As a follow-up to Friday’s Transgender Day of Remembrance post, here are a few links for your consideration.

Firstly Feministing reminds us that alongside the horrific murders we need to remember that trans people are much more likely to commit suicide than the general population.

If anyone would like examples of the sort of hatred directed at trans people, Roz has links to a couple of supposed “feminist” web sites.

In Twitter today I got asked to publicize this call for action on the UK’s supposed “Equality” Bill. That, you may remember, is the bill over which the EU kicked the UK’s butt because Gordon & Co had written in provisions allowing people to be exempt from the duties of the bill if they claimed that their religion required them to be homophobic.

However, the religious exemption and the trans issues raised by the call to action linked to above are just the tip of the iceberg as far as trans issues in this bill are concerned. I refer you to Christine Burns and the Press for Change submission to Parliament.

Those posts date back to June, but as far as I know the government has refused to budge on any of PFC’s complaints. Bear in mind here that the UK’s Gender Recognition Act of 2004 gives trans people who have passed through all of the required hoops full recognition in their new gender: birth certificate and all. However, the Equality Bill specifically creates “single sex services” and “genuine occupational requirements” which would allow vendors and employers to discriminate against trans people, even if they have a Gender Recognition Certificate. For example, the “Equality” Bill would change UK law to make it legal for a clothes store to ban trans women from women’s changing rooms, for a restaurant to ban trans women from women’s restrooms, and for any company with a sufficiently inventive HR department to refuse to employ trans people.

Oddly enough, the same government has also established an Equality and Human Rights Commission whose job it is to, “protect, enforce and promote equality across the seven “protected” grounds – age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, sexual orientation and gender reassignment.” Some of the work it has done on trans issues has been very good. However, today the government announced the appointment of 10 new Commissioners. Not one of them has any interest in or experience of trans issues, and the press release by Harriet Harman (Minister for Women and Equality) omitted any mention of EHRC’s duties regarding gender reassignment.

Sorry if this comes across a little ranty, but it is all rather depressing, especially in view of the strong probability that the UK will soon have a Tory government whose behavior towards trans people is likely to be much, much worse.