Stonewall: 50 Years of Pride
without Trans people
by Stephen Whittle,
Stonewall's Take on 50 Years of Pride
There is a new, very watchable, pretty good, short film made by Stonewall (the film is available at the bottom of this blog) which celebrates the first Pride march in London and the 50 years of Lesbian and Gay. Some of those who were their or who are historians of the LGB community take part.
But ... and it is a very BIG BUT, Stonewall has made a film which completely fails to acknowledge or portray the fight for trans rights during those 50 years. It is as if it did not exist before they (Stonewall) came along and (finally) became trans inclusive in 2015.
Stonewall's film does not include the voice of any trans person who was at the first Pride march, nor does it include the voice of a trans historian, and it includes none of the voices of the many trans activists who took part in the fight for everyone's rights - the rights of of trans people, and LGB people, and women, during the long dark nights and often darker days of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
The history of the trans activists in the UK between 1992 and 2012 is quite astonishing.
Learning lessons from the failures and the gains of the Women's movement and Gay Rights Movement in the 1970s and 80s, trans activists from Press For Change achieved in less than 20 years a body of rights that had long been thought out of the question, in fact almost certainly legally impossible.
By 2010, European and UK law acknowledged a whole raft of trans people's human rights -
On Stonewall's website it announces itself as supposedly having been 'part of every major fight for LGBTQ+ rights since 1989' and to put it plainly, Stonewall is fibbing.
- the right to be legally recognised in their affirmed gender,
- the right to be educated, or undertake vocational training without discrimination or harassment,
- the right to access gender affirming healthcare
- the right to access goods, services, housing or facilities without discrimination or harassment,
- the right to obtain and retain work, and to be treated equally without discrimination or harassment
- the right to to formalise their love with another, of any natal sex, before the law, and
- the right to create and retain families recognised by the law,
- the right to retain parenthood of children one had raised
Let me repeat that:
Stonewall is telling a great big whopper.
Stonewall did not engage in the fight for trans rights for 26 years. I know because I did engage in every single part of that fight. Stonewall did not support the parliamentary lobbying we did for legal change, it did not help finance any of the court cases - we lost more than we won, but in the
end we did win the important ones. Stonewall had no understanding of trans people and the issues they faced. At a Parliamentary Committee reviewing the Equality Bill (which would become the Equality Act 2010), . Ben Summerskill the former Chief Executive of Stonewall is on the record denying there was any need for the Equality Act to provide protection from harassment saying:
Ben Summerskill: "I can certainly say on the issue of harassment we are not convinced that there is a need for protection in this area. Members of the Committee who have dealt with Stonewall in the past will know that we tend only to ask for things where we can provide hard evidence of need"
Yet harassment was always one of the major concerns of trans people, with 73% of the community experiencing harassment, and 10% being victims of threatening behaviour, when out in public spaces.
Until 2015 Stonewall did not have trans rights on their agenda or in their charitable aims. I suspect that having finally succeeded in obtaining same sex marriage for their supporters, Stonewall needed a new 'cause' in order to apply for grant funding. Only then did Stonewall become an LGBT charitable organisation, and think to employ a trans or non-binary person onto its staff.
Doing Trans History
Sometimes I wonder whether young trans people assume trans activists did not exist before 2015, or that if trans activists did, they are now all long dead and buried. They might be surprised to discover that most trans activists from the 1970s, 80s and 90s are still very much breathing, and quite a few of us are still kicking ... butts.There are. reasons why .our voices are not heard much these days; a few of that generation of trans activists needed to reclaim their privacy, sadly a few have died often without the fanfare they deserved, some were just very tired, and for some getting older has brought a new set of bodily challenges. As for the rest we have, quite rightly, given ground to the voices of a younger generation of trans activists.
Stonewall’s film on 50 years of Pride does include 2 young trans and non-binary activists – but the two who feature either don’t appear to know, or have not been given the space to talk, about that older generation of trans activists
Being Trans in the 1970s
There may have been very few 'out' trans people at the first Gay Pride in London in1972. But up north trans people were attending meetings of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality in Manchester, and a few of us were attending Gay Lib meetings – in my case at the Turk's Head Pub on Shude Hill in Manchester.
It wasn't easy being trans in the 1970s. It did not matter if a person merely crossdressed on a part time basis, or they had transitioned and undergone gender reassignment surgery, trans people had no rights.
Also the newspapers (notably the News of the World) did every legal (and some illegal) activity to try and get stories of the 'sexual perverts' who were having a 'sex change'. Those news stories destroyed lives and livelihoods. Any trans person could lose their job in an instant, be refused access to shops and pubs, be refused essential healthcare as well as 'sex change' related healthcare, and the courts would refuse them access to their children if their relationships broke down. In truth, no matter how well trans people managed their lives, loved their families, or contributed to their workplaces and communities, they (and that includes me) were not human beings like other human beings.
In 1974 a group of us set up the UK's first truly inclusive trans support group, the Manchester Transvestite & Transsexual (TV/TS) group, aka the Wednesday group, here in Manchester. In 1975, a number of trans people from the Manchester TV/TS group became involved in a collective of Manchester's LGB & T support groups to start Manchester's Gay Switchboard. We had managed to rent an office but apart from 2 telephones it was just a bare room. It seemed we would be sitting on orange boxes as we took calls.
Flash forward 47 years, and at LGBT History month event at Manchester's Central LIbrary a few months ago, I met an older gay man I had not seen for many years. He reminded me of how I had persuaded him to take part in an 'action'. As he described it, memories long filed away flooded back.
In 1975, every other week, a couple of men ran an inclusive disco at the Manchester Polytechnic's Righton building. They just happened to both be Trade Union shop stewards for the Poly’s laboratory technicians. I just happened to be working at the Poly as a lab technician and they also happened to be my next-door neighbours. I had seen some the tables and chairs being readied for throwing out at the Poly, so I asked if we could have some of them for the switchboard, but bureaucracy said no (this was before there were Computers to say no). We had conspired to liberate the furniture, and so one warm summer evening whilst we had unsupervised access to the building as the disco was being set up, a small group of trans and gay men made numerous hilarious trips down Oxford Road, Manchester’s main student thoroughfare so that the tables and chairs could take up their new duties in the switchboard office.
In 2001, despite the involvement of many members of Manchester’s TV/TS group being involved in setting up and wo/man'ing the switchboard phones (some did so for the next 30 years or more) at a reception put on by the city to celebrate switchboard, not one trans person who was involved in its creation was invited. The city did invite my lovely friend Julia Grant to be the nominal trans person at that event - but Julia was never a trans activist or involved in switchboard. Similarly at many London events, until her death I would see the delightful April Ashley wheeled out to represent the community but, as April would say, she was never ‘one for groups’, and she was never a trans activist.
LGB history also forgets that as a community we lost many people along the way. Whilst here in the UK, only a few died as a direct consequence of transphobic violence, there were far more lost to the deliberate institutional cruelty of those organisations we were often forced to approach when we needed help; the police, the NHS, the courts, our families, our employers, our landlords and also some LGB service providers. Throughout the 80s and 90s we also lost many friends to the AIDS epidemic, but you would never have thought so from the complete failure to include us other than nominally, as drag queens and cute mascots, in any lesbian and gay version of LGBT+ history.
One Group of People were fighting for Trans Rights
Some did more in the campaign, some did less, but every single one of them was jeopardising their employment, their home and their place in their families. Every single one of them knew they were risking public opprobrium, and that they faced (and some did) becoming a victim of violence.
With roots in the Manchester group in 1992, six trans people (and one cis partner) founded the trans rights campaign group Press For Change (PFC).
At first there was a trickle, but by the turn of the century hundreds of trans people and their families had become grass roots PFC activists. Some devoted 25 years of their lives to the fight for those rights, some are still fighting.
Some folk did more in the campaign, some folk did less, but
- every single PFC trans activist knew they were jeopardising their employment, their home and their place in their families, and
- every single PFC activist, trans or cis, knew they were risking public opprobrium, and
- every single PFC activist, trans or cis, knew they were risking becoming (and some would become) a victim of violence.
In the USA, the 80s and 90s saw trans people excluded from many events by many parts of the women's movement. That wasn't our experience here in the UK. Women, particularly 3rd wave feminists, supported us in our fight for trans rights.
The opposition came in the form of right wing/ traditionalist evangelical Christian individuals and organisations and lesbian women, gay men and their organisations, particularly Stonewall, that excluded us. I remember meetings as late as 2012 when as Trans folk walked in, there were LGB people who walked out. Until 2005 trans people really were personae non gratae in the UK's Lesbian & Gay organisations. Stonewall went further than most, barring trans people, including those whose sexual orientation was lesbian or gay, until 2015. It was a response directly mirroring the response of gay men to trans women in the early days of Gay lib. Trans people, especially trans women, threatened their battle for middle class assimilation into some 'special, safe, gay space' within the citadels of heteronormativity.
In retrospect, it seems many gay men and some lesbian women have achieved their assimilation. These are the lesbians and gay men AND their spouses attending Royal and Tory garden parties. Their setting up of the LGB Alliance is partly to protect those spaces from people like us.
When Manchester's Lesbian and Gay groups were prepared to welcome trans people and work alongside them in the setting up of Manchester’s gay switchboard in the 1970s, it is important to acknowledge that rare moment of collaboration was the exception, not the rule.
When Manchester's Lesbian and Gay groups were prepared to welcome trans people and work alongside them in the setting up of Manchester’s gay switchboard in the 1970s, it is important to acknowledge that rare moment of collaboration was the exception, not the rule.
But Trans rights were never about assimilation or inclusion, they were about Liberation for all from the binary control of modernist sex and gender roles. As trans people, we understood and experienced the violence that comes from those who insist we live only in a hetero/homo binary sexed/gendered normative version of ourselves.
Trans activist and writer Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (1994) put it
"gender ambiguity and gender outlaws are made invisible in this culture, and because gender transgressors are by and large silent (and thus invisible), for reasons stated earlier, the defenders of gender rigidity lash out at the nearest familiar label: homosexuality and lesbianism, the points at which gender outsiders intersect with sexual outsiders. Not surprisingly, there are no words for the terror and hatred of gender transgressors, and because no one has named it yet, it seems that there is no hatred. When they do name it, they'll probably call it "genderism" or something equally boring. ...The acts of a gender defender are acts of violence against gender outsiders."
There are now a name given to this lashing out, this hatred of anyone transgressing the gender norm; it is transphobia. Those gender defenders do not admit to being transphobic; they are simply being 'gender critical'. At the same time, in order to justify their attacks on a whole, massively diverse community of people often with little in common except our personal need to transgress their gender norms in order to live as our best selves, they have decided we have a 'plan' which they have framed our 'gender ideology'.
When I ask trans people to explain our gender ideology they initially look confused. When I explain that gender critical feminists say we have a 'plan', funded by the rich American philanthropists George Soros, Jennifer Pritzer and Jon Arcus, to impose our 'gender ideology' on the rest of the world by
- promoting stereotypical sex roles (men as aggressors, women as passive),
- demanding non-binary toilets,
- insisting on legal right for male bodied people to access to women only spaces,
- and the provision of pubertal postponement treatment to gender confused kids,
trans people roar with laughter.
After they calm down, the anger flows
"do these people/women ever stop and think about how disempowered trans people are?",
"they have never stopped and thought what it is like to have your parents tell you, day in day out, that you are a pathetic human being",
"since when did we insist on sex stereotyping, just look at us. Maybe in the past there was a focus on passing - but that was imposed by us on the medics. The London clinic under (Psychiatrist) John Randell wouldn't give you hormones unless you looked like an acceptable woman or man to him. Some of us may still prefer more conventional wear, but most of us are pushing through sex stereotypical boundaries by being the people we are, and being out about who we are. We are not trying to deceive anyone."
"I spent my childhood experiencing almost daily enforcement of heteronormative sex stereotypes, with endless punishment, from excluding me from peer activities at school - the nice parts - to bloody good thrashings from my dad",
" I bet almost every single one of us has been sexually assaulted, usually some guy telling us that his willy will provide the cure. I wish these supposed feminists would stop and think about that. We are their biggest allies in opposing misogyny but they just don't want to hear that.",
"Funding, what funding, has anyone here or any trans organisation ever seen funding, other than Mermaids receiving one lottery grant".
The Gender Ideology that gender critical feminists are insisting we supposedly have and we supposedly promote, is a figment of their imagination. It is a way of justifying their scapegoating of the trans community. It is a reflection of the way the Nazi's insisted the 'Protocols of Zion' was a real plan by Jewish people to take over the world.
Gender ideology is nothing other than a way for the gender critical people to place the blame on a minority, to make us look like the bad guys here. In reality there is no such thing as 'our trans gender ideology". But for what are trans people being blamed? That is another question.
Pride and the Trans Community
It took until 1996 for London Pride to become a Trans inclusive march. Prior to 1996 a few of us did attend, but always on the periphery. Even as late as 1996 we were having to negotiate long and hard with Pride management, who initially told us we could attend but only if we did not bring a banner and we went to the back of the march. We told them where to go with those suggestions, we were not going to be second class citizens at the back of the queue, and we were not going to pretend we were not part of the wider queer community.But as we took our place in the march, even then it was quite clear that some LGB people were not happy with our presence on that march, although to be fair the majority were more than welcoming.
I still have the PFC banner which my cis-sister and her cis-husband made for us to take to the 1996 Pride march, and a t-shirt I designed for the PFC marchers. I went to the march with our two oldest (very young) children. Taking a new banner and poles, a large cardboard box of t-shirts, and two small children – one in a buggy – on the train from Manchester to take part in a march in London was a pretty mad idea at the time, but we had a glorious day.
“we’re here, we’re queer and we are going shopping”
Gabriel, our 3 year old son, spent the day having a long line of trans people jostling to be next in turn for pushing his buggy, and Fay Presto, the Royal’s preferred magician, walked alongside, performing magic to entertain the children. The entire route passed in a happy blur that day. I will never forget the sound rising as we marched down London’s Oxford Street chanting “we’re here, we’re queer and we ARE going shopping”. It sounded like poetic justice.
Eleanor, our 5-year-old, was shocked by the dreadful standard of marching, saying
Eleanor, our 5-year-old, was shocked by the dreadful standard of marching, saying
“they would all learn to march better if they went to Miss Bates’ ballet classes.”
She was right, but trying to explain why we were not marching in a march was difficult. She also wanted to know why the men with bunny tails on the back of their jeans, also had a big hole where their ‘bum’ was. I’m not certain I gave an adequate answer to that either.
That was 1996. It took another 20 years for Stonewall to welcome the trans community into its fold, and I do sometimes wonder what was the real reason behind that inclusion.
Pressing For Change
The recent history of the UK’s trans activism is quite astonishing. In less than 20 years, PFC activists achieved so much more acknowledgement of our human rights to be and to love, and the legal changes to support those rights than either the Women's movement or the LGB community had managed to achieve.
PFC didn't have a fancy London headquarters, PFC had the corners of people's bedrooms in dark northern towns and cities. PFC Activists couldn't go for a cosy tea in the Lords' Bar at the Palace of Westminster, nor could they plan to have lunch with London based BBC Executives. PFC did not have money to spend on advertising budgets, or computers, or anything much. Any money raised went direct to train companies for our journeys back and forth to London to negotiate with Government departments, or speak to our pro-bono lawyers, or to insure against the massive costs the Government increasingly threatened to seek if we lost the court cases our activists took to gain our rights
PFC and the Civil Partnership Act
I will give just one example of what that (now more mature) generation of Trans activists achieved not just for the trans community, but for the UK’s LGBTQ+ community as a whole; the Civil Partnership Act 2005 (CP Act).
The CP Act came about as a direct result of PFC activists lobbying the Government for it. But, back in 2005, why would trans people be lobbying for same sex relationship recognition?
As activists we faced a huge and real challenge as we worked with various Government departments to negotiate an acceptable format for the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GR Act). We were determined to meet a commitment we had made many years earlier. PFC's campaign motto was ‘Respect and Equality for ALL trans people’. and, as far as we were concerned nobody was going to be left behind.
The problem we had was that some older trans woman, many of them PFC activists, had remained married to their wives, and they were now living as married same sex couples.
In their youth, many of those trans women had taken what George Brown MD had termed ‘the flight into hypermasculinity’. At school in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, so as not to be beaten up as sissy boys they had successfully pretended to be much tougher than they really were. Many were to find themselves becoming captain the school Rugger or Soccer teams. On leaving school, they had joined the armed or emergency services going on to become captain of a battalion, a ship or an air squadron, or perhaps a chief superintendent in a Police service. On retiring from the services, they had often ended their working life as a captain of industry - if they made it that far. Many had breakdowns in their 50s or 60s, finally confessing to their wives that they had always thought they should be a woman.
In their youth, many of those trans women had taken what George Brown MD had termed ‘the flight into hypermasculinity’. At school in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, so as not to be beaten up as sissy boys they had successfully pretended to be much tougher than they really were. Many were to find themselves becoming captain the school Rugger or Soccer teams. On leaving school, they had joined the armed or emergency services going on to become captain of a battalion, a ship or an air squadron, or perhaps a chief superintendent in a Police service. On retiring from the services, they had often ended their working life as a captain of industry - if they made it that far. Many had breakdowns in their 50s or 60s, finally confessing to their wives that they had always thought they should be a woman.
The women they had married, had not been able to to build a career & pension for themselves. Their spouse’s career had required the family to frequently move home. The wife would often be the sole parent to their children for months on end, year in year out. For this work, their reward would eventually be a survivor pension benefit if their spouse predeceased them. Many of these women had selflessly volunteered in their local communities and on the service bases they were sent to, and despite their husband transitioning, they had supported them, remaining loyal, loving and married.
In 2004, a spouse's survivor pension benefits disappeared if the couple divorced. We couldn’t seem to find a way within the GR Act to avoid these couple’s having to divorce, as Tony Blair had refused to allow any space for same sex marriage to become a consequence (via some loophole or backdoor) of the GR Act.
Without some special mechanism, either the non-trans spouse would have to forgo the survivor pension benefits if their trans wife died, or the trans spouse had to forgo being legally recognised as the woman they are.These were selfless people who had spent a lifetime in public service, and so both were willing to volunteer to give up their side of this hard-won bargain.
But we refused to let either of them give up what they had both worked so hard for. Those of us in negotiation with the Government were lobbying hard for a solution. Claire McNab and myself took several trips to Stonewall's office just along from Victoria Station, outlined our plans and asked them to support us, or at least not interfere.
We were working with a very sympathetic team inside the Department for Constitutional Affairs, and the minister for the Gender Recognition Bill, Lord Geoffrey Filkin was all for finding a solution, so when we suggested something like France's Pax Civil which gave equivalence (to marriage) to non-married couples, they were willing to look at it. Eventually it was agreed that a Civil Partnership Act (CP Act) allowing unmarried same sex couples to have their unions recognised by the state, would follow the GRA by 6 months. We then had to work with the Tribunals and Courts service to create a mechanism for the GR Act and the CP Act to create the desired effect.
The mechanism created would allow couples, where one partner was trans, to go with some advance preparation to the High Court. There they would divorce but the Court would then conclude the gender recognition application of the trans partner, at the same time handing them their completed gender recognition certificate. The couple would then walk to the Registrars office and contract their civil partnership. Because this all took place on the same day, the Government pension schemes were willing to accept their marriage/civil partnership as a continuing relationship and the survivor pension benefits were protected.
Maybe 50 couples with a trans partner were able to benefit from the CP Act, before the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 came into force, but as we know, many thousands of LGB couples were also able to legally formalise their relationship.
Trans Folk Belong in the History of LGBT+ Britain
Trans folk have a huge place in the LGBT+ history of the UK, but again and again we are not included.
A historically accurate version of 50 years of Pride which is truly trans inclusive is bound to be rather uncomfortable and unsettling for Stonewall, who treated trans folk like lesser humans for too long. It isn’t the story of the heroic Lesbian women and Gay men that Stonewall wants to tell about itself.
In their film celebrating 50 years since the first Pride March, Stonewall has two young trans activists speaking who were not there and who have no idea of that history. Stonewall's film also has two (more mature) lesbian women: Sue Sanders of School's Out and Lisa Power of London Switchboard and the Terence Higgins Trust .
In themselves I greatly admire Sue and Lisa and the work they have done over many years. But I do wonder if they knew they were going to be talking ABOUT us WITHOUT us and instead of us. I suspect not.
What will it take for Stonewall and other LGB (and supposedly T+) organisations to pick up the phone, or to write an email, and involve those of us who were there? The Trans activists who over 25 or 50 years did the work, haven’t gone anywhere. We know we are in their phone books, and their email address lists because they constantly send messages asking us for money.
In reality, the true story of trans activism in the UK has become something of an embarrassment to many LGB organisations like Stonewall. The years of rejection of the trans community by these LGB organisations meant Trans folk didn’t need them to do anything for us – we did it for ourselves, by ourselves. And along the way we also did a lot for them.
A historically accurate version of 50 years of Pride which is truly trans inclusive is bound to be rather uncomfortable and unsettling for Stonewall, who treated us like lesser humans for too many years, and it isn’t the story of the heroic Lesbian women and Gay men that Stonewall wants to tell about itself.
The lack of truth in Stonewall's film is even more disturbing so since trans people have become the scapegoats in this Government’s filthy dirty culture war. But the truth is the truth, and no amount of Lesbian and Gay people claiming to be our saviours, will make them that.
We are still doing it for ourselves.
To see Stonewall's film, Pride 50 follow the link or watch below