cw: death and bad news.

Day 17 - 'Not the News', or 'What the Trans!'

For the past year I’ve been the audio editor for ‘What the Trans!’, a transgender news podcast hosted by Ashleigh Talbot and Michelle Snow, and it comes out every two weeks from the usual podcast places. It’s made primarily for a trans audience, and a few hours of editing work on each episode comes down to an hour or ninety minutes. When this journalistic endeavour started out there was more good news, if you can believe it. Editing and listening these days can be depressing, and I choose that word deliberately. The research, interviews and presentation are excellent, and hope is found where it can be, but this has been a difficult three or five years for the trans community, both here and abroad. You might well be aware of the rising moral panic around trans people. News media is full of pieces on trans sportspeople, use of public toilets, and the apparent audacity of letting teens - or, indeed, anyone - access hormone blockers. The Guardian and The Times have been relentlessly full of trans news these past three years, and none of it by trans people - and for all The Guardian’s former reputation as a leftist paper, it has been consistently hostile.

At the same time, the few Gender Identity Clinics that exist are under strain - as is the entire NHS, thanks to a decade of cuts and cuts. When I was referred to the Sheffield GIC at Porterbrook, the waiting list time, between referral and first appointment, was sixty seven weeks. Now it’s closer to four years. And until you have your first appointment, you can’t even begin on your way to accessing hormones, or other therapy and support, and cannot readily move towards a gender recognition certificate - a process which will grant you some legal acknowledgement and the chance to marry with the right term ‘husband’ or ‘wife’ said during the ceremony. I’ve haven’t even mention the months or years you need to attend the GIC between your first appointment and finally getting medical permission for hormones and so forth. There is a lot of jumping through hoops. There are a couple of GIDS centres - which are GICs specifically for children and younger people seeking support. The government recently announced they would be shutting these down. They’ve announced an intention to open an alternative, but with the closure imminent, the replacement service has not emerged.

It’s a bad time. Those seeking hormones or even hormone blockers may need to wait five or six or seven years to get a chance. To cis people, this may mean nothing, but to those seeking acknowledgement and relief from gender dysphoria, severe depression and anxiety - all things very much recognised by medical professionals - it means years of far better or far worse mental health, and in more cases than I would like to think of, life and death. The ‘moral panic’ is newspapers and certain celebrities painting trans people as villains, as threats, as sexual deviants and as creepy crawlies. With a moral panic comes a large rise in hate crimes and murder in particular. It is a bad time. Trans people are discussed more and more in politics - they’ve become a surprisingly large policy point for right-wing candidates. Famously anti-trans MP Kemi Badenoch is the current Equalities Minister. Polling suggests most of the public have no particular objection to transgender folks, but candidates many elections treat ‘the trans’ issue very much like ‘the gay issue’ in the 80s. Most people are more concerned about the cost of living crisis, or corruption and so forth. There was nearly some good news recently, out of Scotland, but it was felled.

And the trans news outlet which hoped to have some good news items, encouragements and recommendations to bring to their audience now have warnings, bleak news, and mourning for the dead.

I despair that I can do nothing practical to help. In what is sometimes called a ‘culture war’, I can’t take and tangible action to protect people, or to persuade anyone that condemning transgender people in your heart is neither good nor supported by medical professionals. There are protests, but protests do next to nothing. There are petitions, but petitions do next to nothing. In many ways the world is growing harder to live in for a very large percentage of transgender people. For a while it seemed things were getting better for us, and now rights are more likely to be removed than granted. I’m fortunate to be one of the least affected, since I hide and do not ask the NHS for much, broken clavicle aside, but hearing all this news, through editing the podcast and by paying some heed to news reports, sometimes does me in.

And as I say, I can do nothing to help, nothing to bring down the attacks, nothing to shorten the list of the dead we read each 20th of November, the Trans Day of Remembrance. I suspect we all despair of some situations in life where we’re helpless to provide practical aid. Looming disasters we have no power to avert, like climate change, like war.

That’s why I edit the audio. It’s a small and technical thing each fortnight, but it’s the one small way I can help those who spread awareness and encouragement. We cannot and shouldn’t all be on the front line of defence, just as the whole body can’t be an eye, a mouth or a defending arm. The small and administrative or domestic duties, to lighten the load on the people who are required elsewhere. I find the work technically easy but emotionally draining, and I’m glad I can do it so the actual journalists in the team can carry on with the hard work, because whatever the news does to me, it does far stronger to them.

Don’t beat yourself up where you can’t be at the forefront of activism. I know people who’s busy-ness or disability or skillset mean they can’t help in causes where they desperately wish they could. You can help without being at the front. I’ve often said that in times of crisis, danger or aftermath my only real skills or actions are to pray and to make tea. Those are a lot better than nothing. They also serve who only stand and wait, and sometimes auxiliary support and an open ear and a cup of tea are what is specifically needed, and prayer does not go nowhere.