Trans rights have always been on a knife edge
Simply stating that trans rights have always been the children of some lesser god is akin to saying water is wet. To be gender non-conforming in most societies at most points in history has been to walk a fine line between expressing your inner identity and relying in the empathy of your community to ensure your personal safety. Often that personal security has fallen short, and upon revelation of that gender non-conformity a rigid reinforcement of gender norms has usually been thrust upon that person. Sometimes this has resulted in death, beatings, or ostracising, but even if there is acceptance it is on the terms of the major. Trans folk will point to a catalogue of personal experiences, news reports, and archive material to show the reality of trans rights, yet for wider society there is still profound lack of fundamental understanding on trans identities. This lack of understanding brackets all trans lives, even those lives in near perfect assimilation to cis normativity. To be trans is to forever live on a knife edge.
The obsession by the media over women’s rights, women’s sports, and trans masculine bodies highlights the root cause of this issue. The historic controlling of women’s rights and women’s bodies, especially in terms of occupations, political freedoms, and ability to spend money, have meant that many of the trans issues we talk about today are deep rooted. To self-identify as a woman, to cross from the place of societal power into the seat of inferiority is something men simply cannot understand. The patriarchal structures we have built mean that to become a self-made woman is framed as both male usurpation of what rights women have clawed back from men and disgust that a man would ever deign to strip themselves of their power.
Go back to the liberal revolutions of 1848 and you see women being sidelined, their role seen to simply to aid and provide succour. Karl Ulrich’s proclamation of gay liberation in 1869 framed gender and sexuality that deliberately suborned women beneath the masculine, gay sexuality in need of liberation from the perceived shackles of the feminine. To be woman has always been something lesser in the queer cannon because it was framed that way from the start. Trans men were excused their liberation into the masculine to a point, as it there was the excuse that to become a man was to garb yourself in the cloth of power.
This power dynamics played out consistently since 1870 in courtrooms, parliaments, and the court of public opinion. April Ashely was called a facsimile of a woman in 1969, while Ewan Forbes’ manhood was affirmed and his marriage upheld in 1968. To be a man was to be understood, to want to be woman was seen as debasing yourself. Even when the British were forced to pass the Gender Recognition Act in 2003 there was significant peal clutching about the wives of trans women, with a strict provision within the Act that a trans persons’ spouse had to consent to the obtaining of a gender recognition certificate. The seeming decent into womanhood seen as consigning wives into a perpetual purgatory of shame.
Framing trans women as men stealing women’s spaces and trans men as girls confused by it all shows how the power flows. To be woman is lesser, in need of vital protection from the grasping claws of doctors and the internet. If you are a trans woman you are a groomer, predator, always seeking to sneak a peak at the naked girls in the locker room. This is the narrative pushed since trans medicine was possible, the popular press both lionising and lambasting, creating phantom penises in search of abuse. The right to simply exist is never a trans person’s alone, it is abrogated, corralled, made something below what the rest of society enjoys. Either you are an apex predator or a fragile girl-child in need of protection from yourself.
This is the state of play throughout all of trans history. It is not new, and it certainly is not an invented playbook of the right. It is the playbook all media and all publishers have developed since Ulrich made his declaration. His fight for enshrined rights was fought bitterly and in vain. In the 2020s the press masks its distain and distaste for trans lives in a veneer of confected concern, manufactured, cherry picked, and promoted to those who know no better. To be trans is to be an infliction on the world in their eyes, and no amount of evidence will convince the masses otherwise.
Yet, this is not the only narrative we tell. This balance of power is offset in the social media age with the splintering of narratives across Tik Tok and YouTube. It atomises the power of the press, bringing the joy of trans to those who click and swipe. Trans bodies, trans faces, trans narratives beyond the suffering are on display in 30 second blasts. We are here, we are in the magazines, we are in the professions, and we stand up to be counted. No longer is it acceptable for a Judge to label a trans woman a fake, no longer do we have to hide behind State secrets simply to get our just inheritance. For all the negatives, for all the pain and tribulation, the reality is that the 2020s are a far better place than the 1860s. Trans folk do have rights, do have allies, and are able to shape the narratives as they see fit. We are not the children of some lesser god, we are the next-door neighbour, teacher, and politician. What Ulrich started is a long way from being finished, but there is more to us that fake womanhood and confused girls, we are women, men, and non-binary in power. It might be a knife edge, but we are seen and we are still here.
