Yesterday while I was at Ujima I got a call from BBC Radio Bristol. They wanted to do a feature on trans people on today’s John Darvall show and asked if they could have me available by phone. Obviously I said yes. The resulting show can be found on iPlayer. I’m in the first half hour, if you want to fast forward through that.

It is always interesting doing trans stuff on the mainstream media. In most ways John did a really good job of trying to be respectful, use the right language and so on. That was a vast improvement on the “born in the wrong body” train wreck they had on the morning show a few weeks ago. However, nothing’s perfect, so here are a few pointers for future shows.

First up, if the show was inspired by Tara Hudson being released from prison, why was the focus on sexuality as well as gender? That just meant that we had to spend a lot of time disabusing listeners of the idea that sexuality and gender identity are somehow the same thing.

One thing I wish I’d been able to talk about, but didn’t get the opportunity to do so, is history. John, like most Westerners, is under the impression that trans people are something new. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you look at just about any other culture through history and around the world you’ll find societies that have a place for trans people in them. Pretending that human gender is binary is an idea that Europeans came up with a few hundred years ago, and then proceeded to export to the rest of the world as part of their colonialist adventurism.

Going back to Tara, we never really got to the bottom of what went wrong. There was very little discussion of Gender Recognition Certificates, and the fact that only a fraction of people who go through gender transition have one. It is so easy to go through most of your life without one, but any interaction with government where one’s legal gender is called into question immediately centers on the birth certificate, not all of the other ID that you have got changed. It is not just a prison issue either. If you have a GRC you can get a pension at the same age as any other woman. If you don’t you’ll be treated as a man. It is also possible (though it has never been tested in court) that the loopholes in the Equality Act that allow discrimination against trans women don’t apply to someone with a GRC.

Throughout the program both John and the news reports talked about how the government is currently reviewing the regulations for housing trans people in prisons. The impression given was that this is somehow a result of what happened to Tara, Vikki Thompson and Joanne Latham. That’s not true. The guidelines officially expired in March and the Ministry of Justice had been working on a new version when Tara’s case hit the headlines. They have, to date, refused to let anyone see the new draft. They have not involved any trans organizations in the creation of that draft. And they are planning to issue it just before Christmas. I think you can guess from that which direction the new guidelines are likely to take.

The one thing that got me really annoyed was the caller, Ben, who was put on right at the end of the first hour. Everyone else had been fairly supportive, but it is an old journalist trick to let one side have their say and then, right at the end, put on someone who spouts a pile of lies, and then cut leaving those lies uncontested.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Ben had just confined himself to saying how trans people are tragic, ugly freaks, but he also actively promoted conversion therapy. There his comment crossed the line from being abusive to being dangerous, because conversion therapy kills people. There’s plenty of evidence to show that trying to bully people out of being gay or trans doesn’t work, and makes the patient unhappy, potentially suicidal. Worse, there are unscrupulous doctors who prey on religious parents and encourage them to brutalize their kids to prevent said kids “growing up gay”. Conversion therapy is illegal in California, and probably would be here too if the psychiatric profession wasn’t afraid that such a law would be twisted to prevent them from providing any treatment at all to trans people.

Thankfully the show had a long time left to run, and John came back to the topic later in the show. Fingers crossed most people who heard Ben also heard the follow-up to what he said.

All in all I thought it was a pretty good program. I get frustrated because there is so much misinformation out there that mainstream journalists just don’t want to tackle. But the media is what it is as sometimes we just have to be grateful for what we can get. It is rare to find someone who is prepared to try. So thank you, John, you were a big step forward.