And so yet another trans group teeters on the brink...

I got involved with Trans Media Watch more by association than actual judgement - I was available to come to a meeting with Ofcom and was felt to be "presentable". Following that, I went along to a meeting with the BBC, then to Channel 4, then was one of the two presenters to the Press Complaints Commission, then found myself drawing up a constitution and looking at registering it as a charity.

Then all hell broke loose last week. The combination of the outrageous reporting in the tabloids around Sonia Burgess's unfortunate death, combined with anger at the marginalisation of trans people yet again by the gay rights campaigners Stonewall meant that TMW suddenly found itself on the front-line of trans-activism, without either the people or the time required to direct the focus of any protests. And people got angry - angry at Stonewall, livid at the tabloids, and outraged at TMW's deafening silence - completely unaware of what the core were trying to do behind the scenes, and also completely unaware that all of us have jobs to hold down as well. It seemed to become personal.

And it got too much for two of the core five, and I also realised that I could not continue to give it the attention it was demanding, because making a living was actually important for my family and my employees. So, in the space of a week, TMW is on the brink of collapse, having made so much progress in the preceeding 12 months. Its collapse will make it so much harder for any subsequent trans group to get in through the doors to the limited extent we did.

However, the scenario once again demonstrates two things. Firstly that trans people on the whole are incredibly vulnerable and secondly they often carry around a huge slate of anger. Sometimes that anger is directed at the wrong people who are also vulnerable, and the plate fractures again. Other times that anger is directed in a way that is easily parodied and/or ignored, pandering to the "weird" and "other" nature that is so often attributed to trans people.

Things so desperately need to change. There is so much institutional ignorance around, wanting to categorise and then limit people - people who cannot generally be categorised, who are wanting to express individuality. That ignorance leads to horrendous abuses of human rights, vicious attacks (both physical and verbal), fear, guilt, suicide. We see it in the way the medical profession often treats us, the bafflement often expressed by civil servants, the sensationalism often employed by the media, the abuse directed at us by extremists driven by fear.

The way forward is engagement, education, media-savvy presentation, being able to shine a light on causes rather than symptoms. Protest, screaming from the rooftops, revolution - none of these will work - no matter how appealing such routes sound. But until trans people can learn to trust, to show respect, to bury differences between each other, the cause will forever be harmed by groups being ripped apart.

Sadness and Fears

A story has been building in the media since this time last week. A trans woman who was also an influential human rights lawyer was killed under a tube train at Kings Cross station last Monday evening. It seems likely to have been a tragic mistake, with some tomfoolery going on as the train came in. The predictable outcome started to come through with tabloid exposes appearing on Friday, which fed on the prurience because she was trans and probably was working on the side as an escort. The real sadness hit this morning when the tabloids had another frenzy because the person accused of killing her is also a trans woman.

I could see this building and building over the past few days, being privy to some of the information well before it broke into the public eye. And the media exposure has been predictable, prurient, salacious, feeding into the consistent "othering" of trans people that goes on in the British printed media.

This wasn't particularly helped by the coverage of another trans woman who, yesterday, won the UK Scrabble championship - dressed in bright pink, probably for breast cancer awareness, but who had an unfortunate amount of beard shadow. Again the media curiosity tried hard but generally failed to focus on things other than her trans status.

I met a Nina who was probably Tamil many years ago, in my early forays to the Reading trans nightscene. It may not have been the same one, but it's uncomfortably close to home. I was also at Kings Cross (but not the Piccadilly line) yesterday afternoon, having spent a fun few hours with my daughter at the Wicked Day, following her two days at a Wicked workshop run by her school. The celebration and work-lessness of a long weekend had this constant press pressure as a backdrop.

I've written before about fear being the primary driver behind trans people not wanting to be visible, to hide their past away. The media coverage today feeds off that fear, while also building it up. Why can our media (and they would claim it is our society) simply not let people be different? Why are we all forced down this route of social conformity which panders to the bigots? And today's coverage will have screwed down the lid on some trans people who will now be facing a harder journey to discover themselves, and reinforced the view of those who hold it that trans people are only ever weird and motivated by sex. I fear that the result will be that some trans people will ultimately take the choice of suicide as a result of what has happened today.

Sadly because of this, some trans people seem to have moved past the outrage and building into very real anger, which further distorts how people view what has happened. There is talk about a protest on Thursday evening - against who and about what, I don't know. The media are turning around and asking what have they done wrong, using the PCC's "tactic" of focusing on the words they have written rather than the emotion or the layered picture they have built up. They know what they have done wrong, and the mock innocence is grating. As an example, why is it remotely relevant to refer to Nina as unshaven when she appeared in court? Was Ann Widdecombe well shaven before her Strictly Come Dancing appearance on Saturday? I think we ought to be told.

But there are also people in the trans world who also think that a great way to make a quick buck is to pass information onto the ever-hungry media that completely destroys the affected people and makes life harder for many more. I feel nothing but disgust for that self-serving attitude.