Trans people are being pushed into increasing poverty by a system that works against us and a media that relentlessly demonises our community.
Image: protest for Trans rights, London June 2021, copyright Guy Smallman
We’ve adopted a rule in our trans friendship group. It’s a simple rule, and one that I make sure to drum into newly out folks who join our circles. Do not read the Sunday press under any circumstances.
Every week, there are new articles written by people who are not trans “speaking out” about the resentment and fear they have towards trans people, masquerading as “concerns” about women or children. I put “speaking out” in quotations because these people always seem to frame themselves as whistleblowers, bravely going against the grain to speak truth to power.
In reality, however, these anxious and badly researched articles are so common that it’s almost beyond belief, and trans people are rarely given the same kind of platform to give a rebuttal.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) did a study on the trends in coverage of “trans issues” between January 2010 and May 2019 and found over 12,000 articles about trans people or trans issues in a limited selection of newspapers and magazines. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is; I did the maths, and it works out as about 26 a week, or 3-4 a day. All of these articles concern a community which makes up around 1-2% of the population. It’s difficult to think of another group that is so small and yet so extensively discussed, especially by people outside that group, and very often in overwhelmingly negative terms.
So we avoid the Sunday papers. For a long time, my social media feed on Sundays would be full of careful, fact-checked rebuttals disproving the claims thrown around by the anti-trans articles, but it made no difference.
While some trans people continue to bravely and selflessly fight the transphobia in the media, many of us have simply decided to disengage and ignore it as much as we can. Of course, its effects are felt keenly by us through rising hate crimes and increasing numbers of people buying into false narratives about trans people, but, especially with the COVID pandemic, most of us here in South Wales are simply trying to survive.
What the press coverage about trans people won’t tell you is that the vast majority of trans people are not constantly worried about the gender recognition act or which sports teams they should be playing on. The media circus is background noise that worsens the real every day issues we are facing, which are driving us into increasing poverty.
For me personally, I decided to quit fighting transphobia head-on in the middle of 2020 when the government announced that it was dropping their plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act following a public consultation where 70% of respondents expressed support for reform.
It felt, to me, like running into a brick wall at full pelt over and over again and expecting it to come down. Meanwhile, I was seeing and hearing about dozens of trans people in South Wales who were barely scraping by. After hearing one too many of these stories I, alongside some friends, set up Trans Aid Cymru in June 2020, inspired by the mutual aid groups which cropped up at the start of Covid and initiatives like the Black Trans Travel Fund in New York. Its primary aim is to ensure that trans and nonbinary people in poverty have what they need to survive.
There are many reasons why trans and nonbinary people are disproportionately living in poverty, and none of them are suitably explored in discourse about trans people. These factors overlap and exacerbate each other, driving people into financial insecurity. I’ll give you an example informed by what I’ve seen during my time working in Trans Aid Cymru.
A trans person may have been badly bullied in school and faced homelessness after rejection from family. This means that they leave school early without many qualifications. During the time they are homeless, it is difficult to access medical appointments, so they are not able to get themselves on the waiting list for the treatments they need. They are too scared to access support from domestic violence and homelessness charities because of the sheer amount of headlines on the paper stands they pass declaring an invasion of trans people in gendered shelters, so they sleep on the streets.
If they do get off the streets, because of their lack of qualifications, they can only work retail or hospitality, but because they haven’t been able to access medical transition, they are perceived as “obviously trans” by employers so get turned away at the interview stage because they don’t have “the look”, or fall at the last hurdle because they don’t have a passport to prove their identity.
If, by some miracle, they do manage to get a job, they then must pay for private hormone prescriptions because they can’t wait for 2-5 years on an NHS waiting list, which eats up their income. The downward spiral into poverty continues. When you know a fair amount of trans people, stories like this crop up again and again. This doesn’t even begin to cover the way that people with intersecting marginalisations like Black and Brown trans people and disabled trans people are affected.
It’s difficult to communicate the scale of the problem our community is facing. During our first year, Trans Aid Cymru helped 7 trans people to avoid homelessness, which was about 10% of the people we supported. For a small organisation, focussed on a local area, without a specialisation in homelessness outside of the lived experience of myself and a couple of the other volunteers, 10% is one hell of a lot. We’ve financially supported over 50 trans and nonbinary people who were in serious poverty. And however many we help, there are more we hear of every week.
When you work with this community, hearing about experiences that would make your hair curl, it is difficult to see the media noise as anything other than a purposeful tactic to keep trans people scared and powerless.
If mainstream media did what it claims to do and fearlessly report the truth, then it would be exposing the systemic issues that are seeing so many trans people in poverty rather than endlessly sowing fear and misinformation about who we are and what we want.
As things stand, it continues to fuel the fire of transphobia that is scorching all of our institutions, and ensures that the general public perceives trans people as privileged middle-class troublemakers rather than a vulnerable, disproportionately impoverished community.
More must be done to support trans people through the culture war that we’ve been thrown into. The left and progressive movements must remember that trans issues are overwhelmingly working-class and underclass issues as well, and reject transphobia once and for all.
Rudy Harries is a co-founder of Trans Aid Cymru and an advocate for trans people in Wales.
