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Shon Faye
86 quotes
“Suicide attempts occur at a higher rate among trans people than the general population. Indeed, the statistics are truly alarming: research by the UK charity Stonewall published in 2017 found that 45 per cent of trans young people had attempted suicide at least once. Yet, behind the statistics are individuals, suffering in private and leading complex human lives: there is rarely one simple explanation for such a tragedy.”
“It is only through solidarity, compassion and radical reimagining that we can build a more just and joyful world for all of us.”
“It is the adult world, though, that instils and nurtures prejudice.”
“Everyone’s got their own battles to fight.”
“Family rejection and estrangement have devastating long-term health implications. They also have a material impact. For some kids, the only option is leaving home. Others have no option at all: their parents kick them out. As a result, trans teenagers and young adults in Britain are much more likely to experience homelessness than their cisgender peers. [...] A minority within a minority, trans young people are disproportionately over-represented in the homeless population: one in four trans people have experienced homelessness.”
“Many homeless trans people stay off the streets by ‘sofa surfing’: either staying with friends or, in some cases, exchanging sex for a place to stay. Inevitably, some end up sleeping rough. For trans people on the streets, life can be brutal.”
“Ending homelessness is an important political goal for society as a whole; it is especially important for trans people.”
“Conversations around domestic abuse and the dwindling provision for survivors usually focus on the most common scenario: heterosexual couples with a (cisgender) male perpetrator and a (cisgender) female survivor. Yet trans people face extraordinarily high rates of domestic abuse at the hands of their partners.”
“The reality of trans life today is often hidden from public view.”
“Dysphoria, it should be said, is not a precondition of being trans. According to some research, as many as 10 per cent of those who positively identify as trans men, trans women, non-binary people and various other terms do so without any feelings of dysphoria. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed that trans men and women experience dysphoria and non-binary people do not, when in fact some non-binary people feel themselves to be in great need of medical assistance, and some trans men and women seek none at all. Nevertheless, most trans people experience dysphoria to some degree.”
“What we choose to define (and stigmatize) as ‘mental illness’ is itself a matter of politics. For instance, our perception of homosexuality as an identity instead of a disorder is a relatively recent development, made possible by decades of campaigning to depathologize it.”
“Both trans and cis patients alike have good reason to fear the increasing NHS reliance on the private sector, which drives up costs and introduces a profit motive to healthcare, including gender identity services and surgeries. There is an irony here: it is generally conservatives who make specious claims about money-making schemes preying on trans people, but, in fact, it is conservatives’ own policies of cuts and privatization that actually allow the private sector to behave vampirically.”
“Historical accounts of gender-variant people who lived in a social role different from the one assigned to them at birth occur in almost every recorded human culture. Sometimes, they lived their lives with the encouragement and licence of their community, which recognized the existence of a third gender – or even several other genders – beyond man and woman; sometimes, their perceived ‘transgression’ of gender norms was understood to merit punishment.”
“Given the British media’s recent pained wrangling with the very idea of gender affirmation as a potential ‘slippery slope’, the fact that more straightforward access to medical transition and legal gender recognition was available during the Second World War than is often the case today is astonishing. The mainstream media’s presumption that strict ‘controls’ on transition are and have always been necessary relies on the suppression, and ignorance, of trans medical and legal history.”
“It is important to realize that the framing of trans people as ‘parodies’ who reinforce stereotypes cruelly disregards the ways in which those same British trans people – whose gender expression, dress, hairstyles, makeup preferences and so on have, it clearly needs to be said, always varied as much as their cisgender counterparts’ – have spent the past fifty years being coerced into narrow gender conformity by their doctors, then mocked and derided as too stereotypical and regressive by cis onlookers. If it sounds like a catch-22, it’s because it is.”
“In general, trans people are more likely to have lower incomes and to experience poverty than the wider population. [...] Prejudice persists. It is not just a personal affront, but an economic reality that shapes and limits trans lives.”
“The experience of being trans is shaped by social class. While there are trans people, the vast majority are working class – just as the vast majority of the total population is working class. Trans workers are often employed in lower paid and more precarious jobs, with a high risk of discrimination and bullying in the workplace. As a result, trans political struggle is part of a wider class struggle. Despite this, trans politics is commonly misrepresented as coddled, bourgeois and anti-working class.”
“To be trans is an experience bound up with economic struggle. There cannot be one without the other.”
“Movements are taken out of the hands of the radical, angry, non-respectable, non-conforming people who did the years of unrewarded hard graft to make it all happen, then gradually they are overrun by small-minded career activists out to make a name for themselves. In other words, social justice movements that cede their ability to decide priorities and direction to wealthy corporations and media outlets also grant those groups the right to determine which political demands are acceptable and which are not.”
“Generally, trans people remain confined to lower-paid, more precarious roles even in the organizations that campaign for our welfare. In particular, Black and Asian trans communities in Britain remain completely under-represented in LGBTQ+ sector organizations; these are the same communities experiencing the brunt of systemic anti-LGBTQ+ oppression in the UK.”
“Despite the extreme ways in which their bodies are mythologized, fetishized and denigrated by our culture, trans sex workers, compared to other kinds of trans worker, enjoy the least solidarity and have the least political attention paid to the reality of their lives. This disparity only increases when the trans sex worker is also a migrant and a person of colour.”
“The murders of trans women sex workers are not rare. This is a recurring phenomenon and we regularly try to alert public opinion and the authorities to this violence. Unfortunately, as always, we find ourselves alone.”
“Trans people are not a burden to society or to the state. It ought to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around.”
“Reliance on policing to solve transphobic hatred among teenagers and young adults, instead of questioning the underlying causes of their hate, is what some radical activists call ‘carceral logic’: a punishment mentality, which is more concerned with being seen to punish violence with greater force than with working towards the creation of a less violent society. Preventing a culture from developing in which hatred towards trans people is normalized is much more likely to reduce harm than the ineffective use of hate-crime legislation and police powers.”
“Britain should be a country whose borders are open to all who are fleeing persecution. It also should be a country where trans people are not subjected to violence by the British state itself, through brutal misuse of policing and prisons. Trans communities and our allies here and everywhere should fight for our siblings who face state violence and systemic transphobia in all its forms.”
“The effect of both division and consumerism is to encourage individual identity over and above commonality. A person’s sense of their own identity is certainly important for psychological wellbeing – but as a political end point it leads to solipsism and detachment from others. From this perspective, identity is understood as a set of immutable and finite categories with particular criteria for membership. Yet the political justification for the LGBT coalition must begin with something different: the overlapping and occasionally muddled history that all four letters share.”
“When you feel your culture and identity endangered and ephemeral, the anchor of history and the celebration of antecedents can be empowering, and worth fighting fiercely for.”
“The twenty-first century has seen wider acknowledgment of the fact that human sexuality is much more complex than the rigid and unchanging categories of heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual can express; the experiences of trans people are just one part of this increased sexual diversity. In the case of non-binary people – whose gender identities and expressions may sit outside of the categories of man and woman, or move between the two – the nineteenth-century categories of human sexuality make little sense – which is why the term ‘queer’ has risen in popularity.”
“Everyone has a right to set sexual boundaries for any reason and to not feel pressured sexually on an individual basis.”
“Trans lesbians have as much of a right as any other lesbian to pursue sexual and romantic connections in an appropriate and consensual way, without being misrepresented as predatory men. Some lesbians are attracted to trans women and are open to dating them, and such couples risk total erasure of their sexuality by their peers and the media. These disputes often begin with the right of a trans woman to call herself a lesbian at all.”
“Even if a tiny proportion of LGB people are willing to team up with right-wing homophobes to oppose trans civil rights, it only takes a handful of committed LGB people wilfully perpetuating these negative narratives for them to become normalized. Such narratives are then taken up by political conservatives and far-right voices, whose ultimate goal is the dismantling of all LGBTQ+ rights because of their profound disgust for us all.”
“Anti-trans feminists’ repeated claims that they were being silenced were in fact highly effective in getting their viewpoints aired on television, radio and in the press.”
“Patriarchy is based on three key ideas: that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are a natural, immutable and exhaustive binary; that all males should be masculine, and all females should be feminine; that masculinity is incompatible with and superior to femininity.”
“The reality is that transition is an act most trans women and girls see as lifesaving, and one for which they can be punished severely: with violence, with community and familial rejection, with poverty, with mental illness, with sexual abuse, with domestic violence and, yes, with murder. That we can be both highly at risk of rape by men and blamed for rape by feminists is made possible because the media constructs trans women simultaneously as deviant men and as dangerous women.”
“Trans women have received much more coverage, both good and bad. But it is wrong to equate the mainstream media with the LGBTQ+ movement or, more specifically, the trans movement. The idea that greater visibility automatically leads to greater political power is a misapprehension, particularly when some of the most celebrated trans women in media are actresses, models and writers – industries in which all women are sexualized and obsessed over.”
“Misogyny, as we’ve seen, is multifaceted and polices different people and different kinds of bodies in different ways: all must be resisted in order for feminism to truly challenge patriarchy.”
“I believe it is important to debunk the myth that transfeminism is a new departure from the feminist theory of the past. As we have seen, ambivalence about the categories of man and woman, challenging biological essentialism, and championing a multifaceted analysis of the harm that misogyny does to every human being (including men) have always been central to feminist thought.”
“One of feminism’s central ideas: that gender is a reductive trap which limits freedom and curbs individuality, forcing people to deform themselves and their desires in the service of an exploitative and violent system.”
“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.”
“Feminism must concern itself with radical possibilities for our future, a future in which gender-based violence and harm is abolished, freeing us all to lead more joyful lives. That cannot begin with barring the freedom to find other ways to look at, understand or do gender.”
“Trans people deserve social dignity and personal respect, regardless of whether or not they wish to immerse themselves in feminist politics. At a time of growing populist authoritarianism, which seems determined to entrench sexism, misogyny and transphobia across the globe, one may even wonder why a theoretical framework for understanding trans people should be the prime concern for any feminist.”
“Theory is important: it shapes our society, whether or not we engage with it intellectually. [...] But theory should only ever play second fiddle to the practical work of movement-building, resource-allocation, care and solidarity. Political coalitions rarely achieve full mutual understanding of every facet of one another’s reality. Rather, they are practical collaborations based on shared goals.”
“There can be no trans liberation under capitalism. This is a fact. Yet it’s not a popular view among liberal and centrist LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, who – as we’ve seen in the course of this book – talk about ‘trans rights’ in isolation as a range of personal freedoms and protections; and who cling to corporations and brands as potential ‘allies’ in the fight for social acceptance.”
“Being trans, of course, is not a consciously adopted political position, just as claiming a trans identity is not, usually, an expression of a consciously held ideology. A trans person is just a person. We see our daily lives through the same everyday lens as most human beings; after all, we are simply trying to live. However, as with all stigmatized social identities, the very ability to articulate being trans, or to work, seek healthcare, or participate in civic life while trans, is political.”
“Labour itself is innocent of transphobia, both within its membership and from some of its key figures, who have failed to show full and public solidarity with trans communities. Anti-trans discourse is very much alive on the left in Britain, in trade unions and in local party branches.”
“The idea of linear political struggles, which are confined to formal parliamentary politics, is a chimera. Protest, civil disobedience, local community work, care work, and bridge-building with other oppressed people are all politics: all will be necessary in our struggle.”
“Hope is part of the human condition and trans people’s hope is our proof that we are fully human. We are not an ‘issue’ to be debated and derided. We are symbols of hope for many non-trans people, too, who see in our lives the possibility of living more fully and freely. That is why some people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of our freedom. Our existence enriches this world.”
“The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society. I say 'liberation' because I believe that the humbler goals of 'trans rights' or 'trans equality' are insufficient. Trans people should not aspire to be equals in a world that remains both capitalist and patriarchal and which exploits and degrades those who live in it. Rather, we ought to seek justice – for ourselves and others alike. Trans people have endured over a century of injustice. We have been discriminated against, pathologized and victimized. Our full emancipation will only be achieved if we can imagine a society that is completely transformed from the one in which we live.”
“The demand for true trans liberation echoes and overlaps with the demands of workers, socialists, feminists, anti-racists and queer people. They are radical demands, in that they go to the root of what our society is and what it could be. For this reason, the existence of trans people is a source of constant anxiety for many who are either invested in the status quo or fearful about what would replace it. In order to neutralize the potential threat to social norms posed by trans people's existence, the establishment has always sought to confine and curtail their freedom. In twenty-first-century Britain, this has been achieved in large part by belittling our political needs and turning them into a 'issue'. Typically, trans people are lumped together as 'the transgender issue', dismissing and erasing the complexity of trans lives, reducing them to a set of stereotypes on which various social anxieties can be brought to bear. By and large, the transgender issue is seen as a 'toxic debate', a 'difficult topic' chewed over (usually by people who are not trans themselves) on television shows, in newspaper opinion pieces and in university philosophy departments. Actual trans people are rarely to be seen.”
“‘Trans’ [...] is an umbrella term that describes people whose (their personal sense of their own gender) varies from, does not sit comfortably with, or is different from, the biological sex recorded on their birth certificate based on the appearance of their external . The standard view of how sex and gender manifest in the world is as follows. Babies born with observable penises are recorded as male, referred to and raised as boys, and as adults are men; babies born with observable vulvas are recorded as female, referred to and raised as girls, and as adults are women. To be trans is, on some level, to feel that this standardized relationship between one’s genitalia at birth and the assignment of one of two fixed gender identities that are supposed to accurately reflect your feelings about your own body has been interrupted. How the person who experiences this interruption reacts to it can vary hugely – which is why ‘trans’ is a catch-all word for a diverse range of identities and experiences.”