In a landmark moment last week Conservative MP Jamie Wallis made the surprise announcement that he is transgender. At present the elected member for Bridgend and Porthcawl will continue to use he/him pronouns and has no immediate plans to transition, but it’s a significant revelation nonetheless and comes during a time of particular strife for trans people in the UK. Just days after Wallis’ announcement, it was revealed that the Tories would not ban trans conversion therapy, prompting both a backlash and transphobic arguments in the mainstream media justifying the stance. Ivy Taylor looks at the multiple issues facing ordinary trans people and assesses how the community found itself under sustained attack.
By Ivy Taylor @Femke_Axedottir
Cover image: Trans Pride, London 2020, by Steve Eason
Following MP Jamie Walls’ announcement that he is transgender, his Tory colleagues in Westminster leapt to offer support. Prime Minister Boris Johnson even said: “The House stands with you and will give you the support you need to live freely as yourself.”
But soon after, Johnson’s innocuous statement was rendered completely meaningless.
Documents leaked to ITV revealed that the Conservative government will not support a ban on coversation therapy for transgender people, four years after Theresa May’s pledge to put an end to the practice, which Pride Cymru has described as “coercion and abuse.”
The government did however agree to ban conversion therapy for gay, lesbian and bisexual people in response to lobbying from 60 MPs after initial plans were revealed which allowed conversation therapy to continue freely.
UK Editor for ITV Paul Brand tweeted that one Conservative MP told him: “I sent the PM a message directly saying I was ashamed. And lots of other colleagues have too.” Those same MPs seem perfectly happy to support that same barbaric treatment if it applies to trans people, however.
With the government’s refusal to uphold it’s previous promise on banning conversion therapy for trans people, countless LGBTQ+ organisations subsequently backed out of the planned governmnet-backed global equality conference, Safe To Be Me, scheduled later this year. The event was swiftly cancelled due to lack of support.
It’s safe to say then that any Tory claims of supporting LGBT+ rights have been laid bare as the performative farce they are. To the Tory government, trans rights are a bargaining chip that can be tossed away to curry favour with the increasingly extreme “gender critical” movement. By making an enemy of trans people, they make reliable friends elsewhere who will support them no matter how disastrous or corrupt their administration is.
This point was compounded further by Monday’s news that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission supported excluding trans people from single sex spaces such as domestic abuse shelters and public restrooms if “justfiable and proportionate”.
This position is worded vaguely enough that the presence of a trans person can always be challenged, no matter the circumstances. More disturbingly still, the EHRC advice also applies to trans people who have received a gender recognition certificate which legally changes their gender. How it is expected this guidance can be enforced without dehumanising both cisgender and transgender people alike remains an open question because anyone who claims they can “always tell” if a person is transgender, has been wrong more times than they have been right.
As always, steps are taken to remove rights from trans people or simply exclude trans people from spaces, without providing any meaningful alternative. And it is the Conservatives that are driving this marginalisation with their policies and talking points.
My personal feelings are very strong that you cannot be a Tory and meaningfully support trans rights. With that said,however, it is not my place to comment on Wallis’ journey or personal experience beyond how it highlights the struggles of ordinary trans people and the fact that his government brutalises trans people on a daily basis.
In his statement, Wallis mentioned that he has an official gender dysphoria diagnosis. For the uninitiated, gender dysphoria can be most simply described as the discomfort a person feels when their birth gender does not align with their gender identity and frequently contributes to a host of mental health difficulties around anxiety, depression, social isolation, and suicidal ideation which is then often expressed through self-destructive behaviour.
How dysphoria feels and its intensity differs from person to person, but for me it was like being a passenger in my own body, while a stranger drove me around all day making questionable decisions. I felt so disconnected from my body, that the idea that I needed to take care of it barely even occurred to me. The future was for other people, and I had no plans of living it.
Getting a gender dysphoria diagnosis is the first major step towards receiving treatment: the waiting list in Wales for a first appointment with gender services is more than two years. The only reliable treatment for gender dysphoria is to allow that person to transition, often with the help of gender affirming hormones and even surgery. Nothing else has ever proven to be even remotely effective, and yet people are routinely denied this treatment as they get lost in an uncaring system or simply refused it on spurious grounds.
I spoke to one trans woman who wished to remain anonymous; she first made contact with the NHS ten years ago, but has been unable to receive treatment. During that time she reported abuse at the hands of medical staff and safeguarding failures on behalf of the police. Ultimately, she opted to DIY her own healthcare and has resorted to buying hormones online.
“I wanted to do it properly, but I wasn’t allowed to do it properly,” she told me. She is not alone in this either, with niche online support communities like the Trans DIY subreddit boasting over 30,000 members worldwide.
A trans man I spoke with under similar circumstances told me he was put on a four year waiting list for his first appointment, and it would likely be seven years until he would receive gender affirming surgery. He now needs to raise £7,000 for the procedure and currently has just £340. “I don’t think I will live long enough if I wait on the NHS… I feel like time is running out,” he told me.
Although basic hormone therapy through private services such as GenderCare and GenderGP is not prohibitively expensive for your average middle class trans person such as myself, poorer trans people are not so privileged.
The UK doesn’t collect information on unemployment among trans people, but data from Ireland suggests that 50 percent of trans people are out of work. This is supported by a 2018 survey by Crossland Employment Solicitiors which found that one in three employers said they were “less likely” to hire a transgender worker.
Is it any wonder then that nearly two thirds of trans people feel the need to hide their trans status at work? This data comes from a 2021 YouGov poll which found that this figure has risen by 13 percent since 2016, and that more than two in five trans people have quit their job because the work environment was unwelcoming.
Just four years ago then prime minister Theresa May pledged to improve trans rights in the UK. Her plans focused on streamlining and demedicalising the process, “because being trans is not an illness and it should not be treated as such.”
Penny Mordaunt, who was equalities minister at the time, said: “The discrimination and bigotry that the trans community currently faces is unacceptable in today’s society – we need a culture change.”
We did indeed see a culture change, but it was one which made transphobia mainstream and bio-essentialism the de facto position of the Conservative party. Both Boris Johnson and current Equalities Minister Liz Truss have made statements which put biology as the defining criteria for gender.
So we find ourselves in this endless loop: trans people fighting every day just for the right to exist while the government, random celebrities, and far right hate figures campaign both implicitly and explicitly for our extinction.
Every trans person I have ever known, myself included, just wants to quietly live like everyone else but our very existence is always a talking point for someone whose only interest is drumming up controversy or taking some arbitrary intellectual position.
It’s important at this point to recognise that transphobia is not limited to the Tory benches, and that “gender critical” voices can be found across the political spectrum. Just last week Labour MP Wes Streeting was applauded by Julia Heartly Brewer on Talk Radio for his bio-essentialist view that men have penises and women have vaginas.
In the space of four years we’ve gone from the possibility of some very sensible changes to the Gender Recognition Act to people frothing with madness over our genitals, as if any of them would ever be lucky enough to find out what’s really down there.
These talking points, arguing about whether women can have a penis or men a cervix, is entirely arbitrary and frankly quite weird. On top of that, attempts to “clock” trans people in the wild frequently lead to gender non-confirming cisgender people being harassed, and creates an unsafe enviroment for anyone who does not meet the rigorous standards of their assigned gender.
Trans issues have become a lightning rod for mainstream debate because our existence challenges the comfortable, uncomplicated life of cisnormative society. All of a sudden, people are forced to re-examine their understanding of something so fundamental to their existence, they had never paid a single thought to it – and so they feel threatened.
In some ways they are right, of course: Yes, trans people are dangerous to society but we threaten a version of society that isn’t worth saving. That’s why we are so often maligned and scapegoated, because our existence threatens the very fabric of the rigid, authoritarian system by defying it and choosing to live authentically despite the consequences.
We have always existed, dating right back to 204CE with Roman Emperor Elagabalus who was one of the first recorded transgender people. Gender is a social construct: it is a box we are put in for the purposes of control and it serves only the interests of the ruling class. Your gender is whatever you say it is, and pressure to conform to expectations of gender has only ever caused harm.
So to Jamie Wallis, I guess I have this to say: Welcome to the revolution, sister. I’ll save you a seat if you ever decide to stop sleeping with the enemy.
