Being a man or a woman is not all about sex -

an appeal for proportionality

I am a trans woman [sic] who leads a happy and productive life, but my heart has gone out recently to so many trans people – especially the vulnerable and the young – who have felt slapped across the face by the media headlines: ‘Trans women are not women’… and fear hostility on the streets, because of the association with predators that has been ‘weaponised’ to justify a general assault on all trans people’s lives, whether collaterally or on purpose.

16 years ago I transitioned. I am not some kind of pervert. Before and after transition I have lived my life to help others: as a prison governor, a teacher, and as a registered nurse. My life has not been all about me. I’ve tried to do my best for others. I’m loved and respected by the people who know me. And yet… in recent weeks I feel humiliated and demeaned by politicised language that amplifies the dangers linked to trans women like myself and so many other decent trans people getting on with ordinary lives but now facing growing threats when out in public. The treatment of trans people has been frankly shocking.

Since cisgender women and trans women *both* face risks of misogyny, unwanted male attention and male violence, it is therefore wonderful when solidarity is extended to trans women by other women, proactively caring about their vulnerabilities and sometimes pitiful isolation, abuse, disdain.

Given the known and recognised dangers faced by the tiny minority who are trans in our society, it seems insufficient and gravely mistaken to shut out these trans people from inclusion, welcome, and the protection they so badly need; and even worse that through campaigning, media ‘monstering’ of those who are trans, and political weaponisation of exceptional cases… there are those who have exposed trans women to growing danger and abuse on the street.

Ten years ago, the culture wars were less febrile. Most people had started to take a live and let live approach to trans men and women, and many grew to affirm them. There was greater generosity of spirit and proportionality. Understanding had grown that trans people were no more perverts than anyone else, that their suffering was real, and that transition for many could lead to far better lives… lives where they were able to be far more of the whole of who they were, and to be integrated in society.

However, in the intervening decade we have seen a convergence of very different and contrasting ideological groups, intent on isolating trans people as a class, for a variety of reasons: first there were deeply conservative and fundamentalist religious campaigners for whom transition itself was abhorrent; secondly there was a subsection of feminist activists who campaigned to exclude trans women from areas of life, and to subvert their innate and essential sense of identity; thirdly there were right-wing populists who tried to play on worst human instincts to identify scapegoats in order to increase support for their politics; fourthly there were more established political parties who started to fear the traction the far right was gaining, and have come to see trans people as politically expendable; and finally – doing huge damage to trans people – there has been media portrayal of trans people as threat, taking very exceptional one-off cases and weaponising them in a way that has smeared all trans people in the public’s perception and amplified the hatred of the ignorant.

Thankfully there have been a few columnists – such as Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian – who have been voices of balance, sanity and… kindness. And I thank people like these, because kindness has been so missing from recent discourse.

However, the recent Supreme Court ruling on the interpretation of a single law has been hijacked and projected as if it was a universal statement: that what it means to be female and a woman can be summarised by genitalia alone. That is a huge simplification, and the reduction of women to their bits (without any acknowledgment of their primary identity which is seated in the brain… the biological brain). It is frankly a bit sexually obsessive to suggest that everything else about a woman is marginal when it comes to definition. Humans are far more diverse than that, far more complex, and the brain – as the primary platform for sexual awareness and gender awareness, and fundamental identity – may develop individuals’ innate awareness of who they are, their feeling and being, in a wide variety of ways. And that should be celebrated, and intelligently accommodated, with generosity and kindness.

It does seem to me that Baroness Falkner of the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission), notwithstanding lip-service to the rights and needs of trans people, is running ahead of the game in pressurising public bodies to extend one finding of one law to general and hard-line implementations that exclude trans people, without taking responsibility first for the impact such enforcements may have on already endangered and vulnerable trans lives. For example, if good and decent trans women must be excluded from single- sex toilets (because they certainly can’t use male toilets), then surely any such ruling should be delayed until provisions at any individual site have been made for safe places for trans people, as human beings, to carry out such basic human functions. And the whole toilet issue has been dramatized by parties who want to exclude ordinary, decent trans women from carrying out this simple but necessary function of human life in a cubicle next to them. For years – I have been transitioned for 16 years and I have never faced any hostility even once – trans people just went in (like anyone else), found a cubicle, pee’d, washed hands, and left. That’s what people do, because face it, you really want to spend as little time as possible in a public loo. I’ve not had hostility once in all that time. Yet, driven by this combination of parties mentioned above, some of whom are profoundly anti-trans, I am suddenly.. what… a freak, a pervert? That’s really sad.

Of course, the argument is that some pervert could go into the public loos, and that might be someone trans so *no* trans women should be allowed in women’s public toilets. Think about that a moment: men’s public loos, with their open urinals, involve more exposure of genitals, and are there no cisgendered male perverts? Well… I know that there are, because I was formerly a prison governor who ran a national centre for 110 sex offenders (I had an article about it published in The Guardian many years ago). I’m not oblivious to the way sex offenders operate. So in the case of male toilets, on the basis being applied to trans women, no cisgendered male should be allowed in male public toilets because they might be a danger to boys or other men. But it’s trans women who are singled out, using the exceptional possibility as a generalised exclusion in a way they would never do to men. There is far greater threat and danger from cisgendered men to boys in male toilets, but as a society we accept that most people just need these toilets to have a pee.

You could extend the exclusionary principle – excluding all members of a class of people because of rare and exceptional bad people – to schools: I dealt with many cases in prison where cisgendered males had molested young boys. Yet male teachers are routinely allowed to oversee boys getting changed at school. Aren’t they a danger too? Well the answer is the same as for trans women in loos: no. Or rather, there will always be risk of sex offenders but we don’t pin that risk on everyone else. Hundreds of people get killed in car accidents each year, but we don’t ban driving cars. It’s a matter of proportionality: and part of the proportionality needed is a mature, balanced sense of responsibility for minorities and not just the majority.

And then there is the matter of NHS hospitals… already being pressurised by Baroness Falkner to exclude trans women from women’s wards. After working in the prison service, I became a teacher for 25 years, then after transition I re-trained as a registered nurse and absolutely loved my work. By then I felt so much more alive and productive, and I devoted myself to my nursing: and that included all aspects of the challenging work… medication, preparation for theatre, cleaning up shit and vomit, and yes… intimate care such as washing genitalia and catheterisation. Out of care. Out of kindness and compassion. Many patients (male and female) were appreciative. None objected. When you’re sick, you just want to get well.

Yet now, if I myself fell ill, I would be characterised as a potential threat and excluded from a female ward. I was safe before as a nurse (nurses of all genders work in wards for men and wards for women). But in my own vulnerability (and maybe need for company and encouragement of others) I would be cast out. That is very harsh, almost to the point of irrationality. Up until now there has been ‘live and let live’. We have deployed kindness and generosity of spirit to accommodate all the varieties of people who make up a hospital ward.

After my own gender surgery many years ago, because I am privately religious, I was looked after for ten weeks by a community of the most loving sisters in a convent: they had joined as members of the ‘Call the Midwife’ community, and many of them had nursing experience. They cared for me, they washed me, they tended my wounds. I will always remember one afternoon when three of them were there in the room, as my wounds were being washed of blood. ‘Oh my dear,’ one of them said, ‘yours looks exactly the same as ours.’ And the other sisters agreed. It wasn’t intrusive. It was just human kindness… and an expressed solidarity. I feel too little solidarity of that kind has been voiced in recent discourse. I was very vulnerable at that time, but they were there for me. Women there for a vulnerable woman.

The healing continued and I returned to work – I worked in critical care, and acute care, and in later years with the elderly. And psychologically I flourished, able at last to openly be who I was. A couple of years later I joined a women’s football team. They were in the eighth tier of English football and as a team it was far more about recreation than competition. They’d been looking for a goalie, and I approached them to see if, as a trans woman, there was any way I could join them. I was very hesitant. But they just said ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I’m rather a crap goalie?’ I answered. ‘Join the Club!’

They were always lovely and inclusive like that. As is often the case in women’s football quite a number of them were lesbian, and one who identified as non-binary. The captain explained to me after I joined: ‘We know what it’s like to be a minority. We just wanted to share solidarity with you.’ And we trained, and we socialised, and we played. Did it disadvantage anybody? It really didn’t. I was honestly that bad. But they included me and they had my back. So once again, I’d argue for proportionality. Being socially accepted with other females meant the world to me at that time. Transitioning can be a hard and lonely journey, notably in the beginning. Some friends ‘ghost’ you and you can become socially isolated. The abuse on the street can be demoralising… dehumanising. I understand the debate about trans participation in top-level sport. It is difficult. But at the recreational level, can there not be give and take? Solidarity and inclusion?

I mentioned abuse on the street, and that is maybe the saddest thing about the way the media has dramatized the Supreme Court ruling (to repeat, a ruling over one specific law). ‘Trans women are not women!’ the headlines have proclaimed. Well actually, if you have a trans sister or a trans daughter you might not agree. Many friends, neighbours, colleagues who know trans women would probably see through that glib simplification as well. They know, through personal interaction and goodwill, that these friends have female brains, female manner, female presence. Or, at least, they’re certainly not guys!

But the media monstering of trans women exceptions in the lead up to the case… the political weaponisation of those cases by Trump, by Rishi Sunak, and even Labour politicians fearful of Reform, combined with the banner headlines… what substantial effect have they all had? The answer is that they have provided thugs and haters on the street with what they see as a mandate. Those streets have become less safe for trans people. I’ve experienced that. I’ve been abused, chased, mocked… and that was before even before all this. Now it will grow worse. These are dark and fearful times for trans people, and from some quarters I’m afraid there has been a shortfall of solidarity. A lack of kindness. A failure of responsibility. Now the thug on the street can shame you and yell ‘You’re just a bloke in a frock’ and feel they have impunity because that’s what some politicians say, and that’s what so many of the news outlets declare. That essentially, we’re not real. We are fake.

But the opposite is true. We’re fake before transition. We were desperate and lonely inside. I self- harmed for so many years in secret and hidden shame because of the incongruence of who I was in myself, contrasted with the physical externals and social expectations. Sometimes, as my controls unravelled in the classroom, and my ‘performance’ as male started to fragment, I would go and lock myself in a loo until I could gather up the act and continue again. The cost of ‘performance’ outside your true self can be devastating. But when I transitioned… such a psychological ease came flooding into my life. My life became congruent, and no longer tormented by dysphoria. And after surgery: a sense of wholeness, a well-being, and the flourishing of my life. Decades of self-harm just disappeared, sad memories of my past. Today my life is so happy, and I’m loved deeply by my precious wife, my children and my friends. They have not given up on me, and that humbles me. I am a mature trans woman – yes woman – able to give back to society with the whole and best of who I am. And I feel so alive! I don’t have to act anymore.

However, at this time, I really hurt and feel so sad for young trans men and women, and those trans people who are socially vulnerable, or abused by neighbours, or abandoned by society. And that’s why I’m writing this article – out of solidarity – for them. I am a religious sister now, leading a largely secluded life of prayer. I prefer not to get public and out there, but how can I not this week? I’m no saint myself. I fail to be sufficiently kind, and day to day I’m prone to selfishness like anyone else, but I have found a peace and strength to be so much more the whole of who I really am. Yet for the young and vulnerable trans woman or trans man, with their lives all ahead of them, I feel desperately sorry. I feel saddened that – unlike the lesbian footballers in my team who understood solidarity and inclusion - others have taken the route to exclude. I feel sad that unlike the women in convent who showed deep solidarity and tender kindness, there are others who have framed us as ‘predators’ and ‘threats’ when all most trans people want is to live kind and decent lives like anyone else. We’re not perfect. We cannot appropriate every aspect of female experience. I don’t try to. But make no doubt about it: we’ve been ‘monstered’. People talk about ‘the gender ideology’. I’m not an ideology, I’m a person.

Yet some groups – driven by their own ideologies – have set out to ‘other’ us and exclude us. Deliberately in some cases, consequentially in others, they have subverted our identities in the eyes of the public. It has felt demeaning, and for young trans people I would say quite appalling. On their behalf, I would appeal for more kindness and proactive responsibility in public life because they are being put in danger, physically and psychologically. Sadly I believe that, for many of these trans-excluding activists, the campaign for this particular Supreme Court decision is not the end of their campaign at all, but a bridgehead leading to what they hope will be enforced exclusion of trans women from the toilets they have used harmlessly for years, the exclusion of trans women from even recreational sport for women, the banning of skirts for trans girls in schools, the removal of trans women from female wards in hospitals (even if they have vaginas), the imprisonment of trans women in male prisons because where else will they be put. It’s as if they don’t care. And all this is pushed for in a context of cited exceptional cases (like one Scottish rapist wrongly placed in their prison service) and media frenzy that deliberately massages ‘culture wars’ rhetoric and empowers haters on the street to drive trans people further into hiding, in the belief that the law says we are fakes. Whatever the niceties in which the EHRC (led by Baroness Falkner) frames its remarks, the reality is that they back pressurising the NHS and schools into these further exclusions that the trans- excluding campaigners want and will keep pressing for.

It sounds like my orientation and precious relationship is not to be termed as lesbian either: that, although my wife is butch lesbian, and I am what’s called ‘gold star’ lesbian (never been with a man in my life), we have vagina-and-vagina sexuality, nothing masculine involved, have lesbian friends (who actually ‘get’ our vibe and we get theirs), and – beyond sex itself – we just love and care for each other for each other’s personality, and female presence, and tender devoted care… although all this, our attraction is ‘not lesbian’. What? Who are the people who believe they can police the status of our private lives and what possible harm does it do them? We are two women, leading totally decent lives, with perfectly normal and happy sexuality, and sorry, but anyone with common-sense would regard it as madness to say that we aren’t lesbian. I can only shrug.

As I have said, many other women have shown us real respect and solidarity, and know us for who we are. We are not men-haters, we are not even political or ideological for the most part. We are just two women in love and we’re living our lives, and they’re decent lives, and they’re true not fake.

None of this means that a trans woman like myself doesn’t care about the protection of women. I have cared about women all my life: in classrooms and on hospital wards, and challenging the misogyny of sex offenders inside prison. I’ve cared alright. Most trans people do – they care hugely. They know discrimination themselves. To suggest otherwise is to insinuate a lie. After all, we have a vested interest ourselves in protection, arguably just as much as any other woman. And many of us have mothers and daughters and wives and sisters who we love and care about. So of course we do. It’s just that, like cisgendered men in male toilets and their perceived threat to boys, it is quite wrong to frame everyone as potential predators and lock them out. The human race is so diverse, just like life throughout the planet. It is wonderful. We can either share that diversity and accommodate each other’s differences with kindness, or we can go down the road of populism, hatred, othering, and the policing of tribal boundaries. It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of meanness of spirit I think we need: generosity, kindness, responsibility, balance. We should help one another to be the whole and best of who we really are.

We also need politicians to have the courage to reject simplicities and recognise the need for proportionality in what follows this one-off ruling. It’s worth bearing in mind, for example, that the Gender Recognition Act still provides an alternative concept of ‘woman’ in law: those who have transitioned and been certified by the state are legally women. So it’s not all concluded. There is an unresolved anomaly. Baroness Falkner may want to go rushing in, but there needs to be much further reflection, nuance, and consultation. A greater degree of proportionality too. What might proportionality look like? It might involve reining back the knee-jerk actions of the EHRC, and pausing on actions to be enforced, until an independent review has recommended how to navigate the need to protect women generally, but also the need to protect trans women before their lives are imperilled, and how that is completed first. Frankly, that is an urgent responsibility of good government. And yes, of course, the present government may be running scared of losing some votes by sticking its head above the parapets on these issues. They may well prefer to hide behind the Supreme Court ruling and allow the EHRC to carry the can, at the immediate expense of trans people. But that would be a cowardly abandonment of a most vulnerable group in our society: people in desperate need, facing dreadful contempt on the street, and treated like pariahs by the media.

Keir Starmer himself said ‘A trans woman is a woman’. He’s probably frightened that by re-asserting those words he would be losing votes to Reform UK. But he needs to ‘man’ up (if you’ll excuse the irony) and put the brakes on the EHRC. Before you throw people under a runaway bus, you should make provisions to protect them first. You need to achieve that before, not after, the rights of activists (detailed above) have ploughed right through their lives and safety. And an independent review should fully take into account the voices of the people most impacted – something that did not seem to happen in the Supreme Court case. And then relative risk and harm should be very carefully assessed. Are the risks of some individual trans pervert any greater than a male pervert molesting a boy in men’s toilets? That’s unlikely. Yet we don’t ban every male from those toilets because of a few perverts. That would be disproportionate. Why should it be different in the case of decent-living trans women?

Further to that, there are complexities. It can’t all be simplification. In the case of trans women like myself who have vaginas, is it seriously proportionate to ban us from having a quick pee in the facility of our gender at a train station or pub? Is it proportionate to impose a kind of apartheid-style ban on perfectly innocent trans women who have gone through so much in order to live congruent, caring lives? That’s just one example. No-one need pretend that these issues are straightforward. The word ‘trans’ itself is an umbrella term referring to quite a wide group of people following varied paths. There is no one uniform trans person. But at this present time, *all* trans people are exposed to these developments. A morally decent government must not cut trans people loose, abandon them, and just give way to the dog whistles, the weaponising of individual cases to vilify a whole class of people, the subversion of people’s lives and identities. It feels quite hollow for the EHRC to say trans people must be respected, while pressing ahead at breakneck speed to enforce actions that fail first to address the damage such actions will do. A good government needs to be less doctrinaire than that. It needs to slow down the process, and not treat one court decision (about one act) as a starting pistol for the pressurising of schools and NHS to kick trans people away from spaces where previously there was precious little conflict for most people; and a more generous give and take… a more inclusive approach… allowed different types of women to co-exist and show solidarity to one another.

One of my last jobs before retirement in 2022 was as a school nurse caring for 1200 teenagers in a large secondary. There I witnessed – but did not proselytise – four trans teenagers who were trying to explore the whole of who they were. That took courage but the school had a great ethos: to afford them time, space, and respect. The same respect given to young gay or lesbian teens there. They, and all the students, would come to me for care, for cuts, inhalers, migraines, allergic reactions, or sometimes just to talk. And within the first week, I was just ‘the nurse’. Teens are often great like that. It didn’t matter that I was trans. I don’t believe that most teens are misogynists or transphobes. They need to be encouraged to be the best of who they are, and not the worst. The same applies in this whole trans issue. We have seen too many in the media incite the weakness in human nature and play on people’s fears.

But there is a different way: the way of the women in my football team, the way of the convent sisters who nursed me and accepted me as a woman, the way of most women I nursed who welcomed my care, and so many women I meet in day-to-day life: not activists with ideological agenda, but human beings willing to treat other human beings with generosity, decency and kindness.

As I draw to conclusion, maybe I could share a touch of half humour half insanity that illustrates the way trans women can suffer from unwelcome masculinity too. I have had repeated incidents where guys have come up and propositioned me for sex. In supermarkets, at bus stops, on the street. I was walking home to my wife one evening after a 12-hour nursing shift at my hospital, totally knackered, when I was accosted by a young man in a shiny suit and tie who came up and pestered me to come for a drink, and maybe after that… and so on. I said no. But he didn’t give up and kept walking with me. About four times he tried it on. In the end I stopped walking and faced him: ‘Listen! I’ve just worked twelve hours, I’m exhausted, and all I want to do is go home to my wife and have supper. I’m not interested in you, I’m not interested in any man, because I’m only attracted to women. I’m lesbian. Do you get it?’ He blinked. ‘So please stop being a nuisance.’

To which he replied, in words that I will always remember: ‘I don’t mind if I just come and watch.’

To him I was all about sex.

The sad thing is that I feel like the present campaign to define trans women, is also all about sex and genitalia. It excludes the possibility that women are more than their bits. That our biological brains and gestalt identity may also be irrevocably female (in a whole spectrum of different versions). That ‘being a woman’ is at heart something you are, how you know yourself, the heart of your being, and loveliness, and potential. To reduce the definition of a woman only to sex and genitalia is to ignore so much more of what makes a woman who she is. In a way it’s quite insulting. It’s not all about sex. When I go to pee in a toilet, it’s not all about sex. When I need nursing (or when I nurse) on a hospital ward, it’s not all about sex. Being trans is not all about sex. In truth, for most trans people our lives are as mundane as anyone else’s: getting up, going to work, shopping, washing, ironing, making supper. It’s the same ‘lifestyle’ as yours I am sure: it’s called being a human being. I’m a human being who happens to understand myself as woman at the heart of my being. I’m a threat to no-one, and a gift to those who love me, and I don’t deserve to be excluded.

All of us should care about each other, as we dare to open up, more and more, to the whole of who we are.