Claire McNab - PFC campaigner
Former PFC Vice-President
| Name | Claire McNab |
| Age | 37 |
| Occupation | Computer consultant and writer |
| Joined PFC | 1997 |
| Campaign Responsibilities | Formerly Vice-president, web site maintenance and development, mailing lists, parliamentary liason, strategic planning, news & commentary |
| cmcnab@pfc.org.uk |
|
 |
||
|
Educated as a historian, her varied work experience includes time as a charity administrator, banana-harvester, journalist, parliamentary lobbyist, melon farmer, arms control researcher and several spells as a washer-of-dishes — one of which she describes wistfully as “the best job I ever had”. Having been a member of three political parties, including co-founding at age 19 one which now has local, national and European representation, she has promised that she’ll “never join another one. Even David Owen contented himself with three!”
But more seriously, Claire prefers to avoid all labels. As she puts it, “squeezing real people into artificial boxes hurts”, and is particularly vehement about rejecting the label ’transsexual’. She says “It’s a hangover from a painful era when trans people in the Western world were trying to reclaim a space for gender-different people, and when we allowed others to tell us who we are. I can’t identify with that, or with a controlling and repressive Gender Industry which insists on classifying us as ’mentally disordered’ whilst charging us handsomely for the privelige. It’s quite clear that trans people know their own identities — and that’s all that matters.”
Claire believes that a key to the success of the campaign lies in educating ourselves as much as in persuading the public that we are in the end, just people like them. Running PFC’s on-line communications is a time-consuming task, but one she says is “absolutely essential. Having access to a regular feed of trans news, the Forum to discuss what we do, and the website as a resource centre has transformed the campaign from being a set of isolated individuals. Instead, we now have some of the best communication facilities of any campaign group in this country, and can rapidly share ideas, plans and information. It also allows us to be very effective with our limited resources — as the Dept. for Education and Employment found to its surprise in March 1998!”
A persistent (and sometimes strident!) voice for inclusiveness, she says that “every time we try to define who is a trans person, we end up excluding someone. The real trick of rights campaigning is to win what we can when we can, but not to build any barriers to anyone else — and to always remember that many of the freedoms we now enjoy were won by previous generations of trans people who pushed the limits of what was thought to be possible in their era.”
As a former professional lobbyist in Westminster, Claire believes that the strength of the campaign lies in its ordinary members. “MPs pay much more attention to a well-briefed constituent than to a paid suit, and I try to use my political experience to help other trans people to be their own lobbyists.” Whether we’re dealing with the media or government or the courts, she says that “PFC’s uniquely open and non-bureaucratic structure empowers people, and I’m proud to be a part of that.”
