Transform

I went to Oxford's vigil for Brianna Ghey this evening, the young trans woman who was murdered in Warrington last weekend.

The response to this has to go way beyond the sadness that so many people are now expressing. We have to deal with the disbelief, mocking, derision and bullying that our culture legitimises and tolerates against trans people and which leads to violence.

For some of us, our genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, and other bits of biology that I know little about, line up in a predictable way and we fit comfortably into the sex we were assigned at birth.
For some of us those things don't line up quite so neatly and we don't have a strong sense of 'male' or 'female', which feel like arbitrary and bewildering ways of categorising people.
For some of us, those categories make a lot of sense but the one we were assigned at birth doesn't fit with how we feel ourselves to be.

As a woman (AFAB) of my generation I have spent most of my adult life as a second wave feminist. As I saw it my female biology was set but the gender roles I was forced into (caring, good at relationships, good at communication, bad at maths and science, deserving of punishment by the patriarchy, etc - we all know them and trot them out) were social impositions to be resisted. My battling against the stereotypes made it hard for me to stop and listen to people who didn't feel as I did and for a long time I thought that 'trans' people just needed to shake off the stereotyping that I was resisting.

I was profoundly wrong and I apologise. Eventually I shut up and listened and I discovered that just because I haven't had to struggle all that much with the sex I was assigned at birth doesn't mean that other people have had it so easy.

Why do we persecute those who have some characteristics that we don't share and why do we choose those particular characteristics to persecute? Humans are nuanced and varied, with different attributes depending on how our brains and our bodies have developed. Imagine if we decided instead to bully, denigrate and attack those with a talent for, say, art. It's just as arbitrary.

The statistics aren't easy to interpret but possibly 1% of the population is trans. Exactly how are they a threat to the 99% and why do so many people think that they are?

No-one is born hating but Brianna's alleged murderers were aged 15. What culture have we created that in 15 years allowed them to reach the view that murdering someone who was different was OK? And, for those of us with any role at all in nurturing young people (parents, grandparents, teachers, youth workers...) what are we going to do about it?

Apart from shaking our heads and feeling sad.

Because every one of us can do something.


tl;dr - all of us who haven't acted to prevent transphobia are complicit in the murder of trans people.