by Susannah Clark, a member of the Fellowship of the Love of God who has worked as a Prison Governor in charge of a national centre for sex offenders, as a teacher of teenagers for 25 years and, after transitioning 16 years ago, as a registered nurse
These are distressing times for people who are trans. They face increased hostility and danger on the streets, because of the way the media has amplified exceptional cases of ‘bad apples’ and associated trans people with predators, framing them as a danger to the public, when in reality the vast majority are decent people just trying to get on with everyday life. Trans women have been portrayed as a threat to cisgender women, when in fact both groups face unwanted male attention and the risk of male violence.
Ten years ago, the culture wars were less febrile. Most people had started to take a live and let live approach to trans men and women, and many grew to affirm them. There was greater generosity of spirit and proportionality, combined with a realisation that transition for many could lead to better lives.
However, in the intervening decade we have seen a convergence of very different and contrasting ideological groups, intent on isolating trans people as a class, for a variety of reasons: first there were deeply conservative and fundamentalist religious campaigners for whom transition itself was abhorrent; secondly there was a subsection of feminist activists who campaigned to exclude trans women from areas of life, and to subvert their innate and essential sense of identity; thirdly there were right-wing populists who tried to play on the worst human instincts to identify scapegoats in order to increase support for their politics; fourthly there were more established political parties who started to fear the traction the far right was gaining, and have come to see trans people as politically expendable; and finally – doing huge damage to trans people and treating us like pariahs – there has been media portrayal of trans people as threatening perverts. They have smeared all trans people in the public’s perception and amplified the hatred of the ignorant.
Kindness and empathy have been so missing from recent discourse.
Now we have the Supreme Court ruling that, in the context of one Act, the term woman should be understood to mean genital biology at birth. However, assuming that what it means to be female and a woman can be summarised by genitalia alone is a huge simplification. Reducing women to their bits also ignores the complexity of intersex people. The intention of the Supreme Court was to leave it to elected policy-makers to develop and evolve how, in practical terms, the interests of groups might be protected in a humane and responsible manner. So it does seem to me that Baroness Falkner of the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission), notwithstanding lip-service to the rights and needs of trans people, is running ahead of the game in pressurising public bodies to extend one finding of one law to general and hard-line implementations that exclude trans people, without taking responsibility first for the impact such enforcements may have on already endangered and vulnerable trans people’s lives, and allowing further time for debate and consultation on how to manage these issues with proportionality.
The taboo of the toilets has been a focal point. Like anyone else, trans people go in, find a cubicle, pee, wash hands, and leave. That’s what people do, because, let’s face it, you really want to spend as little time as possible in a public loo. I have been transitioned for 16 years and I have never once faced any hostility.
Of course, the argument is that some pervert could go into the public loos, and that might be someone trans; therefore, it is claimed, *no* trans women should be allowed in women’s public toilets. Think about that a moment: men’s public loos, with their open urinals, involve more exposure of genitals, and are there no cisgendered male perverts preying on boys or young men? Are the risks allegedly posed by trans women greater than the much greater number of male perverts molesting boys in men’s toilets? Of course not. Yet we don’t ban every male from those toilets. That would be disproportionate. The whole toilet thing has been weaponised, where it was working event-free for decades before.
You could extend the exclusionary principle – excluding all members of a class of people because of rare and exceptional bad people – to schools (where I worked for 25 years). Some teachers molest young children. Yet male teachers are routinely allowed to oversee boys getting changed at school. Aren’t they a danger too? Well, the answer is the same as for trans women in loos: no. Or rather, there will always be risk of sex offenders but we don’t pin that risk on everyone else. We could ban all men from teaching but, of course, we don’t. It’s a matter of proportionality, and part of the proportionality needed is a mature, balanced sense of responsibility for minorities and not just the majority: worked out and developed by government, and certainly not rushed headlong into, which is what the Chair of the EHRC seems to want to do.
And then there is the matter of NHS hospitals… already being pressurised by Baroness Falkner to exclude trans women from women’s wards immediately. After transition I re-trained as a registered nurse and absolutely loved my work. This included medication, preparation for theatre, cleaning up shit and vomit, and yes… intimate care such as washing genitalia and catheterisation. Out of care. Out of kindness and compassion. Many patients (male and female) were appreciative. Not a single woman objected. I would have shown respect if they did, but in 10 years no-one ever did. When you’re sick, you just want to get well.
Yet now, if I myself fell ill, I would be characterised as a potential ‘threat’ and excluded from a female ward. I was safe before as a nurse (nurses of all genders work in wards for men and wards for women). But in my own vulnerability I would be cast out.
Up until now there has been ‘live and let live’. We have deployed kindness and generosity of spirit to accommodate all the varieties of people who make up a hospital ward. That principle should apply to society as a whole.
People talk about ‘the gender ideology’. I’m not an ideology, I’m a person.
I have described elsewhere my own recovery after gender surgery, in a convent where the loving sisters were there for me, as women caring for a vulnerable woman. The healing continued (to my great joy) and I returned to work – I worked in critical care, and acute care, and in later years with the elderly. And psychologically I flourished, able at last to openly be who I was. At work and at play. It is wonderful when solidarity is extended to trans women by other women, and in my experience many do. They are not all exclusionary ideologues. There is live and let live. And kindness.
If you have a trans sister or a trans daughter, you might well recognise that they are obviously female. Many friends, neighbours, colleagues who know trans women would too. They know, through personal interaction and goodwill, that these friends have female brains, female manner, female presence. Or, at least, they’re certainly not guys!
Yet politicians allege we’re not real. We are fake.
But the opposite is true. We’re fake before transition.
The cost of ‘performance’ outside your true self can be devastating. But when I transitioned… such a psychological ease came flooding into my life. My life became congruent, and no longer tormented by dysphoria. And after surgery: a sense of wholeness, well-being, and flourishing. Decades of self-harm just disappeared, sad memories of my past. Today my life is so happy, and I’m loved deeply by my precious wife, my children and my friends. But I feel so sad for young trans men and women, and those trans people who are socially vulnerable, or abused by neighbours, or abandoned by society. And that’s why I’m writing this article – out of solidarity – for them.
For many trans-excluding activists, I fear that the campaign for this particular Supreme Court decision is not their only goal, merely a bridgehead leading to what they hope will be further enforced exclusion. They frame us as the enemies of women.
It’s as if a trans woman like myself doesn’t care about the protection of all women. I have cared about women all my life. Most trans people do – they care hugely. Many of us have mothers and daughters and wives and sisters who we love and care about. Indeed we have a vested interest ourselves in protection, because trans women know discrimination themselves.
In the end we can either accommodate each other’s differences with kindness, or we can go down the road of populism, hatred, othering, and the policing of tribal boundaries. It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of meanness of spirit I think we need: generosity, kindness, responsibility, balance. We should help one another to be the whole and best of who we really are.
Politicians need to stop courting populism, and find the courage to reject simplicities and recognise the need for proportionality in what follows this one-off ruling. Baroness Falkner may want to go rushing in, but there needs to be much further reflection, nuance, and consultation.
There is a strong case for pausing on actions to be enforced, until an independent review has recommended how to navigate the need to protect women generally, but also the need to protect trans women before their lives are imperilled, and sort that out, because frankly, that is an urgent responsibility of good government. And yes, of course, the present government may be running scared of losing some votes by sticking its head above the parapets on these issues. Hiding behind the Supreme Court ruling and allowing the EHRC to carry the can, at the immediate expense of trans people, would be a cowardly abandonment of a most vulnerable group in our society.
But there is a different way: the way of the convent sisters who nursed me and accepted me as a woman, the way of most women I nursed who welcomed my care, and so many women I meet in day-to-day life: not activists with ideological agenda, but human beings willing to treat other human beings with generosity, decency and kindness.
The sad thing is that I feel like the present campaign to define trans women has been big about sex and genitalia, but the reality is that women are more than their bits. As trans women our biological brains and gestalt identity may also be irrevocably female (in a whole spectrum of different versions). That ‘being a woman’ is at heart something you are, how you know yourself, the heart of your being, and loveliness, and potential. To reduce the definition of a woman only to sex and genitalia is to ignore so much more of what makes a woman who she is. In a way it’s quite insulting. It’s not all about sex. I’m a human being who happens to understand myself as woman at the heart of my being. I’m a threat to no-one, and a gift to those who love me, and we don’t deserve to be excluded, far less to be vilified.
All of us should care about each other, as we dare to open up, more and more, to the whole of who we are.
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Susannah Clark has written other articles, and advice on the pastoral care of trans people, that can be found here: