Trigger warning: description of homophobic attack

I was born just over 50 years ago.

"Congratulations - it’s a boy!.."  It was that easy.  All the midwife had to do was have a look between my pudgy newborn legs and my life was mapped out for me.  The only thing left to decide was which football team I should support.  

It's a cliche but I wasn't really very good at boy things and didn't really enjoy the company of boys as I didn't really care about anything they cared about. I liked music, not sport. When I was about 13 I was gay-bashed for the first and not last time. The bullies knew I wasn’t straight well before I did. I thought I had cleverly hidden my queerness but raving about the Pet Shop Boys, Culture Club, Erasure, The Communards and Frankie Goes to Hollywood may have been a bigger clue than I thought. That and how much I fancied Morton from A-ha and styled myself unsuccessfully on him. After all, music was the only positive LGBT+ representation I knew of and I was jealous.  The local music scene was predominantly metal.  At least it was music and gave me a place to go.
Walking home from school was always something I had to plan carefully. Abuse and bullying was normal.  On one particular walk home when I was about 12, my friend and I were surrounded and punched and kicked (we ran because we didn’t know how to fight back) and took refuge in a coal bunker in my friend’s back garden. We thought we would be safe but the boys had found us.  A couple of them stood on the lid of the bunker and all we could do was hope they would get bored and leave us.  After a while, the lid of the bunker was lifted and hot white wax was poured over us - mostly in our hair and over our uniforms.  Luckily, the boys ran off laughing at that point and it didn’t get worse that day.  Also luckily, hot candle wax didn’t burn as much as they probably hope it did.  We just quietly went home to pick off most of the wax from our blazers and trousers and comb it out of our hair.  We told no-one. There was no point. If I had come out to a teacher about the gay-bashings or looked for support, the likelihood would have been that that teacher would have called my parents and that was the last thing I ever wanted to happen.

When I was 15 and had not yet had a girlfriend my dad told me that if I was gay I could ‘pack and leave now’. “Of course I’m not!” I told him. My parents were lovely parents in many ways and I did have a happy childhood but, like many at the time, were ‘a bit racist and homophobic’ because that's what TV (the thing we had before social media) was like.

Most schools these days have staff who are safe havens for LGBT+ pupils.  Many MPs want to remove that safety.  I wonder how different my life would have been if I had had that safety and I worry what will become of today's pupils if we allow the government to remove it.

I came out as bi to my closest people only (certainly not my family) while I was at university in the early 1990s.  At my first prides, many Gay men and Lesbians told me that I couldn't be Bisexual as that wasn't real - I was either Gay and hiding because I was afraid to be out or I was straight and I was just pretending so I could feel special.  I didn't fit into the binary.

It took me years to realise that it was not just my sexuality that didn't fit the binary but my gender as well.  I'm Non-Binary and Bisexual.  

In a disturbing parallel of my experiences coming out as Bi, people are forever dictating (with no lived experience) what trans and non-binary people feel and need. And even who we are. People debate our right to be who we are and use phrases like ‘not a real woman’ or ‘there’s no such thing’ and the worst one for my day to day life, ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion’.  They are.  They are not entitled to share it if it harms, though.

Along with many of my trans siblings, we get reminded of how little people care about us every single day, like when we simply need the toilet. Or open a newspaper.

A ready reckoner for testing prejudice is to try replacing Trans or Non-binary with another protected characteristic and see how comfortable you feel then. Try this one out : “I don’t want my right to spaces that exclude trans people taken away as I don’t feel safe around trans people.”

We are not the problem. Transphobia is the problem. Hate has no place in our society. 

A hero of mine once said, “You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views, which can be particularly uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”

(It was The Doctor - Tom Baker)

Trans people’s existence harms no one. Nor does our existence take away other people’s rights. We are lied about, made fun of, silenced and marginalised. Sound familiar? That’s because it has happened to groups of people time and time again in history and is always so that the powerful can hang on to their power.  And if you start to wake up to that, they call you ‘woke’.  Well, being awake seems pretty important to me!

In the words of Kathy Burke, “They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things, basically. If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and f***ing call it out.”

The thing that gives me hope is that things have changed so much in the last 30 years.  The LGBT+ community is pretty solidly united.  In a recent YouGov survey, only 3% of LGB people agreed with the 'LGB without the T' movement.  30 years ago, it was hard to be accepted as a Bisexual person within the community.  Look how far we have come!  If we can do that in just 30 years, imagine what we can do in the next 30.

Transphobia will be defeated.  We shall overcome.  It's what we do!