They Said On TV That You Aren't A Person Any More: How trans people organise to be free

This one isn’t really a video essay, as much as I want to push to make my visuals more interesting, to play with the relationships between spoken word and found audio and visuals and so on because that’s what I find artistically satisfying, this is just a message that I want to get across to the right people. I keep saying my work isn’t about being trans but then cis people keep making more bullshit for us to deal with.

On April 16th 2025 the UK Supreme Court made a ruling that made a distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender, deciding that in the Equalities Act terms like “woman” only refer to so-called “biological women”. What they meant by this was cis women, as “biological woman” is a nonsense term that sounds common-sense to people who don’t want to think about trans people and exists to avoid using terms like “cis” that would validate trans people’s experiences. This ruling stated that it should not be taken as an anti-trans victory and was trying to clarify a legal matter.

I don’t care for equivocation on this, although what came next was worse, the Supreme Court ruling was wrong, willfully uninformed and irresponsibly negligent of public duty.

On the 25th of April the EHRC - the Equalities and Human Rights Commission - published “interim guidance” that was not binding but told institutions and businesses that they had a responsibility to exclude trans people from single sex spaces corresponding to their gender. This would make life functionally impossible for trans people, and yes, that’s the point. Asked about what trans women for example should do if they are excluded from the women’s bathroom and extremely unsafe in the men’s, Equalities minister Bridget Philipson said that trans people should use the disabled bathroom, an incredibly telling moment that shows how comfortable those in power are with the fact that their policies had suddenly made trans people explicitly second class citizens, and for that matter how little they care about disabled people having reserved facilities suited to their needs.

In October several international human rights bodies criticised the EHRC and warned that the UK government was fast approaching a complete breakdown on human rights while the EHRC urged the government to hurry up in producing new legally binding guidance so that trans people can be banned from public life under threat of arrest and then imprisonment for peeing. 

Just to put a fine point on this, it is not illegal for a man to use the women’s bathroom, it just may result in him being asked to leave and if he were then aggressive he might be considered trespassing, which would be an offense. On the other hand if a trans woman uses a bathroom and a TERF is there, the TERF may well start harassing her, filming her, and call the police right away. These changes specifically empower bigotry while doing absolutely nothing to protect anyone, and I think that’s obvious to anyone who has thought about it for about 10 seconds.

Anyway, with the EHRC under fire from the international community, Labour hysterically unpopular after chasing the far right since Starmer came to power and then supporting the genocide in Gaza, and Reform surging in the polls, the interim guidance was taken down. Then in November, Bridget Philipson told the EHRC to stop trying to provoke public debate over the issue and let the MPs write their Nuremberg laws in peace.

Are these recent developments a backlash that mean that trans people can relax? No, absolutely not. Even if something more moderate comes out of this, it will be something more moderately hateful. Trans women in this country are still sent to men’s prisons, even if they have had vaginoplasty. The United Kingdom has a very intense special hatred for transsexuals that isn’t going to be casually shrugged off one day.

Social shame is a tool that people use to change the behaviour of others or sometimes make someone disappear from their environment altogether. When the “behaviour” is simply being a type of person this social shame is used to police which groups are considered to have legitimate personhood in society. Arguing against the shaming will get you shamed more, trying to help someone escape the shaming, or perhaps just treating them like a human being at all can sometimes be enough to make you a target too. As shit as this feels, you have to always remember that it is an attack on the target of the shame, not on you - it is trying to get you to abandon them because the goal is to make them completely isolated.

So we, as trans people, are being shamed.

Don’t leave yet I know I’m a posh sounding English tranny but I’m not about to tell you “the cure to shame is pride!” or anything. The cure is organising. It’s always organising. Bear with me.

There is an ongoing project by politicians in the US and UK to eradicate trans people from public life. Week after week you hear about new legislation, often in other places but sometimes where you are, casually and callously announcing a change to policy that if enforced would make life completely unlivable for every trans person. They said on TV that you aren’t a person any more.

For a lot of people, the relative acceptance of trans people in liberal progressive society in the last few years has been a safe enough environment to come out and start living their best lives, and legislative changes that move in the opposite direction are obviously existentially threatening. That makes sense. The problem with this kind of existential panic, however, is that it flattens everything and makes many people freeze or, if they can, flee. I need you to know I understand the panic. When the UK supreme court made its ruling and then the EHRC brought out its guidance, I spent a while with my partner, who is also a trans woman, moving through the world in a numb horror. 

What are you supposed to feel when some of the biggest newspapers in the country run the headline “trans women are not women”? We talked to the owner of a local cafe that day, someone I’ve known for years and years, and she was speechless at the news. Eventually she told us “it will change back”. Maybe, maybe in time it will, but in the meantime I know that some trans women are going to be attacked for using women’s bathrooms and toilets, perhaps even arrested and sent to men’s prisons. These policy changes are going to get people killed, and specifically killed in some of the most impossibly cruel ways. 

But the reality is, I am not one of the people it is actually most likely to affect. I am, despite these changes, in a relatively safe position. Less safe than I was, but I am categorically not in as much danger as some trans people. Realistically, if I spend my time panicking, I am using time that I could be spending making those people safer doing effectively nothing.

I understand the panic, but it isn’t serving us. It isn’t serving diva let it goooo. Let’s get some analysis down so we properly understand the situation, then we’re going to talk about what we have to do.

What states need, even before land, is people. Patriarchal states organise people, and the production of new people, into family units led by men who effectively own the women and children of the family and whose name is passed on through them creating a system that all men are invested in because they think that their names may one day carry a special weight. It’s a pyramid scheme of heredity. The patriarchal state must maintain a tight control on reproductive choices in order to enforce its regime that says biology is destiny, and so men are men and women are property. Of course, if it is possible for someone to change sex, the entire thing falls apart because women must be people.

Trans people serve as a great all-in-one for reactionary politics. There’s the sexual deviance, the “think of the children” angle, medical transition is all about bodily autonomy, a lot of people figure out they’re trans around university student age so clearly it’s a leftist indoctrination cult, speaking of which most of us are leftists, people have to adopt new language which is literally big bother 1965 what george orwin was trying to warn us about in animal crossing. For fascists, we are a small politically weak group who can be targeted for a push toward total extermination, which is like, the whole fascist thing - the ideology fundamentally appeals to people who want to exert petty and cruel power over others, and the goal of exterminating a group of people is a lightning rod for insecure chronic losers. For the state, we are a kind of surplus population, since it is assumed we won’t have kids, or at least that we won’t raise kids to be normal heterosexual men and women who go to work at the business factory and say things like “I was really hoping for a raise but kombucha in the office mini fridge is the next best thing!”

Yes, our enemy is patriarchy plain and simple. 

The founding lie of patriarchy is that men inherently want to do violence to women. This idea, when taught to boys, is what bell hooks calls “the psychic self-mutilation” of men under patriarchy, and while it doesn’t compare to the violence done to women it is the first violence in creating a world that treats women as property. A number of women have fallen into a pseudo-feminism that takes this patriarchal lie for granted, that there is an essential character possessed by everyone born with a penis that makes them want to harm women. In the last few years the most prominent form of this patriarchal pseudo-feminism, the HR department to feminism’s trade union, has been trans exclusionary radical feminism.

TERF ideology is so compatible with the state and with patriarchy because it agrees with it on its most fundamental ideas and the labour of TERFs is always towards destroying trans people, never towards stopping the violence of cis men. 

So here in Britain, TERFs are enacting a secular version of the extermination campaign that evangelicals are pushing in the US, but whether they’re gripping bibles and wearing baseball caps or writing a strongly worded letter to the hampstead heath ladies pond from a Gail’s bakery in Islington, it is patriarchal fascism as a force that is trying to wipe out trans people. When people say that JK Rowling is Andrew Tate for middle class white women, they are simply on the money.

They tried to erase us from history before and they failed. The Nazis burned all the research and records of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut fur Sexuallwissenschaft as an accompanying act of epistemic eradication alongside their murders of queer people. As So Mayer points out in their excellent book A Nazi Word For A Nazi Thing, the reporting at the time that refused to acknowledge what was being burned, what information was being destroyed did a secondary act of erasure and eradication, but this is the one that was less successful. We know what the Nazis were trying to destroy, just as we know from documents hundreds of years old that there were people living transgendered lives even where the histories recording them try to obfuscate this as “unmentionable”. We also know that indigenous cultures all around the world had an enormous variety of gender expressions and experiences before christian heterosexual patriarchal ideas of what men and women had to be were violently imposed on them. Even if they could get rid of every trans person, the fascists have spent the best part of the last decade screaming from the tops of their lungs about us. The cat’s out of the bag. Meow Meow.

We know that they will not be able to erase the memory of trans people from human history. They have failed already at keeping us out of the story of humanity, the task is in making sure as many of us survive what they are trying to do as possible.

As Sarah Harpy puts it in her barn-burner polemic Arm the Dolls, “We don’t need instagram videos, we don’t need t-shirts, we need patriarchal civilization to be weakened by war on many fronts.”

A lot of Sarah Harpy’s writing focuses on separatism - on what Margaret Killjoy recently called The Demiground - what I would call “the disappearing act”, as a revolutionary necessity. This concerns the capacity that revolutionary movements have to be invisible to the state and to broader society generally. As dual power is built the discursive spaces and communities of the revolution supersede the mainstream and absorb its useful parts. For trans women there is an increasing need for hidden spaces, for disappearance - Harpy points out that trans women of colour are not really able to defend themselves from bigoted violence in a world that will punish them for doing so: 

“ In Harlem recently a young trans woman of color, Jaia Cruz, was attacked by a man in a deli. The man struck Jaia repeatedly, calling her a faggot and a tranny. Jaia stabbed him in self defense and her attacker died. She was sent to Rikers island without bail and, after accepting a plea deal, got 15 years in prison. Her official sentencing is at the end of May and while there is a small movement to free her, very few of us trans women want to understand what Jaia Cruz’s case means for us. As with CeCe McDonald back in 2011, Jaia Cruz’s sentence proves that there is no legal way to defend yourself as a trans woman of color. White sisters haven’t picked this up yet.”

Spaces into which trans women, especially trans women of colour can disappear become more vital as the patriarchy makes it more clear and more public its wish to completely exterminate us, but they are only one part of a struggle.

I’m making this video in the specific context that my country is in the process of bringing in laws that will make it incredibly difficult to exist in public as a trans person while emboldening bigots in a way that will almost certainly lead to more direct violence. The laws they are bringing in may lead to trans women I know being arrested, and if they are may lead to them being sent to a men’s prison. I’m also making this in the context of the ruling classes of countries across the imperial core becoming nakedly fascist, with trans people being a primary target of that fascism. I think my perspective on organising here applies to all these countries.

To arm someone means to give them agency, and the nature of agency means that whether it is used to defend, to attack, to disappear, is not the place of the party granting it to say. In the political context of the UK, gun ownership is illegal and practically nonexistent, the concept of an armed revolutionary war against the state is lightyears outside of the public consciousness, and so arming the dolls has to mean different things in order to be more pragmatic than the popular but vague slogan “protect the dolls” which went from cutting edge to cringey instagram mantra in about 10 seconds.

We have to understand not only what threats there are but who is under threat in order to protect them. The biggest immediate threats of physical danger to trans women are from bigoted violence and arrest.

Bigoted violence can be further broken down into the kind of street attacks that Cruz and McDonald were defending themselves against and the cases of domestic violence and violence against sex workers by clients who view them as a type of person it is acceptable to abuse. This means that trans women of colour, trans women who are financially dependent on their partners and survival sex workers are the most at risk members of our community, and not just protecting but also enabling them to protect themselves includes preventing them from being imprisoned.

Prison is grim for everyone by design. For the credibility of punishment-as-justice to be viable, prisons must be places that people suffer by definition. However, for there to be a political movement that fights for our liberation, in a context where prison for trans women means a cage where we are abandoned to be raped until we die, we need to make de-arrest training a fundamental in queer spaces. We also need to engage in intensive prison support for any trans woman who is incarcerated. Here if “protecting the dolls” means keeping trans women off the front lines of direct action to prevent arrest, arming the dolls means in the worst case helping every trans woman survive incarceration and in the best case never letting the cops take a single doll.

In my substack piece which I have drawn from a bit here Arm The Dolls… But What Does It All Mean? I talk from the perspective of community measures to grant trans women the maximum political agency in the face of attacks that are trying to not only drive us out of public life but remove any options for political protest we have too. It’s linked here, but here I’d like to focus on two specific organising strategies that firstly I think are more fundamental and secondly in concert will facilitate the disappearing act for those in our community who need it. The first is harm reduction organising and the second is assemblies.

Harm Reduction (big H big R) as a philosophy aims to shift resources physical, financial and informational into the hands of the people most vulnerable to structural violence. Eager students in the class will have already put together that communism would be the ultimate form of Harm Reduction, and while it is worth understanding this as a socialist organising approach, harm reduction organising seeks to put what capital would deem “surplus populations” at the center of the movement, in a way similar to the approach theorised in the book Health Communism.

In practice harm reduction organising usually focuses on drug users, especially homeless drug users, but has begun to be expanded to address the needs of sex workers, people with precarious immigration status, the mad and the mentally ill, and queer & trans people.

A program aimed at this that I have experience in is the Harm Reduction Hub organised by rats and drugs charity release as part of the London Harm Reduction Collective. The space offers safer sex resources, drug testing strips, a needle supply program and more, but for most hub users the most important thing it offers is a non-judgemental space to have a hot drink and talk.  Harm reduction organising recognises the inevitability of risk and harm, that people will engage in activities like taking drugs that carry some risk and that we can neither rely on teaching abstinence nor on pretending the risks are not real, but to reduce harm the best we can, offering education and resources to anyone who wants them is the best approach. I would love to see more Harm Reduction Hubs set up, frankly as many as possible, because I think they do vital work to keep the most precarious people in our society safe.

But we’re talking about trans people in particular right now.

The fight for trans rights in liberal bourgeois democracy is ongoing, and for the time being it’s not going well, so if we want to focus on saving trans lives, making parallel structures is the bulk of the work to be done. We have been systematically shut out of any democratic recourse against the attacks on our lives - we have to focus on building. I think that as a very first step, more harm reduction organising in trans spaces would make an enormous difference. Some of this overlaps with broader harm reduction organising: many trans women do sex work, so harm reduction organising for sex workers would benefit us; trans community spaces are often party scenes so we need drug testing and education like everybody else; trans people need safer sex resources and sex and kink education to reduce harms in kink and sex; trans people are disproportionately living in poverty or even homeless; trans people frequently experiencing madness and mental illness, especially with the government rolling out new policies against us every week. Some of this work is specific to us - working to make spaces explicitly declare that they are safe to trans people and unsafe to bigots; working to educate ourselves in community on how we internalise and perpetuate transphobia and transmisogyny; harm reduction work around DIY HRT. 

These are jumping off points - there is a lot of work to be done in figuring out and implementing the specifics, but the through-line here is that respectability politics is not going to save our lives. We need to be honest with ourselves about what risks we face and who is at most risk and organise our efforts proportionally. There is a serious danger of us seeing ourselves only through the mostly white, most educated, most comfortable and privileged representations of transness that are upheld as public figures, and hiding the sex work, the drugs, the mental illness all down in the dark so the cis people don’t see while these same things expose the most vulnerable of us to the most harm.

I think all of that brings us quite well to the second strategy, which is for us to hold trans assemblies. An assembly, loosely defined, is a facilitated structured conversation where a group can talk about its issues and how to solve them. The organising efforts being made at the moment by trans activists are well-intentioned but they are decided on by the activists and they are frequently bogged down by a lack of capacity. If our communities had a democratic space for regular discussion, the decision making can grow beyond the activist class. People can raise their own issues in ways that may be completely invisible to those of us who learned radicalism from books (or video essays), and the capacity to make change will be already present in the people assembling to discuss trans issues.

The following is my personal vision for a model where there are trans assemblies at a local, regional and perhaps national level. They say the best way to get the right answer on the internet is to loudly and confidently declare the wrong answer, so please take my proposal and rip it to shreds. Change as much as you like as long as you make the meetings happen. Here it is:

Meet regularly, I’d say every two weeks, with a venue open for a couple of hours before the start of the assembly for a volunteer group to cook food for everyone. With the venue open, people can come in and socialise, get ready for the meeting, help with the food if they want, or use the space for anything else (perhaps they have legal or medical admin they've been putting off). Then, when the assembly begins, start with a rundown of the agenda by the facilitators (the agenda should have been available to everyone before the meeting and the facilitators should have volunteered at the end of the last assembly). 

After this, floor speeches. Allocate a number of slots for fixed length speeches for any attendees to give their perspectives on whatever they'd like. If they want to use this time to talk about community mess, that's just fine, if they want to use their time to talk about the assembly itself, great, if they wanna just let their feelings out, that's vital, if they wanna promote their surgery fundraiser, literally why not. After this move into the agenda items. Either discuss by taking hands in the room, or for some more involved discussions, break out into smaller groups and have a chosen representative from each group feed the answers of the group back to the facilitators. 

When you have issues and goals identified, create working groups to achieve goals - you want to phone blockade the office of a transphobic politician so you're creating a working group to plan it while taking hands in the room for potential participants; you want to start a regular letter writing program to trans prisoners so you create a working group who will find a venue and regular time to convene to write together; you want to make a community HRT production process, start a working group with volunteers to make it based on the estimated size of the need for supply, discuss in the assembly what people's concerns are and how best to satisfy them; you have a lot of trans people with precarious housing, so you have a housing working group who are working closely with renters unions while putting together queer houseshares who need a flatmate with trannies about to be evicted. All these working group examples are based on organising I have seen, to be clear, but through an assembly they could be plugged into each other more effectively and benefit from each other's and the community's resources better. Also like, I think that existing community structures, at least ones I’ve seen, lack a sense of building towards something or capacity to actually make change for our group that a public assembly could achieve.

Consider having a fund for working groups that anyone can donate into - there are a lot of tech trannies and cis allies with comfy salaries who would love to contribute money rather than time. After the main discussion consider having something like a "member solidarity" section like renters union branches will do where people with specific issues bring them to the group and the room splits into volunteer bunches to help those people. After this, do your AOBs, get people to volunteer for next time to facilitate, take hands, take minutes & keep time, and make sure everyone knows who to speak to concerning the operations of each working group.

This local assembly could have representatives feed back to a city or regional assembly, ideally with representatives changing each time - this is sometimes called using "spokes" - but the regional or city assembly should still be open to everyone. The same on a level above to a national assembly. A regional assembly can make projects like housing bigger, or put more funds towards HRT production that enables higher level safety & sterilisation than any small group could afford for their startup costs. It could also coordinate large marches or actions very effectively. A national assembly could mobilise enormous mass demonstrations, deliver political demands to the government and work in concert with trade unions to make sure that trans issues are taken seriously by organised labour.

If we can pull this off, create these assemblies and form this democratic structure, we can turn trans people from a political football to a real political bloc.

The organised structure that makes the assemblies happen can be very small and isn't the same as the assembly itself. It isn't even the same as the facilitators, except maybe in the first meeting of each assembly. People aren't joining an org by coming to any assembly, and the volunteer facilitators come from the community by design. This is similar to how some orgs will have paid staff organisers who aren't the same as their chair, treasurer, secretary, comms officer and so on. The people who get together to organise the assembly are in an obvious position where they could hold power over the community, so getting the assembly out of their hands and into the hands of the community asap is an important part of this. It's also worth saying that no trans person should be excluded from these - community conflicts aren't the job of the assembly to resolve and the situation is too critical to be locking people out of the room. There is an unending wellspring of beefs in the trans community, and if people are excluded by these conflicts your assembly will either not happen or it will just represent one social clique. For these reasons I suggest that the people getting together to organise an assembly make constitutional and protocol documents right away to figure out how they get from organising the logistics of the first assembly to sitting back and letting it carry itself on its own momentum.

Panicking will not save us, organising will.

The job of leaders is to make more leaders, and creating a space for people to learn how to organise by giving them the practical experience of democracy is the most empowering thing that we can do to start to solve our problems. We will win this fight with robust community structures. The protests will go on, the farce of electoralism will go on, but the struggle is where the real politics is happening.

It is essential for the coming decades that we answer the questions of organising in communities where everyone is suffering. These are the most pressing questions of the next 50 years.

One of the first answers is to escape the trauma response mindset that gives us a sense of a foreshortened future and learn to breathe, think more slowly and make structures built to help our communities far into the future. You aren't building a lifeboat to make it through the storm, you're building a sustainable life on your island, knowing that survivors will wash upon your shores daily and when they do your island will get that little bit bigger and that little bit more beautiful.

Before I wrap this up I just want to talk about what a world without patriarchy might look like for a little bit. I’ve talked about how these fascists are bound to lose, I’ve talked about the organising I think we need to do, but I think it keeps our heads pointed in the right direction for us to always be looking toward something utopian.

If the patriarchal grip of states on our reproductive choices and our bodily autonomy is dissolved, every person born into our society can have the same basic opportunities that only white rich cis men have right now.

Gender abolition became one of the most misunderstood and ultimately discarded terms of 2010s gender discourse. “You’re a trans woman? How can you be abolishing gender if you’re sooooo invested in being a woman” you know, the kind of misogyny that thinks it’s clever because it’s wilfully misusing a social justice concept to make a woman’s life bad. Like all abolition, gender abolition does not mean to simply throw away and replace with nothing, it means to build something that can replace the existing structure in a way that will eliminate what fucking sucks total shit about it. “You’re a prison abolitionist huh do you wanna let all the prisoners go tomorrow?” nope. I wish we could but there’s a bunch of organising to do first.

We want to create a world where gender carries with it no power, no threat, and in doing so is able to have not just greater variety and depth but more meaning too. If people aren’t just performing the gender they were assigned at birth, the gender that signifies to everyone what kind of person - or property - they are in the hierarchy, we can interact with one another in a truer way that many people have never known.

It feels like with the monumental repression of the left in the imperial core over the last 40 years especially, our utopias are a lot less clear in the mind for most people, a subject that has been the basis for reams of detailed analysis and some modern classics like Capitalist Realism. What I feel like we’ve started seeing in places like the US and UK where the left is just an embarrassing mess is that the world that the left is trying to create in the political changes it is pushing is easier to see in the reflection of the world the fascists are pushing towards, which they are articulating pretty clearly. A world where trans liberation has succeeded is a gender abolitionist world is a world where gender does not define your safety, comfort, social mobility, agency or freedom, and with any voices that would really fight for our liberation shut out of public discourse, it sometimes feels easiest to see this in the opposite of what the fascists are saying. Men are men and women are women. Women are adult human females, they produce the large gamete. 

It doesn’t matter that these lines are often self contradictory or silly, because they’re not claims about truth, they’re rules that the fascists want to build their world from. They want it to be that biology is destiny and assigned sex dictates an enormous amount of everyone’s lives, and that’s why the big movers behind the TERF movement have already started pushing against abortion, the next thing on the list.
Let’s not forget the world that we are fighting to create, because the flattening of our imaginations is the way that they want to defeat us most completely. We want to bring an end to patriarchal society because we are some of its natural enemies and we refuse to be eternally downtrodden by it any more. And for that reason we are going to organise and for that reason we are going to make the world we want to live in.

As always, start saying it every day: I believe that we will win. Biology is not destiny.