Kira Herdman

Living in the UK as a transgender person has got a lot worse over the last few years. I think also it will probably get worse before it gets better.

I would say since about 2015 things have slowly been descending to where we are today, a society that is in the mist of a culture war where transgender people are in the middle. We get discussed with no representation, get papers written about us without any input from us and get “advise” from government that was given with no input from transgender people or advocacy groups, but instead the government listens to hate groups like the LGB Alliance and the discredited CASS report.

Today, the mainstream media, so the broadsheet newspapers, the BBC etc seem to want to carry on the culture wars that has characterised the UK media ever since Brexit and the days of Boris Johnson as PM.

The way I see it the upper classes and political class are using the LGBT community, especially the transgender community as a distraction to what they are trying to achieve, that is making as much money as possible from the lower/middle classes of society. They also are trying to erase the transgender community entirely .

One of the chief TERF’s, JK Rowling, even posted on the site that was formally known as Twitter, X, that transgender children do not exist. I’m sorry but I am living proof that Transgender Kids do exist, I was one of them.

Twitter, or X as it is now known, is one of the main reasons I think that the culture wars are still going on. Nothing was being done about it until Elon Musk, the site owner and a father who abandoned his own transgender daughter, started to try and get his way of thinking, which is very far right wing, into other governments by interfering in the way they are run and making comments about what party to vote for in elections. His word carries a lot of weight it seems because his are the words richest person in the world and special advisor to the incoming US president. I think governments are waking up to what he is trying to do. They have already seen it happen in America where he helped Donald Trump win the recent US Election so he will become the US president later this month.

The British public however in general seems, in my personal experience, very excepting of transgender people in general. There are, of course, exceptions to that like in any large group of people. People just don’t care as long as we, the transgender community, don’t bother them.

However the biggest threat to the transgender community does not come from the UK, but the US. The incoming Trump administration is very transgender hostile. Everyone knows that what happens in the US will eventually come to the UK as well. Although we have a Labour government in power, the fact that they have been hostile in their policies to transgender people so far, especially against transgender youth, is very discouraging.

I also don’t think Sir Kier Starmer, the current British PM, will stand up to the new administration on anything. When it comes to the LGBT community his government seems to have taken advice from only organisations that are hostile to transgender people.

I fear for what is going to happen over the next year. I just hope Sir Kier Starmer does what he said what he was going to do during the General Election last year, treat the transgender community with respect as so far he has not.