Experiences of trans and gender diverse young people

I try and shield myself from it because I find it’s so triggering, like [name] and people like that and just like I the sort of the GIC consultation I think it was, was that in 2017 when that was happening I remember there were a lot of TERF’s protesting outside my place of work, or like near the sort of near [station] sort of thing, not, not because, you know, I was trans or anything, I hadn’t sort of come out, but I found that really I think it impacted me because I hadn’t come out as Trans yet and I knew, you know, deep down I knew I was Trans and I was sort of… yeah I found that incredibly like emotionally unsettling as someone that wasn’t, hadn’t come out yet and I was at work and going to work and I was passing this TERF and then like people at work were sort of talking about it like debated, debating like their position on it as, and it made me feel incredibly dehumanised and I remember sort of like feeling like incredibly dissociative and then not really engaging like other than like I would sort of post on social media about my like kind of and yeah I’d post my take on things on social media but then when I actually went into the office after like sort of encountering this, yeah like having to actually like be face to face with someone who was like protesting against Trans people and then I didn’t know I was trans and then going into work and then like talking to people who also didn’t know I was Trans and like talking about it as if it was something that was like up for debate and these people didn’t have agency. That was really hard yeah that felt really difficult and I think it really like kind of prevented me from wanting to come out.

It really makes, it shouldn’t but it does make you question yourself and your own identity because you feel that way anyway without people coming on the television and telling you that. But when you are bombarded with the media saying all these people are just going through a phase they’re gonna wanna detransition and they’re gonna be stuck like it forever and all this, all this stuff it really, it makes you feel invalid you start to, people start to perceive you in a negative light as well and I think the media have done a really poor job of Trans representation and they’ve really tainted the Trans identity by making it almost as a joke and it’s ridiculed a lot.

I try and stay away from these debates but I know what my view on young people accessing healthcare is and I know that’s not the view of, of everyone but I feel like all we can do is just like try and create spaces where, or like create discourse where young people feel like, young Trans people feel supported and try and keep them, because unfortunately people are always going to be against our community and that’s something I experienced with a lot of communities that I’m in like regardless of why, people always gonna be racist or going be transphobic people always going to be homophobic like everything and right now is popular it’s very popular to be transphobic and it’s very popular to be questioning our community and that kind of stuff. And so I feel like rather than like challenging every discourse we see that’s like transphobic like directly I feel it’s more important to create infrastructure outside of that because if we keep on going in on that like it just means that we’ll stay at the level of like the harm and not really progress to, I hate the word progress but like not really get to a space where we can like create different like infrastructure and so I feel like creating spaces and doing work outside of like harmful media discourse around Trans young people is like the best work that can be done right now.

I’ve been fairly lucky to find a lot of support through like online communities but I think at least more so in the last year than at any point before, the sort of media coverage and media stories particularly around young trans people has been vile, like it’s so awful and sort of being confronted by all of these negative stories has been really overwhelming a lot of the time and I found a lot of value actually in not checking the news, not looking at the news stories or if I do look at the stories particularly not reading the comments underneath them, so if they’re shared on Facebook I might read the actual but I will not read the comments because they are just so awful and abusive a lot of the time and I don’t think it’s productive or healthy.

I think if some people that are in trouble, they need to completely turn off. Like they don’t, like avoid Twitter, Twitter seems to be a very, very big place where a lot of bad people are, and a lot of bad ideas are. I mean for everything, you know but, avoidance is fine, you’re not letting the community down by cutting yourself off from the media, and from social media cos there can be a thing where people are just like, “Well I’ve got to keep up to this, up on this stuff, cos I’ve got to be aware. You know the community needs, I need to know this stuff because you know, of the community.” No, don’t. If it’s fucking with you, cut yourself off.

I think it’s really important to, and I talk about this all the time, but I think it’s really important to curate your social media, and I think that, I, people don’t necessarily think of that when they’re on social media, that like I don’t follow people who make me feel bad, or if I follow someone and then every time I see their posts I think I don’t like that, I don’t relate to that, this is making me feel bad, I just unfollow them. Because it’s about having a positive experience and it’s, I think a lot of people say, “Well you’re just, you know in your own echo chamber,” but the reason that that is because if you’re not in your own echo chamber you are causing a lot of harm to yourself, that you don’t necessarily need to experience, and so curating your, your Twitter timeline, or your, or your Instagram feed, or your Facebook just by you know unfollowing groups, or you know unfriending people who just don’t want to learn, don’t want to adapt, makes your experience much better.

I think I’ve had quite a lot of experience online I’m always online and been quite involved in that I’ve always enjoyed sort of debates and discussions around it even going into like the most toxic communities through it and stuff like that I’ve always been one of those people whose thought that the best way to get acceptance is to have those hard discussions and not alienate those people even who seem outwardly transphobic and I’ve come to accept through those discussions that there are people who’s minds you aren’t going to change because their beliefs aren’t based on fact, they don’t care what the facts are, they don’t care about, they certainly don’t care about appeals through emotion you know, and a lot of them they have sort of dehumanised trans people in their mind.

I love engaging with it, it you know, sometimes you need to kind of not take it in, you know, on these sort of worst platforms but I try to engage with it because I think yeah, you know, it’s not validating or legitimising these people and their bigoted sort of hatred but I, I, I like to think and I like to hope, I like to see the best in people and I can be way too optimistic in giving people the benefit of the doubt in a lot of cases but I like to hope that maybe one of those people I’ll talk to isn’t so far down the line that they’ve just stopped listening to, they don’t care about the facts, they don’t care about reason that you’re not really a person, I like to think that at least some of them I’ve talked to were just, that they just misunderstood, they were confused because I understand it can be confusing, you know, it is not something that’s easy to just know about. So that’s why I think coming at it from the angle of compassion and empathy and saying look this person may be transphobic they may hate me without reason but I still see the best in them and believe that something good can be pulled from this through conversation, I love to engage like that.

I think it’s quite positive if you stay in like the social bubble of like trans positivity but then like when you branch out and there’s like people spreading transphobic things and like people making videos about their opinions but I think it’s quite good really because like if someone meets one of those a lot of the community will like try and move that away and like not bring attention to it.

So when you say like the bubble of tran’s positivity what do you mean?

Like everyone’s kind of like just being positive and like anyone who is being disrespectful or anything they’ll just remove and it’s just like their own safe place like there’s a lot of Facebook groups I’m in like [support group] and it’s like you can put anything in there and people will help and it’s like if there’s anyone who’d not supposed to be in there they’ll just get them moved.

In my mum’s Indian soaps there were a few characters that were, well very few but still I remember being very shocked because there was a group of people in India called Hijra people. I don’t know if you are—yeah. So, they were like these hijra characters in the soaps that my mum was watching, which was very confusing to me as a child because I didn’t know exactly they were. But I could see that they were some sort of gender queer characters. She seemed quite happy to watch something that had them in it and which portrayed them in a positive light. That is when I think it, I at least acknowledged that it wasn’t 100% taboo.

Hijra people are people I think almost exclusively people that are born male that grow up and then realise that they are gender queer. There is a concept mostly located in India probably places in Pakistan as well. They, it’s traditionally starts out as people being queer men. And then identifying more as female and recognising themselves as being part of a hijra community. There is a lot of traditions associated with them as well. I think in some villages it’s traditional for them to show up before like childbirth or weddings to celebrate this joyous occasion. But their role in society very interesting because they are not, they are not like a plague on society at all. They co-exist with villages and like even very traditional mindsets. They are just an accepted part of queerness in those areas where they exist.

I think I learnt about it as something quite separate to myself before I was able to allow it to be something that I can accept within myself. And so learning about it through like the internet and seeing a lot of representation especially of black Trans feminine people or Trans women and just like looking at their experience and just thinking like yo this is lit like how, I just was like you’re, you living in your truth like that’s a really beautiful thing. And then making friends as well that were like Trans feminine and going to like their events or like holding events for them to come and speak and that kind of stuff has been like a massive part of me like learning about gender. And then just having conversations with people that identify outside of cis binary gender has been like massive and just seeing I think when I was first able to like in real life see representations of black Trans masculine people was when I was able to kind of transfer that learning as something that was outside of me to something that was inside of me. And that was like, that representation even though I don’t always believe in representation politics as something that is gonna save the world but it’s something in that sense that really like helped me and like allowed me to live in my truth.

Seeing a black Trans masculine person allowed me to see myself in the Trans community because I guess the most representation, the main representation of Trans people I saw were either white in general like Trans feminine or people that were just like right at the end of their transition, well not right the end because it’s a process but that, I never really see people on the journey of transition and yeah I saw a few like pregnant white men in like newspapers and stuff but I never really understood and like it was, because whiteness is often something that I see so divorced from myself it’s like this is like as in a lot of cultures like my, like my own this is something that is white like Transness is white like being gay as white all that kind of stuff and to be able to break that dichotomy of who is allowed to exist in those spaces was what I needed in order to feel that I could also exist in that space. And so then following a lot of black Trans masculine people on like Instagram has been like massive and just watching them live their life, it allows you to feel not like an outcast, it allows you to feel like a part of something, it allows you to feel as, not as hard on yourself and as like ostracised because it’s so easy to feel ostracised within your community. And to feel like you’re the only one and to feel like only one is to, to feel like an outcast is to feel othered is to feel like, no there’s something wrong about you, about you and so to see that representation both in real life and online has been like transformative.

There is a show that I watched recently called, Euphoria.

Oh yeah, yeah.

It's so good. There is a main character in it called, Jules who is a trans girl and I think this is the first time that I have seen like a really kind of, like a really positive and really sort of you know, just like I really vibe with her character and I'm like, I love this trans representation and even as a trans guy I can relate to her and kind of there's small bits in it where the, the most of the shows she's just a girl that happens to be trans. And then there are a few bits where we are reminded that she's trans and therefore there's a load of shit that comes with it. And it's like, it's an intense show to be honest.

I guess I’m just really excited for all these new TV shows coming out with very positive kind of trans portrayals. Although I am not seeing that many trans guys. There was a show called, Shameless which was kind of a weird show, but there was one trans guy [video glitches] that was actually a trans gay man who was the love interest of one of the characters, but his whole character is like he's trans and that he's educating his partner on what being a trans guy is. But that is some trans representation I guess.

And right, like you know, if you wanna talk about media more generally like a YouTuber that I loved you know, raising that amount of money and getting that amount of people and me being able to and seeing like a pop culture event that was about explicitly about me.

H Bomb.

Yeah. H Bomb donkey kong stream, right. That was really, that, people were overjoyed because like and I think one of the nicest things about it was it was just, you know, he eventually just shut up and played video games and you heard trans woman after trans woman after trans person after trans person, trans person of colour. All of these voices just being allowed to be platformed and I was hearing people, like me, being treated as individuals and academics and intellectuals and you know, as people who had a voice and were able to contribute meaningfully to their own debate and to actually have a debate beyond like the ontological questions of whether we exist or not, right? There’s a lot more to being trans and like there’s a lot more trans people are wonderful people, you know. And it’s fucking tough, do you know what I mean? And actually like in that adversity comes great art and opinion and insight and everything else. You know, and I would love for that to be what your average person thought of the, you know, trans people in media. I would love, for example, that they stop putting people’s fucking dead names and you know, before pictures when they fucking do articles of people, thank you very much. Yeah. But I yeah, you know, I, for a number of reasons, I don’t engage with much mainstream media anymore.