Trans people must form coalitions to face a government joining the side of cruelty

~ Kell w Farshéa ~

From the genocide in Gaza to refusing to apologise for the enslavement of millions of Africans, from the two-child cap to banning all trans healthcare for under 18s  – Keir Starmer’s government is showing us that it is obstinately determined to place itself and its leader on the side of reaction, cruelty and fascism.

Anarchists have become hoarse shouting over the din of electoral propaganda that voting will not set you free, but the Starmer government waited just eight days for Wes Streeting to defend the Tory government’s removal of NHS-funded and privately prescribed gender-affirming healthcare for under 18s. This has left children and young people denied access to peer-reviewed quality healthcare and educational information — a situation unseen since the days of Section 28. In May, Chalmers GIC & NHS Lothian in Scotland ‘froze’ referrals for gender-affirming care for adults aged 18 to 24, citing The Cass Review. This may be the first step in transphobic mission-creep where, having successfully removed therapies, treatments and prescriptions for children and young people, the next target is adults. It certainly exposes the fact that it isn’t and was never about pre-pubescent children. It has always been about the eradication and silencing of the entire trans population. It’s just that pre-pubescent children were the easiest, most emotionally charged place to start.

In the light of Cass and the lead taken by Streeting and Starmer, activists are reporting an uptick in GPs deciding they will stop prescribing HRT to trans adults. With the collapse of Gender GP earlier this year the options for trans adults to access HRT therapies has already been significantly reduced. It is now also clear the going through the courts is not an effective way to fight for care and treatment options for trans populations in the UK.

But more is on the way. In August, NHS England announced that it had appointed Dr David Levy to head a review of adult trans healthcare services in line with recommendations by the Cass Review. Trans activists fear it will replicate the same flawed approach to research that characterised the Cass Review. Levy’s new review scares trans, nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people because it threatens to tear up even the most basic provisions we have in law, medicine, and our social lives.

Fearless solidarity

I am three months away from my surgery date. I get my oestrogen via an NHS prescription. This past weekend I was at a family do where a person who likely sees themself as a trans ally questioned my anger about the years I have spent on a surgical waiting list by comparing my transition to having cancer. If I had cancer would I want the resources of the NHS to be spent treating that and not worrying about a secondary consideration like gender-affirming surgery? I bit my lip because I was at an important family event celebrating a diamond wedding anniversary of a couple who always make an effort to get my name and pronouns correct. What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was that actually no: if I got cancer tomorrow I would still want my gender-affirming surgery first before any surgeries for cancer because if I was lying in a ward recovering from cancer I’d want to be treated with respect, not treated as an object of disgust or amusement.

I spent far too long being afraid to be who I am and no one, not Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch nor Dr David Levy gets to tell me any day for the rest of my life who I am, what healthcare I need, what my name is or what my pronouns are.

I was reminded of Dr James Barry who rose to become one of the foremost surgeons in nineteenth-century British medicine. He left clear instructions that after death his body was not to be stripped, washed and dressed but that he should be buried in the clothes he died in. He had good cause. Sadly, his wishes were not followed. On removal of his clothes, he was discovered to have a ‘female’ body. For decades he was described as a woman who succeeded in a male profession by disguising himself as a man; he was heralded by herstory feminists claiming him as a shero. It is only in the past few years as trans and nonbinary people have started to insert ourselves into the debates that people have begun to ask whether James was in fact someone we might now describe as trans. That maybe he was living his best life as a man in a male profession and in male company. Maybe the reason he didn’t want to be undressed after death is same reason I would prioritise gender surgery over cancer treatment: because in life and in death he and I want to be seen as who we say we are – and not what people assign us based on our genitals.

My life has been a contradiction of fortune and sadness. It took until I was 54 for me to finally realise that the solution to my terrible gender dysphoria was not being solved or addressed by identifying as a feminine man or ‘an effeminate homosexual’ and that in fact I had spent 40+ years of my life trying to gay the trans away. I spent decades of my life othered by society, by the lesbian and gay community, by the medical professions and by the media and political class. I was fortunate because in 2020 I was able to self-refer to a pilot scheme in London called Trans Plus at Dean Street that fast-tracked me through the appointments, milestones and waiting lists. So I am only a few months away from surgery, having only been in the medical process for five years. Many people wait that long just for the first assessment appointment.

I spent my teens, twenties and thirties picketing shops, media outlets, police stations, local authorities, and government departments over issues as diverse as police deaths in custody and the AIDS crisis. Yes, we made people feel uncomfortable when they took bigoted decisions! From marches through Mansfield and Orgreave to anti-fascist actions, hunt saboteurs and lesbian and gay rights we got out of those siloed identities and the boxes made for us by the state, electoral politics and old simplistic binaries and instead built coalitions of resistance across the lines. We built connections and communities of resistance, we found friends and co-conspirators.

We should take courage from groups like ACT UP and less from third-sector charities like Stonewall. We need to break the model of unaccountable. Transgender Action Block have been out there picketing TERFs for some time and building offline networks of resistance and recently the excellent Trans Kids Deserve Better have begun pickets of government departments, and have also been directly taking the fight to Wes Streeting’s constituency office. They have created the Instagram account @KidsAreDyingWes, where you can download a coffin design & create a message for Wes Streeting, health secretary and the most senior out LGBTIA politician in British political history. Streeting has chosen a red-box ministerial career over his own community and sold out trans kids. Every day they leave one or more coffins outside his constituency office to remind him.