‘We have been given a huge responsibility’

We have been given a huge responsibility. You, the trans community, impoverished by a Labour government which is working for a world in which one cannot be trans and flourish, have nevertheless entrusted us with many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

I know how hard much of this money has been to earn because you have told me. And we must spend it wisely.

I want to emphasise this because we will need your trust. JK Rowling is, in this life at least, accountable to no one for how she spends her billions. We must explain ourselves to you. But sometimes, for us to tell you about litigation we are supporting will be the wrong thing to do. To give our cases the best chance of succeeding – in a world in which parts of the judiciary are conspicuously hostile to us and the trans community – they must happen away from the limelight. We will tell you about them when we can but that will sometimes be when they are over. 

But we will not be idle.

We have teams engaged and working on about twenty legal initiatives. We are involved in one case which is already before the courts. We are convening a group of trans-led organisations to try and ameliorate some of the downsides of this work being done by a cis-led organisation. We have convened a group of highly qualified solicitors and barristers who want to work on trans cases for free or at ‘friendly’ rates. We have instructed an expert team to produce legal advice on what the Supreme Court’s decision means. We will produce guidance for the trans community – and those who don’t cohere to patriarchal archetypes – on what to do if they are challenged for using the spaces that align with their sex. We are hiring a discrimination lawyer. We have employed a leading journalist to talk of the pain caused by the Supreme Court’s clumsy social engineering. We are producing pro forma legal letters for when trans and gender nonconforming men and women are forced into the wrong spaces.

This is some of what we have done already. 

Zooming out for a second, it remains clear that we are no longer compliant with our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. Perhaps Labour no longer cares about this – the so-called justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has started to use the language of the right in how she talks about the Convention. But ultimately this is the question our work must confront the Government with. Is Labour’s desire to eradicate trans people from public life greater even than its attachment to international human rights norms? 

I get thanked a lot for standing up for the trans community. In fact, the thanks run the other way. I wrote, in ‘Bringing Down Goliath’ (Penguin, 2024), about how advocacy for trans people has opened my eyes to how the world is for people without my privilege. The work has given me “a skeleton key to a whole new moral universe”.

• If you are able to support our work with a regular monthly donation, we would be grateful. This work is attritional and it takes a big organisation to do it – and we have no billionaire to write us vast cheques.