The debate around gender identity is certainly a pervasive one in contemporary British politics, an intrinsic part of the culture war that we are supposedly embroiled in as a nation – this is the clash between cultural conservatism and progressivism, one of the more ugly and polarised battlefields in our politics at the moment. Gender identity is what author Shon Faye is concerned with, specifically that many of the talking points and issues discussed in the media regarding the debates about gender and trans people are unhelpful and even a deliberate distraction regarding the real issues that trans people face.
On the evening of the 24th May, in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium in the Student’s Union of the University of Sheffield, one of the most anticipated events of the Festival of Debate in Sheffield unfolded. Faye, author of the 2021 bestseller The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, was introduced and questioned by host Finn Warman, co-founder of Andro & Eve, a Sheffield-based Arts Organisation whose vision is “celebrating queer culture through memorable events that inspire”.
Faye is an accomplished author and journalist, who as well as penning The Transgender Issue has contributed to The Guardian, The Independent, and Novara Media. She also hosts the podcast Call Me Mother, talking with LGBTQ elders who can bring “something important, interesting or enlightening to say about what it means to be queer in the world today.” The transgender issue started to dominate her career, she says, around the time of Theresa May’s proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act in 2017 and 2018. It was around this time the issue turned into the pervasive debate it is today, not least because, in Faye’s words, the “Murdoch owned media made a distinct decision to be anti-trans.”
It is not as though the right-wing media had not already shown itself to be anti-trans; Faye details in the early pages of her book the story of Lucy Meadows, a primary school teacher who had taught in Lancashire, who upon coming out as a trans woman during the Christmas Break of 2012 was hounded and bullied by the national media and tragically ended up taking her own life in early 2013.
But around the time of the proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act, trans people were achieving more visibility in the media and in popular culture, and this visibility had prompted a backlash, what Faye refers to as a “moral panic.” The debate around gender identity became at this point a culture war issue, and it became deadlocked around a number of repetitive talking points, those being the common themes that we see of public bathrooms, trans women in sports, children coming out as trans, to name a few. In these debates Faye often feels that opponents are more interested in debating “their issues with us” than “the challenges facing us,” ‘us’ being trans people.
For Faye, it is these “challenges” that ought to be centred during discussions with and about trans people; we should be centring the needs of trans people. Even reform of the Gender Recognition Act, Faye claims in the talk, is not a top-5 issue for most trans people – these other talking points frequently dragged out by the media are even further removed from trans people’s needs – the frontline priorities are issues like healthcare, for example. A shortage of Gender Identity Clinicians (GIC’s), for example, means longer waiting times are an added barrier for those who are trans and want to transition.
A key part of Faye’s message is that the issues that trans people face are often not removed from the issues that others face, and by solving those issues we can help everyone, as per the first line of her book; “the liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society.” Take the aforementioned healthcare; everyone is suffering from long NHS waiting times due to underfunding and understaffing – the shortage of GIC’s is but one aspect of a wider problem. To liberate trans people by systematically fixing our broken healthcare system would yield benefits that would be felt by a much larger group of people.
Faye thinks similarly about the issue of prisons, looking at how the problem of trans people can “expose a problem in the whole system,” as she details in an appearance on the Channel 4 podcast Ways to Change the World. The issue of which prisons to put trans people in could be negated – given that our goal is to reduce violence and given that prisons are inherently violent – by simply releasing “a large amount of prisoners who haven’t committed violent crimes.” This wouldn’t just help trans prisoners and remove the debate surrounding where to incarcerate them but could help to transform our justice system by moving it away from one where we “delight in punishing people,” towards one where we can actually strive for a “less violent society.” Faye’s vision, as a liberationist, extends far beyond just the liberation of trans people.
The key points then, from this insightful talk, were that contemporary debates about gender obscure and distract from the critical issues that trans people face, and that solving these critical issues and the structural causes of these issues would go a long way to improving everyone’s lives in this country. Faye’s book, which she stuck around after the talk to sign copies of, and her words at the talk, are well worth absorbing for anyone who wants to get a key perspective on this mainstream gender debate that Faye is so critical of.
