Trans healthcare must be revolutionized urgently: it was created not to help us but to conceal that which is… — Shon Faye
Trans healthcare must be revolutionized urgently: it was created not to help us but to conceal that which is unpalatable to cisgender people and to erase the implications of our existence for the rest of society. That is why we were not permitted families in so many cultures and why authoritarian governments always attack our access to care. Yet in this we are not unique. Cisgender women, disabled people, fat people, black people, HIV-positive people and trans people are all groups that experience high degrees of medical discrimination and abuse, historically and currently. Our struggle is, then, a shared one – and it should not be left to us alone. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic especially, the 2020s and beyond will see us all struggle in a new era of recession and growing about who deserves healthcare investment. This is a daunting, frightening time, but solidarity between all of us who are pushed to the margins may yield new health activist movements and resistance.
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Moral panics rely on an inherent paradox: that the rights of a small minority of the population wielding little institutional power are in fact a risk to the majority. This is achieved by inciting in the population a mixture of moral disgust and anxiety about contagion. The problem group may be small now, but they will grow. They will grow by encouraging confused young people to join. For sexual minorities, this narrative of recruitment lends itself to the language of seduction and abuse, which helps direct the moral disgust society feels at paedophilia on to an innocent group. It is a shameful but highly effective propaganda tool. Despite the obvious parallels and analogous struggles that trans people have had with the wider queer movement’s struggle for sexual liberation, the claim that trans people are not only actively different but substantially harmful to the LGB movement has been readily embraced and promoted by extreme political conservatives. This includes even politicians who would themselves traditionally oppose lesbian, gay and bisexual rights.
It may seem paradoxical that in a period where civil rights for LGBT people seem to be at unique risk – a time in which Boris Johnson, a man who once called gay men ‘tank-topped bum boys’ and equated gay marriage with bestiality, can be prime minister – there has never been more media representation for LGBT people or more companies happy to insist they support us. This is not out of the sheer kindness of corporate hearts. Brands have recognized that the rainbow flag lends them the goodwill of people who care about social justice. Corporations can purport to be part of a movement with countercultural and liberationist roots, package that movement as ‘aspirational’ for marketing purposes, and in doing so denude it of all the politics that threaten the capitalist status quo and sell it back to those who can afford it. The idea that conspicuous consumption is a route to sexual and gender freedom has been effective in allowing the LGBT movement’s muscles to atrophy. In a godless age, there are new ways to give the masses their opium.
When non-binary people ask for legal recognition or a rethinking of gendered language (for instance through neutral pronouns, or new words for new genders), they are asking for more freedom for us all. In one sense, the claim that everyone is non-binary isn’t wrong: the binary is a powerful and pervasive myth, and everyone is somewhere on a spectrum. ‘Non-binary’ is only useful insofar as it is a term which can be used to make such ideas legible to policymakers, families, schools and societies. It is a term designed to make conversation easier; it is not the end point.
