Transgenderism

Oppression behind closed doors

Pamela Ripley

Our Lady of the Elms College

Abstract

     Keywords: Transgender, Identity, Orientation, UK

        In July 2013 Bradley Manning, the American soldier who passed thousands of classified documents  in protest at US military operations in the Middle East, was sentenced to 35 years in Fort Leavenworth military prison. The day after sentencing Manning caused a media sensation by announcing that she had had gender identity issues since childhood and from now on was to be known as Chelsea Manning and that she intended to pursue gender transition. She now faces many difficult years in a US military prison and a long struggle to access medical support from an institution which is under no obligation to provide her with the medical care that a transgender person may need. (Allison, 2013)

      Early in 2013 transgender schoolteacher Lucy Meadows, who was undergoing gender transition, killed herself after being ridiculed in a Daily Mail column by Richard Littlejohn, who repeatedly referred to her as “he” and argued that she was “not only in the wrong body but in the wrong job”. The coroner at her inquest singled out the adverse media attention as a contributory factor to the intolerable pressures she had experienced. (Littlejohn, 2012)

        On 24 August 2013 20 year old Australian transgender activist and revolutionary socialist Amber Maxwell took her own life after years of transphobic oppression, finding it impossible to get permanent employment or stable housing. Australian surveys of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people (LGBTI) have found suicide rates between 3.5 and 14 times higher than their heterosexual counterparts. A study in the US by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that 41 percent of 6,450 transgender people surveyed in 2010 had attempted suicide compared to 1.6 percent of the general US population. (Todman, 2013)

       The situation is just as bad in the UK. A Press for Change survey in 2007 for the Equalities Review found that 73 percent of trans people surveyed had experienced public harassment including violence: 19 percent had experienced general practitioners refusing to help or being unwilling to access gender reassignment services, 29 percent had been refused treatment by doctors or nurses who objected to their trans status, and a staggering 35 percent had attempted suicide at least once. This is twice the rate reported for a similarly vulnerable group of people who had suffered childhood abuse and trauma. A 2012 survey by the Scottish Transgender Alliance and Sheffield Hallam University found that 84 percent of trans people surveyed had thought of suicide, 27 percent thought of it during the week prior to the survey, one in three had attempted suicide, one in four more than once. (Australia, 2009)

     These studies and examples illustrate the high levels of oppression transgender people commonly face. Despite capitalism’s ability to accommodate certain limited formal and legal rights in respect of transgender people the extent of such rights falls well short of what socialists mean by liberation and, like all such measures, they exist on sufferance as far as the ruling class are concerned.

      How socialists approach the question of fighting oppressions like transphobia is not an abstract matter. It goes to the heart of how we work with oppressed groups and individuals such as transgender people and how we persuade them to become part of building a mass united working class movement to overthrow capitalism and create a socialist society.

                                      Terminology

       Many people will be unfamiliar with transgender terminology and may find gender variant desires hard to comprehend. Many may also be unsure how to address a trans person to avoid giving offence. There are certainly terms which should be understood as deeply offensive examples include “she-male” or “he-male”, “tranny”, “gender bender”.  More acceptable terms, such as “trans” and “transgender” should, however, only be used as adjectives, not nouns a person is a trans person, not “a trans” or “a transgender”. In general a trans person should be addressed by whichever, “he” or “she”, is applicable to their gender presentation, and by their chosen name, never a former name if you happen to know it. It is also deeply offensive to refer to a trans person by their former gender, “he” or “she”, although most trans people will understand the difficulties and slip ups that this may sometimes lead to if someone may have known them in their former gender. If there is doubt about the gender of a person or about how they might want to be addressed, asking them sensitively how they want to be addressed stands a good chance of resolving the matter.