A Footnote to Humanity: The Costs of Silence
Preface
Silence itself had become the loudest voice in the room
It began, as so many turning points in my life did, with a pile of papers and a sense of disbelief. In 1990, I sat alone in my office, reading study after study about “transsexuals” — two hundred and one in total — written by lawyers, philosophers, and doctors who had never spoken to a single trans person. Each page treated us as abstractions, curiosities, problems to be solved. By the time I reached the last one, I realised that silence itself had become the loudest voice in the room. That was when I decided to start listening — and to help trans people, for once, be heard in their own words.
1990 Discovering the Ignorance of Trans Lives
In 1990, I sat down with a stack of papers — 201 of them —
each written by a lawyer, philosopher, sociologist, or medical professional who
claimed to be writing about “transsexuals,” as we were then called. Every
single one described trans people as individuals who wanted to “change their
birth registration” and disappear into the anonymity of “successful passing.”
I remember the sinking feeling as I read. Not one of those
writers — not a single lawyer, legal academic, or philosopher — had actually
spoken to a trans person. A few of the doctors had, but only in the most
clinical of ways. These papers were not research; they were intellectual
curiosities — clever, speculative essays written from a distance. They were not
about us, but about ideas of us.
It was fashionable, I realised, to write about trans lives
without ever encountering one. In the early 1990s, we were curiosities,
footnotes, case studies, metaphors — anything but people.
Back then, the tabloids called us “sex-changers,”
“gender-benders,” “perverts.” The Sunday People and News of the World ran
lurid stories of “sex swaps gone wrong.” Even the broadsheets described us with
discomfort. The term transgender was barely in circulation;
“transsexual” was the label of the day — clinical, pathologising, and cold.
So I decided to ask trans people themselves what mattered to
them in law.
In 1991, after conducting forty-two long ethnographic
interviews with UK-based trans people — and surveying 867 more — I asked them
to rank their legal needs in order of priority. Their answers were remarkably
consistent:
(a) Protection from discrimination in employment, housing, and access to services.
(b) Personal safety, in public and at home.
(c) Equal access to gender-affirming healthcare.
(d) Legal recognition of family and intimate relationships.
(e) Documentation confirming their affirmed gender.
It was sobering, but unsurprising. What people wanted wasn’t
glamour or special treatment. They wanted to live, to work, to love, to be
safe.
Thirty-five years on, I think if I repeated that study
today, the answers would be heartbreakingly similar. Despite decades of legal
progress — the 1999 Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations,
the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the Equality Act 2010 — the
everyday reality for many trans people feels increasingly precarious again.
Nine years of organised, well-funded anti-trans campaigning
have brought us full circle. The rhetoric of suspicion and disgust that I
thought we had left behind in the 1980s has been repackaged as a debate about
“fairness” and “free speech.”
The Humanity behind the Statistics and Headlines
Most people in Britain — unless they are trans themselves,
or part of a Black, Asian, or other minority community — have no idea how
dangerous this moment feels. The far right has learned to cloak its hate in
moral language. And just as Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant tirades made many
Black and brown Britons fear for their safety, so now trans people are
frightened too.
Friends tell me they no longer leave home unless necessary.
They avoid public spaces. They delete social media accounts. They are living
under a kind of self-imposed house arrest. It feels horribly familiar — the
quiet terror of the 1980s, when many of us lost jobs, homes, and hope.
That, I fear, is precisely what today’s gender-critical
activists — the Helen Joyce’s, Maya Forstater’s, Julie Bindel’s, and Kathleen
Stock’s — intend. They have “othered” us with chilling efficiency, recasting
our existence as a cultural threat.
History offers grim lessons here. Ordinary people — Germans,
Russians, Poles — once turned away from the persecution of their neighbours.
Most did not act; they simply looked away. Others did the deeds. The result was
the same.
The Costs of Being Othered
And now, here in Britain, those at the centre of government
— people I had hoped would know better, people like Keir Starmer, Yvette
Cooper, and Angela Rayner — have stood by, mute, as the politics of
fear takes root again.
Silence has once again become the loudest voice in the room
We, the older generation who have seen this cycle before,
have a duty to tell the country what is coming. The choice before us is stark: we can look away — and bear the guilt of silence for generations to come
— or we can stand up and say:
“This has to stop. We will not tolerate the far right. We will stand and be the shield for our neighbours.”
That is the measure of a society — not how loudly it
proclaims freedom, but how steadfastly it protects those most at risk of losing
it.
__________
The End