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.