The Range of Transgenderism - the Errors and the Successes

There is an increasing amount of legal, academic and media coverage about transgender people. In the UK the organizations Stonewall and LGF are now promoting themselves as being transgender supportive as well. Published 28th July, Alexandra Topping of The Guardian interviewed Ruth Hunt, the new chief executive of gay rights group Stonewall. The group

• is to meet leading members of the UK's transgender community to see how the organisation can best promote rights for all members of the LGBT community.
• Speaking to the Guardian on the first day of her new job, Ruth Hunt said Stonewall, which does not campaign or lobby on transgender issues but works with transgender groups, would be opening conversations with the trans community at a meeting at the end of August.
• "We are at quite an important tipping point in terms of trans equality, and we are looking at how we can best support and maximise that tipping point," she said.

But there is still a long way to go.

On 22nd May Paris Lees made an article entitled, "It's Time We Exposed the Media's Lies About Transgender Kids". She wrote:

• What a horrible pile of shit the Mail on Sunday ran on its cover last weekend: “NHS to give sex change drugs to nine-year-olds: Clinics accused of ‘playing God’ with treatment that stops puberty”. You know what that means, don’t you? That the NHS is definitely NOT giving nine-year-olds any “sex change drugs” and won’t be any time soon.
• The Telegraph, a paper that revels in being openly hostile towards trans people, is now repeating the misleading headline. And what’s with the “playing God” bullshit? As one parent of a trans child pointed out by email: “The Mail wouldn't be questioning the treatment of diabetic children or children with congenital hypothyroidism on the NHS, so what makes it OK to print this shite about children receiving another kind of endocrine treatment?”

Jayne Hanson writes in a Huffington Post entry about Cher's transgender son:

• To be clear, Chaz Bono does not speak for me. To me he represents an ideology and rhetoric surrounding trans identities that only serves to further stereotypes that make it easier for conservative-minded cis-gendered people (i.e., people whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth) to grasp the concept of transsexuality. This ideology is the notion of becoming a man or woman through medical intervention (and a very stereotypical and misogynistic man, at that).

Trans* identities can include those who are BIGENDERED. My PhD covers that as well as countering several of the legal, medical, academic and media mistakes that the Equality and Human Rights Commission recognises. Some those that EHRC acknowledges, which I write to counter, include:

- Comprehending present-day transvestism.

- Inconsistent definitions of ‘transgenderism’ and the connected terms.

- Understanding online transgender communities.

- Information regarding

• Transphobia.
• Family issues with transgender people.
• Employment difficulties of transgender people.
• Presentations of transgender people within media texts.

But of course EHRC have had their funding dramatically cut back so those mistakes carry on... and books written in the 60s and 70s carry on being assumed to be the correct ways of looking at the ranges of transgender identities.

This is partly why I was interviewed by the Gaydio radio station as part of highlighting some of those errors. (A big 'thank you' to the Gaydio people.) Well it'll be a taster until the book I'm editing, that's from my PhD work, gets published. Click on the picture for the link to my interview: