Stepping Over the Line
Notes on resisting trans segregation
A chàirdean,
I’m immersed in full-time rehearsals for the tour of Deep Wheel Orcadia, while also trying to cook, clean, co-ordinate a blood-testing project, have friends, have a part-time job, have enough sleep. Something has to give. At the moment what’s giving is finishing my next book, which is 95% done and just needs one week of solid work to be finished – but that week’s not coming till likely the end of July. What really should give is this blog, which has gotten out of hand: I can’t write a well-made essay for you twice a month. It was supposed to be just a nice way of staying in touch! I should have known myself better. But I like writing to you, and I’m moved to say some things about the current political situation, so I’m giving myself permission to be looser. I’ve a spare hour after doing the big shop and before batch cooking for the week, so whatever I get out by the end of that will have to do for you. I did have a nice rest day yesterday, at least! I’ve been playing solo boardgames as a way to let my mind escape into gentle meaninglessness without having to look at a screen or talk to another person. I hope you’re getting what you need too.
Aye,
Josie
*
Here’s a story I was told recently. There’s this community drama group who were putting on a Gilbert and Sullivan show. Because it’s a community drama group, there weren’t enough men – the top shortage of amdram. This means that lady tenors are a common feature, and, speaking as a lady bass-baritone, more power to them. Now, it’s always been common practice in this company for the vocal parts, who share a costume, to change in the same changing room (the required change being, in this operetta, changing a hat). But then the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled on the definition of woman in the Equality Act, a decision no-one of which no-one yet understands the full implications. Cue scene: a group of court-authenticated adult human females stalled outside the door to their own changing room, all looking at each other with real anxiety, wondering whether or not they were allowed to go in with the men.
I love this story (that is, I hate it) because of what it illustrates about the Supreme Court ruling. This committee of fools thought they could clear up the whole gender business and rule on a simple nicety of law to bring “much-needed clarity” to the situation. As a result, everyone’s confused. Now they and their fellow-travellers are making mild noises about not over-interpreting the judgement, as if they shouldn’t have known full well what would happen. They drew a line around undelineatable concept of gender, and the rest of us have to deal with the consequences: lines where lines never used to be. There’s nothing in the judgement or the Equality Act that would prevent a community drama group running a mixed sex tenor changing room, but now everyone’s worried that there is.
The story also illustrates how people are failing to understand the intended effect of those who campaigned for the judgement, which is to exclude trans women from public life. It is to make our workplaces sites of fear and distress, to make communtiy facilities inaccessible to us, and to make it impossible for us to benefit from women’s solidarity. One of the nastier effects of the EHRC interim guidance is, for example, that it becomes very difficult to run, say, a women’s walking group that includes trans women, because such a group could then be sued by a cisgender man for excluding him. The campaign to exclude trans women from public life has much collateral damage – gender non-conforming women’s comfort in the toilets; trans men’s access to medical wards; everyone’s sense of freedom – but we are the target.
The walking group scenario also illustrates the other missed point: because this is a judgement about civil rather than criminal law, it is never the case that no-one is allowed to enter the tenor changing room – there is no line – but rather it is the case that anyone who allows trans people to use single sex facilities is vulnerable to being sued. That is, the judgement hands malicious actors seeking trans segregation to weaponise social and economic power against any effort for trans inclusion.
This is why we’re seeing a parade of quislings announcing their willingness to collaborate with segregation. Derek Mitchell, the Chief Executive of Citizens Advice Scotland, for example, is a collaborator with segregation, which is to say, he is a segregationist: he’s frightened of CAS getting sued by an anti-trans campaigner, and so he’s announced a policy of staff segregation while acknowledging “the upset that had been caused”. It should not be acceptable for segregation to be the price of public business, but men like Derek Mitchell think that it is. They don’t know where to draw their own moral line. I could name people in similar positions in the Scottish arts sector – my workplace – who have made similar internal announcements. I am learning which of my senior colleagues are segregationists.
All this I expected. What I’m more distressed by is the ineffectual response from large sections of the trans community, particularly its representatives in the NGO sector. We have spent a decade pouring resources into answering government consultations on the basic needs of our lives; we have “won” every single one of these consultations (that is, they’ve all documented strong support for our positions); and decision-makers have ignored or obstructed these consultations – on Gender Recognition Act reform, on the census, on trans healthcare – every single time. Why would anyone think that responding to the EHRC’s consultation on exactly what the parameters of excluding trans women from public life should be is going to produce a positive result? The very best we can hope for under the curent EHRC regime is a registered note of protest. Edinburgh Action for Trans Health argued against compliance with such consultations when they began, encouraging “hostile participation in the form of direct submissions of demands that don't react to the questions posed or restrict themselves to the scope imposed by the government”. More people should have listened then.
Similarly, why are we pouring energy into lobbying MPs who have consistently refused to stick their necks out for us, within a Parliamentary system that has thrown us to the wolves at every opportunity? Why has hundreds of thousands of pounds been raised to spend on more speculative court cases to try and secure rights that state mechanisms have shown they are happy to overrule? We already fought a legal battle to try and secure trans inclusion through gender recognition and equalities law, and some judges just decided that the law didn’t say what its authors wrote it to say! When I think of what all that money could do for trans community healthcare I boil over with so much rage that I can’t think: I have to choose not to think about it. I’m helping run blood tests for nearly 100 trans people who really need them on five grand! Why are we continuing to advocate for political strategies that have consistently failed? Why do we continue to grant the authority to manage our lives to the state?
“Ah,” you’re saying, “but it’s not a zero sum game. We can use multiple tactics at once!” Theoretically, you’re correct. Theoretically, an army of well-resourced energetic activists could simultaneously engage in state-centred advocacy and also do grassroots politics. In practice, it doesn’t happen. In practice, state-centred pseudo-organising dominates the social media feeds and the limited energy reserves of an already depleted community, and absorbs what little money is available to pay for the salaried self-licking ice-cream cone of the lobbying profession.
Instead of pleading with psychiatrists for NHS reform, start a trans community healthcare project. Instead of paying lawyers, collectivise finances for mutual aid. And instead of lobbying the government, organise your workplace. Or rather: pick just one of these things, and do it slowly and consistently, making sure you’re tending to your life and your loves so that you can keep doing it slowly and consistently for a long time. (Have you read your own introductory note? – Ed.) While I’m hectoring you and pretending I have any more strategic nous than the next t-slur: get the hell off social media and stop shouting about the wizard lady, it’s cringe, sorry not sorry, I’m pushing 40.
I want to talk particularly about organising your workplace in response to segregation policies. Right now, your trans colleagues are receiving emails from their bosses saying that they have to use segregated toilets and changing rooms. Their bosses are doing this because they’re frightened of getting sued. You have to be able to present those bosses with something scarier than the anti-trans legal budget. An individual email of protest isn’t going to cut it. A resignation certainly isn’t. I know it’s shit but soon you won’t be able to find a trans-inclusive workplace, and most people don’t have the luxury of moving jobs, so you may as well stick it out and organise this one. You need a significant group of your colleagues to make your boss’s life miserable. Yes, including and especially your nice boss at your middle-class job who invites you to an annual dinner party. You need enough workers to refuse to comply with segregation, and to obstruct their workplaces if they attempt to impose segregation, that segregation becomes unenforceable. This doesn’t start with another pointless open letter, it doesn’t start with disempowering one-to-ones with your segregationist senior manager, it doesn’t start with a symbolic media-targeted protest at a time and place where you’re not even causing a problem to anyone: it starts with talking to your colleagues and making a plan together. If you don’t have a union, or your union is obstructing you, then you need a wildcat action. The best part of this approach is, once you’ve worked together to resist one shitty policy, you can work together for everything else you need, like a pay rise.
Do you remember when you didn’t need to show your passport to get a job? I do. The first time I was asked under so-called “right to work” legislation, I was appalled. I saw it clearly for the moral abhorrence that it was. I fought it for months, all the way up to the head of HR, until they were going to stop me teaching the classes I’d already begun. I tried to resist alone and gave up, because I wasn’t organised. Everyone else had already caved – I’d been too long freelance to notice – and made of themselves a border guard. An enormous social change was inflicted on us, and now it’s become normal. We should have collectively resisted that when we could. We still must, whenever we can, refuse to take down people’s details and submit them to the state.
There is a small window now to show that segregation is unworkable, that our workplaces and public services cannot and will not mark every trans person for exclusion. We are in the interregnum right now where most people haven’t quite decided or not whether segregation is normal and acceptable. We cannot show segregation as the moral abhorrence, practical disaster and mechanism of terrifying social control that it is with open letters, symbolic protests and lobbying campaigns. We show segregation for what it is by collectively making segregation impossible to enforce: by enough workers in enough places refusing to submit to an evil rule, and by taking direct action to resist. This means collective sit-ins of the senior management office, removing gendered bathroom signs when the building is empty, going to the right loo with your trans colleagues, refusing to ask people for their birth certificates and faking the compliance form if necessary, inviting the lawsuit and fighting it with everything you’ve got when it comes.
I strongly suspect that a major reason so many trans people remain wedded to ineffective tactics is that they – we – are trying to hold on to privilege we’ve lost. I’m speaking to people like me, white and from a middle-class background, who grew up expecting the state the guarantee a certain amount of safety and security. Now that the state has made it very clear that we’re disposable, we experience a certain outrage, or moral affront. “You mean you’re going to treat me like you treat all the people who were already disposable?” Faced with that, we try very hard, against all the evidence that it’s not going to work, to recover our position within the state. James Baldwin on white gay people also applies to white trans people. Instead, we have to recognise with whom our practical solidarity must lie, and act accordingly. The rewards are greater than anything the state can give.
In Ali Smith’s new novel Gliff, the state begins painting red lines around buildings. These buildings are targeted for demolition, and their inhabitants and users are liable to be made “unverified”, a status which subjects them to state-sanctioned abuse and exploitation. The narrator, another of the truth-telling non-binary prophets which populate Smith’s novels – though in this case they are, I think for the first time in her work, transfeminine, and subjected to additional horrors as a result – is able to see the world clearly because they are, economically and socially and psychologically, outwith the world. They were already over the line before the lines were drawn. At one point, in a chaotic scene, a teenage boy finds that a red circle has been painted around him, and around him alone. He is frozen, panicked about what this means, but unable to step across it. All he needs to do to escape is to step across the undefended line, but in that suspended moment he cannot.
Stepping across the line, becoming unverified, is terrifying. It means that the state can do appalling things to you and call it justice. But staying within the line is worse: it means that at any point the state can take whatever it’s given you away, and you will always live in fear of that moment. When you’re unverified, your fears become real, but you also learn who else is there alongside you, and how you can fight those fears together.
I step over a line most days of my life now. Service station toilets, swimming pool changing rooms, women’s groups – all places I’m no longer supposed to be. I don’t have a choice, because otherwise it would be literally impossible to participate fully in public life. Every time, now, I know that a terminally online obsessive who’s convinced herself and a sizeable portion of the ruling class that she needs a state-granted right not to look at a t-slur might decide to make my life miserable. Every time, now, I know that HR will back her up, and that the state will back HR up. If that happens, it happens. I’m stepping over the line anyway. The freedom of this is worth any price I could pay. It’s practice, each day, for every other line I will need to step over in my life, practice for all the times I will act in solidarity with every other person marked for disposal by the state. Stepping over the line is not just what makes life worthwhile: it’s what makes life live.
What I’m Doing
I have a busy August with the Edinburgh International Book Festival:
Sun 10th August, 2pm: A Scots writing workshop
Sun 10th, 6.15pm: A panel with Alan Hollinghurst and Randa Jarrar
Thu 14th, 7.15pm: Restaging my performance with Malin Lewis, Unco
Sat 16th, 5.45pm: Interviewing Torrey Peters
Sun 17th, 2.45pm: Talking about Who Will Be Remembered Here (see below!)
Sun 17th, 5.45pm: Interviewing Maggie Nelson
This summer, I’m touring the full stage show of Deep Wheel Orcadia, an Orkney language story in poems with a full score performed by live string quartet. Tickets available here.
26th June 2025: St Magnus International Festival, Orkney
18th + 19th July 2025: The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen
25th + 26th July 2025: Eden Court, Inverness
I wrote and performed for a short film about Dùn Trodan ’s Dùn Teilbh, the Glenelg Brochs, for Historic Environment Scotland. It’s part of a set of four films in four languages of Scotland, made by Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony. The films will be exhibited at Edinburgh Art Festival this August, and there’ll be discussion events too. You can watch the trailer online.
7th-24th August: EAF Pavilion, 45 Leith St, Edinburgh
What I’m Reading
Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is so philosophically exacting I was left feeling like I never wanted to waste a word again.
Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail shocked me with the clarity of its theme and method, which made the horror of the subject real again.
Never Angeline Nørth’s Rainbear!!!!!!!!! is a serious hallucination that explodes with life and is uninterested in catering to anything other than your committed joy.
I loved this Josie, thank you 💜