KateMickeyTake

I don’t need to read every word J.K. Rowling writes to know I find her stance on trans people unhealthy and unhelpful. I cannot know what drives her, but I can question what this relentless attention achieves for a minority already subjected to so much scrutiny. The internet throws up examples of rare incidents, then circulates them until people imagine they represent everyday life. “Terfs in a Panic”—sounds like a great song title. A frightening post becomes everyone’s reality, regardless of whether it resembles anything they have actually experienced. JK is there with her big wooden spoon. And perhaps, like me, she could sometimes benefit from putting the phone down. I know many, many, many trans people. Some have turned on me because of my support for the Jewish community. I find that weird and disturbing, but I will never turn on an entire minority because I have fallen out with some of its members. My belief in someone’s right to live safely does not depend on them liking me. People also need to stop acting as though trans people were invented last Tuesday. The internet has given us access to lives we knew nothing about, but access is clearly no guarantee of understanding. As a teenager going to my first gay clubs, my mind was blown when I met an American or German poof. Even homosexuality had an international department! My world was small. Making it bigger took more than opening a door. Trans people have always existed, often under the radar or dragged into view by a sensationalist newspaper headline. I photographed the late trans pioneer and beauty April Ashley. But long before that, I remember edging towards a newspaper, fascinated by a cruel headline about her marriage case. I was eight, almost nine. What was being presented as a scandal was, to me, a glimpse of another possible life. By some strange twist of fate, years later Philip Sallon invited me to a party at Danny La Rue’s flat, and there was April. I had just signed my record deal. I arrived in my braids and hat, with a heavily painted face. In my mind, I belonged to the same universal cycle that had created April and Danny. We were connected. They appeared to see things differently. We were radical upstarts, greeted with what felt like curious hostility. There was an altercation involving my friend Marilyn, and we were thrown out. Myself, Marilyn and Philip were often turned away from gay venues. We were taking drag somewhere exotic and upsetting the status quo. Not the band, although they had lovely hair. The Black Cap in Camden was one place that said, “No entry.” So we spent more time in straight places, punk venues and at exciting gigs. Being gay did not automatically mean you were welcome in every gay space. At a club in Swiss Cottage, I was kicked by lesbians because I was dressed as a woman. They all looked like my dad. I was fifteen or sixteen, and even then the idea that clothes belonged to one sex seemed a total nonsense. It still does. I grew up in a house with five boys and one girl, and I cannot remember a single drama about who used the toilet. Of course a family bathroom is different from a public one, but it taught me that sharing a space need not become a crisis. Everyone deserves privacy. Everyone deserves safety. We ought to be able to discuss how to provide both without treating trans people as a danger simply for existing. You are not dangerous because you are trans. Your behaviour matters. Your intentions matter. Rage and violence do not belong exclusively to one sex, and there are plenty of men who cannot fight, do not want to fight and have no interest in frightening women or each other. Perhaps we need to put more imagination into the spaces we share, so that privacy and dignity are available to everyone. The world belongs to all of us. If someone is simply getting on with their life and causing no trouble, why are we so determined to make what is between their legs everybody else’s business? open.spotify.com/track/22iaf…