I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [519]

My umpteenth "Myra Breckinridge" reference

With the leaking to “The Times” newspaper of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) update of the 2010 Equality Act Regulations, instigated by the Supreme Court judgement in April 2025 that transgender women with a Gender Recognition Certificate are not women under the terms of the Act, it has been confirmed that requests for paperwork for some people to enter single-sex spaces that correspond with their gender, found in interim changes to these regulations that have since been withdrawn, have been replaced with perception-based assessments on appearance and behaviour. 

This attempt to avoid the policing of these spaces inadvertently creates what sounds like, to me, a beauty contest, because what a joy it is going to be having to pass the test to appear in the correct space at the right time. 

This remains theory for now, as the knowledge of what could become law stems from a leak of something the Government is assessing, but considering how often “The Times” reports on this issue, and with the EHRC imploring the Government to implement these new regulations as soon as possible, this new report raises questions for me about motivations I won’t get answers for, as I will only be affected by what the final decisions will be.

Years of experience as a human being, let alone as a trans woman, show that “passing” as the correct gender in any situation, for anyone and everyone, is as much in the eye of the beholder as bias and prejudice will be in other situations. In using a public toilet or a changing room, the regulations make clear that there will be circumstances where you present so well in your gender that you can reasonably be excluded from the space that corresponds to your sex, but it is made clear I cannot be left without any facility.

I hope people don’t talk about me like they would the cross-dresser from across the road, if they have one, or any person they see more than once without ever needing to talk to them. I am not “committing to the bit”, I am being myself, but if you don’t know me, you don’t know that, and your confidence in bridging the gap should not then leave me at your mercy.

The knowledge that months of waiting for clarification of the law is effectively to continue the status quo that existed for decades, after what has felt like a protracted abjectification of trans people in the media since the Supreme Court judgement, is a profound waste of my time and energy. By necessity, “gender critical” belief is included in the regulations, but also crucial wording about distinguishing the objectionable expression of beliefs.

If implemented as reported, the new Equality Act regulations codify a loss of trust, regulating what could no longer be left to people to decide. Good luck, everyone.

DON’T BE AFRAID, 'CAUSE THERE’S STILL TIME [507]

In the 2024 film “I Saw the TV Glow”, a trailer for “The Pink Opaque”, the Young Adult Network drama enrapturing the isolated teenagers Maddy and Owen, includes the line, “It can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them”. This hits home toward the end of the film as Owen, eight years older, having resisted the call to escape his passive small-town life, tells himself, “It’s not real if I don’t think about it.”

I heard the second line when I first watched the film, but I only caught the first line on my second viewing. Owen tells himself to dismiss Maddy’s plan to take Owen back to the world of “The Pink Opaque”, to reassume his real identity as a character inside the show itself, having been banished to the “Midnight Realm” of our world by the “Big Bad” Mr Melancholy in the show’s final episode. Hearing the first line clarified to me the peril of staying blinkered to what needs to be confronted.

Films are not made to be watched like TV programmes, screen vastly reduced in size, sound compressed and funnelled down to small speakers, viewing spaces not acoustically optimised. I expected to get the most out of “I Saw the TV Glow” with a second viewing, but I had not expected to need it. So, harking back to my film studies degree, I was in a quiet room by myself, with pen, paper and (this time) a PDF copy of the script on standby, fully prepared to rock footage back and forth to ensure I hear each line correctly. It wasn’t that anyone mumbled their lines, even if the lead characters are teenagers, but I clearly didn’t have the volume up high enough on that first viewing.

I wanted to see “I Saw the TV Glow” for some time – no physical Blu-ray release has happened in the UK, so after a year I resorted to streaming the film, and I was not disappointed. The film’s allegory for the discovery of transgender identity, which I now know is also called the “egg crack” moment, preceded it, its writer/director Jane Schoenbrun reportedly having begun writing the script at the outset of their own transition process. 

The “white draft” of the script, dated 31^st May 2022, had a lot more jumping between different periods of time, which I took as evidence of the cracks appearing in the characters’ reality appeared, but the finished film proceeds more linearly to concentrate on Maddy and Owen’s relationship with the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show “The Pink Opaque”, a title I am guessing is deliberately, well, opaque, only because I don’t know why Cocteau Twins used it as the title of their 1986 compilation album.

Aside from self-inflicted sound issues, I had some frustration “I Saw the TV Glow” on its first viewing. For instance, there is a point where shots of “our world”, presented by the film’s regular widescreen aspect ratio and pin-sharp picture, overlaps with the squarer VHS-quality picture of “The Pink Opaque”, realities passing between resolutions. The second viewing confirmed this already elsewhere as the shots of the show’s character of Isabel are shown are repeated in both forms, and in parallel with Owen in “our world”, which I should really be calling the “Midnight Realm”. Later, as Maddy – or Tara, as she is called in “The Pink Opaque” – has an almighty long speech about what happened to her, how she crossed dimensions, and how she came back to get Owen. The script had Owen watching her monologue as intently as he watched the show, physically breaking up the long passages, but none of these reverse shots made their way into the finished film, making it look easier for Owen to dismiss the story later as a long ramble.

However, what I appreciated on the second viewing were when the parallels were drawn between Maddy and Owen, and Isabel and Tara. The pilot of “The Pink Opaque” had Isabel not knowing what was happening to her as her telepathic powers became apparent, later serving her in defeating foes with Tara, who lived in a different county – in the “Midnight Realm”, Owen can’t say more than a few words to Maddy, but they communicate via cassettes of the show, left in a neutral location to pick up. 

Elements from “The Pink Opaque” also appear in the “Midnight Realm” – an ice cream van, the ghost tattoo from Isabel and Tara’s necks – to reinforce the magic link between the worlds. I never had a show I loved enough to substitute for real life – I loved “The Simpsons” at their age, but not that intently – but with Tara being Maddy’s favourite character, and with her saying the show feels more real than real life, you are primed as an audience for when reality eventually flips...

...which is why Owen, as a character, is confounding. As a trans woman, I initially didn’t have the words for what I was beginning to realise about me, but I got them in the end, and acted upon them. Owen, however, doesn’t appear to make the connection when it is presented to him. As a teenager, he doesn’t know if he likes girls or boys, but he does like TV shows, going so far as saying, “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m too nervous to open up and check” – even when he does, he closes himself back up. 

This passivity makes Owen a character without agency, consistently immobilised from saving the day, or himself – when Maddy tells him of his initial plan to leave town, he tells another friend’s mother that he “needs to be grounded”: “You can’t let me leave here with her. I don’t want to leave home.” Through the film, we see an adult Owen in front of a fire, alone in a forest at night – in the end, he puts out the fire.

This makes one scene particularly jarring upon watching it a second time, and after reading the script. Upon seeing the final episode of “The Pink Opaque”, Owen puts his head through his TV screen. His father pulls him out, Owen yelling, “this is not my home! You’re not my father!” He vomits something, obscured by the scratchy neon effect added to it – it is not just the “glow” of the TV, it is meant to be soil, from having been buried alive. You are left to assume this horrific moment was repressed by Owen, or repressed for him.

What starts as psychological horror film becomes a tragedy. The chalk drawings are topped with the message, “There is still time”. I have heard this sentiment, in the same context as “I Saw the TV Glow”, in two songs, Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home” and Lisa Lougheed’s “Run With Us” – hell, throw in Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” as well. The film does not explicitly say its story acts as a transgender metaphor, although its pink and blue colour palettes acts as a guide, but when a piece of art connects with you, you will see what you need to see, eventually.

CAN’T YOU FEEL THE TOWN EXPLODING? [497]

I decided to use the famous shot of Buser Keaton being framed by the window in a falling wall, from his 1928 film “Steamboat Bill, Jr”, to illustrate exactly how I have felt since the UK Supreme Court decided that, for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act, that transgender women did not count as women – I would have been flattened by the wall, had I not known where my marker was, which in Keaton’s case was a nail.

The monolithic stature and sheer audacity of the stunt means its context is rarely considered. After an hour of a comedy plot involving a rivalry between paddle boat owners, into which an effectual son of one captain arrives, along with his girl friend from college, a cyclone comes in to destroy the harbour town, at which point it becomes a disaster film – Keaton, in hospital, looks up as the building is torn away. His bed is blown through a street and a stable, avoiding falling masonry, until it stops outside a house – its occupant, seeing a crack opening the side of the house, jumps out of the top floor window and onto the bed, saving his life. Keaton, looking obliviously into the street, does not see the façade as it then falls, effectively entering the window the man had just leapt from. 

From there, every possible physical gag about walking into the wind, and last-second avoiding crumbling buildings, leads to a final escape on the steamboat. It is an extremely well-handled sequence, coming from someone either supremely confident in their ability to conceive and execute these stunts so effectively, or so lax in their judgement to have endangered themselves so recklessly in the name of entertainment, financial problems and alcohol abuse having contributed to the latter narrative. 

“Steamboat Bill, Jr” was also the last of Keaton’s films to be made independently, before a move to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that saw his creative control gradually eliminated. His previous distributor, United Artists, had already began to insist on the monitoring of expenses after Keaton deployed the most expensive shot in silent film history, the destruction of a steam engine and a railway bridge in “The General” (1926). The cyclone sequence in “Steamboat Bill, Jr”, one seventh of the film’s running time but one third of the budget, replaced a planned flood sequence, although a real-life river flood also forced this change. In short, as Keaton reached his creative peak, he was becoming less trusted.

As I said, I knew where my marker was. I have held a Gender Recognition Certificate since 2017, having done everything required of me to prove my status as a transgender woman was stable and permanent. My gender was changed in law for all purposes, as the Gender Recognition Act 2004 stated. At no point was anyone telling me that I didn’t know myself, or that I am instead autistic or have borderline personality disorder because it fit the limits of their understanding. I am perfectly fine, and the matter was settled.

Since the Supreme Court decision on Wednesday 16^th April to define “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to mean “biological” sex, because we all speak of ourselves in terms of washing powder now, it has felt like open season on trans people, despite gender reassignment being protected under the same act. I have been most perturbed by the tendency for the Supreme Court decision to have settled the matter morally, that trans people were never what they said they were, but I think the people saying that now only do so because they feel emboldened. So what – the terms “gender ideology” and “gender critical” appeared years after my formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and the phrase “live and let live” pre-dates all of them.

In May 2025, there are too many reasons to be apprehensive. Interim guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission appears to ban trans people both from the bathroom of their appropriate gender, and from their biological sex in certain situations, presumably if they “pass” in their gender too much, but I can’t be allowed to have nowhere to go. I can also still play a sport, so long as the association providing it is comprised of no more than twenty-five people. This is ahead of full guidance expected in the coming months. Meanwhile, I wrote to my MP asking for confirmation that my legal paperwork is still valid – I await their answer.

But I have not been made an outlaw. I have not been deemed an undesirable presence in society. Enough people treat trans people with dignity and respect to balance out those who say they should be, then do nothing more. 

Unlike Buster Keaton, I don’t feel that people have less trust in me because of my situation, but other people could not trust themselves with the subject and concept of gender, so it has been decided for them absolutely. Policing of gender will now be unavoidable – can you prove yours?

I’ll be fine, somehow – I think the law may still be on my side. In the meantime, hoping and coping produced the following playlist, unexpectedly all from the 1970s:

The Real Thing - Can You Feel The Force

Jackson Browne - Doctor My Eyes

Fleetwood Mac - Don’t Stop

Wings - With a Little Luck

David Bowie - Starman

Elton John - Crazy Water

Slade – How Does It Feel

COULDN’T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO [396]

Mae Muller performing "I Wrote a Song" for the UK

May 2023 has been a good time for politically charged camp spectacles held in the United Kingdom, the Coronation of King Charles III having been followed by a week of events for the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Liverpool on behalf of Ukraine after Russia’s war left them unable to host after winning last year. If the Prime Minister calls a General Election next week, I am going to explode.

Much like trying to follow the overnight results of a General Election, I have fallen asleep before the end of the last five Eurovision finals. Starting at the usual 8pm UK time, this year’s contest was scheduled to finish at midnight, which was 2am in Ukraine, or an hour past my natural power-down time. This has been a result of the gradual change in both the presentation and significance of the contest, and my sleeping habits not having changed in that time.

How did I do in 2023? It turns out that deciding to write an article about the programme you are watching requires you to remain alert, although I began flagging during the reading out of the scores, which will always be slower paced than everything that came before it. With the UK’s brilliant entry, Mae Muller’s “I Wrote a Song”, finishing second from last on the night, or 25th out of 37 overall, I finally called it a night at 12.05am, ten minutes before the end of the contest, and before Sweden’s entrant, Loreen, could reprise her winning song “Tattoo”. Whatever time it is planned to end, the Eurovision final is always destined to overrun by about fifteen minutes.

But that is hardly the point. With the theme of the contest being “United by Music”, with Ukrainian music and culture emphasised from the start, and culminating in the most effective performance of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” there has probably been, every part of the contest that has grown bigger since the UK last held it in 1998, from the opening flag-waving procession of entrants, through the use of video walls in the staging of each song, to the scale and length of the interval acts, and the ultimate gruelling wait to find out the public vote only gave the UK nine points (even if that was still four more than Spain), everything had a reason to be there.

The scale of the coverage given this year by the BBC, as host broadcaster, made the Eurovision Song Contest into a week-long event this time, from the opening ceremony in Liverpool the previous Sunday, the two semi-finals on the Tuesday and Thursday, and various programmes celebrating the music and history of the contest. The semi-final had been introduced in 2004, with a second added five years later, as broadcasters from more countries joined the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) during the 1990s. Australia’s love of the contest made them honorary Europeans to compete themselves from 2011, but Australia has been represented in the EBU since it was formed in 1950, alongside Canada and New Zealand. (“Active” and “Associate” membership of the EBU is determined using the “European Broadcasting Area” as defined by the International Telecommunications Union, for those who still ask why Israel competes each year.) 

Held in Birmingham, the 1998 contest still closely resembled how it began in 1956, a one-night event linking countries both through friendship, music and technology, with all twenty-five entrants singing in their home languages with the backing of an orchestra. Lower-scoring countries were still required to skip the following year to allow other countries the chance to compete at least every other year, a scheme introduced in 1993 to replace an off-air qualifying round. Pop music, very much mainstream in 1998, remained disseminated by TV, radio and physical sales of music, and “Top of the Pops” aired on BBC One the night before the contest, like it did every Friday night. It was primarily a song contest, and one the UK was always destined to take very seriously.

But changes were already underway: 1998 was the last year for both the language rule and the orchestra, and the first year where a public vote by telephone replaced scoring from professional juries, where the phone network of competing countries allowed – years of chopping and changing the scoring system has now arrived at the jury and phone/online votes being treated separately and weighted the same as each other. Furthermore, the choice of the National Indoor Arena cemented the contest’s move away from theatres to larger venues, from stalls to standing crowds.

I did start by saying Eurovision was a camp spectacle, the subtext of outrageousness and gaudiness in both the songs and their staging having now become both outright text and a major selling point of the contest. It is no surprise that the growing inclusivity of other countries and cultures would lead to the contest being adopted as a symbol of inclusivity. The backlashes and death threats against Israel’s transgender competitor in 1998, Dana International, and Austria’s drag queen entrant Conchita Wurst in 2014, are mostly forgotten because their songs went on to win the contest. Dana International’s song “Diva” becoming the first to win when (almost) all the people of Europe were given the chance to vote may prove to be the most poignant moment in the history of the contest.

I’D LIKE TO KNOW WHERE YOU GOT THE NOTION [337]

It is unfortunate that, whenever I have talked here about transgender rights, it is usually because something bad has happened: the Roman Catholic church publishes its own guidance [link], rancour during a consultation over the UK’s Gender Recognition Act [link], how being trans isn’t postmodern because of Mr Potato Head [link], or how trans rights are being used as a weapon in the culture wars [link]. Even when I have talked about being trans myself, it was in relation to how the headache of applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate in the UK was preferable to waiting for the process to become easier [link].

My occasional return to this subject, one where the question of whether trans people should be able to self-identify in their correct gender, without needing the legal process I went through, has been treated like a dog whistle for so long that everyone can hear it, is like sticking a pin in a particular moment in time and saying, “wow, people are just the worst, aren’t they?” The whistle has been blown multiple times in the last week that I thought I should just keep a record of what happened here, so when I return to this some time later, I hope I can say that things became better from here, because they could not get any worse.

On Sunday 20^th March, the “Sunday Times” columnist Camilla Long wrote, on page 25 of the main paper, that the victory of trans female swimmer Lia Thomas, in an American college swimming championship race – or, in her terms, a “hulking man-bodied swimmer” – would make you ask “where on earth are we as a culture... Yes, yes, I know she was within the rules, but if these are the rules, they obviously suck. Instead of protecting trans people, they open them up to ridicule and accusations of cheating.” 

Reading the last paragraph in a British newspaper made me feel sick: “It ends up feeling as if the very act of being trans is designed to mock and goad women: a brazen act of public humiliation. Is that really what Thomas was aiming for?” Whether Long actually believes that or not, knowing that someone could make that sort of deduction is clearly not the fault of Lia Thomas, or Caster Semenya for that matter. I only know about both people in how others have spoken about them, or projected their thoughts onto them. Women’s sport is only the latest battleground in the culture wars.

Meanwhile, on Saturday 19^th March, the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss MP, made a speech a the Conservative Party’s Spring Conference in Blackpool, against the background of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: “We should be proud of our country, and our long standing commitment to freedom and democracy. Now is the time to end the culture of self-doubt. The constant self-questioning and introspection. The ludicrous debates about language, statues and pronouns. Our history – warts and all – makes us what we are today.”

I recall one of the first things to go when the Soviet Union collapsed was the statues. Bringing up certain debates, however “warty” they are, in order to say they are “ludicrous” only energises them.

On Thursday 24^th March, former comedy writer Graham Linehan claimed that he has been “cancelled” both from public life, and from his marriage, by trans rights activists and former friends, by appearing on Stephen Nolan’s TV talk show on BBC One Northern Ireland, a story picked up and relayed by many newspapers and websites. Linehan, who was so against trans people being able to self-identify themselves in law that he was permanently suspended from Twitter for being enough of a nuisance to diminish the experience of using the service for people, said, “The one thing about this that keeps me going is that I know I'm right. Sometimes something is so wrong that you have to say something and if I didn't say something I'd go mad.”

Then there is J.K. Rowling, for no discussion of trans rights can happen without the most powerful person in the room being present, until someone more powerful than them compares themselves to you: on Friday 25^thMarch, Vladimir Putin compared the cultural “cancellation” of Russia, due to the actions of their “special military operation” in Ukraine, to how Rowling has been “cancelled” for her views on trans self-identification. Apparently Rowling does believe trans people should be protected, but it is not often mentioned in media reporting, or by herself in particular, as nuance is often lost in arguments. 

Putin’s statement felt like the ceiling in the trans rights debate might have been reached. I didn’t plan on writing about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine until after it had ended, as the moral outrage that led to the withdrawal of Western business and consumer products and brands from Russia, without intervention from Western governments, is something that will eventually be worth discussing – it is a kind of cancel culture that everyone has seemingly supported. However, “critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics,” as Rowling said, on Twitter, in response to Putin.

Finally, on Wednesday 23^rd March, in response to a question on young people experiencing gender distress, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the following: “This is one of those issues that the whole House is coming to realise requires extreme sensitivity, tact, love and care. We must recognise that when people want to make a transition in their lives, they should be treated with the maximum possible generosity and respect. We have systems in this country that allow that and have done for a long time, and we should be very proud of that, but I want to say in addition that I think, when it comes to distinguishing between a man and a woman, the basic facts of biology remain overwhelmingly important.” As much as the first part of that statement was needed, the last part was what made the headlines.

One day, I will run a thread between all the pins I have placed over time, and see what picture it makes.

IT AIN’T NOTHING BUT A HEART-BREAKER [315]

I think I am writing this one more for my benefit than for anyone else.

 

The term “culture war” was coined by the German physicist, biologist and politician Rudolf Virchow to describe the campaign of the pre-German kingdom of Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck to reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in educational matter. Translated from the German “Kulturkampf,” the term was repeated in American newspapers, later applied to opposing values, whether they be conservative or liberal, progressive or traditionalist, or urban or rural. The increasing polarisation in American politics along these lines was described in sociologist James Davison Hunter’s book “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America” (1991), which returned the term to widespread use.

 

When “kampf” means “struggle”, a less charged word than “war”, the choice of one word over the other implies an intent to win outright. Concord is never an option, let alone an objective. If one side is described as a deranged, totalitarian illiberal mob, then the other side must be too. Does it ultimately matter? Not if either side think they are having a good war.

 

I don’t believe “culture war” was a term ever needed in the UK until its own politics and culture experienced polarisation through the Brexit referendum - “cancel culture” and “woke” have similarly only entered common use in the media in the last five years since then. However, all the terms are snappy, emotionally charged and easy to apply to a headline, alongside “feud”, “blast”, “hits out at”, “shame”, “mob”, “cult”, “shock”, “ban”, “axe” and “row”. Any issue can be heated like a microwave dinner if the right words are chosen.

 

My preoccupation on “culture war” as a term comes from being, as a transgender person, the subject of a culture war. I am not on either side of the argument, I am what is being fought over – my rights are under question. This culture war appears to have begun in the summer of 2017, when the UK government announced a consultation on whether people can self-identify as their correct gender, instead of going through the court-based system to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate. 

 

It does not matter that this issue has apparently been resolved: the existing system is to remain in place, but applying will become online-based and substantially cheaper. It does not matter what my opinion of the issue is: if living your life authentically means you need to use whatever system exists, rather than waiting for enough minds to be changed so it can be replaced with one more dignified, you would do it – I know I did.

 

However, the opening of a government consultation on one specific issue became a wider argument on how a group of people should continue to fit into society – again, the Equality Act 2004 was not in question. The culture war that now exists seems to be more predicated on the use of words, from those that each side have for each other like “TERF”, “transphobe” and “gender critical”, to the checklist of what allows someone to be called a “woman” or a “man”, and whether you can change your sex at all. Framing this as a “culture war” implies that both sides are as strong as each other, but when the much of the reporting on the issue is on protecting the rights of celebrities like J.K. Rowling, Dave Chapelle and Piers Morgan to speak, it feels like the objective is to protect the most powerful people in the room - people who appear to be having a good war. Meanwhile, I need to be careful about how I speak in case it jeopardises any part of my life, from my job to friendships. 

 

The target of legislation is no longer the Equality Act, which already had regulations on access to single-sex spaces, to freedom of expression in academic institutions. My theory is this is more a symptom of tuition fees in universities, now over £9,000 a year, making students more into customers and stakeholders that demand more of their academic journey than I would have done when I started my degree twenty years ago.

 

I am not willing to engage in an argument over my own rights. There are enough books being published on the subject right now, such as “The Transgender Issue” by Shon Faye, and “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” by Helen Joyce. Both books were reviewed in the Culture magazine of “The Sunday Times” in August 2021 under the headline “Which side are you on?” With that headline, not mine.

 

Once again, I am writing here more for my benefit this time around.

HE DID THE MASH, IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH [284]

Lately, I have been waking up extremely early on Saturday mornings. With the work week done, my mind turns to writing the next “Gatekeepers” article and will already be running through what the next subject will be, or what I should include.

 

This week, it became increasingly obvious what I should be writing. Hasbro has announced their “Mr Potato Head” line of toys will be renamed to simply “Potato Head,” with Mr and Mrs Potato Head as parts of the lines. Instead, this was interpreted as Mr Potato Head itself being made gender-neutral, and Piers Morgan was triggered into his usual Twitter tirade about woke virtual-signalling imbeciles, because “woke” uses fewer characters than “politically correct.” Perhaps everyone should be made to provide their own potato once more.

 

Meanwhile, American Republican politicians Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul – the latter named after Ayn Rand – were both rebuked for comments aimed at transgender people, repeating the usual mischaracterisations and talking points, into which I cannot be bothered to repeat, except to say that Dr Rachel Levine will become United States Assistant Secretary for Health because she proved herself to be supremely qualified for the job, and does not stop being transgender because other people decide they can live in a world that excludes things they don’t like. I wish I could do that; I would be much happier.

 

I had already decided I was going to write that transgender is not postmodern, although I feel like just saying that and leaving it there. I shouldn’t have to explain it any further than that. I don’t need discourse to explain away my own existence as a transgender woman, and if you think you do to make your own life easier, then how am I the one who has problems?

 

Anyway, transgender isn’t postmodern because transgender is older than postmodernism. I also do not need an argument about how “transsexual” became replaced by “transgender,” because it does not preclude its earlier existence. Pointing out logic does not rationalise something out of existence. Even more obviously, I don’t think transgender people that existed before even the coining of the term “postmodernism,” like Albert Cashier, Joseph Lobdell, Billy Tipton, Mark Weston, Lili Elbe, Christine Jorgensen and the Public Universal Friend – put all these names into your nearest search engine – had any problems with reconciling their existence with those of anyone else, let alone what each individual believed at any particular point.

 

And yet, I somehow left out the following from something I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

 

“Gender isn’t constructed, but an individual who desires gender re-assignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman’s body (or vice versa). The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored (or rationalized away with another appalling post-modern claim: that logic itself – along with the techniques of science – is merely part of the oppressive patriarchal system.)”

 

Somehow, I wrote an entire article about Jordan Peterson a couple of weeks ago without mentioning the above statement, from page 315 of my copy of “12 Rules for Life,” in the section for rule 11, “Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.” (The italics are his.) A few sentences earlier, Peterson talks about the “insane and incomprehensible postmodern insistence” that gender is constructed, and the moral imperative for this is to make all outcomes equitable. Yep, somehow, I just focussed on his misreading of Jacques Derrida.

 

What Peterson wrote does not change anything I have said. Historical precedence overrules present-day ideology, and I can sleep at night. I prefer to take the example of Alan L Hart, a transgender man best known for pioneering the use of X-ray photography in detecting of tuberculosis, saving many lives, who completed his transition in 1917. Three years later, Hart’s surgeon Joshua Allen Gilbert, wrote, “Let him who finds himself a tendency to criticize an to offer some constructive method of dealing with the problem on hand. He will not want for difficulties. The patient and I have done our best with it.”

AND BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE TO FLY [132]

...aaand time’s up. At noon today (Monday 22^nd October), the UK Government’s consultation on reform to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act ended – it was meant to end at 11pm the previous Friday, but a last-minute minute flurry of responses crashed the online portal – it had been open since 3^rdJuly. I answered its questions two weeks ago, later than I really should have, but with the discourse, or argument, over transgender rights having become what they have over the last year in the UK, I would be doing a disservice to myself not to say something.

The proposed reform to the Act will update the process by which transgender people can apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate, so their correct gender can be recognised in law. I don’t have any irons in that part of the fire anymore – in fact, this week will mark one year since I received my certificate. The first thing I did with it was to update work, then obtain an updated birth certificate – the system for this is run, oddly enough, by the UK Passport Office.

The Government wants to make applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate a self-declaration process, already in place in the Republic of Ireland, Malta, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Portugal – the Irish application form is four pages long, not unlike applying for a passport. The current British form, meanwhile, has sixteen pages, and has a twenty-four-page guide on how to fill it in. When you send it away, you must also send two medical reports - one from a gender specialist confirming a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and another from your GP – a statutory declaration, signed by a solicitor, confirming I will continue living in my gender, and at least five types of document that prove you have been living in your gender for at least two years. I ended up sending practically everything I had, to avoid any doubt. The cost of making the application is £140 – once you add in the costs of acquiring medical reports, photocopying, special delivery for all your valuable documents, and finally getting your updated birth certificate, I spent nearly £200.

There has to be a better way. In my reply to the consultation, I said that all you needed was to supply the evidence that you were living in your correct gender, and that the two-year timeframe could be too inflexible. As it turns out, all that is needed in Ireland is the statutory declaration, which is pages 3 and 4 of their form. In both cases, there is a statement of intent: you won’t be doing this more than once. The hoops I had to jump through, under the “old” system, meant that I, and the approximately five thousand other transgender people that had to jump through those hoops since 2005, earned their right to feel happy in themselves, and would rather not have had to jump so many times.

I have heard too many arguments recently that trans self-identification will mean that men can use it to access women’s spaces inappropriately, as if the Gender Recognition Act, and the Equality Act, didn’t already make provisions for situations like this. The consultation asked many questions on whether I think there is a potential impact on everything from women’s refuges, the armed forces and public services, to sport, insurance and religious marriage. I found myself saying that these provisions can stay as they are, because they all require any issues to be dealt with by communication, and consideration, by adults. Someone can be questioned for unfairly providing access to a service, as much as unfairly denying access, whether that is to a transgender person or not. However, I did say that religious marriage cannot be stopped if it is found that one person in the couple has a Gender Recognition Certificate – I only found out that was a thing when I read the question.

The consultation has been taken by some as a referendum on transgender people, as if everything is to play for. Advertisements stating “Woman: Noun, Adult Human Female” have been taken down because of why they were placed, and not because of what they said. As a transgender woman, I could be accused of being a man infiltrating womanhood, of redefining what it is to be a woman, of reducing being a woman to being a feeling, of confirming the dominance of the patriarchy. Even worse, I could be told I am mentally ill, that I don’t know what I am, that people like me don’t really exist. All I can possibly know, in my experience, is this: when I realised what I was all along, why did my life become so much easier to understand?

The consultation is over, and the law-making must begin. I am not going anywhere.

[Update: “The New York Times” is reporting that the Trump is trying to redefine gender as being defined by genitalia at birth, stripping transgender people of the rights they have under the law. Firstly, that won’t happen – too many Americans will have too much to lose, and too many Americans are good people to allow it to happen. Secondly, what is the point of the word “sex” if you are planning to do that?]

LIKE BREATHING OUT AND BREATHING IN [66]

UPDATE (26/10/2017): I received my Gender Recognition Certificate in the post, and the world became, for once, demonstrably better. The soundtrack to my celebration was “Land of Hope and Glory,” followed by “Look Back In Anger” by David Bowie, and the live version of his “Station to Station” title track, from the “Stage” album... and then "Sunrise" by Eric Carmen, for some reason.

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There has been a lot about transgender rights in the news recently, especially in the last week – to those in the United States, still enraged by the President planning to remove thousands of trans people from the military, your President is Donald Trump, so what did you expect?

The one group you don’t hear, apart from left-wing pressure groups, right-wing pressure groups, and media commentators, and media commentators, are ACTUAL TRANSGENDER PEOPLE. I then remembered that I see a trans woman in the mirror every day, so here I am.

[You take five pictures, and the first one was the best.]

On Sunday 23^rd July, the UK Government announced two consultations. The first, ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality – the age of consent wasn’t the same for everyone until January 2001 - is to ask the LGBT community’s experiences of discrimination, and on accessing and using public services. I completed this survey online - you get the feeling that these questions are being asked for the first time, especially those on discrimination.

The other survey would have been important to me, but I already decided not to wait for the answer. In the autumn, the Government will canvass opinions on whether applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate, to change your gender in law from female to male, or vice versa, should be streamlined, allowing people simply to identify how they wish, instead of needing evidence about why you needed to do it.

Many people have not waited to be asked. We already know that Germaine Greer, “Woman’s Hour” presenter Dame Jenni Murray, and the novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Fay Weldon are all on record as saying that transgender women are not real women, while on Twitter, Piers Morgan has a profound dislike for the idea of people not identifying as male or female, although “third gender” or “two-spirit” people, among other names, are found in cultures for centuries.

The reason I am not waiting for the Government here is simple – I am applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate, under the existing system. There had been a bill in Parliament to change the process, but after the first reading, months of delays, and a General Election, nothing more happened.  Therefore, I am pressing on with what the existing process, which costs £140, requires me to do.

It relies heavily on evidence that you are on your final-destination path, including medical reports, passport, utility bills, official letters, and a statutory declaration I have signed in the presence of a solicitor – there may have also been something about collecting all the gold rings, jumping over a ravine, and rescuing a princess, but I haven’t seen anything more about that. A panel then decides if I should be given the certificate that has “female” written on it, but with what it has taken to get there, both in years of personal experience as well as paperwork, it may as well also say “sane.” Either way, it unequivocally leaves no room for doubt.

Even if I am choosing to do this the hard way, it doesn’t mean it will be a harder-won victory than those that may only have to fill in a simple form later. For the record, I think having a statutory declaration will weed out those who don’t realise how serious changing your gender, in the eyes of the law, really is. Only 112 people submitted applications under the existing process in the first three months of 2017, so making that process easier won’t open the floodgates for women’s toilets and changing rooms to be invaded by men, which is an understandable fear, but unlikely. The Republic of Ireland already have a simpler process, introduced in September 2015, and only 240 people have used it, out of a population of five million.