In the run up to the founding conference of Your Party, several groupings and campaigns have developed and emerged. At The World Transformed, seven of these groupings came together to present a minimum unity declaration. At Prometheus we have interviewed these groups to provide a guide for people to understand them and their political differences more.
These groups are The Democratic Bloc, Democratic Socialists, Eco-Socialist Horizon, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Organising for Popular Power, Trans Liberation Group and People’s Front.
In this interview, we talk to Jaimie from the Trans Liberation Group. You can read their full proposals and join them here. This interview was conducted on the 15th of October.
HH – So could you briefly summarise what the Trans Liberation Group is and what it argues for?
J – It’s a group of trans people and cis allies that organise themselves as a faction around Your Party to advocate for a platform of trans liberation that we want the party to adopt.
That’s the basic side of it. I guess a wider answer is it’s a response to how much we’ve faced, especially in the last five or more years in Britain, a massive backlash from the state and the ruling class in Britain. I think as trans people, I don’t think we’ve really been organised politically in a way to counter that. Effectively, it’s been very much riding on NGO-type structures, often relying on laws to save us when now we can see the Supreme Court just decided to reinterpret that we basically don’t have the rights we thought we had.
Feeding into that is how transphobic the British left is and I think that probably feeds into, in a way, how elitist the British left can be. Because in Britain, transphobia, and especially terfism, seems to very much be a thing for the more elite people in society, more of a middle class type – journalists, politicians, people that have too much spare time, I think, on their hands. That definitely shows within the British left, where you get, a lot of people from an older generation who have maybe managed to get themselves in a position of being somewhat well-off, and they’re sort of sheltered from a lot of the the trials and tribulations that most normal working-class people have to go through. Most normal working class people do not give a shit about trans people, for better or for worse. Most working-class people are pretty ambivalent or mildly supportive or just a little bit transphobic, but not enough that they give such a shit that they dedicate their whole lives to trying to eradicate us.
HH – How did the TLG come together?
J – So the inspiration came after I was reading Max Shanly’s articles about having a party with open factions and more. I thought it’d be good to have one that’s just focused on trans liberation. I was talking with some of my friends and thought let’s try and get organised around this because, knowing transphobia on the British left, it was always going to include people of questionable viewpoints, to put it mildly, on trans people. So better to get going with organising against them within the party.
I used to be on Twitter a lot back, like five years ago, but I accidentally deleted my account, so I’ve not really got any presence on there anymore. Plus, I used to be a guy back then, so I totally had a gender change – totally all new person. So I had no reach or anything, but I basically just emailed Max saying – could you put out a tweet for us to say, oh, there’s a trans faction forming? He did that, and then he just basically fed me some emails. This plus a couple of people I knew in real life. We ended up having one big online meeting at the end of August just to chat things through. Then from there, we started building the organisation, really cracking,
HH – How would you summarise your approach to the regional assemblies and founding conference?
J – We’ve had a large series of sign ups since launching. We’re going to group our members into regional groups that correspond to where the regional assemblies are. From there make interventions at the regional assemblies, whether speaking or raising demands in breakouts.
We have a working group now which is focused on the Your Party founding process. That will work to consider how best to push our demands through the founding process. For example, do we have particular responses to the multiple choices on the founding conference? Then encouraging delegates to vote for these.
Fundamentally, it’s about getting out there and talking to as many Your Party members as possible, to get people on board with our demands. We’ve moved into a new phase, moving from the work of setting up the group, to now being out there getting our message to members.
HH – On the TLG site, you have four demands. You start with demands at number zero – love that vibe! This is the idea of a party for everyone, could you just explain a bit more, what that means for you?
J – As you say, it’s called demand zero, and it’s basically, as it’s the base line thing we need to build. We reckon most people who want to sign up as Your Party members are not transphobic and are generally supportive of trans people. The more democratic the party is, the more likely that this feeling of positivity and pro trans sentiment will filter through to the party programme. It’s the first step for us, because what we’ve seen with the backlash against trans people in Britain, a lot of it’s been done through very anti-democratic and bureaucratic means, particularly by people who are networked with the upper echelons of society. Basically, it’s been done in anti-democratic ways. And if your party is not democratic and is too beholden to a bureaucracy, there’s going to be a massive urge for them to, like, pull rightwards on these questions. There is a risk that these bureaucrats you could find in your party – they’re older, more well off, and are probably going to know more these terf type people who have an influence on them. Or just from a purely electoralist perspective, they’ll think ‘well, we shouldn’t focus on this because it’s identity politics, not class politics’.
Well it is class politics, but there’s always going to be this tendency to throw us under the bus. But if the party is actually democratic and has a programme for trans liberation that all elected representatives are bound by – that’s how we can actually get our demands heard and pushed for.
HH – The next set of demands is about legalising trans existence. And so this is predominantly around the sort of legal structures, around identification, and the recent violence done through the Supreme Court ruling. Could you explain a bit more like that?
J – Like you say, a lot of it is to do with immediate concerns – just getting us back to where we were a year ago in a way of having the rights that we had stripped from us. But I think also just in terms of wanting it so the state can’t police us as much.
So there’s stuff that’s quite simple, like getting rid of gender markers from documentation, like passports, because it’s one of them things where, when you transition, you have to change all these documents. For a passport, for example, you have to ask a doctor to write a note for you, to say that your gender transition is ‘likely to be permanent’. So you have to get them to do that for you, and there is no guarantee that the doctor is going to do that for you. You have to send it to the passport office and hope they accept it. It’s just, like, one of many things, of basically trying to get the state off state boot off our necks. I guess it’s the same with the introduction of ID cards. There’s just no way that that’s not going to be another weapon to just just hit us over the head with. It’ll be another thing where we have to jump through hoops to change what’s probably our gender on it, or sex or whatever. Also just making sure that we have access to bathrooms as well. We just want to be able to have a piss. It’s just ridiculous. I joke, but it’s about having access to spaces. This includes prisons as well.because there’s just horrific, horrific things which happen to trans women in male prisons in particular.
Then the final demand gets into something that’s a bit more hotly contested about trans women in sports. This feeds into a lot of women of colour experience. For example, if you remember, Caster Semenya, she faced a lot of similar abuse to what trans people do in terms of like, being called a man and having her hormone levels tested and questioned, and experienced being excluded. So that the final demand in this section is to do with just basically making it so that we can partake in sports and not be fucking, like, hounded for it.
Also in this section, there is one that’s just scrapping the Equality and Human Rights Commission. When we were discussing this, we debated whether we should say scrap it, or propose something else to replace it. What we realised was we’re too young and too small of an organisation to actually be able to propose an alternative to this. What we decided was that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is so off the deep end when it comes to transphobia that whatever apparent use it might have to us on paper, it just doesn’t matter, because it’s basically just being used as a weapon to attack us. So we would actually be better off if it just ceased to exist – just fucking get rid of it. At its core is a very neoliberal conception of human rights and all this stuff, isn’t it? But as an organisation, as we grow and gain capacity we want to be able to propose alternatives to these kinds of structures for trans liberation, and, more importantly, for working-class liberation and socialist intersectionality. But we have to walk before we can run.
Finally, the amending of the Equality Act so that it actually makes clear like sex refers to a person’s lived experience and making gender identity a protected characteristic. But another thing that we want is to amend the Equality Act so ‘gender critical’ beliefs cannot be treated as protected beliefs. We want to make it so that they can’t be treated like that, because it’s ridiculous. It’s like saying being a Nazi is a protected belief. It’s ridiculous.
HH – I guess with the Equality Act, the protected beliefs for transphobia becomes a major problem when you look at the class politics in Britain. You have an upper class movement of transphobes that use their resources through strategic litigation, right, in the same way Zionists do as well.
J – There’s a lot of overlap between Zionists and transphobes, and absolutely there is this intentional use of litigation. .
HH – It feels like, and correct me, if I’m wrong, a lot of demand number one is dealing with this, like rampant transphobic intensification that seems to have really occurred in the last like two years?
J –I think one of our members said it’s just being able to make it so we can exist in public life. So the demands of legalise trans existence allow us to exist in public life as anybody else can.
HH – And then demands number two are reform of the broken system. And these are a variety of demands, from changing guidance to schools and the policing of gender in schools to, like, banning conversion therapy. These feel like fights that have been going for many years now?
J – It very much feels like, if the last few years hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have needed to have as much focus on demand number one, because we could actually focus on demands number two and three. But a lot of it, it’s just what we want to be able to get back on track in terms of LGBT+ liberation – stuff like relationships and sex education, just wanting that to be more queer and trans inclusive.
HH – Are there any particular ones on reform the broken system that you’d like to highlight?
J – I mean, there’s a ban on conversion therapy, which there’s been attempts to try to stop – that is trying to get trans conversion therapy from being banned, though I mean, a lot of what the NHS does now anyways is sort of conversion therapy. So it remains to be seen about actually getting that through in a meaningful way.
And then there’s a third one, which is enshrining in the UK law the right to privacy around assigned gender at birth and trans status, as well as opposing all attempts to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. I think this all dovetails into what Reform wants. A big part of their agenda is to leave the ECHR.The Right definitely thinks that they can use trans people to try and convince the electorate ‘oh, this is we have to, we have to leave the ECHR to protect women from men in their bathrooms’, or some shit like that. So I think that’s definitely going to be coming down the line in the next couple of years. And I’m sure Labour and all the other parties, apart from the Greens, will probably echo that sentiment and not do anything to oppose it.
Then the’ trans panic’ legal defence. There was a recent case in Teesside with a trans woman, and she got, like, she got prosecuted for, like, not revealing her sex or whatever.
HH – I feel like that case, it’s almost, it’s a step beyond some of these trans panic legal defences which are usually done to, like, excuse violence, right? It’s instead arguing that non-disclosure itself is a form of violence.
J – It’s basically, accusing us of sexual assault because you didn’t reveal your ‘true identity’ or whatever. The question becomes how far does that go? Does it apply when you kiss somebody in the club and then, like that, you, are sexually assaulting them because they thought you were a ‘woman’? This definitely feeds into legalising trans existence – it’s just trying to stop us being able to exist as normal human beings.
HH – Yeah, it’s, this kind of closing of, like, any civic space, and then the state just having so many more vectors to, like, fucking stick its neck in. Anything else you’d highlight on demand numbers two?
J – So these two are important for trans people but also allies as well. So there is decriminalising all sex work, and everything that goes with that. It’s because trans people are just disproportionately involved in sex work. We have to actually get money, because we’re just excluded from employment, excluded from healthcare, and a lot of trans healthcare costs a lot of money when it’s not actually available to you.
I guess that feeds into the next bit, which is to reverse the cuts to PIP. This was really pushed for by our members, because a lot of members, or people that they know, are disabled and just know that cuts to PIP are just going to be absolutely devastating for disabled people.
HH – That does neatly bring us into the third set of demands. The kind of socialism that I’ve come to, and I think actually, like the majority of our generation, is one that sees this as an integrated struggle, not just for bodily autonomy, but access to basic necessities. And so when we see demands number three around healthcare that works – they’re not just about removing restrictions, though they do, they’re also about, like, expanding, like, you know, both, like, patient autonomy within services, but also just like, access to treatment in like, a tangible sense, right?
J – Oh, definitely.,It’s funny how a lot of what trans people deal with, from the NHS, in terms of basically not getting the healthcare that we need, dovetails with so many other things. For one thing, the massive waiting list we have, you see the same sort of structure happen with people trying to access mental health care, or in particular, stuff like autism or ADHD diagnoses, where they are just put off by the NHS bureaucracy. Because, if you look at things from the capitalist lens, the more that stuff like mental health and autism and ADHD are sort of taken into account, means capitalists are gonna be forced by the state to accommodate them through the means of providing healthcare. But obviously they don’t want to do that. They just want to, like, milk us for everything that they can. So the more that they can delegitimize people’s mental health illnesses or conditions or what have you, the more that they can make profit, essentially.
Then there’s another one that’s interesting about making HRT a right for all people with no legal restrictions, over the counter on an informed consent basis. So you might think that it’s trans people who are mainly using DIY hormones because it’s almost impossible nowadays to get it through the NHS, or you have to pay for private stuff and even that’s not great. But it’s interesting, because it’s not actually trans people who DIY the most with hormones. It’s actually cis people, because a lot of a lot of cis women just buy hormones, like oestrogen hormones and stuff off the grey market to deal with menopause, because doctors just won’t give them it. And I think that sort of speaks to the sort of inbuilt misogyny in the health service that they won’t take women seriously when they ask for these things. Then that’s not even to get into the amount of cis men who take testosterone for the gains. The T-boys and the gym bros need to make an alliance over testosterone – maybe that’s an alliance that could change the course of the country. But yeh, because even that is not just for trans people, it’s for all other adult people. Because, like, hormone treatment, it’s very easy to actually do. I’ve taught myself how to do it because of DIY. You just have a certain amount, you get some blood tests done once every month or two. Then you’ll hit a certain amount that you need, and then you only need to do a blood test once every three months or six months. It’s not hard stuff to do, but because of the way that the NHS structure it you think like you needed, like, 10 PhDs and 30 different, like, super, super nerd scientists to, like, look after you,
HH – There is so much about bodily autonomy and strategies for securing it, because, whether it’s the DIY scene or just like access in private, there is just this politics of resisting these many barriers that seem to be just thrown up, I guess the puberty blocker ban is a really serious priority and has really intensified a crisis amongst young trans people, right?
J – Yes absolutely. Ultimately it’s a fight for bodily autonomy, the whole of all of this, and it dovetails with, like classic feminist struggles of decriminalising abortion and access to contraception.It’s about being able to. I think it’s just a shame that so many of these so-called feminists who fought in these struggles decades ago just can’t see that.
On top of the demands regarding puberty blockers, we’ve also got a demand for ending so-called corrective surgery for intersex children, because they are genitally mutilated for no reason, other than to make these kids fit a strict binary that we are told exists even when reality shows otherwise.
HH -In the ideal world, we have a democratic socialist party, and we get the programme and membership to be championing these demands, right? That said, I imagine there’s a lot of trans comrades who might be looking at Your Party. They’ve seen something like Adnan Hussein’s tweeting or something like that, and they are going like, Why? Why even bother? What do you say to those comrades? Because they might go, oh, fuck it, I’ll just go to the Greens or, fuck it, I’ll just continue to sort of do like, either DIY provision or community organising or direct action or whatever. The TLG feels like a bit of a step change, but maybe one that opens up some terrain?
J –I was talking about this with one of the other TLG members today, something along these lines. There’s like local trans activists where I live. They’re not like, electorally focused and stuff. It’s around mutual aid or protesting or whatever. And it’s hard to talk about Your Party, because Your Party, is a mess as we talk right now, but one thing I say about TLG is that we’ve come together to deliver what is essentially a programme for trans liberation.
I don’t know if there’s any other national programme, whilst we also have a democratic structure that allows for participation in it, which we spent a lot of time on. There’s a whole governance structure, you can see, and that’s only going to be in place until after your party’s founded, when we’ll take stock and probably rewrite it all. But so we’ve got the we’ve got – a programme and a democratic structure, and we’re getting towards having a national profile. And I just don’t think that this has existed for trans people in Britain, where we have something like a national organisation that can push a programme for trans liberation, because people get pulled into all of these ‘debates’ like, what is a woman? Or blah, blah, blah. But armed with a programme of concrete things that we want, it makes it so much easier to cut through the bullshit.
HH – I guess even in the worst case scenario, which is Your Party just catastrophically collapses – the organisation you have allows a step forward a bit?
J – We’ve sort of, like, just discussed this a bit and stuff. There’s nothing stopping us from, if Your Party collapses we can just continue and keep growing. And, ideally, it’ll be the case that we’ll have branches in different cities and towns, and then it can be tied into a wider national organisation. There’s loads of great trans organisations in all these different places. But they’re not really tied into, like, any sort of national infrastructure that can, like, really make the most of them and make them more effective and also more efficient, I guess, as well.
HH – Is there anything else you’d like to add about the TLG?
J – I’d like to talk about who we want in the TLG. We obviously want trans people and cis allies, but we in particular want working-class trans people, especially trans people of colour as well. The sections of us that face the worst conditions. I’m a stereotype of the trans girl in tech, one of the more privileged fractions of us. I’m not living the high life or anything. But, there’s a lot of trans people, people in my scenario, where we can, like, be sheltered from things a bit everyday. We can work from home. For example, we don’t have to, like, have a public facing job. Say you work in a warehouse and just don’t have enough money to pay for private health insurance – stuff like this means that basically, you are more visibly trans. Personally, I think it’s a failure if it’s just a load of, like, more middle class trans people. I personally want us to be making sure that we’re recruiting working-class trans people, particularly trans people of colour.. Also personally there’s one thing I want to do as well, which is institute a quota of only 10% of the steering committee being privately educated, because that’s just a problem in the left in general. But, yeah I think building an organisation led by working-class and racialised trans people is something that I’m passionate about with the TLG.
