It still gives me great pleasure ...
Sunday 19th July, 1998
Adapted from a posting to the UKPFC-News mailing list
Those of you with a close eye on the calendar may have noticed that yesterday, July 18th, was the first anniversary of the launch of the UKPFC-NEWS mailing list.
Christine Burns’ opening message to the list "It gives me great pleasure…" looked forward to a new phase of campaigning, where we we could all share information quickly and easily, and involve everyone in the campaign for our rights. Before then, Press for Change activists kept in contact through the quarterly newsletter and by phone calls and emails between individuals. It wasn’t fast and it wasn’t easy, and all too often news of key developments was slow in reaching those who needed it.
A year on, it’s easy to forget just how much has changed. In more than 300 messages, we’ve been able to distribute dozens of items of news coverage of trans people, to show how we are portrayed by the media, and just how much the public understanding of our issues has grown. The stories we’ve covered include:
- September ’97: the first elected public representative to transition on-the-job in the UK (Councillor Ros Mitchell in Bristol);
- December ’97: the Gay Games’ plans to include a discriminatory test for trans athletes
- January ’98, the first news of the imminent appearance of someone who must now be the UK’s best-known trans woman (Coronation Street’s Hayley);
- February ’98: The Sheffield and Horsham case’s hearing in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg;
- April ’98: A Dominican priest who transitioned and was cruelly driven out of the religious order;
- May ’98: Dana International’s win in the Eurovision song contest, catapulting her to fame as the world’s best-known trans woman;
- May 1998: The first case we’d heard of a trans person being granted asylum because of her gender status.
There are, of course, many more stories we could dig out: but you can find them for yourselves in the on-line archives by following any of the links above.
A few weeks after the launch of UKPFC-News, the campaigners’ Forum carried the first of several thousand messages. The Forum, too, has been a brilliant success — much more than we could have hoped — allowing us not to just to distribute information, but to share it. It has helped us all build a powerful network of activists, pooling ideas and sharing skills and resources, and notching up several sucesses.
Mentioning successes, you’ll notice that I’ve omitted from the above list two of the biggest events of the last year … things which would just have been impossible without the mailing lists.
In August 1997, a last-minute cancellation gave us the opportunity to have a stall at the Labour Party conference in Brighton — a key chance for us to go and bring our message to the annual gathering of the key activists of the new governing party. The only problem, though, was the cost: 3,000 pounds! — almost as much as the whole of PFC’s annual budget. (see Please help us to seize this opportunity)
The response to that appeal was overwhelming: well before the conference opened at the end of September, we had raised the entire amount — with enough over to cover the costs of display materials and extra passes. The full story is also in the archives — but the key point is that a lot of valuable contacts were made, and our message was brought directly to thousands of activists. And without the mailing lists, we couldn’t have made our appeal quickly enough or widely enough, and we’ve never have raised the money. Without UKPFC-News, we wouldn’t have made it to Brighton.
All this educational work stood us in good stead later. In February, the bombshell hit: the Dept for Education and Employment, which had in October promised ongoing discussions on protecting employment rights of trans people, released a so-called ’consultation paper’ — a set of ill-considered proposals which would have drastically reduced our rights.
The rest is history. With only 6 weeks to alert a scattered community, we told the government "If you want feedback, we’ll give you feedback" … and bombarded a stunned DfEE with over 300 detailed, critical responses.
It’s worth remembering what that 300 means: it’s more than 5% of the whole transsexual population of the UK. That’s an astounding, and possibly unprecedented response: if 5% of disabled people wrote in, the pile of some hundreds of thousands of letters would weigh more than 10 tonnes.
That pile of letters didn’t just shock the DfEE: it stopped them in their tracks, and through our combined efforts we turned a threat into an opportunity. The DfEE then asked us to write the guidelines … and quietly set aside its own proposals. In the months since, I have talked to campaigners on race and disability issues, to lobbyists for disarmament and human rights — all of whom have stopped open-jawed when they hear what we achieved.
What we did of course, was to do what Press For Change activists do all the time: to politely and persistently remind others that all we seek is what THEY take for granted — no more, and no less. We don’t mount demonstrations to block the traffic; we don’t make outrageous demands in the hope of winning some of the points; we make a reasoned demand for our rights. All of them.
And people do listen. Confronted with the facts, the Great British public do understand that trans people are just ordinary people with some special circumstances: after the trial run, Granada TV did some market research on public responses to Hayley. The result was an overwhelming Yes, and Hayley is now back, permanently — on our television screens several times a week, as a daily reminder to everyone that trans people are just ordinary folk like them, facing the same problems and deserving the same respect as anyone else.
In medieval England, there was a tradition that if a serf escaped to a town and remained free for a year and a day, he became a free man. Unfortunately, there isn’t a similar principle applying to giving trans people their rights, and there is still a lot to be done; we still haven’t got any way of correcting our birth certificates; we can’t marry; the NHS still gives us the run-around or worse; our list of grievances is long.
But after a year and a day, we’ve come a long way. We’ve shown that despite all the stresses and strains of our transgendered lives, we can work together as a team of disparate people to demand our rights — and get them.
This campaign is going to take time. The wheels of legislative change turn slowly, and judicial minds tune in to reality at a depressingly slow pace. But, after a year and a day, we can confidently say something we couldn’t have said a year ago: that the public is ahead of the government and politicians, and ordinary people do understand what we are asking.
We’ve got our network. We’re developing our skills. Who knows what the NEXT year will bring, and we, together, will achieve?
Claire McNab
Vice-president, Press for Change