Lilly Symonds—It feels cliché to describe my life as living in a world that wants me dead, but this has become the reality that transgender people within this nation have to contend with. Being the target of the culture war that our political parties have gripped hold of, our lives have been reduced to a matter of politics. All too often we will be asked to justify our existence to people, something alien to cisgender people. However, this lack of balance is not exclusive to my community. It seems every election cycle the political parties come together to select a group to be their antagonists, a threat that needs to be stopped, and introduce more and more oppressive legislation to ensure this goal is carried out.
In the 80s this was seen most clearly in Thatcher’s Section 28, a restrictive and homophobic part of the Local Governments Act of 1988, which came as the Aids crisis was in full swing, and more misery dropped atop an already suffering and dying community. This barbaric piece of legislation was only repealed in 2003. More recently we have had the CASS review, a paper that has been put under heavy questioning and has led to a ban on gender-affirming care for those under the age of 18, an action that is likely to already high suicide numbers to increase even further.
We have seen our charities defunded, our resources stripped and left drowning in an ocean that already treats us harshly. Transgender people already cope with a heartbreakingly high suicide rate: the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that over 40% of transgender adults in the US have attempted suicide. With the pushes to remove our safety nets and gender-affirming care, I can only come to one conclusion, they are trying to kill us off. The discourse online has been pretty open about this, the alt-right tends to go mask off when given the shield of anonymity, delighting in the comments every time one of us is murdered or failed by the system.
This negativity is reflected across the community, I reached out to some friends by asking them the question. “How do you feel being a transgender person in the UK?”
“At the moment, it’s incredibly unstable and unsafe. Not enough is being done to protect and nurture transgender youth, and access to life-saving, gender-affirming care is a lifetime wait or a lifetime debt. Transgender people are getting, at the time of this statement, bottom-of-the-barrel attention from our National Health Service. Things need to change. So, to answer shortly, and to reword your question, I feel ashamed to be a resident of the UK as a Transgender person.” – S, Billie.
“I feel as though I am consistently let down by a government that does not serve my interests and that I survive only through the support and affection of those around me.” – L, Eleanor.
“It’s worrying to be a trans person in the UK at the minute, as with the government’s opinion on trans people especially trans youth, the debates about our very existence, the laws being made making it harder for everyone but especially minors to get gender-affirming care and generally making life harder for trans people to feel seen and protected by the law. As well the number of public figures that are outwardly transphobic and getting away with it and influencing people of younger generations with their ideals, making it harder to be yourself publicly due to the fear of the people you may run into.” – B, Bee.
I often find myself hoping and wishing for a day that this oppression stops but realistically it won’t. I can’t imagine a day when transgender people are given the same dignity that Cisgender people are in my lifetime. However, for every second we are here, we need to fight for our people, and one of the most powerful things we can do is stay alive. When the world wants nothing more than to see you dead, your greatest strength is your own life.
Image By: Aidan Carver
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