The Real & Ever-Present Danger

Changes have happened, but more are needed.

   Policing the Black Trans Community   

WPATH members know from their direct interactions with our colleagues, patients or clients, and in some cases their own experiences, that more BAME than 'white' trans people continue to be victims of multiple discrimination, prejudice, homelessness, poverty, abuse, and hate crimes.

In 2019, according to the Trans Murder Project, 3314 trans and gender diverse people from across the world, were murdered. 148 of these people were in Europe. Not all were black, but most died alone, killed by unknown assailants.

Tony McDade, a Black trans man, was shot dead by a white police officer in north Florida on May 27, becoming the third person killed by Florida police in the last two months.

In my adult lifetime, I can remember when Argentine law enforcers used to throw trans women into the Harbour to drown. That has ended, but it seems Bolsanaro's Brazil might have reclaimed the practice.

Put simply, many Law enforcers cannot accept our authenticity and frequently refuse to affirm our identities. Failing to acknowledge our cultures, they refuse to learn how to communicate with trans people. It is much worse for BAME trans people.

As a lawyer & a trans man, all too often I see many Law enforcers who ignore the needs of trans people. I have known police to arrest a trans person who has been beaten up. Apparently, we are the cause of our victimisation by simply being. I have been threatened with arrest myself simply for trying to say another arrestee has a severe medical condition. And from personal experience, I know Law enforcers will rarely pursue those others who have victimised us.

      Being Watched     

BAME trans people experience a daily suspicion which sees them watched, stopped and searched so frequently that they can barely go grocery shopping without seeing handcuffs. BAME trans people experience the intersectional failure of justice because they are black, poor, and trans.

Our lives are not all roses and new underwear. Far too many trans people, and BAME trans people in particular,

• experience prejudice and discrimination, harassment and victimisation in their workplace, their family, their faith groups or in any public space,
• are victims of domestic violence within their birth families, and then excluded from their families, for ever,
• are refused employment, or lose employment on transition,
• are unable to obtain or afford life or medical insurance,
• will acquire life changing and life shortening disease from the men who rape them; including HIV, aids and other sexually transmitted diseases.
• are refused asylum and are returned to be brutally persecuted on account of their gender identity.
• are brutally trafficked into sex work and suffer appalling injuries at the hands of men,
• are induced into drug habits which may numb whatever they have to do, but they are then forever owned by their pimp, and the huge international and European trafficking gangs,
• will experience life changing injuries from, brutal beatings by strangers,
• develop mental illness because of their despair and lack of power.

These trans women and men come from all over the world, but they are disproportionately BAME. 

Trans people,are over-represented in prison - in the USA, 30% of black people incarcerated in the men’s estate are trans or non-binary women. Europe's figures are much lower, but still too high.

In most of the world including the continental European states, trans people, often asylum seekers, are unable to access free or low cost gender services, and they are not allowed to take up paid employment. A significant number of trans women and some trans men only survive by taking up sex work. They are frequently victimised or brutalised;  disproportionately killed when they become a nuisance to the world and economic structures of their pimps or punters, who (surprisingly) are never caught or punished. 

     The Real & Ever-Present Danger     

Throughout the world, for many trans teenagers their first sexual experience will be rape by a man who believes he is doing them a favour by inserting his magic penis into their bodies. Men insist they can make trans men into happy straight women, and they also insist they can make trans women into happy gay men. Like so many others of the trans community, age 14, one men's logic completely escaped me. It was not a good day.

The undermining of our very beings, our gender identity, never seems to stop. I just want to shout "Butt out, what did I do to you?".
For some trans people the violence and abuse only ends when their life does.

  The Division of the Victims  

     Crying In Despair    

As for our Gender Critical friends, our divisions are a crying shame. We should be natural allies with our critics, and them with us. 

We have common cause in fighting the good fight to end men's violence on women, children, and trans people. It is not our job any longer to change any men except our sons and their futures. But it is all of our job to tell men to pull their socks up and get with the programme which demands they all  stand up, are counted, and make men into better people.

Having become pariahs, we will cast them out from our reclaimed city streets, onto a Ship of Fools to forever roam our waterways. If generous, we might leave out a box of jaffa cakes or similar. 

Thomas Bühler (1957-), Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools)

If they don't do it soon, they will find the boat has left as the rest of the world changes. They will be left is a pair of blow up swimming wings, as my personal vengeance will be to take away their power to swim. That way they might finally learn what it is like trying to doggy paddle when you fall into very deep, frigid water.

  You saw me on telly, but you don't know me  

Our nationalist right wing government has an aversion to experts. So it seems do many others. A few hours (not the 10 thousand normally required) of reading unattributed 'witness' makes a person into an expert on trans lives,. So much an expert, they are now qualified to tell trans people what it is like to be us, who we are and how we should live - a somewhat presumptive position.  

As a trans person who has studied for 45 years, try remembering that when I say I know, I know and will show the evidence. If I don't know, then I will tell you that no data has been collected and analysed on that question. I won't lie, fantasise, or politicise my answer. And if wrong I will apologise and do some more work. 

As a person raised as a girl and who almost stepped into womanhood  - I certainly tried hard - and who did 20 years with that status, when I say I understand, I am not being facetious. I know what it is like to be ignored, flashed at, harassed, thumped, sexually assaulted and more. 

When you say I cannot understand your worries about the safety of your daughters, having raised three young women I can truthfully tell you those worries were, and are still mine, and they are now in the twenties. I wish you could respect that maybe I know some things. 

I as a white British, able, articulate, middle aged, middle income, now middle class,** legally qualified (with 5 degrees) Professor, who has received thanks from our Head of State for my service to my country, and the handshake and thanks of the prime minister of the day. 

If I cannot justify, or even have to justify,  my existence and knowledge as real - as real as the existence of those gender critical, or evangelical, pseudo 'experts', what chance does a black, disabled, or elderly trans person have?

Yet the authority of these amateur experts is apparently far greater than my 250,000 hours of study will ever be - but isn't that just exactly how Power works

When we threaten the certainty of a world view, they - the people with that view -  throw us back down the stairs to the bottom of the pyramid. They say we are being unreasonable by not understanding that we are only fit for walking on by those on the next layer up. And then we are meant to kiss ass and quietly have our heads up their arses for the remainder of our lives.

It isn't fair and it isn't right.

Standing in Solidarity

 Trans Health & Support Providers
It is now our time to 

Stand in Solidarity

                                                                                                                      

I was very pleased to see the USPATH and WPATH statement standing in solidarity with those protesting the violent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, and many other Black and minority ethnic people. 

Below, I use the term BAME People to refer to Black and Minority Ethnic people.

I believe similar statements to that of UPATH & WPATH are needed from many of WPATH's affiliated groups including CPATH (Canada), (Auspath) Australia, South America and of course the EU. I have asked EPATH (of which I am a member as a lawyer and researcher) to try and take the time to embrace  this historical moment. 

IEPATH's non-BAME members will have seen and heard the historical and continuing RACISM that our Black and ethnic minority (BAME) members who are healthcare or social support providers experience. 

EPATH's Non-BAME members will have seen and heard the historical and continuing multi-faceted RACISM that BAME trans and non-binary service users of gender clinics, primary care, and other secondary and tertiary healthcare providers have experienced within those settings. 

As EPATH members, I believe we need to use this moment in time, to stop, reflect and state that we are committed to promoting and demonstrating the very best transgender care & support without discrimination for all who need it regardless of wealth, race, skin colour, genetics, dis/ability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and place of birth or place of habitation.  I have faith that all EPATH, CPATH, AUSPATH members support those principles. 

Europe: a geographical body of nations built on slavery. 

Whilst I acknowledge the complex history of slavery throughout the ancient and modern world, as people of European heritage, in truth we cannot deny that Europe was central to the promotion of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery during the 17th and 18th century trade in human lives. 

European slave traders shipped over 12 million once proud people in appalling conditions to the Caribbean and the Americas. Many died of disease and starvation on the way. Almost 2 million - mostly alive, as well as dead - were thrown into the freezing mid-Atlantic so the traders could profit from the insurance taken out on them - not on their lives, if they died a natural death onboard the crew was deemed responsible - but on their value as saleable goods. 

When they arrived at their destination these African people were sold into slavery; a form of existence  filled with abjection, and brutalisation by the whip, malnutrition, rape. the rope and the tree. Huge numbers acquired dreadful diseases, or appalling injuries, but were denied access to medical expertise or medicines. 

Europe including the United Kingdom was the cultural heritage of, or home to the majority of profiteers of those engaged in the Atlantic slave trades. They owned the ships, or captained them, held the title to the lands which became plantations - hell holes to the people they deemed slaves. 

Our cities are littered with statues of them, raised in their time to acknowledge and praise their local social or charitable contribution to the wealth of the city. Regardless of their philanthropy, these men were only able to afford to give charity, by stealing the tears of millions of Africa’s people including children. 

Personally, I think many of these statues can go  to the scrap yard, we don't even notice them, they have become street wallpaper as we walk through our cities. I would like a representative few being placed in museums, featured in school curriculums, and properly contextualised. But I believe that is pretty much the only purpose that they might have left. 

I would far prefer we used their plinths to acknowledge today's heroes and philanthropists, in particular those people, including BAME people, who are rarely celebrated. The 2018 statue in Parliament Square of the suffragist leader and social campaigner, Millicent Fawcett, and the 2016 statue of Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole who cared for wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War in the 19th century are good examples.

Millicent Fawcett

Mary Seacole

           

 

Of 968 public statues or sculptures in London,  610 are of named people. Almost 40 celebrate historic individuals involved in promoting racism or the slave trade.  

Only 30 are of BAME people, and only 5 are named BAME people. There is a statue at West Bromwich Football Cub to Laurie Cunningham, Brendon Batson and Cyrille Regis who played for the club in the 1970s. Laurie Cunningham also has a statue outside of Leyton Orient's ground. A statue to Nelson Mandela is in Parliament Square, and Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole is just  over the road in the grounds of St Thomas's hospital. A work often thought to be Guyanese poet Cécile Nobrega is not her though, but figures a character from one of her better known poems; Bronze Woman. 

There is long history of BAME key workers; whether sailors from ships of our 15th and 16th seafaring days, or Black Caribbean people who arrived on the Windrush in 1949 in order to staff our new National Health Service in 2011, or (wo)man the new Transport for London Bus services. 

This is a city where 112 languages are spoken and where 44% of the population have a Black or minority ethnic heritage. Clearly our public monuments are not reflective of London's historical or contemporary society. 

Statues are a Red Herring

Pulling statues down does not pull down the edifices of structural, institutional or personal racism and victimisation that continues to roar like a hurricane through the lives of the BAME people we know, or should know. 

This historical moment gives EPATH members the opportunity to re-commit and insist that our practice will reflect our public position, for all trans people but especially those BAME trans people who have been exceptionally disadvantaged and the  invisible victims of our community for far too long.