TRANS RIGHTS ARE IN DANGER – HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP

It was an absolute joy to put this feature together and be able to give a platform to such a beautiful celebration of same-sex love. But as a brand that feels passionately about trans rights, we couldn’t celebrate progress without also spotlighting the hate, discrimination and lack of understanding so many people are still facing. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

In 2017, the Conservative Party, under Theresa May, vowed to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). May merely wanted to make a relatively simple change to the way legal gender recognition works in the UK – removing the requirements that trans people be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and have the documented approval of two medical professionals to change their legal gender. Her decision sparked the beginning of a transphobic panic in some circles.

Six years later, the Conservative government has just blocked Scotland’s own attempt to reform the gender recognition process. Westminster abandoned its own plans for reforming the GRA long ago, after years of delays and six different equalities ministers. In the meantime, hostility has grown towards the LGBTQ+ community, particularly trans women and trans and non-binary young people.

Rishi Sunak vowed to ‘review’ the Equality Act to ‘make it clear that sex means biological sex rather than gender’. This move would block trans people from accessing toilets, sports teams or domestic abuse refuges that correspond as women-only spaces. In the past few years, funding has been withdrawn for tackling LGBTQ+ bullying in schools, the government’s LGBT Advisory Panel has been disbanded and teachers have been left confused about the best way to support trans students, with fears that new guidance will force them to ‘out’ trans, non-binary and gender-conforming students to their parents, leaving them at risk of abuse. Those seeking genderaffirming healthcare must endure NHS waiting lists that are now measured in years, with no hope that the waiting times will come down any time soon; a court recently ruled that NHS England is ‘doing all it can reasonably be expected to do’ to reduce the waiting times for treatment. Meanwhile, anti-LGBTQ+ violence has hit a 10-year high and the number of reported anti-trans hate crimes continues to increase year on year. Trans people have no power and nowhere to turn; the only political champion we had was Nicola Sturgeon, who steadfastly backed Scotland’s gender recognition reforms, and who resigned in February this year.

As a result, you’d be hard pressed to find a trans or non-binary person in the UK who has not lost a trans friend in recent years. Whether that friend was murdered like trans schoolgirl Brianna Ghey or whether that friend died by suicide, the toxic mix of political attacks on trans rights, increasing online abuse, real-world violence and horrendously long waiting times for vital healthcare make the UK a frightening place to be trans right now.

In short, the trans community has never needed your support more. We asked three trans activists what Cosmopolitan readers could do now, today, to show solidarity and allyship…