A poem for TDOV

Content warning: mentions transphobia, murder, death of trans kids, fascism and JK Rowling

Visibility was never our problem

You can see us just fine.
The target on our backs
is visible to all.

Forget the passivity of seeing,
or remembering.
It’s time to act.

So how about a new day?
Trans day of love and celebration
trans day of getting housed
trans day of caring about us
trans day of access to healthcare
trans day of not being infantilised
trans day of not being gatekept
trans day of… just fucking believe us, okay?
even when we’re autistic, yes
just… accept what we say
give us dignity and respect
let us explore ourselves
our needs
without judgement.

Or how about
trans day of quit pretending your arbitrary rules
about pronouns and names
bits of paper
and toilet doors
are biological facts?
Trans day of maybe the world
doesn’t have to be ordered
solely for the convenience of cis people.

Or then again why not
trans day of no cis woman
was ever hurt by trans civil rights?
Trans day of fuck the cisheteropatriarchy
and all its works?
Trans day of fuck the police
and fuck your borders.
Trans day of agreeing with Donald Trump
does not make you a feminist.

I’m far from done
Because this is my
Trans day of rage.

How about trans day of not letting kids die
for want of evidence-based healthcare?
Trans day of recognising a few alive adults with regrets
is better than larger numbers of dead kids.
Trans day of minding that kids are dying.

Trans day of actually cancelling JK Rowling
before she gets more of us killed.
What’s it going to take
to stop people from helping
her fund hate and destruction?

Or how about trans day of truth?
Trans day of journalists knowing how to
debunk propaganda and lies?
Trans day of people doing the reading
before opening their mouths.
Trans day of listening to us
instead of opinionated, clueless cis people.

Trans day of bodily autonomy.
Trans day of giving a fuck about the murders.
Trans day of being allowed to be
Really. Fucking. Angry.
Trans day of cis allies speaking up for us.
Trans day of not having to worry about
how bad it’s going to get
before folks realise we’re dying here.

Trans day of no it’s not a complex issue:
Accept us and we don’t die
and nobody else gets hurt either.
That’s not complicated.

Trans day of not comparing me
burning my personal copy of Harry Potter
with the Nazis destroying
the biggest repository
of the study of trans people
that had yet existed.

Trans day of knowing your history.
Trans day of knowing what fascism does to trans people.
Trans day of knowing fascism
when your country is in the grip of it.

Fuck visibility.
Everyone can see us just fine.
How about
trans day of not turning away?
We don’t need to be seen
we need to be heard.

Is it necessary for libraries to stock gender critical books?

This blog came out of a conversation with a librarian friend who was talking through the rationale for pushing back against the insistence of some anti-trans lobbyists that their books be stocked on free speech grounds.

Don’t let them draw you onto their turf

The thing about free speech arguments, so beloved of the far right, including those in the “gender critical (GC)” camp, is they only work from within their own, flawed, internal logic. We get firehosed with these arguments almost daily, so we don’t always see the holes. This can make them difficult to contradict, until we realise that free speech is often not the relevant or salient issue in the discussion, and it is not really what is being argued for.

Note, too, that right wing free speech ideology contains a contradiction, which is essentially this:

“What the left are saying is so dangerous and harmful, free speech arguments should not apply – they must be silenced at all costs”.

So, there is an inherent belief that free speech should have limits. The self-same people who claim a right to say what they like about trans people will also talk about “dangerous trans ideology”, social contagion, the need to stop schools from talking supportively about trans kids, and so on.

It’s worth spotting this hypocrisy. Are we really talking about the principles of free speech? Is that really what they are championing? It’s worth a closer look.

A library doesn’t stock all books

This applies to books and libraries, but it also applies to giving people a platform. Because unless a platform or library is equally open to all books/all comers, then there is a selection process. It’s no longer possible to call this a free speech argument if speakers or books are being chosen over other speakers or books. To not be given a place in a library or on a platform is a consequence of selection and choice, not censorship.

And then, a belief that you are owed a place on a platform or in a library becomes a question not of free speech but entitlement.

What’s the selection process by which a speaker is invited to speak? we might ask. What are the criteria, say, if it’s an academic space? A justice-oriented space? A political space? A news program? What credentials does the person need? How is that decided? Does the institution have a responsibility to fact-check before information is included?

Likewise for books: which books are included here? How are they selected? Which books are rejected and why? Are books independently verified and fact-checked?

“A lot of the books we need for our courses aren’t in the library” X*, a trans student tells me when he finds out I’m writing this blog, frustrated that his university library just ordered multiple copies of a GC, explicitly anti-trans book that has been much criticised for misleading and inaccurate content.

Is the anti-trans book required reading for something? Given the general lack of academic rigour behind GC thinking, why would it be? If not, why is it necessary for it to be in the library? Or is the library just including it to come into line with a populist movement targeting trans people? Or for fear of being plastered over the pages of the Daily Mail as an example of the dangerous leftist urge to control discourse?

“How did this particular book meet the rigorous inclusion/selection and peer review processes an academic institution requires in order to maintain academic standards?” is a good question to ask.

Academic rigour

From two decades analysing the flawed logic of “gender critical (GC)” transphobia in particular, I have learned one thing, and that is that GCs regurgitate the same arguments over and over, leaning on the same tiny number of flawed or misrepresented research, all of which has long been superseded and debunked by rigorous academic processes.

What in my experience GCs don’t do is respond to trans academia; the enormous body of research into trans experiences and healthcare, or any of the thorough and rigorously academic data that entirely deconstructs and dismantles their worldview. I have hundreds of relevant academic papers on my hard drive alone – the amount of study and evidence base supporting what I write and train about cannot be understated.

The reason they get away with this lack of academic rigour and engagement without simply being laughed out of the room wherever they go is that trans academia is niche, academics in the field are rarely given a platform to alert the world to good data and arguments, and so it’s possible to maintain public ignorance and for GCs to delude the world that they are making good arguments.

For folks that use the term “critical” a lot, they don’t seem very aware of what it means or what critical academia requires of them.

They are not having an academic discourse because they are not engaging with the vastly superior quantity of academic work that disagrees with them, critically or otherwise. Meanwhile, trans academia has no choice but to discourse with them, and that at least has honed and refined our own feminist arguments to a highly sophisticated level. Which in turn is why trans academia is so respected within feminist academia as a whole.

How do you categorise anti-trans books?

The next question to think about is the one of labelling. Where do you put such books in a library? How do you introduce such speakers? Do you forewarn your audience that, like climate change deniers, GC thinking is disputed by the vast majority of experts in the field? That there is a huge body of work debunking their ideas? That they are widely seen by many as a hate group, organised and well funded lobbyists who disseminate nothing more than propaganda?

Is there a section for propaganda in the library? A section for what is widely considered to be bigotry? Who assesses the material before it is categorised, and how much do they know about the topic? Would you put a book that was widely considered to be homophobic in the LGBTQ+ section? If a book must be in the library, then where should such a book be? Arguably not the LGBTQ+ section if its stance is so profoundly anti part of the LGBTQ community. Equally, these texts cannot be considered categorisable as feminist if their central focus is not on women, but on trans people (and explicitly stripping their civil rights from them). It’s an absurd thought that in 2023, with all the moves forward in discussion of intersectional feminism, that we should be even contemplating a campaign against a marginalised group’s civil rights as “feminist”. Meanwhile, many thinkers, including Judith Butler, have pointed to the ways GC campaigns are damaging to women.

It might be worth also asking this question: In the year 2023, would a library take seriously an academic book about women written by men, and disagreed with by most women? A book about gay people written by straight people, that most gay academics vehemently oppose? What does it mean when we choose not to afford trans people as a group their own voice within academic thought, but allow cis people to pronounce loudly on trans experiences? This could be described as infantilisation.

Of course, if a culture pretends GCs themselves are marginalised, then it legitimises giving them support, facilitating and spreading their views. Which in turn allows people not to lend trans people their support and strength at a time in history when trans people are by all metrics a dangerously beset and scapegoated marginalised group. Cis GCs are not marginalised on the topic of trans issues because they are not trans, whatever their other marginalisations might be. Being widely disagreed with is not in and of itself a marginalisation.

Book burning isn’t what you think it is

Of course, the other thing we know about libraries is they are book burners. I remember as a kid my librarian mother putting me in the back room and getting me to stamp “cancelled” in a pile of books they’d put into retirement. It was the 1970s, but apparently cancel culture was already in full swing. Books get destroyed constantly, because they’re falling apart, because nobody wants them, because the knowledge in them has been superseded, and sometimes, because they are, in light of better understanding about the world and about minorities, too appalling to put on the shelves.

There is nothing a “gender critical” writer has written that hasn’t been superseded, disproven, overturned or thoroughly debunked. They rely on the subject area being sufficiently niche to mean most people don’t know how flimsy their arguments are.

Putting a gender critical book in a library of up-to-date knowledge is akin to having a book from the 70s that says autism is caused by “refrigerator moms” or homosexuality is a psychological disease. There is a need for such books to be held somewhere as a record of what people used to think before we knew better, but again it’s important to think about where, and how they are presented.

At best, it’s like housing the 2^nd edition of a science book when we’re now on version ten. No, it doesn’t matter if the copies of the old book are burned, we’re not trying to suppress anything, we’re just keeping up to date. Science is full of things we used to think and now know are wrong. Science is also full of academics who cling to outdated ideas out of ego while the world moves on around them. When they are given undue power and platform, as we’ve seen with the anti-vaxxer movement, they can create havoc.

I sympathise with people who’ve been lured by social media algorithms and firehosed with misinformation and propaganda about trans people, but there are also flat earthers and anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers out there in great numbers, and we don’t hold any moral responsibility to pander to or treat with reverence such beliefs, especially when we’re bound by notions of academic rigour or accurate reporting. An idea being popular or politically expedient does not make it right or hold more academic weight.

The frustrating thing about comparing people who pulp obsolete knowledge or burn their own unwanted books when millions of copies exist in the world is that it misunderstands what Nazi bookburning was.

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was specifically a repository of knowledge about LGBTQA+ people, where the openly gay academic and campaigner Magnus Hirschfield formalised (for better and worse) the way trans people were viewed and medicalised in the twentieth century. The Nazis burned the library there and knowledge that was at the time more current and up to date than anything the world had seen was lost entirely.

This is what censorship looks like – the state withholding information from the populace that has not been disproven or superceded, but is objected to on ideological grounds.

in the exact way that GC ideologists go all-out to suppress knowledge of trans issues in schools and the media, and insist that their academically dubious and well disproven dogma is always represented as equally valid in any discussion of trans experiences.

There are appropriate places to put these books

Eventually GC books will be pulped because it’s inevitable that their lack of rigour and coherent argument will be seen through., and nobody will have any use for them, because they are not useful.

Such books need to be preserved in collections that want to hold an accurate history of any movement of thought and ideas. In such collections, e.g of the history of feminist discourse, an insert alerting the reader to issues with the contents is of course appropriate. An institution is allowed to both stock a piece of writing it opposes, and position itself in relation to that writing. But such material only belongs in very specific libraries.

Even there, neutrality in the face of oppression is neither desirable nor required.

My friend tells me about a library that carries accurate transcripts of Hitler’s speeches, which are valuable historical documents, particularly given propaganda rewrote what he said. An appropriate institution can house these works and still have a stance on what it thinks of their contents.

Perhaps, it is more universally understood that Hitler’s speeches are wrong and harmful. We probably won’t have people persuading us that it’s a matter of free speech that copies of these transcripts are stocked in every public library. We don’t have the BBC wheeling out a Hitler expert to justify his philosophy as a counter to every relevant news item.

But how can we possibly be living in a free society if someone is not making a case for Hitler’s views whenever a relevant conversation arises?

If free speech is to be the argument then I’m sorry, it applies as much to Hitler’s speeches as it does to Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock and Sheila Jeffries.  

Is this an appropriate place to house this discussion; are we seeking to be a complete and definitive record of a particular branch of knowledge, or are we selective? If selective, then free speech arguments do not apply.

If we are selective, how do we select? My justice principles state we should centre the marginalised group affected by such discourse in advising how we produce a fair and accurate representation of the salient points and issues.

And for those outraged that I’m comparing the ideology of people who currently campaign against trans people’s civil rights with fascism – I could and Judith Butler has, but in this case that’s not the argument I’m making at all. I’m saying that if your argument is “we’re right, we’re good, and we’re not like Hitler” that’s a very different argument than “we, along with everyone else including Hitler, have a right to free speech, therefore you should platform me/stock my books/include my arguments on Newsnight and so on, in exactly the same way as you should include Hitler’s.”

Take this seriously before it’s too late

We’ve seen before the damage done by institutions treating inaccurate, ideological information with more respect, weight and rigour than it deserves, thus giving it an endorsement of robustness it did not warrant. We saw this with the BBC over-platforming Nigel Farage and moving the Overton window strongly in favour of anti-immigrant sentiments that drove the Brexit agenda. We’ve seen it globally with climate change denial being platformed over and over until it is now too late to save much of what would have been saved had the world concertedly and robustly taken climate change seriously when we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that it was a problem.

The trans community are in the heart of a cultural emergency. Those of us who work with large numbers of trans people have a sense of the size of the cost from society unnecessarily wringing its hands over whether it is safe to allow us to exist as who we are.

Libraries, media, and those that are booking speakers can and do have a moral responsibility to ensure they are not signal boosting harmful misinformation, academically obsolete arguments and pure propaganda. Unless it’s their job to ensure that all views are aired and heard equally, and they are making no selection process, the concept of “free speech” is just a red herring.

*name redacted for anonymity

With great thanks to B, my librarian friend, for inspiring this blog, for reading it through, and for providing the following resources for librarians:

LGBTQIA resources for library workers

Book 28 is a small LGBTIQ+ library

Violence against the marginalised: it’s not just a gendered thing

CN for domestic violence and sexual violence mentions, discussions of structural violence, particularly ableism, and its role in violence

I was preparing some training on disability access and inclusion recently and I looked up the statistics on disabled people’s experiences of crime. The following graphs show the ONS statistics on domestic abuse and sexual assault.

The very blatant story these graphs show us is that disability is a stronger factor in being targeted for violence than being a woman. Now, if we look at the various stats for assault of LGBT+ people, we see the same thing – LGBT+ people, regardless of gender, experience higher levels of victimisation across the board than women as a group, and trans people’s experiences are particularly high.

So, the question is, why do we say, “violence against women and girls” rather than “violence against marginalised people” and what does this do to our understanding of the mechanisms behind victimisation?

How “gender critical” ideology has warped the conversation to serve patriarchy

Feminism talks about structures of power created to give a group advantages. Intersectional feminism talks about how these oppressive structures interlock with one another so that misogyny and classism and racism and ableism etc are not separable – it leads to the overarching concept of kyriarchy.

“Gender Critical” ideology has, I think it’s clear, flourished because mainstream non-feminist influences promoted it over other feminists. This was evident within the domestic violence sector that I used to work in, where funding went towards gender essentialist models of male violence and female passivity (discussed here), and with the publications and mainstream successes of writers who promoted this ideology. The establishment may pretend to disapprove, but it will gleefully facilitate.

And the reason this ideology serves patriarchy so well is because it erases the idea of built power structures that can be dismantled in favour of the idea of male supremacy as a biological inheritance. Men are imagined as fundamentally and biologically predisposed towards dominance and violence, sexual or otherwise. Inherent to this message is the idea that it’s not patriarchal power we need to be afraid of, but rather the dangerous, marginalised stranger lurking behind the bushes. Women need protection, it says, not equality, and safe, legally segregated spaces, not a level playing field.

Women don’t experience less violence in society from men because segregated toilets (etc) exist and because they are legally separate and can be excluded from the kinds of schools that breed many of our politicians and judiciary. But it makes a nice story in preservation of the status quo.

Let’s not learn our trans politics from transphobes

In making misogyny the “one true oppression” we bow to the erasure of built oppressive structures and reinforce biological essentialism – buying into the notion that there are fundamental differences between men and women that cause inequality, rather than simply power relations.

Meanwhile, here’s the rub: a lot of us in this community are disabled, and all of us are LGBT+, and actually, these two axes of oppression are much more salient in predicting the amount of violence we experience. Transmisogyny ensures an extra helping of many types of violence, because it adds in another dimension of oppression us TME folks don’t experience. Equally racism adds a dimension white people don’t experience, and so on.

Where our discourse goes awry is when we omit to notice that all trans people are experiencing levels of violence greater than those of cis women. It took me a long time to realise this – the inordinate amounts of violence I’ve face in my life are statistically more likely to be related to me being disabled, bi, trans or autistic than to having been assigned or perceived female. Transphobia, queerphobia and the victimisation of disability are incredibly strong forces in all our lives. Ageism, racism and classism are also much greater predictors of violence than is often acknowledged.

I think this is what has partly given rise to the “transandrophobia” debate and the unnecessary need for AFAB trans folks to talk about their (dubious) “female socialisation”. The narrative of female victimisation is so powerful we completely lose sight of belonging to groups that are far more likely to be attacked than cishet, able white (etc) women.

Where’s the discourse on violence against disabled people? LGBT+ people? POC? Young people? And so forth.

White women are also unfortunately good at co-opting the victimisation of women of colour to exaggerate their own marginalisation. Meanwhile, sometimes very privileged white middle class able women can put themselves into positions of power in queer spaces with zero ability to reflect on the ways in which they hold structural power. The apparent narrative is that “woman” is the big brand oppression and no other oppression comes close.

You cannot split our community down the middle

For me, quite aside from the fact gender isn’t a binary and gendered oppression isn’t either, trans spaces need a very vibrant awareness of intersectionality and an ability to not be blinkered to any oppressive structures. While current toxic mainstream discourse has focussed on trans women, additionally endangering them, in community spaces what we see is a much more mixed picture, in terms of who especially needs our care.

The community isn’t divided neatly by AGAB into winners and losers – there are trans women who’ve never experienced violence, and trans men who have. This isn’t because “men are oppressed too” and it certainly isn’t because trans women hold structural power over trans men, but because our identities are complex and our experiences multi-determined. If you’ve experienced violence, you probably have less in common with someone of your AGAB who hasn’t than another trans person, AGAB irrelevant, who has. If you’re living on the breadline, that’s a social factor more salient in terms of the risks you face than which label you claim.

This doesn’t mean TME folks don’t need to reflect on and unlearn transmisogyny. It does mean that transmisogyny isn’t the only oppressive structure that exists. It’s the job of all of us to reflect on the ways in which we hold privilege as well as the ways we don’t, and be mindful of which intersections are relevent in any given conversation.  

I remember once making a transphobic feminist implode by pointing out that Margaret Thatcher could and did oppress working class men, gay men and men of colour, and none of that meant that misogyny isn’t real, nor was MT exempt from it. In a conversation where gendered oppression was the One True Real Oppression, this statement was too much for said transphobe.

Of course, if we’d specifically been having a conversation about misogyny, that would have been a derail, but we weren’t, we were talking about the fact that women can be oppressive and hold power.

If we simply understood queerphobia and transphobia as Huge and Deadly forms of oppression in their own right trans men would have the framework to articulate their struggles more coherently and we as a community could hold together instead of letting ourselves be split by what are essentially outside narratives.

Equally, while the term transmisogyny is entirely justified because of the specific and prevalent phenomenon it describes, the deadly combination of being young and trans is often missed and neglected, as is the risk our young people of all AGAB are at because of the current transphobic discourse that specifically targets young people. And the way the prevalence of neurodiversity in our community is used to undermine autistic trans people is also a glaring issue. And the way ableism and fatphobia create lethal barriers to trans healthcare (and the ways barriers to healthcare create barriers to safety). And the multiple systemic barriers and risk of violence trans people of colour experience. Structural violence takes many forms, and it all matters. There doesn’t need to be a competition on this, we can care about all oppression and want to dismantle it in all its forms.

Trans men who’ve faced violence, discrimination and abuse don’t need to (and shouldn’t) insert themselves into a conversation about trans women’s experiences, they can have their own conversation on its own merits, in other words.

Right now in the UK if you don’t have the means to self-fund your transition you face 5 year waits for healthcare and that could prove fatal, and expose you to increased violence, so anyone already transitioned or with access to private healthcare carries enormous privileges in our community. I own that privilege as someone who faced a one, not five-year wait.

We all have value and many of us are in poor shape

There are many ways in which our marginalisations can put our safety at risk. They’re all violences. In community, we don’t need to figure out which of these violences is the most important because they’re bad enough, all of them are. We can and should value and care about everyone in this community and the violences thay face. The LGBT+ community has played the “we’ll send the bus back for the rest of you later” game and it doesn’t work out for anyone.

If the stats shown above tell us anything it’s that unlearning ableism is every bit as imperative as unlearning sexism. There are no lesser oppressions, no unimportant causes. And if that’s true, as a community we have a responsibility to show up for each other, work at dismantling all these structures, and building community across difference, not assumptions of sameness.

Why not to say trans and non-binary and what to say instead

CW: mentions suicidal thoughts, misgendering, transphobia, mental health, exclusion, dysphoria, trans healthcare

Not the blog post I’ve been promising, but one that’s been requested by a couple of people.

This blog isn’t about correcting individual people’s language or labels. What it’s about is how we organise ourselves, and the words we use when we come together in visible groups, the messages we collectively give to cis people about who belongs where, and why it matters.

Nothing is ever as simple as a longer-than-i-wanted-it-to-be blog post can describe. I’m going to argue, though, that trans or trans+ are good enough umbrella terms, and, more, to the point, even if they’re not, “trans and non-binary” is not useful, and there’s a reason why many of us have been fighting against this terminology tooth and nail for many years and feel frustrated by its resurgence. It’s also why I used “trans and gender diverse” in my book title, even though I’m not entirely wedded to that term either, and “divergent” would probably have been more accurate.

Words rewrite history

Recently, I was delivering some LGBT+ competency training and I was asked two familiar questions: the first – why were trans people “added on” to LGBT+ when being gay is about sex? And the second, “wait, are you saying non-binary people are trans? I didn’t know!”

Cue me patiently explaining the history – that the word “gay” was once more inclusive, and being queer is a many-faceted thing that for many people, not just trans people, is about gender as well as sex. A butch lesbian once told me “butch is my gender, lesbian my sexuality” – you cannot separate the two when so many of us have a queer relationship with both.

We were always a part of this community, so the addition of the letters B&T as an act of “inclusion” created a false story – that bi and trans people were a late addition to an existing gay movement, erasing the fact that bi and trans people were integral (and often foundational) to the movement right from the start, and “gay” at one time meant us too.

And the same thing is happening with trans.

The history of trans labels

When Leslie Feinberg popularised the word “transgender” in the 90s its meaning was close to what non-binary means now, only perhaps even wider and more inclusive than non-binary has become. Feinberg was in no way a “binary” trans person, and zie used the term to include a very wide group of people. But over time, transgender became narrowed to mean trans men and women, or rather non-binary people got forgotten and excluded, and we needed a new word to include ourselves again.

For the record, many of us wanted that word to be genderqueer, not non-binary. I don’t like the word non-binary at all and for many reasons don’t want it as my label. But I accept this is what the majority settled on. Just like, back in the 90s a lot of WLW didn’t like the word lesbian and did not identify as lesbian, but we didn’t replace the L in LGBT for them.

When I came out as non-binary a decade ago, we were fighting for the right to access trans healthcare and be included in trans spaces. We were fighting to drop the godawful trans asterisk popularised by Sam Killerman, the cis guy who plagiarised the Genderbread person from trans people and talked over our community time and time again, becoming cis people’s go-to resources on learning about gender diversity. We needed not to be seen as a footnote, something separate. We needed people to understand that misgendering us mattered just as much as misgendering any trans person. That those of us who needed healthcare needed it as much as any trans person. That we weren’t something different and separate – that we were the trans community as much as anybody.

Meanwhile TERFs back then were telling the world that “true transsexuals” were okay (as long as they saw themselves as mentally ill and biologically the sex they were assigned as) but the rest of us – the transgenders – were the real problem, and sure enough we were getting backlash from some quarters within the community that we didn’t belong and were spoiling things for the real trans people with real needs and real gender dysphoria. We were the special snowflakes identifying as attack helicopters, and so on.

This us and them splitting of a movement into the “good ones” and the “unacceptable riff-raff” is of course a classic divide-and-conquer tactic.

No specific detriment

Then in 2015 the UK government stated:

The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination if it arises from their being perceived as either male or female. We recognise that a very small number of people consider themselves to be of neither gender. We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment…

Trans men and women needed to be trans, but we were just doing it for kicks, was the underlying message. We didn’t need protection or inclusion like the real trans people. Although since then we’ve had one legal case that set a precedent to the contrary, let’s be clear that “non-binary is separate/different from trans” has legal implications for inclusion, healthcare and civil rights.

One real-world consequence of this was me going without a passport for a decade, with all the difficulties that entailed, and finally succumbing to one that misidentifies me.

Back in 2015, I was in a long-term relationship with a trans man. The reactions to us both coming out were starkly different. He was correctly gendered by our queer friends quickly, I was not. His trans man friends almost never got my pronouns right, and saw me either as a trans man in denial or a cis woman – many trans men still do. In other words, refusing to see me at all. Queer friends thought I was just jumping on my partner’s bandwagon, even though I was the one who’d been involved in trans activism and talking about my complicated gender for years and we came out within weeks of one another. He got support, I got pushback, it was that blatant a divide.

In seeing non-binary genders as different, more trivial, less in need of support or as suffering less difficulty than trans men and women, non-binary people get excluded from safety and care. The exact same thing happened to bi+ people, incidentally, which is why it transpires that bi+ people suffer worse health outcomes than lesbian and gay people. Exclusion harms. Stories about groups being less oppressed and therefore less in need of inclusion harm. When we internalise those stories, we can harm ourselves and each other too.

The psychological impact of your needs being dismissed

I really hear the non-transitioning non-binary people who exclude themselves from the word trans because they feel like they’re not as oppressed, or don’t suffer enough.

But here’s the thing. People did such a comprehensive job of making me feel like an inconvenience to the “real” trans community that I started to think the world would be better off without me even existing. I began to believe I was inconvenient to the cause of trans rights in exactly the same way bi and trans people had been made to feel inconvenient to the cause of gay rights, and edged out. In having my needs trivialised, I trivialised myself and that meant it became harder and harder to ask for what I needed, or even accept my needs were real and valid.

But none of that changed what I needed or the pain I felt in trying to make my needs smaller, e.g by not coming out to my partner’s wider family, by accepting “he” pronouns for a while at work when I decided to medically transition.

It took a long time for me to understand it’s important to all trans people to realise we have the right to exist as ourselves without assimilation, neat little boxes, and medicalisation. Non-binary people being fully part of this community gives everyone breathing space because nothing about trans experiences is binary. It dismantles the tyranny of “trans enough” that can leave everyone with a sense of imposter syndrome.

The last thing this community needs is more gates and gatekeepers.

But also, understanding non-binary people’s stated needs, whether for correct pronouns, somewhere safe to pee, or healthcare, are every bit as important and necessary as for trans men and women’s is a matter of life and death for many of us. I could so easily not still be here thanks to that belief that I was taking space I had no right to chipping away at my sense that I had could ask for things that I nevertheless profoundly needed.

If I don’t get to call myself trans, does the trans man who doesn’t want lower surgery? What about the one who doesn’t mind what pronouns he gets? The one who transitioned quietly and easily thanks to private health insurance and never experienced transphobia? The one who didn’t experience anything he could have called dysphoria, only euphoria?

If trans is a term only permissible for those who have it the toughest we are going backwards to the days when you only got to transition if you would not survive otherwise. We become defined by our suffering.

Newsflash: we should have the right to transition in any way we need if it will make our lives happier or more meaningful. We don’t owe anyone a narrative of suffering in order to get what we need to thrive.

The move from transsexual to transgender to trans* to trans to trans+

There was a reason the community had gone towards “transgender” and away from “transsexual” – the community as a whole were realising we weren’t all about surgery, that not all of us, even the most “binary” among us had identical needs and profiles that could neatly be spelled out by a medical pathway and underlined with a GRC. That it wasn’t for cis clinicians to make us into who we knew ourselves to be, but for us to self-determine who we were.  Transness is a mixed and complicated experience and each of our transitions is different, tailor made for us alone. But all of us probably do share the need to change something – clothes, pronouns, names, identity labels, documents, hair, bodies etc – in order to thrive.

And this is why people distancing themselves from the word trans can be so problematic if it goes beyond personal preference and into dictating umbrella terms. Not because everyone doesn’t have the right to determine their own personal labels, of course they do, but because “I’m not trans because…” so often misdefines and misunderstands the breadth and complexity of what “trans” is. It narrows the definition of trans in order to leave people outside of it, which can have the effect of excluding non-binary people from spaces they need to be included, or to problematise, medicalise or otherwise distance from the trans community.

For instance, every time someone says “I’m not trans because I’m not medically transitioning” I die a little inside, because that person just reduced trans people to a medical process, and it’s only a small step to reinforcing the validity of trans identities only if they have the correct surgeries. Which screws over a lot of disenfranchised people who don’t have access to, or don’t want, trans healthcare.

Trans+ works fine. Or trans and gender diverse/divergent. There are genuine and legitimate reasons for someone not to call themself trans (e.g. intersex, 2 spirit) but that doesn’t mean splitting off non-binary from trans is the answer.

I understand equally that we need to signal that non-binary people are fully included in our spaces because that’s not always a given – we haven’t always been sure of our welcome. At the ICTA Project I worked on through to last year we (most of the trans researchers were non-binary) favoured using “trans (including non-binary)” to be very clear about our inclusivity. But “trans and non-binary” doesn’t signal inclusion, but separation, in the way “men and trans men” wouldn’t be an inclusive phrasing, but “men, including trans men” would, or “cis and trans men” would.

Whose needs are greater here?

I’m prepared to be proved wrong, but I feel like the damage done to non-binary people excluded from the support of trans spaces, not counted in trans healthcare discussions, excluded from trans healthcare itself, and left out of trans legal/civil rights discourse outweighs the impact on non-binary people who don’t consider themselves trans of us vetoing the umbrella term “trans and non-binary”, which we’ve been trying to do relentlessly for a decade.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve yet to hear evidence that the same safety/civil rights imperatives are attached to the need for the specific terminology “trans and non-binary” to be used as the default umbrella term.

Someone’s right to choose what labels they want for themselves is essential, but it does not need to dictate what umbrella term should be used more generally, because no umbrella term will be perfect. For example, I choose genderqueer and trans as my personal labels, but I accept non-binary as a term that includes me, even though I dislike the word, and don’t think it’s helpful or fair to conceptualise trans men and women as “binary”.

Likewise, I see no great harm done to people when we accept trans as Leslie Feinberg intended “transgender” – an umbrella term that includes what we now call non-binary.

The growing use of “trans and non-binary” isn’t just about language: it teaches cis people that folks like me aren’t trans when we just spent a decade fighting hard to be recognised as part of this community. The real-world consequences are people taking non-binary identities less seriously and seeing our need for healthcare, accommodations and civil rights as less important. And that impacts our safety, mental health, and wellbeing.

Not cis, not trans, but a secret third thing?

I’m not a fan of binaries or dichotomies. But it’s hard to describe someone non-binary as definitively “not trans” without narrowing the definition of what trans means. People say cis/trans is an unwanted binary, but as cis only means not trans, let’s try saying “I’m neither queer nor not-queer” or “I’m neither bisexual nor not-bisexual” “I’m neither non-binary nor not non-binary” – sounds ridiculous huh?

It’s not a binary to say there are people who are trans and people who aren’t. Even though we can’t accurately measure where one ends and the other begins. We don’t need to – trans can be a land without borders, because if people need to belong here, then they do. It’s not a resource that will run out if too many people claim it, it’s not something that needs to be patrolled and guarded with high fences and “no entry without a permit” signs. It’s not exactly prime property to be located in at this juncture in history.

It is more than okay to not know if you’re cis or trans, or feel you live in the undefined borderlands between the two, but that’s a whole other thing that doesn’t require the drawing of new borders around your identity. The drawing of those borders only reinforces the “trans enough” narrative where people might feel they have to move faster than they want to or towards things they’re not sure of in order to prove their belonging and need of the safety of community. We don’t need anything to feed people’s queer imposter syndrome, which is also in infinitely available supply.

When trans people are one of the most scapegoated groups on the planet right now, I understand the need to disown the trans label, or to deny having the same difficult experiences that some trans people share. But rewriting our history and definitions, and talking over those of us in need of inclusion for our safety and wellbeing is not helpful.

By doing this, “trans” gets turned into the narrow little box it never was.

Transandrophobia: we need to ditch this word now

It’s been a long time since I blogged, I may say more about why another day. But today I want to speak up about how destructive the “transandrophobia” discourse has been.

Where transmisogyny was a clarifying word that helped us understand something about the specific attack on trans women, transandrophobia is a muddying word that has entirely betrayed our community and made nuanced discourse impossible, as well as pulling apart our spaces when we desperately need to pull together. I’m furious at the number of people who’ve adopted this word and dug in at the inevitable conflict this has stirred.

Who am I?

It feels important to own where my voice in this is coming from. I’m a disabled, transitioned AFAB non-binary person, living a relatively marginalised and fragile existence. I’ve been on the receiving end of much violence in my life that lives at the intersection of queer and transphobia. I do want a way to have conversations about that violence without talking over trans women. I’ll blog more about this later. I have thoughts on how we have these conversations, but this blog is about how not to do it.

I am transmisogyny exempt (TME), and have always considered it vital to reflect on my TME privilege. I know many trans women have highlighted how bringing diverse trans experiences into the frame when done right has the power to disrupt TERF discourse, our invisibility fosters narratives that collapse when we become more visible.

But there are ways to talk about trans men’s experiences and TME non-binary experiences (which are not the same) and this wasn’t it.

These things are relevant: I am not a man, neither am I masculine. The tedious way AFAB trans people are categorised as either “trans men lite” or “not really trans at all” is only reinforced by this discourse. I am not having an experience that can be “rounded up” into a trans man’s and I am not responsible for trans men’s or indeed masculine people’s words. I hope at some point to blog more about my own experience, including the very gendered way I get treated by men and masculine folks, regardless of their AGAB, but in this particular blog I’m going to concentrate more on the TME privilege I do have than the gendered privileges I’m not so blessed with.

But note: catch-all words with analogs of masc, man etc are not in any way helpful to my liberation and are just reinforcements of the binary. Transandrophobia is a word that, even were it not a cursed and oppressive concoction, explicitly excludes me. “Transmasculine” does not describe me.

But this is a conversation about feminist discourse that should have taken us way past the point of invoking such a word, and much as this discourse does harm me, the much bigger problem is that it harms trans women and harms our community cohesion.

Transandrophobia and its origins

The word started out as “transmisandry” and effectively it is still “transmisandry” wearing a supposedly more palatable mask. Like the word “misandry” it was intended as a mirror of “transmisogyny” – a way to equalise conversations about trans men and women’s experiences in the same way men’s right’s activists inserted themselves into feminist conversations. “What about teh menz?” we used to mockingly say in feminist spaces about these folks who would only ever talk about male suicide or the draft in the context of talking over feminist conversations, never in their own spaces and on their own merit.

Is this a way to highlight trans men’s experiences or does it simply talk over women and also, conveniently, abandon trans women at the time they most need us to be vocally and steadfastly alongside them?

What it looks like is male entitlement to take from women. By jumping onto the transmisogyny conversation, trans men did the equivalent of asking about International Men’s Day on International Women’s Day but not actually getting involved in IMD on the day it falls, or building a discourse on its own structures rather than stealing from trans women’s labour.

Masculinity is complicated by various marginalisations

Black men have specific experiences at the intersection of masculinity and blackness. This means, for example, that black men can be prized for their physicality in a way that is deeply objectifying. Think of the dehumanising way Linford Christie was treated when he was winning as a runner, for example. Young black men face profiling and institutional, state violence, including murder by the police, as in the case of Chris Kaba here in the UK. Just two examples among millions.

Working class men have specific experiences at the intersection of masculinity and class. In some cultures they can be drafted, for example, or in certain contexts have no prospects outside of work that is physically damaging to them. They may be heavily indoctrinated in toxic masculinity; ideas that encourage them to not value their own health and safety, take risks, see themselves as expendable, neglect their emotional wellbeing and each other’s, see themselves as inessential to family life and nurturing children, see themselves as needing to be physically strong and capable of violence – all of these values are indoctrinated into working class men to serve the ruling class.

And just so we’re clear, a way working-class men are ‘rewarded’ for this terrible deal, is by being placed above working-class women.

Disabled men and gay men may fall foul of masculinity based on not meeting the expectations of masculinity that society holds. These expectations can prove fatal for gay and disabled men.

Any man who also occupies a place in an oppressed group will have their masculinity complicated by oppression in ways that create a unique group experience. Trans men are not remotely special in this regard.

Expectations of maleness and masculinity are called toxic for a reason. Nearly every time an MRA shouts “misandry” what they are reporting on is in fact toxic masculinity and they just need to go read about that through a feminist lens. Start with Bell Hooks Feminism is for everyone and go on from there.

There are many experiences that gay men have that lesbians do not. But they do not need a special word for their oppression, nor do they need to claim parity with lesbians in a game of oppression top trumps. Misogyny, while it undoubtedly is part of the origin story of homophobia, alongside colonialism, is still a structure that gay men (conditionally) benefit from.

Masculinity is constructed to make everyone insecure

Of course there are specific experiences for those who live at the intersection of transphobia and masculinity in all its toxic constructions. Masculinity was designed to be a game most people lose and fall foul of. Just like wealth, it makes you insecure, and is by its nature precarious and violent to even its most privileged members, let alone those otherwise marginalised. It is designed to create power and incite fear through strength, violence and rape culture, but the cost of that for marginalised men is high.

But these negative associations with men did not come from some group of people oppressing men. So when trans men post those tiresome entreaties that “men are good, we shouldn’t hate them” they are ignoring that “man hating” is usually the term levelled at people who call out men’s violence as it is enabled and constructed by patriarchy as a system of oppression.

Example: when a trans man entitles himself to physically lash out at a partner because culturally the message is that’s something excusable for men to do, he is not being oppressed by toxic ideas about men, he is being indoctrinated into toxic masculinity, the seductive idea that men can’t help being violent, and therefore are held to less account when they are violent, even in queer spaces.

Masculinity is a pyramid scheme, just like wealth and power. Just like whiteness was a tool to divide white working men from enslaved people in order to make them feel like they were winning at something and stop them rising up together, these structures were created to maintain the power of ruling classes. Toxic masculinity and male supremacy is designed to make men feel like they have something special, to feel superior.

Masculinity as a construct lures marginalised men into thinking there is one power in the world they ought to have. And when they find that they don’t have as much power as the story told them they should, they blame women and cry “misandry!” when women did not create this unequal structure.

White women, do of course perpetuate the objectification of black male bodies, and they are also co-opted into white supremacist ideas of men of colour being a threat to them, something that has perpetuated racism and segregation throughout the history of white supremacy. These oppression structures interlock – they are designed to work together, so even though we talk about them separately, we really can’t pretend that colonialism, white supremacy, male supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, ableism and class are not interlocking systems that are designed to support each other.

So yes, being marginalised complicates masculinity and the entitlement to the benefits that male supremacy sells. But male supremacy is a fiction, men are not better than women and they don’t deserve to have things easier or be in charge.

More to the point, the reason gay and trans men have certain experiences lesbians and trans women don’t is because they are falling foul of the expectations society attaches to masculinity and power. It is because of the power story associated with masculinity – gay and trans men threaten that story and so they are attacked. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be power attached to being a man even when your marginalisation disrupts that power.

Who gets their own special word?

If the community want a special word that really means transmisandry, then it’s probably because a lot of the TME community haven’t had to think this stuff through collectively since 1976, Sandy Stone and Janice Raymond. And that’s because of privilege. They are only just now grappling with the reality that TERFs hurt them too because they haven’t been in TERF lines-of-sight for half a century. That’s the only explanation for such a half-assed and obfuscating discourse starting up around this at the worst possible time, like someone asking a really basic question in class because they didn’t do the reading.

If we’re to keep “transandrophobia” we’re going to have to accept that we also need a special word for gay men, and black men, and disabled men, and working class men, and so on. And we’re going to have to accept that in doing so we’re saying that these particular intersections are specifically notable at this moment in history in the same way that transmisogyny and misogynoir are. That there is a particular reason above other intersections why the world is piling on trans men because they’re men and not just because they’re trans. Otherwise the word we’re looking for is transphobia.

Transphobia is bad enough on its own

I cannot overstate how much we ignore that transphobia is in and of itself bad enough for all trans people. At a time when we are being scapegoated by fascism, hell yes all trans people are subject to a monstrous and violent form of oppression. Transphobia is not the low-powered junior sibling of misogyny, far from it. I’ll talk about this further in another upcoming blog.

We can talk about things better if we don’t insert ourselves into other’s discourses. For example, it’s problematic to talk about trans suicide at TDOR because on that day we centre the violence happening disproportionately to trans women of colour. When white trans people bring the conversation away from that and centre the more universal difficulties we face around mental health, it’s white people centring themselves in someone else’s emergency. You have every right to be upset about your leaky roof, but best not to draw attention to it when people are responding to another person’s house burning down.

Likewise, we should not be inserting ourselves as TME folk into conversations about transmisogyny. The word transandrophobia does exactly that. It tarnishes every important conversation we want to have about our experiences of transphobia with the lie that there is some sort of equivalence here with transmisogyny. There isn’t, and there doesn’t need to be. A leaky roof is a leaky roof, regardless that it’s not the same as a house on fire. It needs attending to. We don’t have to compete with people to get our own needs met. That’s a questionable neoliberal idea, that says we can only get anything in this world in competition with others.

By pre-loading our discourse with the word transandrophobia – and I cannot state this in strong enough terms – we have entirely lost the ability to have this conversation in the appropriate spaces, at the appropriate times, and on its own merits. The discourse has trampled in big, patriarchal boots over my need to talk about the violence I’ve experienced on its own terms, and not in comparison with transmisogyny.

Every time the word transandrophobia is used, its user is co-opting a trans woman’s discourse by default. Nothing after that is going to be listened to by anybody who’s a feminist, however important the point is.

Thus the word transandrophobia is a manifestation of men’s violence against women because it diminishes a particulary lethal type of misogyny and puts it on the same level with men’s experiences as well as co-opting women’s labour instead of building something from scratch. It’s also often a lash-out at trans women with a veiled insinuation they have privilege (which is transmisogyny) rather than a genuine call to attend to trans men-specific issues. It is invariably breathtakingly unaware of the extent of male privilege and transmisogynistic violence.

It’s ugly. It has done nothing but seed conflict and it needs to end before it tears our communities apart.

The level of hate, fear, disgust and vitriol levelled at trans women is specific and extreme, and when Serano coined the term transmisogyny it functioned in a very useful way to name the way pseudo-feminist arguments were killing trans women. It helpfully added to a growing collective understanding of intersectional feminism.

Who are trans men trying to have a conversation with by using the word transandrophobia? Not intersectional feminists, because there are so many other ways of having a conversation about how toxic masculinity and gendered oppression damages marginalised men, without seeing masculinity in itself as a form of oppression. It could appeal to the same people who like the idea of men’s rights activism in general – the people who claim that women hold the power in this world. You know, the right wing. But if trans men think they’re going to find a home with Jordan Peterson’s buddies, they need a reality check.

For me, it’s worrying to see how closely the transandrophobia discourse mirrors men’s rights activism discourse circa 1990s which I thought we were past. It’s a testament to how little trans men have needed feminism that they are so cut off from its arguments as to fall into this trap. Proof if we needed it that trans men are men and hold male privilege.

The conversation we should be having is the way that TERFs have essentialised gender oppression as the “one true oppression” (well, they would, they’re a bunch of middle-class white women, many of them millionaires), and so trans women and trans men are left dragging our oppression origin story over onto their territory and completely ignoring the huge structure that overwhelmingly harms all of us – transphobia.

I’ll offer a better term that fits the complexity of this: we are talking about a nexus of gendered oppression and yes, it manifests in so many interlocking ways that relate to misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism, classism, the imposition of the gender binary, ableism, endosexism…

But, transphobia is bad enough. Transphobia is violent and deadly.

It’s big and it’s ugly and being a man or masculine does not mitigate it, it just doesn’t add to it.

You do not need a special word

Trans men do not need a special word. And neither do AFAB non-binary people (and if we did it wouldn’t be this word). Transmisogyny and misogynoir are not words to be jealously copied.

If trans men deserve a special word for how they face a special kind of trans oppression, here’s a list of other trans people who should be in the queue ahead of them, all deserving of their own words: trans people who are sex workers, trans people of colour, disabled trans people, fat trans people, autistic trans people, young trans people, immigrant trans people, poor trans people, trans people without access to healthcare…

When all those people have their own special words, well, trans men still shouldn’t get one, because being a man is still not a form of oppression.

We cannot have the conversations in community we could five years ago, thanks to this obfuscating discourse. I’ve seen good, supportive mixed trans spaces unravel over this discourse. We need to be pulling together and we need to be fully alongside trans women right now, not finding excuses to look away from what TERFs are doing to them by claiming “TERFs hurt us too”. Yes, they do, and it’s still not equivalent. We will find our moments and spaces to speak about our own experiences without inserting ourselves into a discourse that isn’t about us.

A lot of people steeped in this discourse got there by engaging with TERF nonsense rather than spending their time on good feminist discourse, especially trans feminist discourse. TERFs have warped the way we speak about everything, and it’s not good. Most of the arguments for the term transandrophobia would quickly be cleared up by intersectional feminist responses to the men’s rights movement. Feminism has been here before, we had these conversations, and it’s tedious to have them again.

Trans men and masculine folk, please stop tearing our community apart with this sense of entitlement to this special word of yours and understand what, structurally, the invocation of that word actually means and why we can either have good discourse about our experiences or we can have the word, but we cannot have both.

Liberating Trans Bodies

Content note: discussion of violence, oppression, and abuse

Click here to read my article about Liberating Trans Bodies for Shuddhashar

Why do so many trans and neurodiverse people have eating issues?

CONTENT NOTE FOR EATING DISORDERS, SEXUAL ABUSE, GENDER INCONGRUENCE AND DYSMORPHIA

A discussion came up in a clinical consultation group I’m involved with about the number of trans people who have disordered eating. I reeled off some thoughts are not always considered, so I’m repeating them here.

It is well known that trans experiences often co-occur with some form of neurodiversity (Sensory Processing Disorder, autism, ADHD etc). So I’m going to start with these, less often thought about, reasons for eating issues and then afterwards I’ll talk about the two things people might assume – body dysphoria and trauma.

As our relationship to food, whether disordered or not, is complex and multidetermined, trans people may be having many-layered and complex responses to food and eating, some aspects of which can be missed.

IS IT A SENSORY ISSUE?

Many trans people have sensory issues, that can be an aspect of different kinds of neurodiversity. This can be around food texture, smell or taste, but it might also be around sound – e.g. the sound of someone else eating, people talking or the noise of cutlery and crockery. Some neurodiverse people get overwhelmed when their senses have too much to do, so it’s not the sounds and tastes and thinking about communication individually are problems, but all together they could be too much.
When these problems are out of the person’s awareness and go unresolved, or are even minimised or denied by caregivers, they can develop into stress reactions and avoidant or problematic behaviours around food or eating.

We need to start taking sensory difficulties and overwhelm seriously. If someone can only eat bland food whilst alone in a room with non-metallic cutlery, that’s cool – we should never have to do a thing that is painful, and for people with sensory differences, things that seem quite benign to neurotypicals can be agony. If hearing others eat or clanking plates and cutlery can be masked by soft music, a person should not have to sit down to a meal without that adjustment. Noise cancelling headphones can also be very helpful in this case. If a person can’t manage to talk or listen whilst also eating, that’s okay. If they can cope with food texture just fine at home but it’s too much in a noisy restaurant, that’s okay too. If they want to smother everything in very hot sauce because that’s a good sensation, that’s a great sensory fix. If they cannot eat sticky food with their fingers, or deal with bones, pips and gristle, we just have to believe that matters.

For some people eating is always going to be a sensory challenge no matter what and all we can do is find ways to support them to cope with that challenge. Sensory issues and overwhelm often get worse at times of stress, so there may be days our clients cope with eating and days they just can’t.

BODILY CONTROL

Some trans people use their relationship with food to manage feelings of physical incongruence (previously called dysphoria) they feel with their body or to change the shape of their body. In young people, eating issues can develop out of a desire to delay or halt puberty.
In the UK, trans adolescents have recently been denied the kind of bodily autonomy other teenagers have in law by the Bell v. Tavistock ruling. Trans adults are denied autonomy by UK gender clinic waiting lists that are up to 5 years – this despite robust clinical evidence that transition healthcare is life-saving and overwhelmingly helpful.

It is imperative that we help trans people, especially teens, feel a sense of bodily autonomy. Understanding the difference between dysphoria and dysmorphia is vital as part of this. Trans people don’t misperceive their own bodies, as in dysmorphia, nor is it about hating their bodies, although if unalleviated, feelings of hatred can develop. Trans people know well the physical reality of their bodies, the problem is their brain telling them their bodies should not be like that. Unlike dysmorphia, it cannot be cured by psychotherapy – the clinical evidence for this is well established.

Uninformed clinicians might get dysphoria and dysmorphia muddled up and focus on trying to make the trans person accept their body, a practice that simply does not work for trans people and can increase their distress.

But on top of this, trans bodies are sites of violence and aggression. Trans children, like other kids that are marginalised, vulnerable and isolated, are highly likely to have been sexually abused because of that vulnerability. Sadly, predators take advantage of difference and social isolation. Whether or not they have “come out” as trans, differences in behaviour and socialization are often apparent and trans people frequently report being excluded as children. Trans kids are more likely to be bullied, attacked and abused in other ways throughout life too. And their bodies are aggressively mislabelled, policed and treated with invasive curiosity. A trauma history can exacerbate this, with people, including therapists, wrongly assuming trauma “causes” trans feelings when the opposite is true – being a gender diverse person in a transphobic world can lead to trauma.

Trans people are also more likely to have been homeless or lived in poverty, and this can bring its own complex issues regarding food. Food and eating can become the means to gain a sense of control amid these different forms of violence, marginalization, and coercion.

IS IT RELATED TO INTEROCEPTION?

Many neurodiverse people have problems with interoception, their ability to know what their body is telling them. Not knowing when we are hungry or full may be part of overeating or undereating. During childhood, this may have made it harder for caregivers to get a child to eat or to not overeat. If this then became a battleground there can be extra emotional difficulty here, with issues of guilt and shame, and feelings of being controlled by others around food.

IS IT A STIM?

Stimming, or self-stimulatory behaviour, is common in neurodiverse people. It can be benign, such as sucking, chewing, hand-flapping, rocking, humming or spinning, or self-injurious, such as hair-pulling, cutting, hitting self, or skin-picking.

Neurodiverse people may have a greater need to seek comfort through stimming. They may also have been discouraged from some relatively harmless stims (think about which is more harmful: thumb-sucking or smoking. Now think about which is more socially acceptable for adults to do). Eating can be a kind of stim – a self-soothing sensory experience. This, of course, can be completely benign but can also develop into something potentially more harmful, such as eating to the point of unwellness. It may have been more socially acceptable to stim using food than to fidget, fiddle, rock, or flap as a child.

Recognising what stimming is and what it does for the nervous system can sometimes allow someone to find alternative stims if eating has become an issue. Stim toys you can safely chew are available on the internet, for example. I have had clients who wear these around their neck and have let the people around them know about their need to use these to soothe themselves.

How Medicine Treats Disabled Trans People

In an article for SpoonieHacker, I talked about how medicine treats disabled trans people, and this conversation is something everyone can benefit from reading.

Podcast On Trans Issues

“Trans and non-binary activist, counsellor, trainer and writer Sam Hope is a founding member of Nottingham Trans Hub and the author of the book _Person-Centred Counselling for Trans and Gender Diverse People: A Practical Guide_ (2019). We speak to them about the dangers facing the trans community in Europe, and how best to offer meaningful support and solidarity.”

I gave this interview back in August, but it still feels relatively current, referencing GRA reforms, JK Rowling, and the situation for trans people across Europe. It took place prior to the Government’s decision not to reform the Gender Recognition Act in the UK. 

With thanks to Ibtisam Ahmed for giving me the platform to speak up for my community.

How Covid-19 Is Affecting The Transgender Community…

An extract from a talk I did for the University of Nottingham for Transgender Day of Visibility (31/3/20), detailing some of the extra complications that exist for the trans community around this pandemic.

Please note, I use certain language in this video that is ingrained but not ideal – It’s interesting how when we’re tired and stressed we use less skilful words, for example:

• Trans people being on a “journey” is an unhelpful cliché.
• Most trans people who were assigned female at birth would prefer to refer to their upper body with the word “chest”.
• Gender incongruence has superseded the term gender dysphoria, according to the World Health Organisation, and is generally preferred in-community, although not by everyone.