Earlier this month, on June 11, Kishwer Falkner, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), stated that trans people could be asked about their gender status in the workplace. The potential legislation marks the latest attack on trans rights, but it also threatens the hard-won protections workers have fought for in this country, such as our right to privacy and a safe work environment. Under the guise of safeguarding cisgender women, we are witnessing the potential normalisation of a society that outs certain individuals in spaces that political movements have struggled to make fair, inclusive and free from unequal power dynamics.
Falkner’s comment described how the government could implement the Supreme Court ruling, which stated that transgender women should not be entitled to the same legal protection as cis women. Since the ruling was made on April 16, trans people have been feeling weary and fearful about the future: We have been left in the dark, anxiously waiting to learn how our rights will be restricted. Falkner’s proposal was a new development in this horrific assault on our dignity and freedom.
The amazing actors from the BBC TV adaptation of Paris Lees' memoir take GLAMOUR's Friendship Test, and open up about queer joy and resilience.
Had the chair used an evidence-based approach in her comments on trans people to the Women and Equalities Committee that day, she would have informed them that we pose no threat to anyone in any sector of society. Both cis women and trans people are vulnerable groups – recent studies show that two out of three women in the UK have experienced workplace harassment, and four out of five trans people have experienced bullying. If Falkner had taken these statistics into account, she would have understood that the only moral action for the government to take would be to increase protection for these two populations, but especially trans people: We are 18% less likely to be in full-time employment, and 51% more likely to be in unpaid labour.
Instead, Falkner chose to accept the false narrative that trans people are indeed a threat, and that this threat justifies the control and regulation of our public presence. When the Court made its judgment distinguishing between cis and trans people’s legal rights, it stated that trans people may claim sex-based discrimination only if their employer is unaware of their gender transition – essentially, if they ‘pass’ as cis. During the past few years, I have relied on my passability to secure security and acceptance at work, but that will no longer be possible if women like me are forced to disclose our identities. Not only will we not have the same rights once we are forced to differentiate ourselves from cis women, an act of legal segregation, but we will also be more likely to experience harassment, bullying, and ostracisation at our places of employment. With 43% of trans people reportedly leaving jobs due to unwelcoming environments, a law like this will inevitably increase and legitimise that hostility.
But the most troubling part, for me, is the EHRC’s implication that the danger trans people pose is insidious and deceptive. It suggests that, because you cannot always “tell” who is transgender, who might be, in their view, encroaching on women’s rights, the state must intervene to mark and isolate them.
Healthcare models are still centred around cisgender white men, which should worry us all.
As a Jewish woman, I can’t help but feel that this response bears an appalling resemblance to how ethnic minorities have been persecuted and outlawed throughout history by their governments. When I was growing up, I heard stories about my ancestors being forced by the Nazi regime to wear identifiers such as armbands or badges in the shape of the Star of David. Like many Jewish children living in the aftermath of this horror, I experienced nightmares about this tactic of persecution resurfacing in the modern day. What I could not foresee was that the first time I would hear about the possibility of my lawful exclusion and loss of privacy in public life would be because I am trans.
Falker is not unaware of how this all looks. That is why, later in the conference, she tried to make her comments sound, well, a little less like the language of an authoritarian state. When questioned about how trans people would be identified (at this point, they were discussing the use of public toilets and services in general), she insisted the EHRC was “not talking about people with badges coming along to enforce anything.” It’s one of those blunt, ironic remarks made by someone in politics wielding immense power, aiming to reassure, that lays bare the full extent of our transphobic culture’s absurdity: It does not matter how the revocation of our freedoms is dressed, the outcome remains the same. We are still less equal, less free to occupy the social and physical space we deserve and rely on.
What would a law like this mean for the future of trans people? It is clearly an existential threat, but to Falkner, it would simply be the loss of their argument. “I think you have to distinguish”, she declared, “between rights in law and a preference for things to be a certain way”. The flaw in her distinction, though, is that trans people’s “preference” is to not vanish completely from the country’s social fabric. This was never, at least for us, about ideology: we don’t care about winning a culture war. We’re too busy fighting for our lives.
