On the need for our existence

Trans Mutual Aid Manchester is not a campaign organisation, our focus is on supporting our local community, however there are several issues within the UK that contribute to our needing to exist. There are many organisations working to address these issues and we encourage people to get involved with them. Currently many institutions in the UK are trying to do something we do not believe is possible: to compromise with people who would prefer trans people didn't exist.
A lot of people are unaware of the issues we face, often because of misrepresentation in the media. If you know or are one of those people the following list might be helpful we consider this to be the very least that anyone in favour of basic human decency should support. This list is by no means exhaustive and intentionally does not include anything that would require large scale reform of the political system.
We have provided links that will hopefully serve as a good starting point if you wish to research further. If you prefer quantitative data, TransActual's trans lives survey is probably the most accurate and up to date set of statistics on the trans people's actual lives.
This write up covers several issues that might be distressing: Suicide, Rape, Medical Abuse, and of course Transphobia.

1: Bodily autonomy for ALL

Bodily autonomy is a foundational human right that we are routinely denied. We deeply believe that any person should be allowed to decide what to do to their body, after all it's theirs. The global rise of the far right has caused progress in this area to reverse. It is not just trans people affected by this trend. It is no surprise to us that the same groups funding the anti trans movement are funding the anti abortion one. This is most visible in the United States with whom our country is deeply entwined with. This movement is unfortunately also gaining power within the UK.

- Easy access to an informed consent model of healthcare

In many parts of the country trans people face waiting lists longer than the UK's life expectancy. The so called diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria are a farce. The GIC system is built around the refusal to admit that trans people are a normal part of human existence. Indigo is less abusive than most GICs but its existence is still an insult. The NHS has repeatedly refused to engage with demands for informed consent, including in the most recent review, despite it being the obvious solution to the numerous issues with GICs. Trans healthcare is not complicated and we should not have to seek permission to transition.
If you are struggling to access healthcare there are some resources available on our healthcare page and signposting document.

- Resume access to puberty blockers for trans teenagers

The effects of puberty blockers are well known: they save lives. The ban is deeply unethical and the new trial is coercive. We do not accept the government and NHS England's policy based evidence making. Puberty blockers have always been a compromise with cis people's unwarranted anxieties, they prevent unwanted permanent changes to the body that cost tens of thousands of pounds to attempt to reduce after going through them. The government know that this ban and other anti-trans policies will cost lives. We know from coroner's reports, whistle-blowers and how many of us have lost loved ones that the current system is killing children. The trans youth charity Mermaids even received reports of police investigations into people's access to HRT. This is a clear attempt at forced detransition.

2: Ensure there is affordable quality housing

Trans people are disproportionately poor, experience homelessness at higher rates and are more likely to be victims of domestic abuse. Discrimination leaves us under-employed for our skill levels, we are typically promoted slower and paid less. This means we are often only able to afford poor quality housing. Large amounts of this housing does not meet basic habitability requirements. The legal process to get issues with housing fixed is prohibitively long, better measures are needed to prevent slum landlords taking advantage of those in desperate need of housing.
If you are struggling with housing there are several resources available in our signposting document.

3: Ban so called conversion therapy

We consider it a disgrace that despite being promised for years there is still no ban on conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is a form of torture designed to traumatise people into repressing who they are. This includes the rebranding as "exploratory therapy", otherwise known as medical gaslighting. These abhorrent practices are still done by the NHS including forced detransition. A GP should not be able to withdraw care by feigning incompetence.
It is a sad reality that the previous health secretary has expressed more sympathy for an organisation of child abusers than the children themselves. The new health secretary shows no signs of reversing this and only pays lip service to "dignity" while refusing to even address us correctly. In light of these facts the loopholes in the draft conversion therapy ban seem deliberate.

4: Actually enforceable anti-discrimination laws

Legal battles are long and expensive, most of us simply do not have the capacity to fight our employers or landlords in court. In the last few years far right lobby groups have funded numerous lawsuits arguing that our mere presence counts as harassment and that preventing them abusing us is a violation of their freedom of belief. There is clear evidence of bias in the legal system that needs to be addressed.
If you have been the victim of discrimination it might be worth checking out groups such as the Good Law Project or Trans Legal Clinic.

5: A competent press regulator

In the last few years media coverage of trans people and trans issues has grown exponentially, almost all of this coverage has been negative in nature and in several cases amounts to incitement to violence. Trans people's perspectives are rarely given any space in so called debates about our rights in mainstream sources. The same tired tropes that have been used against every minority group for decades are being repeated with apparent amnesia over their previous invocation being shown to be vile and empirically false.
In the last census 0.5% of people were willing to tell the government that they are trans. The office of national statistics considers this an overestimate. Even if everything the most bigoted commentator claims about us was true the amount of coverage would still be disproportionate. It is a common experience to for us to be the only trans person someone knows and have to single handedly counter an astroturfing campaign with millions of pounds behind it. It is not an infringement on people's freedom of speech to demand that the largest media organisations in the country not uncritically quote people who have explicitly advocated for our annihilation.

6: Allow people to participate in social activities and sports

A lot has been said about the supposed fairness of allowing trans women to compete in sports. The rationale behind recent bans falls apart once you look at many of the events that have banned or tried to ban trans women. These include purely intellectual exercises such as chess; technique based sports with no or negligible perceivable advantage such as darts, fishing and snooker. Even some beauty pageants have banned trans women.
It is worth noting that for many years trans women were able to compete in the olympics but never won an event. We also don't ban people from playing basketball for being too tall. Events with only a singular trans participant at national level have banned trans people for their supposed advantages despite large numbers of cis people regularly beating them.
There are several social and sporting groups for trans and/or queer people working to counteract the alienation that these bans create. Some of these are in our signposting document.

7: Prison conditions

As a mutual aid organisation it should be unsurprising that we believe that by helping those worst off the conditions of everyone improve. This includes those who have been incarcerated and we have provided help to specific trans prisoners before. We believe that you can tell a lot about a society by who it imprisons and how it treats them. We are disgusted by the assumption that trans inmates are a treat to their fellow prisoners when the opposite is typically the truth.

- End the forced detransition of trans prisoners

Trans people as a group are statistically less likely to commit violent crime, this obviously does not mean that all of us are saints. Some of us end up in prison, justly or otherwise. We believe those convicted of crimes also deserve basic human dignity. It is unfortunately routine to remove trans people's access to medication if they are incarcerated. Not only is this a violation of our rights it can be severely damaging to the person's physical and mental health.

Summary and Conclusion

While we arn't lawyers we believe there is a strong case to be made that the cumulation of these issues constitutes a violation of the Human Rights Act. We consider the For Women Scotland supreme court case to be a farce that is especially relevant to this point. Numerous parts of the judgement are in contradiction with demonstrable fact and no organisation was allowed to present evidence to counter FWS's arguments. We believe the UK to be in breach of Article 2 for banning known life saving treatment;
Article 3 for allowing conversion therapy within the NHS;
Article 6 for enforcing a collective punishment in a miscarriage of justice at the supreme court; article 8 from the forced outing of people via "3rd gendering" that was already found illegal by the ECHR resulting in the GRA;
Article 11 for restricting the rights of women's organisations to include trans women if they wish and men's organisations to include trans men;
and Article 14 for all of the above.
This is why we say trans rights are human rights. Regrettably there is no way to actually force the government to follow its own laws. We believe that the multiple institutions in the UK are causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the trans community and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". We consider this to fit the definition of genocide. It is difficult to predict how far and how fast the UK will go down this road but the trajectory is clear. It is our belief that the government has either been taken over by a genocidal movement or allowing the growth of such a movement for political expediency.

Generations of activists have spent their entire lives attempting to achieve the mundane bare minimum of human dignity. Watching it all be stripped away is nothing short of depressing.