I transitioned from male to female around 10 years ago at the age of 27, and doing so undoubtedly saved my life. I made the decision to transition one night, having left my home with no intention of ever returning. On that occasion I chose “do” rather than “die”.
Fast forward a decade, and I now have a career in the NHS and a quiet life with travel, socialising and time in the gym being my interests. At the start of last week I was as happy as I’ve been in my adult life. Now, every one of those aspects is shrouded in uncertainty and worry. Will the gym still welcome me? When out with my friends, what do I do about toilets? When I travel, airport security is even more of a minefield than before.
Then there is work. I found myself lying awake the night after the supreme court ruling wondering where in our department I’ll have to get changed. Where will I keep my things when the locker room is out of bounds? I’m dreading the day that an apologetic looking manager looks on while I clear my locker out before I get banished from a room I’ve used daily for the past nine years. A room I’ll continue to walk past, but I’m no longer a member of. It feels like no man’s land (painfully ironic). I’m not one thing, but legally not the other now either.
Thinking back to the night I made my “do or die” decision, being trans was becoming more “normalised”, rights existed for our protection, and it seemed that the hostility towards our community that I had seen growing up was fading into history. I made my decision based on this information. I cannot honestly say I would have come to the same conclusion if I were making this decision today.
Jessica Williams
Dereham, Norfolk
• Gaby Hinsliff’s article (If Britain is now resetting the clock on trans rights, where will that leave us?, 18 April) mentioned that recent surveys show rising public hostility towards the trans community. Unsurprising. All sensible, two-way discussion of this topic has been prevented. If you stop people from saying what they think, it doesn’t mean that they stop thinking it – quite the contrary. Views become more deeply entrenched if they cannot be expressed, discussed and challenged.
I suspect that most people didn’t previously have a strong opinion one way or the other, but years of having Stonewalls’s view of the world stuffed down their throats, with no possibility to challenge it in any way, on threat of life-destroying “cancellation”, death threats and hysterical screams of “you bigots can’t bear the fact that we exist!” have made them anti-trans.
Stonewall has created this climate and, in doing so, has done trans people a disservice. I would have thought that the desired outcome would be for people to accept trans people on a day-to-day basis in normal life. That can’t be achieved by bullying and censorship. Get the topic out in the open and let everyone express their honest views, then these can be discussed properly, with counterarguments suggested, and a possibility of progress is created.
Will that happen? Of course not. Stonewall will put all its energy into trying to get the court’s decision reversed and keeping the public forced to pick a side and too scared to express an opinion. And ordinary trans people will be more alienated from mainstream society than ever.
Name and address supplied
• Gaby Hinsliff speaks a lot of sense, but I disagree with her implied view of the safety of changing rooms. Many women’s changing rooms are not like the “locked cubicle at the local lido”. They are open rooms with only a couple of lockable cubicles. Users are not just adult women but girls and children too. The appearance of a male-looking person in an open-style changing room would be very difficult for most women.
In the 1990s, I used two public pools that changed their single-sex changing rooms with individual cubicles into unisex “changing villages”. Immediately a problem arose of holes being surreptitiously drilled into cubicle walls, until eventually it was hard to find one without a spyhole. Pool managers claimed they couldn’t do anything about it. This created a feeling of unease about whether there was a voyeur nearby and what else he might do. The problem is not trans women, it is male sex offenders.
For this reason, although sympathetic to trans women, I feel arrangements for the safety and privacy of biological women, girls and children must not be overridden as they have been in recent years.
Name and address supplied
• Gaby Hinsliff sounds a much-needed note of hope. I underwent full genital modification surgery 40 years ago. I have lived almost all my adult life going into female spaces without problems. It seems cruel that a point of law can erase my established identity. Nor is this without precedent. In 1970, Justice Ormrod reached similar conclusions on another point of law. The Gender Recognition Act was a belated attempt to remedy this.
Talking only of rights and legal truths, we have forgotten the medical aim of the treatment. My generation needed to be diagnosed with a persistent and incurable mental disorder (primary transexualism) before surgery was offered. The aim of genital surgical modification was that, while a true sex change was beyond medical science, the removal of all functionality in our original sex would enable us to “pass” and achieve peace of mind, precisely by permitting access to some single-sex spaces without posing any threat. The court ruling talks of proportionality and shared biology, but while we may not completely share biology with our adopted sex, those who have undergone surgical processes no longer share biology with our natal sex either.
It is true that not all trans people are the same, but lumping us all together as a “threat” is a simplistic view of proportionality, and nullifies the point of arduous and painful medical treatment.
We may not truly change sex, but many have made major biological changes and the law should recognise that. As Gaby says, if this judgment results in a more nuanced approach, it will do good. But the Equality and Human Rights Commission appears to be ignoring the needs of those who have undergone irreversible surgery. Please can we try to return to a mutually workable accommodation.
Jenny Day
Glasgow
• In your report (Court ruling on ‘woman’ at odds with UK Equality Act aim, says ex-civil servant, 18 April), Melanie Field is quoted as saying that it is not for her to say that the supreme court has got it wrong. But that is clearly what she is doing.
If sex was meant to have a different meaning, those involved in the drafting should have made it clear that they intended to rewrite the English language and the biologically accepted interpretation. As to how Field knows the intentions of parliamentarians, that’s an entirely different question. The fact that there appears to have been some ambiguity for all these years does not mean the matter should not finally have been cleared up. This appears to be another case of laws being passed without the scrutiny they should have been given.
Simon Lauris Hudson
Pontefract, West Yorkshire
