Today, as a family, we have booked our flights and our one-way ticket out of the UK. This has not felt like a choice. This feels like fleeing to protect ourselves.
For the past 7 years we have looked at our own heavy and escalating life challenges, at the UK law and policy-scape, at the immense threats to trans life and trans childhood in the UK, and said to ourselves, “things are really bad and getting worse – if they get any worse we really should try and leave”.
Every year we have looked very closely at the options for leaving, discovered how hard it is to leave, even with white British middle-class privilege, and decided, not yet, we’ll slog it out here: inertia, fear of change, worry about finances, better the devil you know. Every year the legal, healthcare, school and social context has got worse.
This year the equation is unthinkably bad.
Trans children’s healthcare has been removed and criminalised, replaced with state mandated conversion. Medical doctors have been made to withdraw NHS prescribed healthcare that they know is important, against their own medical judgement, in ways that those same medical doctors know is deeply unsafe and harmful. Families are being targeted with social services investigations that feel deeply threatening.
Trans children who have been supported and included at school for years were told, bad luck, policy change. Rights were removed, children have faced humiliation and segregation. My daughter is has been out of school since July, as have so many supported trans kids. Sport as leisure is already a no-go. We can’t use our local swimming pool without stress. Public bathrooms are a potential source of aggression. I’ve been screamed at to get out of toilets twice since the Supreme court ruled against trans life. Looking at the legal, medical, media and political landscape, I can’t see a safe, secure and dignified future for my daughter in the UK.
I know things will turn around. Things can turn around. But that won’t happen until more cis people actually stand up against this persecution.
I need more cis people to notice what is happening in the UK.
I need the cis people who notice to speak up and tell other cis people. It feels like the majority of the country have no real idea what is happening, which is systemic, top-down efforts to make trans lives unliveable in the UK.
When will trans kids be a priority? Right now, our allies are weak, the anti-trans forces are strong, and the UK is not safe for any trans child.
This Labour Government is the worst thing to have ever happened to trans children.
They have step by step dismantled every protection that supported my daughter. We have tried so hard to help her grow up with happiness and self-esteem through a childhood in an increasingly transphobic UK. At every point when the Labour Government could have made something better, they have turned around and given her another kick.
It is sickening to see how far we have fallen.
As a parent of a trans kid, trying to protect and uphold her rights, to give her a fair chance at a safe and secure childhood, it has been an uphill battle from the start. Every step has been a fight. I am deeply exhausted and defeated.
At the start, when she was young, it felt like parenting on hard mode. The outright discrimination. The prejudice. The ignorance. But the fight was fightable.
And then every year things have got harder. Every. Single. Year. I always thought some of the threats and risks might get easier as she got older. I definitely told myself that story. Instead, year on year the threats and risks have multiplied.
The threats right now are directly targeting my family in ways that make me feel deeply unsafe.
Every year we have been hit by challenge after challenge, set-back after set-back, threat after threat, arriving at least monthly for years. Every set-back reduces our family’s space to live with equality, dignity and hope. Every set-back, every roll back on our family’s rights takes an immense mental health toll. Every time it gets harder to bounce back, to regroup, to regain hope for the future. The toll has been really heavy – it weighs on me – it weighs on our daughter. She shouldn’t have to live under this constant psychological strain. None of us should.
The UK is not a safe location for a trans child.
So, we are finally drawing a line in the sand. We only get one life. Her childhood has already been hard enough. She only gets one adolescence. We are collectively broken by the experience of fighting every day.
We are heading for a new start in Australia.
A location our children have never visited. Their knowledge of Australia is 90% Bluey. They have no friends, no family. I know barely anyone in that continent. It’s a complete step into the unknown without any support system. We are leaving behind everyone we know. Elderly parents who won’t be able to visit us. Siblings and niblings. Friends.
We’ve had to be hugely selective in what we can bring with us, leaving 95% of our things behind. Possessions are just stuff, but the process is not without heaviness. Selling and giving away things that represented home. That represented a life we did not freely choose to leave.
We are now trying to see the optimism and excitement of new shores. We are lucky. We are privileged. We have an opportunity most do not have. But when I compare our lot to the cis families around us, I don’t feel lucky or privileged. I feel persecuted and isolated.
We’re not naïve about how rosy the picture is for trans people, for trans children, in Australia. The same fascism is hitting there, the same arguments, the same transphobia.
I won’t be forgetting about trans kids in the UK, about the trans kids and families who I know and care about, as well as those I don’t know. I will remain part of the fight. I hope I can be more effective at a distance, with a bit more protection from the direct impacts. For some of the recent setbacks in UK policy I’ve really struggled to provide direct support to the trans kids and families I know, let alone beyond that. It’s hard to support others when you are yourself under water.
To everyone reading this, take care of yourselves. Trans people matter. Trans kids matter. It does not need to be so awful. The world can be a better place, and I’ll never stop fighting for the future we all deserve.
In Solidarity,
Cal
