I don’t really know why I’ve always had so many transgender friends. It’s just one of those facts of life. What I can say for certain is that having trans people in my life has shaped my political opinions in quite a fundamental manner.
I’ve watched the people around me change and evolve, hide and worry and change their ways of being, just so they could feel safer. As newspapers began their crusades against people like them, it became clear that few columnists saw the issue as anything but theoretical. They pontificated over the innate meaning of “gender” because clearly it felt intellectually stimulating to them, but they didn’t seem to care about the real-life ramifications of their work.
As things got worse, the media continued to ignore the real, tangible lives of trans people, and instead printed the opinions and arguments of people with little to lose either way. The British political sphere followed, meekly, or out of sheer and complete lack of interest.
We are now in 2026 and things are worse for transgender people than they have been in years, perhaps decades. You’d be forgiven for having missed it, or not thought about it all that much. Around 0.5% of people in the UK are trans. They’re a small, small minority.
Still, they deserve to have their voices heard. It would be tough to poll them all, but I did reach out to a few of my friends and asked them to speak to me for this piece. The sample they represent may not be wholly representative, but that’s not really the point.
Below are the thoughts of three transgender women, all of them in their 30s. S. works in the public sector in London, and I’ve known her for over a decade. I met A., another public sector worker, a few years ago through mutual social circles. R. and I have never actually seen each other face-to-face, because she lives in Wales, but we have been online friends for some time.
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None of them will be named here because all three of them are too scared to go on the record. “I’m not saying this anonymously because I wouldn’t stand by any of the words if I had to,” R. told me. “It’s because it feels dangerous, as a trans woman, to have my name published, because the wider press might try to destroy my life for a story.”
Similarly, S. wanted to be sure I wouldn’t publish any potentially identifying details, joking that she felt as if she were working on the Snowden leaks and not, say, chatting to a friend about her life. This is the state of play for trans people today. How did we get here?
On beginnings
S: “I came out as trans in around 2020. It was a gradual process. When I first decided that actually, no, I needed to transition, after a long time of internal complex feelings about it and working out whether that was the right thing to do, I realised that the UK was not a super-friendly and welcoming environment for trans people and trans women in particular.
“Still, I was fairly confident in the knowledge that there was a legislative framework for trans people that allowed us to transition and move on with our lives. We had legal gender recognition, and equality protections that I felt were probably fairly unassailable. No matter how toxic the political discourse was becoming, I was relatively safe knowing that it could only get so bad.”
R: “I came out as trans around 10, 12 years ago. I was a teacher, and schools are very gendered environments. You’re sir or ma’am or whatever, and so you’re thinking about it all the time.
“I was kind of OK being a boy when I was a kid, but once I started to realise what manhood was, I was like, “Well, actually that’s not me at all. I don’t want this.” It still took me a few years to work out what I was feeling.
“Most people didn’t really know much about trans people, but they were maybe starting to in 2014. There was a trans character [in] Orange Is the New Black, and she was played by a trans actor, I remember that.”
A: “It felt challenging to be transgender in the early 2020s, but at least it wasn’t getting worse. Ever since then, things have actually got worse; I feel like if I hadn’t come out four or five years ago, I might not come out now.”
On the Labour government
S: “Despite having some reservations about Labour, I breathed a sigh of relief that the Conservatives, with their increasingly vocal anti-trans position, were no longer in government. While I didn’t think Labour were going to do anything good, I didn’t think they would pursue the kind of mendacious anti-trans policy that the previous government was talking about.”
A: “I was astonished. I knew that the media hated us and that was pretty bad, but we had 15 years of Conservative governments and they didn’t really do anything, even when they were yelling about how much they hated us. I hoped the Labour Party might fight for us, but I was badly mistaken, and I’m deeply ashamed of having campaigned for them. I volunteered and I organised canvassing sessions and then they decided that I don’t get to exist in public any more.”
S: “Labour failed to make any positive case for trans people’s lives and human rights, or even for their own laws – from the Gender Recognition Act to the Equality Act – which were supposed to protect us. Labour has never stood up to defend our protections under any of this, or our right to exist.”
On the emotional impact of last year
R: “When the Supreme Court ruling happened, I was in tears at work.”
A: “For a few months I would meet up with friends and they would say ‘oh, how are you?’, in a nice normal way, and normally you go ‘oh I went on holiday last week’, you know, ‘I’m having an OK time!’. But the problem was, as soon as they asked how are you, I would then launch into, ‘God, everything fucking sucks. I’m terrified every time I go to the toilet now’. But then, you just have a shit evening, don’t you? So now I try to answer in a nice normal way when people ask me questions like that.”
S: “2025 was the year I realised that I was no longer going to be able to live a normal life in Britain, and that was going to continue to be the case for some time. I started looking at options for moving abroad, started thinking seriously about whether I could still do my job, started thinking seriously about how I could exist in public life in the UK.”
R: “We are, as a population, really quite prone to mental health issues. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have struggled with those things anyway, but it is harder to get out of bed and say ‘fuck you’ to depression when you turn on your phone or read the news, and people are basically debating whether or not you get to have rights or participate in society. It’s just harder.”
On the legal situation
S: “It’s a weird one because of course we had the Supreme Court ruling in April, but to this day still, nobody really knows exactly what that means, what the legal implications of it are. I think it’s notable to say that many, many organisations, despite what the EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission] has said, just haven’t implemented [a bathroom ban]. They’ve just gone ‘no, this can’t be right’. So my workplace hasn’t actually changed its policies. But at the same time, my life has become extremely precarious.
“I spend my time keeping up with the minutiae of politics and employment tribunal judgments and developments to work out where I can and can’t pee at work or when going to the pub with friends. That’s just not a sustainable way to live. I no longer have any security in my life whatsoever.”
R: “The idea that if I break my leg then I suddenly have to worry about being on a male ward – I don’t want to be on a male ward! I mean, with the best will in the world, I’m a woman with giant tits. I would not feel comfortable or safe. And people will say ‘oh, the NHS can just put you in an individual ward’. Oh, yeah, the famously well-resourced NHS! Are you high?”
S: “I work in the public sector, in a not particularly political area with normal people who aren’t having their brains fried by politics or the media. I work mostly with cis women, and my whole close group of colleagues, when they started seeing this talk about bathroom bans, said that they would walk out on strike if I was banned from using the women’s bathrooms at work. It’s just true that when you know trans people in your day-to-day lives, there is a certain clarity to this all being bullshit.”
On the absurdity of it all
R: “My partner didn’t transition through the NHS, they get meds now from them, but mostly they did it outside the UK, so they’re now in the position where they don’t have a gender recognition certificate. We’re currently thinking of getting married, we’re two women, but legally, she would be my husband. It would be a straight marriage, as far as the law is concerned – just an ordinary union of a man and a woman. I really don’t think this is a very heterosexual relationship, I have to say, just from the perspective of being in it! I’m sorry, British state, but I think you may have got this one a bit wrong.”
S: “My partner, who is a woman who isn’t trans, but is a butch queer woman, has been harassed in women’s toilets, and I haven’t.”
On the future
A: “I mean, I am the most fucking boring, middle-class, milquetoast centrist person imaginable, and the government and civil society have just decided that I need to be persecuted for no reason. All I want is to have a nice house and a nice family and to have my job and one day to retire to the countryside, and that’s not possible any more because of the actions of rich people who hate us.”
R: “I want to live in defiance: indeed, to defy by living. What gets me through the day nowadays isn’t joy. Joy is all right but actually, I prefer spite. I will live, I will flourish in defiance of these people, and that’s what powers me through.”
