilets is equally stupid, especially if your supposed aim as a “gender critical” campaigner is to produce a space free of beards and penises.

But here I am disappearing once again into details. None of this is about details. It’s about terrorising trans people, and we are terrified.

It’s about making our lives impossible. Ideally, we will disappear; our oppressors don’t really care if we suffer or we die. And we know, trans people know, that people around us are suffering and dying because we are actually a part of that community. I’ve spent the past 13 years producing research that formally documents the oppression we face, because when we simply say what we know is true because we are living that truth every day, nobody in power gives a shit.

In the meantime, people in suits believe there are votes and clicks and money to be won through fighting culture wars, through distracting people from rising poverty and slow-burning climate collapse.

If you are cis, it is up to you, the reader, to do something about this. Over the past five years trans people have been systematically harassed and silenced by a hostile media. We have been pushed out of political parties and campaign groups. Supposed human rights protectors such as the EHRC have been institutionally captured by the far right. Academics happily write abstract theory about what a terrible danger we pose. Fascist groups are rallying against us in the streets, trans healthcare is under attack, and trans children are being told they must be outed to their parents, all with the support of Labour and Tory politicians as well as popular children’s authors.

Obviously we will fight for our own liberation. We have always fought. We are so beautiful and so powerful, especially here and especially now.

But we need you to fight with us.

Here are some things you can do. Write to your MP, and then do it again. Make sure they are sick of hearing from you and then keep going. Go to a protest. Engage in direct action. Maybe sign a petition if you’re into that kind of thing. If you are in a political party, fight like hell to ensure that party is actually on our side. Join a union and fight for us there. Join a human rights group. Join a small trans organisation and offer whatever you can, whether that’s volunteer time, small donations, or signal-boosting.

Think about how you or your organisation might productively break the law to help people. If the EHRC’s proposals actually make it through Parliament, we must make them unworkable. Section 28 was only successful because teachers, administrators, and local authorities collaborated with an openly homophobic government. That doesn’t have to be the case again.

If you need evidence to back you up, it is all over this website. Don’t ask me for advice – I am tired and burned out and have already done the work. Read TERF Wars, read my evidence to Parliament, read the report I wrote with Katharine Jenkins with a feminist perspective on sex, gender, and the Gender Recognition Act.

Finally, it’s important to note this is just the tip of the iceberg. Attacking trans people and defining women by “biological sex” are a part of a wider attempt to remove women’s reproductive rights. Our government is shredding the refugee convention and putting asylum seekers in camps. Our legal rights to protest and strike have been massively curtailed.

If you’ve ever wondered “what would I have done in the face of rising fascism?” then wonder no longer.

Your moment is here. The question is how you act.

–

edit 9/4/23 – read more here:

A pocket guide to escalation (Beth Gale)

Gender: the EHRC explain (jane fae)

The EHRC wants to redefine sex. Here’s what it means for trans people (Open Democracy)

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The Soul of Sexism

What The Commitments taught me about playing music

Like most women musicians, I’ve experienced a fair amount of sexism while playing in a band.

It can be insidious. Bands with women in often find they are more likely to put on stage earlier in the night, and paid less than other bands, regardless of skill, experience or size of following.

Other times, it’s entirely explicit. Like when men have shouted GET YOUR TITS OUT while I’m setting up on stage, or RAPE while we’re playing.

Sometimes, I downplay the impact of sexism in music, to focus on the positives. But it always gets to me – that sense that live music is for men and boys, that sense that it’s not for women and girls, that sense that we’re not really welcome – unless we are willing to be objectified and treated less seriously as performers.

—

I saw The Commitments musical with colleagues during its December 2022 run in Glasgow. After a difficult semester, I looked forward to being at the theatre with new friends from work, and enjoying a night of brilliant soul classics.

The Commitments is about a group of young (white) Irish people who form a soul covers band in the late 1980s. The musical depicts disparate personalities coming together, arguing a lot, playing a handful of gigs, and then going their separate ways. Most of the songs are performed by the cast on stage, although the production also used either off-stage musicians or a backing track.

The Commitments lived up to its billing as a jukebox musical. The band (on stage and off) were great. It was exciting to hear a series of well-known tunes re-arranged for the show, and performed with gusto. The architecture of the stage set was gorgeous, variously depicting a Dublin neighbourhood, small family houses, pubs, and bingo halls. The plot and characters were paper thin at best, but this didn’t detract from the overall experience – or wouldn’t have done, if it weren’t for the treatment of the handful of women on stage.

There were three women in the band. They were portrayed as backing singers, although often they actually performed lead vocals. They were collectively referred to as the “Commit-tits”.

Most of the male characters benefited from some basic level of characterisation: e.g. the drunk “prick” of a lead singer with a great voice, the older guy who claimed to have played in various famous bands, the manager with a grand vision. By contrast, only one woman had a character trait; she was the “hot one”. Literally every male character in the band made various objectifying comments about her. The other two women were implicitly pitted against her, and one another; the randy older guy had sex with all three, eventually resulting in a brief fight where they jealously pulled each another’s hair.

During the first half of the musical, the band members changed into stage wear, which they remained in for most of the rest of the play. The eight male performers wore smart white shirts, black suits and ties. The three women wore sexy black mini dresses.

Their characters were objectified in every sense, existing seemingly only as objects of desire and the butt of every misogynist joke. Meanwhile, I was surrounded in the theatre by the joy and laughter of an audience who enthusiastically clapped and sang along with the (genuinely excellent) music. The cognitive dissonance was wild.

Through the second half of the play, I felt increasingly physically sick.

—

Once the night was over, I reflect on why I experienced such a visceral reaction to the sexism of The Commitments. None of the musical’s misogyny was extraordinary or spectacular. On the contrary, it was low-key, continual, and passed off as normal: just like the everyday sexism women experience in our everyday lives. This makes it hard to identify as a problem, and hard to address in practice.

When I spoke about my feelings on social media, several people who had seen the 1991 movie told me that I misunderstood The Commitments. They told me this was a story of white working class experience in 1980s Dublin, that the characters’ behaviour was reflective of attitudes at the time, that the characters were represented honestly within a social realist narrative.

My issue is, however, is not with a film I haven’t watched. What I saw in the theatre was not social realism, but a jukebox musical where the story worked to loosely link one song to another. The setting was broad; the characters were one note at best.

The narrative of the play had nothing to say about the constant sexism to which women were subject. It was simply present in the actions and words of every male character. In this way, it was normalised, and legitimised.

The very structure of the play itself perpetuated sexist stereotypes about the roles of men and women within storytelling, within society, and within music. The male characters expressed desires and interests, organised events, played musical instruments, and provided commentary on one another’s decisions. The women sang nicely, looked pretty, and were a device for the characters development among the men who leered at them. That is what women are for. That is what women do.

The everyday sexism of The Commitments also reflected a wider failure of the musical to grapple with the political issues it hinted at. An apparently all-white cast performed music historically written and performed by Black women and men, for an overwhelmingly white audience. The musical’s only nod to this were some vague references to worker’s rights and the assertion by one character that “the Irish are the Blacks of Europe, and Dubliners are the Blacks of Ireland”. While I imagine the play was attempting to comment on class solidarity and the historical contingency of whiteness, the clumsy claim of comparative oppression treated the existence of actual Black Irish people as an impossibility (an assumption made all the more bizarre by a later brief reference to the Thin Lizzy version of “Whisky in the Jar”).

—

I felt sick watching The Commitments because I saw myself – the expectations placed on me as a woman, the possibilities available to me as a woman, the everyday impact of everyday sexism on me as a woman – in the experiences of those women on stage.

I felt sick watching The Commitments because I saw how my non-white friends are so often treated, especially women of colour – their creative endeavours diminished or appropriated, their experiences of racism ignored and erased.

As a bassist and singer, I saw the norms that have led to male musicians shouting stuff at me and my bandmates when we are playing, demanding to examine my fingers for calluses, and assuming that I am at a gig accompanying a man. I saw the hidden structures that made it hard for me and many of my friends to pick up an instrument in the first place. I saw how and why it is constantly so difficult for women and people of colour to simply turn up and play music in so many settings.

I felt sick watching The Commitments because I was witnessing the operation of power.

—

The stage musical version of The Commitments debuted in 2013: the same year myself and a couple of friends were organising Revolt, a feminist club night in Coventry which prioritised women and trans performers. We did this in reaction to male dominated line-ups, which perhaps had a token woman singing or (at a certain kind of indie rock show) playing bass guitar. We knew that having numerous women from a range of backgrounds on stage does something important. It undermines the assumption that women musicians can or should only play second fiddle to men, and builds a sense of possibility for women in the audience: that music is for us.

We can be more; we will be more; we are more. Creating space for many types of people on stage changes people’s worlds.

In doing so it threatens white male power, which can sometimes feel threatening for white men.

That is why certain promoters and musicians and audience members make life difficult for others in music, through intentional bigotry or unthinking bias. For women, it doesn’t matter how good we are, how we dress, or how we behave on stage. We are so often an alien presence in a space supposedly for men, not obeying the unspoken rules: shut up, don’t speak out, and don’t take up a male musician’s space on stage unless you’re prepared to be compliant and sexually available.

What does matter is context. I reflected on this, wondering why the clothing the women wore in The Commitments bothered me so much. I’ve worn very similar outfits on stage myself. Men have shouted RAPE at me when I’ve done so. But they’ve also shouted GET YOUR TITS OUT at me when I was wearing jeans, trainers, and a loose black band t-shirt. It’s not about what we’re wearing – it’s never about what we’re wearing. It’s about how male desire, male prejudice, and male power is projected onto us.

I realised my problem with The Commitments was that the women characters’ sexuality doesn’t belong to them. Within the context of the plot, they were only ever given the opportunity to be attractive for the men around them, not for themselves. Sex without power.

The Commitments musical wants women in the audience to enjoy the music while sucking up the sexism and ignoring the depth of anti-racist histories. By contrast, at Revolt we sought to build power for women – all women – on and off stage. We sought to bring into being a world in which we can dress how we want, and dance, and sing, and listen, and play, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to diminish us for having and creating a great time. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours.

—

I love a good feminist space, but separatism won’t save us. If we want women musicians to prosper, we need an actual commitment to promoting respect in every context.

The biggest onus is on event organisers, writers, and musicians – especially those in a position of relative power. There is no excuse for endless all-male and all-white line-ups at events, for casual sexism or racism in lyrics, in event promotion, or in the lines of a jukebox musical. How many people involved in putting on The Commitments looked at the script or the choreography and thought, “hang on a moment”, but didn’t speak out? How many white men (or women) who put on gigs or tour in bands even bother to think about whether or not there are women or people of colour on stage?

Simply having women or people of colour in the room is also not enough. We deserve to be present without having to worry about discrimination or abuse. Campaigns such as Good Night Out and the Healthy Music Audiences project have loads of resources available oncreating safer spaces for musicians and audience members alike.

Ultimately, everyone can play a part in changing the world – that’s how cultural change happens. You can support minoritized musicians by taking us seriously and helping us to build power. Attend our shows, listen to our music, share it with other people, and have a great time. That, really, is what it’s all about. 

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A Methodology for the Marginalised

This is a deeply strange time to have a new peer-reviewed article out. I’ve been on strike for weeks, and otherwise on annual leave, planning a move south (for my new job) which may well be indefinitely postponed. It’s hard to comprehend the enormity of the COVID-19 crisis, nor the fact that the most helpful thing I can do right now is stay put.

The article was originally drafted in 2018, and based on experiences I had during fieldwork and while disseminating my research between 2013 and 2017. With the pandemic upon us, this previous decade feels like deep, distant history. Here in the UK, the true, awful toll of the illness is yet to become apparent; yet cities are beginning to turn silent as we self-isolate, political axioms are turned on their head, and all conversation turns eventually to the virus.

In this context, it’s easy to wonder if any of the work we did a month or more prior could possibly still be relevant. And yet.

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Cover image of the journal Sociology.My new piece is titled A Methodology for the Marginalised: Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy, and it is published in Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association. I use my experiences as a trans academic as a case study to talk about the huge inequalities endemic within universities, and how these disproportionately impact those who already experience forms of social marginalisation. My aim is not simply to chronicle the harms of marketisation, transphobia, sexism, and racism, but to also propose a way forward. We need to start thinking and acting more collectively; in addition to workplace organisation and union activity, this is relevant to how we design and implement our studies.

My proposed “methodology” involves bringing questions of solidarity and mutual support to the procedure of research design. Universities have long been bastions of privilege, with mechanisms of exclusion are unthinkingly built into every aspect of academic life. The only way we can possibly open up higher education is through creating systems of support which acknowledge and account for pre-existing inequalities, and these must be embedded within the process of knowledge creation itself.

My article uses the example of suicide within trans communities to illustrate this principle. Suicide ideation and suicide attempts are especially common among trans people. As such, it is highly likely that any given trans academic will either be suicidal, or will have friends who are. Consequently, if trans people are to stand a reasonable chance of surviving within the university, this is something that should be accounted for in research design and funding proposals as well as in wider institutional support structures.

~

It’s impossible right now to know when and if the world will return to “normal”. I have seen some contend that this cannot be possible given the devastating number of predicted deaths, the shock to our economic and political systems. Others observe that the prevailing social order has survived before, and argue that any emergency measures to support workers who have lost their livelihood and/or increase police powers will inevitably be reversed in the long term.

However, what we do know is that universities have historically been remarkably resiliant – as have the inequalities in our society. Whatever happens next, we must continue to fight for a better world, and that includes within academia.

We can already see this beginning to play out in the UK as universities scramble to shift their activities online. Managers are relying on staff to carry on teaching, conducting research, and undertaking assessment and monitoring activities such as the REF. Meanwhile, most of us struggle to balance working from home with looking after partners, housemates, and/or families, wrestling with IT systems that have been heavily undermined by cuts as shiny new buildings stand empty on our campuses. We cannot possibly expect to carry on as normal.

It is in this context that I invite you to read my new article, as and when you find the time and mental energy. It is one of the most difficult and vulnerable things I have ever written. I am really proud of it. It helped me think through some small ways in which I might change my work patterns and practice of solidarity, as part of a far larger push for change. I hope that in turn, it might help you also.

A Methodology for the Marginalised:
Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy

~

Update 17 July 2020: the article has now been published in Volume 54, Issue 4 of Sociology, and is also now available free to read on the journal’s website. I have updated the links to reflect this.

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Interview on Acadames podcast

webfront8Earlier this year I took part in an interview for Acadames, a super-cool podcast “that explores whether being a woman in academia is a dream, game, or scam”. The episode is now available! I really enjoyed speaking with Whitney  Robinson about my work, and hope you will enjoy our conversation just as much.

Today Whitney speaks with Dr. Ruth Pearce, a social researcher and feminist scholar based at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. Ruth discusses her current work with the Trans Pregnancy project, why gender equity schemes are so important in academia, and offers tips for resiliency when facing online harassment and political backlash. Along the way, she shares stories of her life as a trans woman, how academic institutions in the UK differ from those in the US, and the similarities between organizing a concert and organizing a conference.

Click here to listen.

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A slow, painful grind: WPATH 2018 conference report

IWPATH_BuenoAr_Logo_reverse.jpgn the first week of November I attended the 2018 WPATH Symposium in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This biennial event is one of the largest trans studies conferences in the world, with around 800 academics, activists, healthcare practitioners and researchers coming together to exchange knowledge.

Most of the conference consisted of parallel sessions: approximately eight or nine speaker panels occurring simultaneously in different parts of the conference venue. So it is impossible for anyone to take part in the majority of conference events. Nevertheless, I attended as many sessions as possible, and livetweeted from most of these. Links to Twitter summaries of the sessions I attended can be found at the end of this post.

In this post, I comment primarily on my observations of the conference as a sociologist and trans professional.


Opportunities and inclusion

As I anticipated, WPATH 2018 was full of contradictions.

On the one hand, it was exciting to join and learn from so many academics, healthcare practitioners and human rights experts working in the field of trans health. As I report in the Twitter summaries below, the conference provided a great opportunity to participate in debates over new ideas and standards of care, and hear about cutting-edge research findings and advances in clinical practice. It was an especial privilege to learn first-hand about the implementation and impact of Argentina’s pioneering Gender Identity Law, a topic I expand upon later in this post, but hope to write about in more detail in the near future.

I was also glad to have the opportunity to present a paper on research ethics and a poster with initial findings from the Trans Pregnancy project to an international audience.

It was excellent to see that the conference organisers acknowledged and responded to some of the feedback from trans delegates in previous years. Gender-neutral toilet blocks were present on every floor of the conference venue, and pronoun stickers were provided to accompany name badges. The provision of a “trans hospitality suite” enabled trans attendees to relax in a more comfortable environment, and also arrange our own ad-hoc meetings and events. This was inevitably re-branded by its users as an “intersex and trans” room in recognition of the importance of this space also to intersex delegates; I hope conference organisers will learn from this for future events.

This year’s Symposium also benefited from a clear code of conduct and language guide, previously introduced for the 2017 USPATH and EPATH conferences.


Microaggressions and objectification

On the other hand, the cis-centric atmosphere of the event felt like a slow, painful, constant grind. As with previous WPATH conferences, the event was punctuated by constant microaggressions (and, on occasion, outright “macro”aggression); these were damaging to intersex people, people of colour and delegates from the Global South as well as trans attendees. Examples include individuals advocating for intersex genital mutilation, off-colour jokes about trans suicide, the use of outdated language, and misgendering of research participants.

Some research seemed entirely voyeuristic: for example, one poster from the Netherlands purported to report on differing levels of jealousy towards sexual competitors among “mtof and ftom transgenders”. It was often unclear how consent was obtained (if at all) for the use of personal information about research participants and/or patients. This was particularly concerning when numerous posters and powerpoint slides included unnecessary photographs of intersex and/or trans genitalia (a “WPATH conference bingo” grid circulated among intersex and trans attendees of the event included a square for “unexpected genitals”).

As a trans attendee, I felt deeply objectified by the tone and content of this material. It felt dehumanising, and I felt like a thing, subject to the harsh gaze of an abstract, dehumanising curiosity. Yet I was disturbed not only by those engaging in such work, but also in the response of many of their peers. Numerous practitioners and researchers who seemed broadly sympathetic to trans rights and affirmative in their own work often said nothing to counter transphobia, cisgenderism and endosexism in the work of others. It is difficult for intersex and trans people to explain how painful this situation is when most of our colleagues and the senior figures in the field are not intersex or trans; we know that our projects and careers alike may suffer if we speak out too openly or too harshly. I encourage fellow members of WPATH to reflect on their potential complicity in this situation, and consider how we might collectively work to change it.


Tokenism and colonialism

The choice to locate the conference in Buenos Aires felt deeply tokenistic, with numerous attendees from the Global South arguing that this represented a colonial attitude. The vast majority of conference attendees were from the United States or Western Europe. The price of the conference was a significant barrier to many attendees, amounting to the equivalent of the average monthly income in Buenos Aires. The choice to host the event in an expensive Hilton hotel felt like it was taken primarily for the benefit of (the more wealthy) attendees from the West to the detriment of local intersex and trans people, some of whom reported that they risked being profiled by the police if they tried to enter the wealthy area of the city in which the hotel was located.

The sessions on clinical practice in Argentina and human rights in Latin American were some of the most interesting I sat in on, but also least well-attended. I later heard that on one occasion a high-profile lawyer invited to speak on the topic of Argentina’s Gender Identity Law addressed a near-empty room, due to clashes with sessions that focused on Western bioethics, research and medical practice. This sense of tokenism was compounded through the choice to hold the conference in English (the official language of WPATH), with funded translation into Spanish available in a maximum of two rooms at any one time. Some of the conference organisers later stated that they had been worried about the finances of the event, but this felt like a strange claim in the wake of a lavish gala dinner with dancers, DJs, and multiple buffets serving food from various regions of Argentina. As human rights expert and executive director of GATE Mauro Cabral declared in the closing plenary of the conference, “When WPATH decided to come to Argentina, with the most progressive gender identity law in the world, I was excited. But we could only talk among ourselves. You came to this country because of the weather, steak and wine, but not to learn from us”.

While these issues are primarily structural ones that need to be formally addressed by WPATH, the onus is also upon individuals from Western and/or Anglophone countries to take action and reflect upon our relative power and privilege in attending these events. In addition to vocally supporting my colleagues from the Global South, one aspect of my own practice I feel I can address is my use of language in planning talks. For example, I could have undertaken a little extra work to ensure that my slides were bilingual, listing bullet points in Spanish as well as in English. I hope to draw on this lesson in preparing for future international events.


TPATH, human rights monitors, and lessons from Argentina

My experience of WPATH 2018 was improved enormously by the presence of other trans people working in the field of trans health, as well as the intersex activists and human rights experts who came to monitor WPATH’s historic antipathy towards intersex rights. Many of us are members of TPATH (the Transgender Professional Association for Transgender Health), a new and as-yet loosely affiliated group of trans people working in trans health that I helped to co-found during the 2016 WPATH Symposium in Amsterdam. Numerous others were part of a 50-strong delegation of intersex and trans human rights monitors from all parts of the world, who attended in order to conduct a collective human rights audit of the conference.

It was with these individuals that I found myself having the deepest conversations, these individuals with whom I heard the most fascinating research findings and the most rigorous analyses. We also shared a strong sense of solidarity in the face of the many problems apparent at WPATH 2018.

That said, the most important event I attended took place outside of the WPATH event: in Casa Jáuregui, a historic queer cultural centre many blocks away from the Hilton. Here, Frente de Trans Masculinidades (the Transmasculine Front) and other activists based in Buenos Aires hosted a meeting with TPATH members from the Bahamas, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the UK and the USA. We shared information on our various areas of work, and the local activists talked at length about the history, implementation and practical impact of the Gender Recognition Law.

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Argentinian activists host TPATH members at Casa Jáuregui.

While it is important not to deny the significant challenges faced by trans people in Argentina, which include harassment by authorities, economic marginalisation and many forms of violence and discrimination, many of us were struck by how much has been achieved by activists in Argentina and (consequently) how advanced trans rights are in this country. The Gender Identity Law has been carefully written to enable flexibility; this has meant, for example, that it was interpreted to enable non-binary recognition by a judge as recently as last week. It also guarantees access to healthcare, which has meant that every possible medical intervention is available to trans people, either for free or through relatively inexpensive health insurance (in theory, that is: in practice, various legal battles have been necessary). This has been of benefit to cis women and queer people as well as trans people: for instance, through enabling easier access to hysterectomies or breast reductions.

During the meeting, the local activists described gender-affirming medical interventions that most of us had never even considered, such as beard hair implants for transmasculine individuals who cannot or would prefer not to use testosterone. Moreover, while long waiting lists exist for some procedures such as surgeries, those of us attending from European countries and (especially) Aotearoa/New Zealand were astonished by how much shorter they were than equivalent waiting times in our own countries, in part due to the absence of unnecessary gatekeeping procedures and treatment bottlenecks.

I was profoundly moved by the opportunity to attend this meeting, and regretted that so much of my time in Buenos Aires was spent in the sterile environment of the Hilton. However, I was also glad to have the opportunity to work with others to challenge the hierarchies and cisgenderist assumptions inherent in WPATH. We undertook many small interventions: asking questions about ethics, consent and power dynamics in the sessions we attended, raising concerns in private conversations, reporting blatant contraventions of the WPATH code of conduct. I was also pleased to hear many of my colleagues openly critiquing problematic issues identified during an update on the progress of the forthcoming Version 8 WPATH Standards of Care, and take part in attempts to hold our professional body to account during a member’s meeting on the final day.

Overall, I found WPATH 2018 to be a very tiring, draining and frequently unpleasant experience. However, I do not regret attending. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to learn so much from so many. I am also glad to have played a small role in supporting my intersex and trans colleagues and my colleagues from the Global South in attempting to help transform WPATH so it is more transparent, more accountable, and less colonial in attitude and in action.


Session summaries

The following links are to Twitter threads in which I summarise plenaries, talks and mini-symposia I attended at WPATH 2018.

Saturday 3rd November

Opening session and President’s Plenary

Keynote: Employment discrimination against trans people (Sam Winter)

Keynote: Trans legal history in Latin America (Tamara Adrian)


Sunday 4th November

Mini-Symposium: The Argentinian experience of public transgender health after the implantation of the Gender Identity Law

Oral presentations: Services in different parts of the world (Australia, Southern Africa, Scotland)

Mini-Symposium: Trans refugees: escape into invisibility

Mini-Symposium: Latin American perspectives on depathologization of trans and travesti identities

Plenary: Show hospitality to strangers: intersex issues in the time of gender identity laws (Mauro Cabral and respondents)
Note: this was listed as a plenary session in the programme, but actually took place alongside multiple parallel sessions. Consequently, this talk was under-attended by Western healthcare practitioners in much the same way as the Latin American sessions.


Monday 5th November

Oral presentations: Suicidal and non-suicidal behavior

Mini-Symposium: Ethical considerations in transgender health research

Oral presentations: Fertility

Oral presentations: Reproduction


Tuesday 6th November

Mini-Symposium: Child and adolescent medicine Mini-Symposium: Child and adolescent medicine

Plenary: SOC 8 update

Plenary: SOC 8 Q&A

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Staff sexual misconduct: new research and ways forward

Last week I attended an important event on staff-to-student sexual misconduct in UK Higher Education institutions. The event included a summary of new research showing the huge challenges students face in reporting sexual misconduct, and reflections on how best to tackle misconduct and reform reporting mechanisms. It was hosted by The 1752 Group, who are working hard to end staff-to-student misconduct in Higher Education. My talk focused on Athena SWAN. I reflected on how self-assessment teams can make use of the process to push for better reporting mechanisms in their institutions.

One of the most important aspects of the day was the focus on power. The very real power differential between lecturers/tutors/supervisors and their students is rarely acknowledged within academia. By ignoring this power relation or pretending that it is not relevant to sexual encounters, Higher Education institutions and those of us who work in them do our students an enormous disservice.

We heard some harrowing stories from researchers and survivors, but I also left inspired by the commitment of those who gathered to consider how best to create change. For decades now, stories of sexual misconduct have been silenced and covered up, which has effectively enabled perpetrators to continue their abuse. Through bringing together people with a range of expertise to reflect openly on themes such as power, complicity and accountability, we can begin to end the silence and think about practical solutions.

You can read a full account of the day from myself and other Twitter users on Storify here.