The A to Z of Trans People's Discrimination

A is also for Arson: within days of appearing on a television programme about trans issues in early 1998, trans woman Terri Anne Walker and her family had petrol poured under their front door and ignited.

B also stands for British Transport Police, who not only refused to allow Lynsay Watson to transition at work, as a normal part of her prescribed treatment, but then went on to harass her when travelling with her updated documents.

C also stands for Granada Television’s Coronation Street, an unlikely but powerful opportunity which Press for Change has seized to educate the public about the realities of trans people’s lives and the problems they face.  (see also ’H’)

C should also be for Christian … but for trans people, it all too often means contempt.  One trans woman was refused communion by her Church of England vicar; others have found that after transition, their marriage has been anulled by a Roman Catholic Church which still will not accept them in their true gender… casting them into a living limbo.

D also stands for Dana International … who demonstrated rather spectacularly in March 1998 that an Israeli trans woman can not only sing and look good, but that she can also sweep the board for public support among an audience of 350 million … carrying off the Eurovision trophy due to the votes of the viewers who award the prize.  Her reward at home includes facing face death threats from fundamentalists, of course.

Sadly D also stands for Death, which haunts all British trans people.  The law does not define how sex is to be recorded, but the Office of National Statistics informs us in correspondence that “the registrar would generally expect this information to correspond with the sex recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death issued by the doctor who certified the cause of death”.  So we’re all in the hands of the doctor: if he follow’s Ormrod’s definitions of sex, or if a trans dead person’s genitalia are ambiguous, he may record sex as it was recorded at birth.
A dilemma also awaits living trans people, however, if they go to register the death of a friend or relative.  The law demands that they identify themselves, and that the information given is “true to the best of the informant’s knowledge and belief”.  A trans person knows what sex they are, but the law believes the opposite … so we are left with a choice between a declaration we know to be false and one the law belives to be false.

Finally, D stands for DSS … which does not alter its’ records to truly reflect a change of official gender.  New names are merely treated as aliases and the gender of the person concerned is unchanged … resulting in people like Liz Bellinger (see ’L’) reporting cases of blackmail or intimidation.  Files can be flagged as private, so that only local managers can see the contents but, for many, this results in tremendous inconvenience dealing with benefit claims.  Either way, many trans people (such as Mark Rees) report cases of correspondence being sent to them in their original names and with the wrong title.  This was graphically illustrated by the experience of the fictional character, Hayley Patterson in the soap opera, Coronation Street (see ’H’).

E is also for European Court of Human Rights, which has repeatedly ducked the issue of challenging a risible defence by the British Government to charges levelled by a succession of trans plaintiffs.  In fairness, mind you, even the court is getting tired of hearing the excuses.  Following the Mark Rees case in 1986, the Caroline Cossey case in 1990 and the XYZ case in 1997 the court, whilst rejecting the claims of Rachel Horsham and Kristina Sheffield in 1998, strongly critiscised the government for its’ failure to implement its repeated promises to the court to review arrangements.

E is for evidence too … which spells a risk of a breach of privacy for any trans person involved in Court proceedings, whether they are involved in civil proceedings, charged with an offence, giving evidence, or standing surety for a friend.  A Commons written answer from the Lord Chancellors’ Dept in November 1999 confirms PFC’s legal advice that the courts have discretion to require disclosure of any former name(s) if they decide it is relevant to the proceedings.  Whatever the likelihood of this actually happening, the risk of forced disclosure may deter some trans people from seeking justice through the courts.

H is also for Hate Mail, like the kind which PFC co-founder Stephen Whittle discovered to have been sent to hundreds of residents in the streets surrounding his home in March 1997.  The letter urged neighbours to join in a call to eject him and his family from the neighbourhood, ignorantly assuming them to be council tenants rather than owner-occupiers.  When the time came for the called-for “public meeting” in Stephen’s local pub, however, he was joined and supported by dozens of supportive neighbours, friends, work colleagues … and an invited BBC reporter.  The bigots were nowhere to be seen and so the assembled throng decided not to waste the opportunity and had a jolly good party instead.  The fact remains, however, that many trans people are less well connected than Stephen … less confident, and often alone.  Hate mail is hate mail, whether it succeeds in its objective or not, and it will continue to exert a power over lonely and vulnerable trans people until we have a society which sends one clear, unequivocal message about how they are to be respected and treated.

H stands for Human Rights.  Britain’s New Labour government has committed itself to supporting human rights at home and abroad, yet still spends taxpayers’ money fighting legal actions to deny trans people the basic right of legal recognition in the gender in which they live their lives.  In 1998, it even lost count of how much money had spent on these cases!

J is also for justice, a bittersweet word for trans people, whose legal nightmare is too often overlooked by the courts.  In the 1998 ECHR judgement in the cases of Sheffield & Horsham, the judges recognised “the extreme disadvantages which beset post-operative transsexuals ” but didn’t take the oportunity to rule against the UK and require it to end them

K is also for Kristina Sheffield, a commercial airline pilot by profession, who failed (by the narrowest of margins) to win her 1998 attempt to get the European Court of Human Rights to rule that the government had abused her human rights.  She lost by just 9 votes to 11, along with her co-plaintiff, Rachel Horsham … however weeks later she was able to celebrate an expensive sex discrimination case win against her former employers, who had unfairly dismissed her.

L is also for Love, which is the reason why Liz and Mike wished to marry, and the reason why they have remained together for twenty years to bring up their daughter.  Their case is a reminder that it is only when you strip away the sensationalism attached to trans lives that people can begin to appreciate that trans people need love, security, warmth and an income to feed themselves like anyone else.  The basics of humanity … which have been denied to them by employment discrimination, persecution, and the low self worth created by looking all their lives at the image of themselves painted by others in a sensationalising media.  Trans people cry.  They laugh.  They care for other people.  They bleed.  They’re human.  Which makes the inhumanity of the treatment handed out to them for thirty years so much harder to understand.

Finally, L is for “level playing field for business”, which the then Scottish Office Minister Henry McLeish argued in 1998 would be fatally undermined if the Scottish Parliament was free to legislate against discrimination on grounds of gender identity.  Contrary to the experience of companies which follow equal opportunities policies, the Minister seemed to believe that employers would be disadvantaged if required to hire the best person for the job.

M is also for Metropolitan Police Guidelines … which although representing a start on the road to treating trans people in custody with respect, are still written on the presumption that the trans person is guilty to start with and that the feelings most at stake in an intimate search are those of the police officer.

M stands for M vs West Midlands Police too … an employment discrimination case which was lost by ’M’ solely because of the legal status accorded to trans people.  M was rejected as a recruit by West Midlands police on the basis that she could not carry out the full range of duties expected of her … as a legal male they were concerned about the repercussions of her searching other women (who could claim that they were being searched by some who was legally a ’man’), and yet she obviously couldn’t search men either.

Finally, M is also for trans woman Rosalind Mitchell, a Bristol City councillor who transitioned “on the job” in 1997.  When a BBC film crew was making a documentary about her, one of her fellow labour councillors expressed his tolerance for human diversity by taking time on camera to threaten the reporter.

O is also for Ormrod, the British judge who presided in the April Ashley case in 1969 and was responsible, directly or indirectly for the root of virtually every example of discrimination descibed here.  Ormrod was a medical doctor as well as a judge and, when the professional witnesses couldn’t agree whether April Ashley was medically male, female or intersex, he decided to put forward a test … and a conclusion … of his own.  Of the four possible indicators of sex, which are usually concordant, Ormrod specifically chose to discount the most vital one of all from a trans point of view, the sense of sexual identity which we call gender.  The others, he said, all had to be in agreement : chromosomes, external genitalia and internal reproductive organs … which for classically defined “transsexual” people they are (pre-operatively).  The neo vagina of a trans woman (and, by implication, a trans man’s genitals too) he declared to be false … referring to the difference between anal intercourse and neo-vaginal intercourse as just “a difference to be measured in centimetres”.  And thus, with breathtaking brutality and not a word of compassion, he declared a very beautiful woman … and all who followed in her steps … to be a legal absurdity.

P is also for Passports.  British trans people can have a new ten year passport appropriate to their presentation issued to them following surgery, but are cautioned against using the sex indicator on the document as a means of avoiding the problems created by their birth certificate.  Prior to surgery, trans people can have a one year passport issued to them with similar details, under the bizarre logic that “they may decide to change back”.  Instead of having to deal with an extremely rare and unlikely possibility once in a blue moon, therefore, the passport office has to reissue a new passport to every pre-operative trans person, every year until they’ve managed to jump through sufficient medical hoops to be treated (a process which can take ten years or more, given the deliberate delaying tactics adopted by some health authorities).  For travel to countries which require visas, there is often a requirement for a minumum period of remaing validity of the passport … which means that trans people may be effectively barred for much of the time from travel to certain destinations.

P is for Pensions too.  Any trans person taking out a private pension is obliged to reveal their legal sex, otherwise they may find, when the policy matures, that they are entitled to no more than the value of their contributions.  The reason is simple … the government insist that trans people must retire at the age implied by the sex recorded on their birth certificate, 65 for men and 60 for women.  Recent changes to the law mean that people under the age of about forty will retire at the same age, so this isn’t a universal problem and will automatically resolve itself in 15-20 years time.  In the meantime, for those trans people already in middle age, the difference means they must ensure that a pension company treats them “correctly” in their records and, of course, their circumstances will become obvious when they are forced to retire at a different age to their contemporaries.

Finally, P is for Prison … a frightening prospect for British trans people … who have no gaurantee of being sent to an appropriate institution, nor of being allowed to continue their treatment if preoperative.

Q is also for queues too … which are absurdly long for trans people seeking treatment through the National Health Service.  It is not uncommon for some people to patiently attend a Gender Identity clinic in their own area, see the clinic closed by cuts, be referred to a distant centre such as the Charing Cross Hospital in London … and then be told that their “evaluation” then has to start all over again, disregarding everything that has gone before.  Finally, approved for surgery, the hapless trans person … now halfway between the sexes after years of hormone administration … can then find themselves at the tail end of a surgery waiting list, made long by a local health authority quota which arbitrarily dictates that only one or two procedures will be funded each year.  With at least 100 trans people in every million of the population, it is little wonder that some reach this point seriously contemplating suicide.  It isn’t “gender dysphoria” (or whatever fancy name you give it) that drives people to such despair, however, but aggravated neglect.

Then there is R v Tan … one of many employment discrimination cases, which hammered the nails of the April Ashley, case into the coffin of British trans people’s lives.  This particular case established that male sexual offence law, with its’ generally higher tariffs, should apply to trans sex workers … sending transsexual prostitutes to jail for gross indecency rather than soliciting.

R is also for Rachel Horsham … see ’K’ for details of her Human Rights Court case with co-plaintiff, Kristina Sheffield.

S is also for PFC’s Susan Marshall, who put the new power of the SDA to immediate good use, by extracting a humiliating settlement and official change of policy from no less than the Crown Prosecution Service itself.  Marshall, a barrister, was all set to take up a new post with the CPS in her former male role (and had accepted the job offer) when she thought she ought to explain her intention to become the woman she is.  The result was a letter from the head of the service, Barbara Mills, immediately retracting the offer and describing Marshall’s plans as “inimicable” to the service.  The settlement, reached on the steps of the appeal court, is undisclosed but is believed to have been very substantial.

T is also for Treatment Problems Working Party … a part of the Press for Change campaign taking evidence and compiling a report on the problems and abuses encountered by trans people at the hands of health officials and medical professionals in Britain.

Finally, T is for Trans … the all-embracing term for those whose gender presentation or behaviour conflicts with the “norms” expected by the society they live in.

U is also for unions, which exist to protect the rights of their members.  Many trans people have received a lot of valuable support from their unions, yet trans woman Lynsay Watson, who was fired for being trans, found that her union (the British Transport Police Federation) would not even use her new name in official documentation.

W is also for White vs British Sugar, the case which first introduced the wicked and pernicious legal notion that it was alright for an employer to discriminate against a trans man so long as they could show that they would be equally objectionable towards a trans woman.  Unfortunately this sort of idea appeals to a certain type of lawyer and before long an enterprising soul, on taxpayer’s money for the government, had extended the idea to apply to discrimination against gay and lesbian employees too.  It is an argument which is still advanced, although the P vs S and Cornwall County Council case finally put paid to it so far as trans people are concerned.

Y is also for youth: and we should not forget the plight of young trans people in this account, for their status is often far more precarious than that of adults.  Forced into gender stereotypes at school, with little chance of access to medical assistance unless they develop serious behavioural problems, many young trans people live their formative years in a silent nightmare, beginning the cycle of low self esteem leading to a mute acceptance of discrimination, which is the hallmark of a systemic, self-sustaining oppression.  This is the cycle which Press for Change and the self help organisations needs to break in order to prevent another generation of trans children growing into damaged, desperately unhappy adults … a goal which will be far easier to achieve when it is self evident that society respects and values its’ trans people sufficiently to recognise the true nature of their identity.