Trans women like me are now effectively outlawed from public life – what are you so scared of?

Independent

16-04-2025

The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 specifically says that someone with a gender recognition certificate shall be considered in law to belong to their acquired sex. This is being reversed thanks to today's Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of 'woman' is based on biological sex.
Had the court allowed any trans people to give evidence or any doctors or scientists who work in the field of gender identity, they would have discovered two things. First, the supported 'threat' to women's rights posed by the existence of trans women does not exist. And second, the definition of 'biological sex' is infinitely more complicated and harder to pin down than a simple matter of X or Y chromosomes.
Instead, they accepted a narrative of bigotry and prejudice that bears a sickening resemblance to that used as the justification for the segregation and persecution of Black people and Jews: this group is inferior, but it is also dangerous, and its very presence is a threat to a healthy society.
But what threat do trans women actually pose? Name me the trans female who has won an Olympic medal or a tennis grand slam. There is no such name because it has never happened (and no, those two boxers at Paris 2024 were not transgender).
Give me a case of a trans woman causing trouble in a female hospital ward. In 2024, the trans rights group TransLucent contacted 102 NHS hospital trusts and, using Freedom of Information requests, asked them to provide any records of complaints against trans patients in women's wards (of whom I was one, as it happened), over the past three years. Millions of women went to hospital at that time. Only one made any complaint about a trans patient, and that was so trifling that it required no further action.
As for trans women in ladies' loos, here's an exclusive report on what we do there. We stand in line. We dash for the first available cubicle. We do our business. Then we wash our hands, check our face, brush our hair and leave.
Sound familiar? Well, so would the rest of my life. Ten days ago, a couple of girlfriends (both 100 per cent XX-chromosome natal females) and I decided to treat ourselves to a very special lunch at the Ritz. I was called madam at the front door, at the concierge desk, by the man at the cloakroom and by all the waiters. When I used the ladies' loo, no one batted an eyelid. No one ever does. I've been going full Marie Kondo on my flat, and I'm 'luv' and 'darlin'' at the council tip where I'm dumping all my rubbish, too.
It never occurs to people who meet me for the first time that I'm trans. If I tell them, they either don't care or are actively supportive. Above all, I am a woman-made woman.
Quite apart from my mum, who started the process, the psychiatrist who approved me for gender surgery is a woman, as is the surgeon who, to be blunt, gave me my labia, clitoris and vagina. (My breasts, I might add, grew without anything more than oestrogen to help them.)
A woman taught me how to speak like a woman. Women were my nurses and are my hairdressers. I go to a salon that only has female clients. Everyone knows I'm trans, and they are all friendly and absolutely at ease with my identity. Why wouldn't they be? I mean, why would I go through all the time, trouble, pain and expense of gender transition if I were hostile to women?
And yet, for all the acceptance in my everyday life, I, like all trans women, have to live in a world of persecution without justification. In 2024, a UN report into the treatment of trans people in the UK reported on the worrying rise of transphobic speech in media and politics, which was leading to a dramatic increase in violence against trans people. The people who are supposed to be such a threat face more violence and abuse than any other group in society.
The Supreme Court's judgement, coupled with the recent assault on gender-affirming medical care in the NHS in the wake of the Cass Review, just adds to the weight of state abuse of trans women, putting Britain on a par with the most bigoted states of the USA. But in America, there are at least some states that are still safe havens for trans people. There is no haven here.
And don't think it will stop with trans women. As if to echo the Martin Niemöller poem 'First They Came', the White Christian Nationalist groups who fund the anti-trans campaign in the UK, and who are open about seeking the total eradication of 'transgenderism' (which is to say, trans people) aren't stopping with us. They are coming for abortion rights. They are coming for gay rights. You could be next.
In the meantime, we trans women are being destroyed by lies and the suckers who support those lies. It's just a pity that some of those suckers sit on the Supreme Court.