Sarah Everard's case stirs awful memories. So little has changed over the years
Years ago, on an early morning furred with frost, something caught my attention as I passed the local churchyard: a mannequin sprawled on a gravestone. It took a moment for me to realise what I was seeing, a body, naked from the waist down.
The police took a statement. This should have been the extent of my involvement. I couldn’t identify the murder victim or add any other useful detail. Nevertheless, during the following week an officer dropped by my flat several times unannounced to “update me on the case”. On his last visit, he showed me a card he’d made for a colleague as a joke, a post-mortem headshot of the victim with helmet and moustache added, transforming the dead woman, he said, into the spitting image of his boss. As horror robbed me of speech, he asked me out on a date.
I thought about that encounter after the gut-punch news about Sarah Everard’s disappearance, and that a suspect, Wayne Couzens, an officer of the Metropolitan police, was being held for questioning about her kidnap and killing. I thought about it when I read of the “reassurance patrols” deployed in the area from which Everard was snatched, the visible presence of Couzens’ colleagues supposed, somehow, to make women feel safer. Should the Met be investigating or investigated? This question gained urgency with reports that the force faces an inquiry into whether it properly looked into the claim that Couzens had exposed himself at a restaurant, days before Everard’s disappearance.
I thought about it when the Today programme responded to the outpouring of rage and sorrow for Everard by booking an interview with a criminologist called Prof Marian FitzGerald. Many women had taken to social media with their own stories of assault and intimidation. The broadcaster Shelagh Fogarty, for example, tweeted a list of bad things that had happened to her, starting with a man following her home from school when she was 10 and culminating four decades later with a stalker terrorising her for three years.
FitzGerald’s response to similar testimonies, some of which were read at the beginning of the segment, was dismissive: “Perhaps I’m entitled to say as a woman we should not pander to stereotypes and get hysterical,” she said. She advised “the sort of precautions I’ve always taken walking about London late at night, knowing where to walk, where not to walk, how to hold yourself” and rounded off her appearance with the observation that the risk to women “hasn’t changed in a long time”.
This last point was true, but not in the way she meant it. The reason I cannot shake the memory of a police officer’s unwanted attentions and grotesque misuse of a victim’s image is precisely because so little has changed in the intervening years. Back then, in my 20s, I assumed progress just happened without us doing anything to prod it along. Equality shimmered on the near horizon. I understood violence purely as an interaction between individuals rather than grasping its systemic and cultural dimensions and the ways in which the institutions that should combat it too often harbour and enable it. Learning about these dimensions came at a personal cost that underscores my activism and helped propel Sandi Toksvig and me into creating the Women’s Equality party in 2015.
Yes, there are psychopaths, born not socially constructed, but even rotten apples take their cues from their surroundings, with studies suggesting that the behaviours of male psychopaths may differ from female psychopaths along gendered lines dictated by their upbringing and environment. Violence is rarely random, despite the frequency with which this phrase appears. Its targets are predetermined by hatreds that are learned, not inherent.
The ordinary everyday sexism I knew in my youth, the routine sexualisation and dehumanisation of women, hasn’t gone away, any more than have the other ideologies that start from the idea that some humans are worth less than others. On the contrary, these things have found amplifying channels and platforms online and are enjoying a terrible resurgence.
The Crown Prosecution Service is currently evaluating charges against two Met police officers accused of taking selfies in front of the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, then sharing those images on WhatsApp. These days women still walk home with keys threaded through anxious knuckles, only to switch on their computers to find death and rape threats. We are supposed to shrug these things off, treat them as normal, rather than normalised.
Well I’m not prepared to do so. Plans for distanced vigils and protests and the continuing tidal wave of personal testimonies suggest that many, many others feel as I do. This is in the face of opposition from the Metropolitan police, which is banning the Reclaim These Streets vigil planned on Clapham Common on Saturday night despite the organisers’ care to ensure adherence to Covid safety. I joined more than 200 women, MPs, party colleagues, charity workers and others to sign a letter pushing for action to tackle violence against women and girls. And such action is long overdue. Women are leading the calls, but it is way past time that men stepped up to the plate.
We can best honour the victims of violence not only by demanding their assailants face justice, but by challenging the systems and cultures that enable violence and pin the blame on victims. I’m looking at Westminster with its failure to tackle its own culture of abusive behaviour – its own 2018 investigation found that one in five people working there had suffered harassment. I’m looking at the media, reflexively denying its own culpability while pumping out stories that diminish, divide and dehumanise. And I’m looking at those tasked with protecting us. I’m remembering a winter morning and all these years later, I still feel the cold.
Catherine Mayer is an author and co-founder of the Women’s Equality party
it’s a great honour.”
The thing is, she says, when she first came out as a transvestite in 1985, she was pretty much making the same statement she is now. For Izzard it was never just about having a thing for dresses and high heels, it was always about identifying as female. As far as she was concerned, being a transvestite simply meant being transgender without physically transitioning. She says she was four years old when she first had an inkling that she was transgender, even if she had no words for it back then.
Izzard is big on self-analysis. Read her memoir Believe Me, and the two most important dates are dissected time and again – first, when Izzard was six and her beloved mother died, and second, the day she first stepped out in a frock and lippy. Both shaped her future. After her mother’s death she realised she would never again feel so lost and betrayed by the world. Everything she has done since then, she says, has been for her mother – not only to make her proud, but also in the hope of somehow bringing her back. Meanwhile, coming out at the age of 23 was the toughest thing she has done. It emboldened her as much as it terrified her – from then on she knew she could take on anything because nothing would be so scary.
Today we are Zooming to discuss her new movie – an entertaining if rickety second world war spy thriller, in which Izzard stars alongside Judi Dench. Six Minutes to Midnight is yet another first for Izzard – her debut as a screenwriter. The film is very loosely based on a remarkable true story about a tiny girls’ school in Bexhill-on-Sea (one of a number of places Izzard grew up in as the family regularly moved because of her father’s job with British Petroleum) whose students were all German, including daughters of the Nazi high command.
But Izzard being Izzard, the movie is hardly the only thing on her mind. Yes, acting is her priority at the moment, but she is also planning a standup tour of Spain in Spanish. Then there is her solo performance of Dickens’s Great Expectations, which she hopes to take to the US. Oh yes, and in January she raised more than £300,000 for charity by doing 32 virtual marathons and 31 standup gigs in 31 days. Her appetite for ever more audacious challenges is as huge as her ambition to succeed. And finally there is politics. Izzard tells me she is planning to win a seat for Labour at the next general election, and if by some quirk she fails to she will stand again and again till she does win. There have been few performers with the stamina or self-belief of Eddie Izzard. I tell her I’m exhausted just listening to her itinerary.
Doesn’t she get knackered? “No,” she says. Again, it goes back to the early days. From the age of seven, she was desperate to act, but she never got chosen for anything. So she insinuated herself into school plays – when the cast were rehearsing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, she hovered by, uninvited, and when the drama teacher wanted a table moving she would move it. Her persistence paid off when she was given one line in the musical. At the age of 15 she broke into Pinewood Studios in the hope that somebody would spot her potential. Nobody did, and she was turfed out. At school she already had that hunger to achieve and impress. She was expected to do nine O-levels, but opted for 12.
Alongside her outre persona, there has always been something rather conservative about Izzard. As a teenager she wanted to join the special forces (till she discovered she couldn’t pick and choose her wars), and believed strongly in moderation and the rule of law. One of her favourite expressions is “cool and groovy”, and never does she sound more establishment than when she says it. She studied sciences at Alevel, started a degree in accounting at the University of Sheffield and left a year later to pursue a career as a street performer.
She honed her comedic skills by talking to (often imaginary) audiences on the streets as an escapologist. Inspired by the Goons and Monty Python, she developed her own brand of stream of consciousness riffing. Izzard’s humour is a form of mental contortionism, twisting crazy concepts one way then another before reaching even more half-baked conclusions. She never made any headway till establishing herself as a standup comic at the age of 30. And this, she says, is why nothing exhausts her now. “I was seven and I was ready to go. So there were 23 years of twiddling my thumbs waiting for things to get going. And when it did get going I thought I’m way behind, I’ve got to catch up.” She pauses. “I realise now if I go towards things slowly they tend to work.”
While many transgender people suffer terrible gender dysphoria because they believe they have been born into the wrong sex, Izzard continued to seesaw between girl mode and boy mode. Perhaps because of this there has been a tendency to dismiss her as attention-seeking or whimsical. But she insists this could not be less true. In January, she told the Big Issue: “I went through such hell since ’85 that the idea that I’ve come out recently just sounds ridiculous.”
Can she describe that hell? “There’s the self-analysis I did lying on the bed with the curtains closed trying to walk through my mental passageways, and my brain not letting me do it. Then there’s the coming out – the people hurling the abuse, and what do you do. And then there’s the panic attacks that happened most days, several times a day. You start sweating, and if it’s in the summer months and you’re panicking, you bucket with sweat and you think: ‘My God, I’m sweating.’ So you sweat even more.”
The panic attacks only stopped a few years ago. Izzard shows me how people used to laugh in her face. She moves her face forward so she is virtually headbutting the screen. “People would stand this close, and say: ‘What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?’ They turn you into an it.” Did it scare her? “No, it infuriated me. I want to fight everyone that says things like that.”
There is another fight, though, that she thinks is utterly pointless – between some trans women and some feminists. She believes they should be allies rather than enemies. “It saddens me. How do we change that conversation? I can’t come up with a magic wand and provide an answer for everyone. I’m just trying to create a space for myself and anybody else who wants to slipstream behind that. But if you sat me down with some radical feminists I’m not sure whether we would sort everything out.” She thinks it’s a waste of political energy. “I’d like to get to the place where we don’t have to have this fight because I’m trying to deal with rightwing fascists and what they say.”
Izzard, aged 58, is dressed soberly in a shirt and jacket, and could easily pass as a politician. In fact, she says this is how she will dress when (not if) she wins her seat. Has she talked to Labour about standing in the next election? “Yes, I’ve told everybody that I can tell that I want to stand. But still, a lot of other people want to stand, so nothing is a given.”
Is she as determined about this as she has been about her standup, acting and running? “Yep. I’m not mucking about with this. I’m going in. If something goes wrong, if I stand in a byelection and I don’t get in, I’ll still go on. It doesn’t really matter because I am a relentless bastard.”
She’s had to be, she says – after all, she has chosen the path of most resistance in everything she has pursued. So after climbing to the top of the standup mountain she walked back down and started again at the bottom of the acting mountain. And now, having made a respectable career for herself in acting, she is preparing to give it all up for Westminster.
Why is it so important for her to go into politics? “If moderate people don’t go into politics then you leave it to egotistical extremists who are happy to lie. Moderates have got to go in. I’m a radical and a moderate.” In what way? “I do radical things, but my politics are moderate. I perform in French, German and Spanish as well as English when I’m a standup, so that’s slightly radical. And I’m radical because I came out as transgender. I’ve run about 130 marathons for charity. That’s slightly radical.”
Why does she do all the marathons – are they an obsession? Again she returns to her early life and trans issues. “No. It’s more feeling I never did enough when I was younger.” How has running changed her? “It’s been great for my mental health. Great for reclaiming the sort of fitness I had as a kid. It’s also changed people’s attitude towards me, too – being a trans person who is an endurance runner is no bad thing.” In what way? “People don’t expect a trans woman to be able to run 130 marathons for charity and it changes their sense of what a trans woman is. I can see in their eyes they go: well, fair play.”
In so many ways, she is bursting with self-belief. But Izzard says she has never found relationships easy. As a kid, she struggled to make an impression on girls she fancied. When she grew up, it didn’t improve much. And now as an out trans woman she reckons it may get a whole lot harder.
“Relationships with me are tricky. You’ve got to be a woman who’s very self-confident about your own sexuality to go out with me.” There have been few relationships in her adult life, partly because she is so often on the road working or running, partly because she is happy with her own company. Does she prefer not being in a relationship? “I don’t think I prefer it but I’m not going to agonise over it.”
I ask if it’s easier to be a trans woman now that she’s getting older. “It’s true older men and older women look quite a lot similar. There’s a middle area where it’s much trickier. Visually, there’s not so much difference between older men and older women, so it does get easier.”
Is she worried that transitioning may harm her career? After all, she worked so hard to be recognised as an actor, and now casting directors may well be unsure what to do with her. “Yes, potentially, but that was there already. So yes, it is a thought, and a lot of people wouldn’t come out because they felt that was going to screw up their career.” Again, she says she has been astonished by some reactions. “Some people are going: ‘Are you serious?’ I have floated this thing up as slowly as I fucking can. Thirty-five fucking years, mate, how much warning do you need?” But she says she has had plenty of practice taking on hecklers on stage and in real life. “I was the right person to come out because if people were going to hurl abuse at me in the streets, as they have done, I would hurl it back. Sometimes it would just be us standing in the street swapping abuse or if they fight me, I’ll fight them back.”
At the moment, Izzard is self-identifying as a trans woman. Does she think she will ever physically transition? “I might do. I feel that boy mode has had a good innings in this one life that we get. It would be great to get up in the morning and think I look like a woman so I’m going to throw on a tracksuit and have breakfast. It is getting better and better. I do feel I can express myself in a more feminine way, which may be the age thing.”
Would she like boobs? “Yeah! I’ve had boob envy since my teens. Just when teenage girls of my age were going ‘I want boobs’, I was thinking yeah me too. But I couldn’t say it. They talk about penis envy, and I believe some women suffer penis envy. I cannot for the life of me get my head around this. But yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.”
We’re coming to the end of our time. As she talks, I’m thinking how she has grown into her face over the years. Her features seems softer and more feminine these days. I ask if she is taking hormone pills. She smiles and, for once, declines to answer. “I’m very happy to transition and I feel I have been transitioning,” she says. “But I do feel I’ve told everybody everything in my life, so I’m going to keep a certain amount of privacy.”
• Six Minutes to Midnight is available on Sky Cinema and Now TV from 26 March.
• This article was amended on 12 March 2021 to change a reference to body dysmorphia to gender dysphoria.
I’ve been promoted to she, and it’s a great honour
everything was monitored behaviour, personal data is collected by thousands of cameras,” said Jasmine Mohamed, a Toronto resident completing her graduate degree in urban planning. “I’m glad that’s no longer a priority for the new vision.”
Instead, the new plan centres on affordability, low-carbon design and an emphasis on local and minority-owned businesses.
While it retains a number of elements from the initial glossy renderings – such as wooden skyscrapers – the new plan focuses more on integrating elements of Lake Ontario into parks and recreational amenities.
For a city already grappling with a housing shortage and affordability crisis, the plans need to be ambitious if Toronto hopes to achieve any degree of equity, warns Mohamed.
“The pandemic has brought disparities in the city to the forefront. It’s hit low-income areas so hard. And so this it’s an opportunity for the city to be bold.”
In rejecting a technology-heavy approach, Waterfront Toronto appears to be returning to its original development goals.
“The idea of a smart city sounds really nice. It’s new, it’s innovative and it’s world-leading. It promises to make hard problems simpler and easier and faster to solve,” said Shoshanna Saxe, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto. “But when you dig into the details of these pitches, they really tend not to work very well.”
As an example, she pointed to the “smart” rainwater monitoring system proposed by Sidewalk Labs as a way to avoid flooding. But the idea, she says, was premised both on the notion that weather systems that caused the worst damage could be predicted – and that the city wouldn’t lose power during a severe storm.
Saxe highlighted the need for decision makers to take a far longer view of city infrastructure.
“We’re often easily distracted by the idea of something new and flashy, but then we learn it’s quite hard to deliver on those promises,” she said. “And while we’re chasing something flashy, the problems become more entrenched and it becomes harder to deal with them.”
In lessening its reliance on technology, Toronto has also sent a broader message to other cities flirting with the prospects of developing their own
“smart city”, said Mike Lydon, a New York-based planner
“The original Quayside development was a cautionary tale to many other cities as not to over-promise the outcomes of a smart city,” he said. And with the coronavirus pandemic highlighting the need for human connections, he believes planning decisions will need to centre on residents.
“To bet the farm on technology that redesigns our entire streets and relies on apps and sensors doesn’t really jive with how human beings actually use public spaces – and how they want to live in cities.”
Joe Biden’s promise of a more “fair, safe and orderly” immigration system is facing an early test as the number of children seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border has increased this year.
On Biden’s first day in office, the president began reversing the policies of Donald Trump, who sought to reduce all forms of migration. But more is needed to respond to the increase in unaccompanied children at the border – 9,457 of whom were taken into US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in February, the most since May 2019.
This is what we know so far:
Why is there an increase in children at the border?
The issues driving families and children to the border in the past decade remain: the climate crisis, violence, unemployment and poverty. Two devastating hurricanes in Honduras in November and the coronavirus pandemic have added to the desperate conditions. And each year migration increases when the weather warms up.
All of this is colliding with a change in the US approach to migration. For four years, Donald Trump introduced policies that made it much more difficult to migrate to the US and essentially brought asylum to a halt last year – but people kept coming. Biden has revoked some Trump-era asylum measures and children who were being turned away two months ago are now being processed because Biden stopped a rule known as Title 42 from being applied to children.
Florence Chamberlin, managing attorney for the advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense, told the Guardian last week from Mexico: “Title 42 and other policies of the previous administration have created an artificial back-up at the border of these children that has compounded the danger and trauma that they fled.”
It is also believed that at least some of the unaccompanied children initially approached the border with parents or other family members and were turned away, leading some families to send their children alone to improve their chances of entering the US. The border patrol also separates many children who are with non-parents, even when those adults may be the child’s primary guardian.
What happens to children after they seek asylum?
For children seeking asylum on their own, the first step is to contact a border patrol official either at a legal port of entry or while trying to cross the border outside those checkpoints. Those unaccompanied children are supposed to be moved within three days out of border patrol custody to the health department’s office of refugee resettlement’s (ORR) network of shelters. From there, they are placed with a sponsor, usually a family member or friend already living in the US while their legal cases play out.
Child welfare experts say it is essential children are moved to a sponsor as quickly as possible - but it is not happening veryefficiently. As of Monday, nearly 1,400 children had been in border patrol custody for more than three days, according to CBS News. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, CBP officials would not provide information on how many children were in its custody and concerns are growing about the number of children detained in border patrol facilities.
Troy Miller, the acting CBP commissioner, said: “We’re doing everything that is possible to move the children out of our custody as quickly as we should, in a safe and healthy manner.”
Why are children still being detained?
Precisely because the process of getting children to sponsors is not moving quickly enough. The Biden administration has taken steps to improve its efficiency, and other changes are rumored to be on the way, but it is also inheriting the changes Trump made to shrinkshrink asylum and refugee processing.
Leah Chavla, a senior policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission,
said: “What we saw under the last administration was, yes, there were times when there were a lot of unaccompanied children in government custody and those were really due to policies that were cruel and awful and on purpose. It wasn’t because the system couldn’t process the children.”
What is Biden doing about this?
ORR shelters usually have capacity for 13,600 children, but this was reduced by 40% because of the pandemic. This week, Biden opened the shelters to full capacity.
The administration has also introduced several measures to streamline the sponsor process, including improving information sharing between the many agencies involved and allowing shelter operators to pay for transportation of undocumented children if their sponsors couldn’t – which previously only happened with special approval.
Biden on Wednesday resurrected a program shuttered by Trump that allows children to apply for asylum from their home countries, instead of making the dangerous journey north.
And it is expected that the Biden administration will act on a long-held request by advocates to send health department officials to work with the border patrol, which could expedite matching children with sponsors.
Perhaps the most controversial change has been Biden’s decision to reopen the remote Carrizo Springs influx facility in Texas for children aged 13 to 17. The administration is also considering opening additional influx shelters in California and Virginia.
Why is the influx shelter controversial?
Influx facilities are meant to be temporary and are not subject to the same licensing as permanent shelters. The news about Carrizo Springs prompted criticism of the administration returning to “kids in cages”, from prominent figures on the left and right. But many advocates have said despite their serious concerns these shelters are preferable to the alternative available today: keeping children at a border patrol facility while sponsors are vetted.
What happens next?
Independent advocates are monitoring what happens at the shelters, how long children are being kept at border patrol stations and how quickly children are safely placed with sponsors. There were 8,100 children in ORR custody as of Monday.
A group of senior administration officials visited the border over the weekend and briefed Biden about their findings on Wednesday.
Crucially, the border is still mostly closed to asylum seekers. Unaccompanied children are being allowed in, but most single adults are not. Some families and people in the Remain in Mexico program have also been admitted since Biden took office.
The US southern border coordinator, Roberta Jacobson, said on Wednesday in Spanish and English at a White House briefing: “La frontera está cerrada,” or “the border is closed.”