Prejudice and equality
Abigail Maxwell writes about transphobia
My Friend prefers First Class on the train, especially after a group of youths in the vestibule began shouting abuse. ‘It’s a Tranny!’ And: ‘It’s a Man!’ They kept shouting until they got off the train. That might be described as societal transphobia, where boisterous young men think that men in dresses are ridiculous, and should be ridiculed. But some people have a similar and disproportionate response to transsexual or transgender people akin to arachnophobes’ reaction to spiders.
I had never seen the man before, but when he passed me, he hissed: ‘f***ing nonce’, and I wondered at his hatred, to call me a sex offender. After the Manchester Pride festival I walked back to my car, followed by a man who kept singing a running commentary: ‘It’s a man! She used to be a man! She doesn’t like people to know, she used to be a man!’ I was so freaked by this that, reversing my car out, I nearly crashed into the vehicles on the other side of the car park.
Once I passed a very drunk man as I was walking home from work, and he started to abuse me. He said: ‘My cousin’s gay, and I can understand that, but you!’ He tried to push me in front of a passing car.
Transphobia is prejudice against transsexual or transgender people. Most transphobes are self-righteous about it, but not all. I had a good relationship with a work colleague until I transitioned. She knew that the employer’s diversity policy, English law and basic decency were on my side, so she was apologetic. But she told me that she felt disgust for me. I was sorry. Eventually we managed to discuss work issues reasonably well, though we kept apart as much as possible.
In my New Age spirituality group a woman was enraged to see me at the taster session for ‘Open to the Goddess’, which was advertised for women only. She kept quiet, and told me about it afterwards. She had decided, she said, that: ‘While you are not a woman, you are a lovely person.’ That had to be good enough for me. Good Quakers explain to me that ‘transphobia’ is a poor word for it, because they think it is not a fear. If anyone can coin another word conveying its irrational aversion and complete lack of proportion, please do say.
A man came to my Meeting just as we started, but did not like the silence and left. A few weeks later he came in again, just as we were about to finish, and waited in the library until we went through for coffee. He sat at one end of the room, and we congregated at the other. We barely talked to him, but I took him over a coffee and offered him a biscuit.
At noon, we were about to start our Business Meeting, and I went to ask him to leave. He objected strongly, stood close to me with his hand raised to my face and said: ‘I don’t know if you are a man or a woman.’ Fortunately, other Quakers escorted him out.
I have leftie guilt that we did not explore what he wanted. He goes to the local homelessness centre, where two of us volunteer. Perhaps he wanted to talk to one of them. He went to prison two days later, so would have been very stressed.
When I was an Anglican, Wilf, an Afro-Caribbean, was the churchwarden of my parish church. He and the vicar worked hard to integrate our worship. Many of the choir were black, but when we had social events the black people sat together. When Wilf had a party the few white people he invited from the church sat together.
Quakers have a greater proportion of lesbian and gay people than the wider population, because we are known to work for equality, but we are overwhelmingly white. When BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) people experience bigotry elsewhere, we have to work very hard to win trust. I know how vicious prejudice can be.
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