Jake Graf: Supreme Court ruling turned our lives upside down

For a brief few years after 2015, it felt as though society had finally accepted us. The media were being kinder, The Danish Girl had just come out in cinemas to a wave of empathy and rave reviews, Boy Meets Girl was gracing our TV screens. Even when The Sun outed my wife Hannah as trans, the accompanying front-page story felt almost – dare I say it – respectful.

We basked in those fleeting moments, for the first time feeling safe. Then David Cameron announced a review of the Gender Recognition Act and all hell broke loose.

Almost overnight, the press began running sensationalist, inflammatory stories. And then realising that those headlines sold papers, the media leaned into that clickbait appeal.

I remember marching with the Mermaids bus at Pride in London 2018, when six anti-trans activists hijacked the front of the parade, calling for trans women to be banned from women’s spaces – the embarrassment I felt as I realised the young people around me on the bus were having their first Pride ruined by this hate. Two years later, JK Rowling’s tweet about “People who menstruate” broke a thousand young trans hearts, and we knew we were in trouble.

We were on the tube a couple of weeks later, when a middle-aged man pointed out my wife and sneered “That’s a transsexual.” The following week we opened the Metro to find a full-page spread of hate, paid for by anti-trans groups, suggesting that trans women are a threat to cis women and children. That last one made my beautiful Hannah weep, in rage and heartbreak, incredulous that this was London in 2018. Having served her country for over a decade in the British Army, the backlash against women like her was especially hard to take.

The last few years have seen the intensity of this hate increase – an almost blanket exclusion of trans voices grew across the media, while the anti-trans slur campaign became a deafening roar. We saw disturbing and aggressive attacks on every trans charity, on every celebrity who voiced support for our community. When a 15-year-old trans girl was stabbed to death in 2023, Brianna Ghey’s name was forever etched in the mind of every British trans person.

The fleeting support we had seen from Cameron and Theresa May gave way to the Tories’ Cass review and the ban on puberty blockers, devastating the UK’s trans youth. The drumbeat of hatred continued in the rightwing media and even in the progressive press. But we lost the last glimmer of hope when Labour hung us out to dry, meeting with JK Rowling in the run-up to the election, extending the Tory ban on healthcare, and firmly shelving plans for self ID.

Then the bombshell hit. When the Supreme Court ripped up the Equality Act and the Equality and Human Rights Commission put out their horrifying interim guidance last month, it didn’t just knock us sideways. As a trans man married to a trans woman, it turned our lives upside down. After years of living, working and existing as a man, the state was now telling me that legally I’m still a woman, and that my wife is legally a man. 

Since that most extreme guidance came out, I worry for my wife’s safety every time she leaves the house. I worry that if the guidance becomes statutory, I would be unable to use either the male or female toilet, ludicrous though that sounds. And most of all, I worry about the almost instant cultural shift we’ve all felt, in the form of more open abuse, more emboldened hate, more people feeling they have permission to treat us as less than human.

We’re also parents to two young girls. And we’re now asking ourselves questions no family should have to face. How can we safely take our daughters to the toilet when we’re out in public? Will we be allowed into changing rooms with them? Will someone challenge us, maybe with violence, in front of our two small children? What used to be an everyday moment of family life now feels like something risky, something loaded.

And this guidance isn’t just putting trans women at risk. There are stories emerging daily of cis women who present as more masculine being dragged out of women’s toilets. Women whose cancer treatment has left them bald being reported and marched out by security. Women who are taller or broader being questioned and judged. Indeed, any woman who does not fit western ideals of femininity is being policed every time she needs to use the loo. And the violence only increases.

This is the disaster the Supreme Court has set in motion. The quarter of a million trans people living peacefully in the UK, previously the most progressive place to live for LGBTQ+ people across Europe, are cast adrift, treated like second-class citizens, and face societal segregation. It’s pulled the rug out from under trans people, sending a clear message that neither our equalities watchdog nor our government thinks we deserve the same rights as everyone else. What a damning legacy for this government.

The backlash against trans people has upended our lives, and it’s all the more heartbreaking because it’s driven by a vocal minority that has weaponised disinformation and fear. So we need to be louder than ever – sharing our stories, holding politicians to account and showing that trans people won’t be erased, that we’re human beings who deserve the same rights, protections and space as everyone else.

It’s time for us to fight back against hatred and fear. We need to stand together and stop the erosion of trans rights before it’s too late, because as history has shown us, once the bigots come for one of us, they come for us all.