While the Supreme Court ruled, I tore up a fence

On being trans and living a life

Rain-soaked red gauntlets on my hands, I grabbed one side of the rusted wire and Douglas grabbed the other. We pulled together, and the rotting fence rolled up, pulling a thin layer of turf with it. We staggered backwards, hoods flapping in the biting wind, and the fence jammed. Kneeling in the dirt, I realised that it was caught on the wooden stake and plastic tube of a young tree. Some of the trees that had been planted a few years earlier were rooted down through the half-buried fence. I got out the wire cutters and clipped away, but the snag was deep and tricky. Jimmy gently lifted up the sapling until we could pull the snarling wire clear. If we didn’t, the tree would grow around it, a rusted bit of metal troubling the root system. Eventually, the fence was clear, and the two men made sure the tree settled back in safely. “I hope it’ll be alright,” I said. Jimmy pointed to the yellow-green leaf poking out of the top of the tube. “That’s an alder. They grow well here. It’ll be fine.”

Earlier, in the car up to the nature reserve, against my better judgement, I checked the news on my phone. “Oh,” I thought. “That looks bad.” The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom had ruled that sex in the Equality Act 2010 refers to “biological sex”, a ruling designed to strengthen the rising authoritarian effort to segregate trans women like me from public life. “Ach, whitivver,” I said to myself. The car had parked and I needed to zip up my waterproofs.

I hadn’t planned to be in the Pentlands on the same day as a court ruling, and I had no idea that I’d be walking against the wind into a metaphor. It’s just that I’ve been going out with Friends of the Pentlands once a month to help look after the bit of land where I walk the most. The hills have looked after me for years, offering a place to pace out my troubles and be with people I love, so I wanted to look after the hills in return. I also know that, as someone who’s spent two decades campaigning against the fossil fuel economy that’s super-heating our climate, the more I can actually get my hands in the dirt the better. There’s no point campaigning against a system if you’re not looking after the land to which you belong and the more-than-human lives it supports. Last month we were clearing gorse from a reforestation project that had gotten overgrown in the lockdown years. This month we were tending to a small and scrappy reserve donated by a local farm.

It took a couple of hours, but we got the old fence up, preventing walkers from getting caught in the hidden coils of barbed wire and giving the trees a better shot at growth. Another bale of wire was hidden in the pines: we hauled it out, and I kicked it down the hill. That was more than enough for the day, so we piled back into the car, doing our best not to soak the seats. I looked at my phone again. There were two dozen people checking in with me, wanting to make sure I was OK. “I’m honestly fine,” I wrote back to one or two. “I’ve been digging up a fence.”

Also on my phone, my trans women’s group chat was making the decision not to talk about it. Those of us who’ve been at it a while have learned how to look after ourselves and each other. We shared selfies and bad jokes. We planned the work that’s necessary for caring for trans life. One person was trying to get help for a trans woman in another city facing imminent homelessness. Another needed a chat about our plans to make an escape fund for trans women dealing with intimate partner violence, after a local shelter made public their ideology that trans women are acceptable targets of male violence. Some of us are working on a project to get trans people excluded from state healthcare (which is most of us) access to vital blood monitoring, after the local harm reduction clinic made public their belief that we are too risky and problematic for even this basic support. In lots of ways, this was an ordinary day.

That is the work where I actually put my time. Earlier in my transition, like a lot of people early in transition, I put far too much energy into lobbying governments, analysing legal cases, and trying to reform NHS protocols. You’ll find long essays doing this work from me elsewhere online. I mostly regret them. It should have been apparent to me much sooner – especially given that my older and wider trans friends were generously telling me – that I was making appeals to a state that fundamentally did not care for me. White and middle-class, I was outraged by the loss of privilege, by my sudden shift in social status from being loved by the state to being a problem. I wanted the courts, the moral arc of the universe, the God I was taught about as a child, somebody in charge to say “yes, you’re a woman, and I’m going to make it okay.” But no-one is going to make it okay except me and those with whom I live in solidarity. I see my current disillusionment as a gift: it is the gift of not believing that any state system will look after me, the gift of knowing that I must put my energy into looking after and being looked after by the communities to which I belong. Nobody else is going to tear up the fence. Nobody else is going to plant the tree. You need to find some friends so that you can do it together.

This Supreme Court ruling is going to put more obstacles in my life. I will encounter more efforts to segregate me from public services, more ignorance from people who think they know best, more abandonment by existing healthcare systems. Every trans woman I know is worried about her job, worried if she’s going to be the next one targeted by a malicious legal case, the next one pilloried by the press. These worries are now worse. All of that is true.

What the Supreme Court cannot do, however, is stop me living my life as a woman. It has absolutely no power over my gender, no power over my sense of self, no power over 99.99% of the decisions I make each day. My existence has not been called into question, because it was never a matter for the state: I exist. The legal decision, made without ever hearing from a trans person, is absurd to trans eyes. I laughed when I read it. It looks like a fumbled attempt to clear up all this gender trouble by judges who have no idea what a trans life is actually like. What we are, definitionally, are people whose gendered lives and sexed bodies do not fit easily into received legal categories. We meet a law, a workplace, a public service, a bit of outdoor clothing, a doctor, and encounter a problem. In return, we are made into a problem. The Supreme Court is wishing that problem away, and so gifting more problems to our lives. Those lives can, must and will continue being lived in their fullness and their joy.

My sisters, please give all your love to each other and none of it to the state. Please do not look to the courts to affirm who you are. Where it is necessary and strategic, certainly, you may wish to fight through these state systems to remove some of the material barriers to living our lives well. But please hear from me, and from all the women who told me and whom I ignored for years, that you are almost always better off spending your limited and precious time on practical community efforts to address the direct needs of trans people around you. Our people live precarious lives, our communities are struggling, and our organisations collapse under the strain more often than not; meanwhile, trans segregationists are riding a global authoritarian wave on a legal superyacht funded by millionaires. We’re losing because our communities simply do not have the resilience and resources to successfully fight the state. That means that if we are ever to succeed in getting courts to lift legal barriers, we need first to build stronger communities.

Nobody else is going to run the transfemicide prevention project. Nobody else is going to run the harm reduction scheme. Nobody else is going to give your sister a sofa or a job. If the need exists in your community, you can organise to meet it. You already have everything you need to become an organiser. Do your research to find out who else is working on your chosen project and what work has been done before. Speak to lots of people before you launch, because there’s experience you can draw on. Get advice and think strategically about what needs doing. Don’t immediately pour all your energy into every project at once and then burn out in two months. Get some rest. Have a stretch. Go for a walk. Find some friends so that you can do it together.

And a last recommendation: do something that has nothing to do with being trans, because that has everything to do with being trans. The cis people in your lives are much less worried about you than the media would have you believe. Douglas and Jimmy haven’t had any trouble with my name and pronouns. Just being openly trans in mixed community spaces is important right now. My thing is ecological restoration, and I can’t speak highly enough of how good it feels to be outside, wet and cold, tending to a tree. I can’t speak highly enough of doing something offline. But you know your life best. Your thing might be making soup for a community kitchen, or keeping a little library, or running a cèilidh. Please do it with your neighbours, whoever they are. The way to beat the Supreme Court is to do what you love as hard as possible. There are lots of fences to tear up, and your life is yours.

The early days of reforestation and wetlands recreation at Patieshill: a spread of spring green under a white-blue sky.