Oral History Interview - Roz Kaveney

Video File

25/08/2017

2020.4

Audio recording of an oral history interview with Roz Kaveney, born London 1949.

12 x video file (.mov), recording of an oral history interview with Roz Kaveney. Total length - 1 hour, 51 minutes, 9 seconds.

Fom the exhibition 'Making Her Mark: 100 Years of Women's Activism in Hackney' [6 February - 19 May 2018]

“I’m terribly sorry officer. But I helped write the law, so I think I know
better than you what it says!”

Roz Kaveney is a British writer, critic, and poet living in Hackney. She is also a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship, a former deputy chair of Liberty and has worked as transgender rights activist.

She was invited to be part of a policy forum during the creation of The Gender Recognition Act (2004) a law which enabled trans people to get their gender identity legally recognised on their birth certificate and other documents for the first time. Kaveney also worked on the Equalities Act (2010).

In this film she discusses her role in shaping the Gender Recognition Act, the issues and the moral questions raised by the process, and why the current legislation is in need of reform.

No

[2020.4a_Roz_Kaveney]



Q. Just a very technical one, we need to do before we get started --. Would you just state your name? [00:24]

RK. Right, sorry. I am Roz Kaveney.


Q. When were you born and where were you born? [00:34]

RK. I was born in Hammersmith Hospital, which is between East Acton and White City, in summer 1949.


Q. How did you or your family come to Hackney? [00:50]

RK. Well, my family didn’t. I lived in various flats in the borough, in the middle and late 1970s. I then got a flat on the Kingsmead [Estate]. The winter of 1979 to 1980, The Greater London Council, as it then was, during a brief conservative administration, decided to run a homesteading scheme for young single people. And I got a flat on the Kingsmead Estate which was in quite serious bad repair. But basically I got it at a low rent, I got a big flat. They left it to us to do the renovations.


Q. What were your impressions when you first came here? [01:55]

RK. I knew the borough already, various friends had lived here. I had lived in a flat on the border of Hackney and Islington, because I am not sure whether Upton Road is in the borough or in Islington, but it’s near De Beauvoir Road. So, I knew the Dalston area quite well from a flat I had lived in somewhat earlier in the 1970s. Shortly before I went to The States, in 1978 and immediately after coming back from The States in 1978, I had stayed with a friend in Finsbury Park, again in the borough but on the fringes of the borough. I knew bits of the borough quite well already. I then lived on the Kingsmead for around a year, a bit longer than a year. Then I moved, I had to move for complicated reasons to Whiston Road just by Broadway Market in 1981, which is where I have lived ever since.

I have been in the borough for a very long time, but I am not a native. I have only ever lived here as an adult. My living in Hackney is very much a function of the housing situation for young queer people in late 1970s and early 1980s. It was possible to get a tenancy in Hackney, if you were young and vulnerable, and I got one.


Q. Was it targeted for vulnerable people? [03:55]

RK. Not specifically, but it was a factor I think. Previous to getting the place on the Kingsmead I had been living in various places in Dalston, actually now come to think of it, because after I got back from the states in 1978, in early 1979, after I had been living in Finsbury Park, I moved into a licensed-housing association, that whole scheme some housing associations used to run, where you got a licensed squat.

So, in 1979 I lived, first of all on the Hackney end of Amhurst Road and then on Colvestone Crescent in Dalston. This will be one of the things that will interest you most, because that's the period when, because I had a licensed squat, I filled it up with a number of very slightly younger trans club workers that I knew from the trans community in Soho. There was briefly, first of all on Amhurst Road and then on Colvestone Crescent, The Dalston Trans Commune.


Q. It’s amazing. [05:47]

RK. Looking back it only lasted a few months, because I think it lasted a while after I left, because there was a point when I got my flat on the Kingsmead, I tossed people the keys and said “You are on your own kids, I am out of here.” Because I didn't much relish being everyone's parent. That whole thing I was, what, 28 or 29 and they were 24 or 25 I mean, one of them was a bit younger, one of them was 19 or 20. Mostly they were people in the 23, 24, 25 area. But I nonetheless had to be the responsible adult.


Q. What led you to be the grown up in there? [06:30]

RK. It wasn't particularly a plan. The other people in the licensed squat, the person through whom I got it, a gay man called Rolland, who actually worked for a different housing association, moved out. Andrew Britton, the film scholar, who was the third person in the flat, got an academic post and moved out. So I was living on my own. One of my friends got out of jail, so I let her stay, while she was between engagements in jail. She had been evicted while she was in jail, so she needed somewhere to stay, so I let her stay, and then she went back to jail for a short period, only a couple of months.

While she was in jail along with one of her friends, two slightly younger trans women, who had been living with the friend who went to jail at the same time that she went to jail, got thrown out of the flat where they were living in the middle of the night. Basically Bieber's boyfriend, decided to make a pass at the pair of them, in the middle of the night, and they walked out, and then realised they had nowhere to go. Literally, I mean, at 1 o'clock in the morning I found two drowned rats on my doorstep. Obviously, I let them stay and there was nowhere else for them to go immediately and I thought, “Oh what the hell.” Then they moved with me from Amhurst Road to Colvestone Crescent, and then Maz, and for a while Bieber, came out of jail, needed somewhere to stay. Yeah I mean it was a big house.

Suddenly, there were all sorts of people wandering in, it became a crash base as well. It was a matter of very much policing people because, well, the border of Amhurst Road and Sandringham Road which is the first one, was in those days a front-line for drug dealing. So, I made an executive decision that this was a drug-free house, otherwise we would be people of interest, which meant being quite firm about dope. But also it meant, one of them, Vivian, had, I won't say an addiction problem, but certainly a barbiturate habit, I had to tell her, “what you do when you are not here, is your concern, while you are in the house, you are clean”, and that meant that she didn't get a key.

And it’s these things that everyone who finds themselves in that kind of alternative housing has to learn quite fast. You make people pay some rent, because otherwise they don’t feel a commitment. You make people contribute to a food kitty, because otherwise they take advantage. It's all token things and you have to be prepared to throw someone out if they do something wrong, which I found myself having to do on one occasion, but I won't mention the specific thing, because it was something quite hard. Someone else who lived in the flat briefly did something extremely criminal and I evicted them on the spot. Again, you have to be prepared to do this. I mean, I then went to a house and called a house meeting and said, “I have just done this, any objections?”


Q. Was it an exciting time as well? [11:02]

RK. Oh it is. I mean I just turned 29, I just transitioned. I was in-between trips to America. I was starting to build a career, a totally respectable career, as a literary journalist and publishing freelance. Literary, I was juggling that with all of this. Of course it was a period, it was going out to gigs, going out to clubs. The Soho we were all part of, was the Soho where various people that hadn't yet made it were part of our circle. We knew George, we knew Marilyn, we vaguely knew Morrissey. But I didn't remember them, because I never went out of the house wearing glasses and in those days I was very short sighted. I mean, couple of times down the years I bumped into George O’Dowd and he said, “Hey” I go, “Hi. I don't remember you at all, I know I know you” and apparently I met Morrissey a few times, but it's [2020.4.b_00:00] complicated by the fact that my memory of this period is quite cloudy, because… in between 1983 and 1985, well the end of 1982 and 1985, I was in and out of hospital. I had 25 general anaesthetics in two years. So, my memory can be a little sketchy. There were problems with my GRS [Gender Reassignment Surgery].


Q. It’s all right. [00:33]

RK. I mean, it happens. I collected the bad karma from a lot of other people. It’s the way I always look at it. You know, someone has to be the one who gets bad luck. I was the one who got bad luck.

So, and then I moved up to the Kingsmead, where I was fine for a while, because on a different floor of the same building was a gay male commune made up of reformed skin heads. Which meant that they dyed pink triangles on to their scalps, and adopted anti-fascist politics, having had fascist politics, but were still quite scary people. On the other hand, they were on my side. I mean, yes, there were a couple of times I got into arguments in clubs in the West End, and they appeared sort of out nowhere and said, “She is our mate,” which was nice, but then they moved off to a farm in Wales or something. Farm or what, I don’t know. I don’t ask.

At that point, things on the Kingsmead got a little less pleasant. There was a very speed addled [02:06] gang on the Kingsmead in those days, and I’ve made the mistake of ringing the police when I saw them doing a burglary. As a result of which, the police came around to my flat to take a statement, rather than ask me into the station to take a statement. What kind of idiot does that? As a result of which, I got threatened with being firebombed, and this is how I ended up living down in Haggerston, but I had to move out fairly quickly and go on paying rent in a flat I couldn’t live in, because the police had fingered me.

This was 1981. The police weren’t terribly… and I mean, significantly one of the other things then, while I was waiting to move out, I had a friend call from friends of friends, of friends of West End friends saying, “I gather you’re having some trouble. Do you want a shooter?” I said “no, no, thank you. I’ll do without a shooter, thank you very much”. It was one of those realisations that the world of Minder is not that far away from the real world, because literally, it turned out it was someone that was a friend of some people I knew in a pub, where my friends drank, and It really was, someone had told someone else that I was having a problem and they rang me up to offer me…

No, I don’t want to get… I mean, I probably could’ve said, well no, but if you want to come and give me protection, you know. But I thought no, Let’s not do that. I mean, this was the aftermath of my second time in the States, and as anyone who reads my novel, Tiny Pieces of Skull, will know, my time in the States was very much like this.


Q. You’ve mentioned your time in America a couple of times. I wonder if you could take us back a little bit ? [04:34]

RK. Sure. The story on that, short form. This is the plot of my novel, Tiny Pieces of Skull, which I wrote 10 years after the event, which eventually got published in 2014, 2015, and which won the Lambda in 2016. And sorting out my actual memories from how I rewrote them in a novel, need a certain disentangling, because obviously I was there twice, whereas the novel and certain characters were only there once.

Essentially, what happened was that I made friends, in the years leading up to my transitioning myself, with a slightly younger American trans woman, who was living in London, who was a friend of friends, who was lonely, and we hung out and we got it into our heads that a really smart thing to do would be that when I transitioned, I should run away to Chicago, where she was moving back, and stay with her and this was all going to be triff. And of course, things don’t work out like that, because when I got to Chicago, after a week or so in New York, because it was my first time in the States, so obviously I went to New York first, in the interim, a previous protégé had shtuped her boyfriend, and so she was suddenly well off the idea of having proteges, and it was, “you can move into a hotel. You can look after yourself. You’ll be all right,” which didn’t work out quite so well as all that.

I was okay for a couple of months, but then… bad stuff happened. And so I came back to London, slightly with my tail between my legs. Two years later, when I was living on the Kingsmead, I got a phone call and a letter, saying, “I let you down really badly.” You think? “Let me make it up to you. I will pay for you to fly. I will pay your ticket.” Pay… being… we weren’t talking about paying with money. She was sleeping with an airline pilot. So, of course, I went back to Chicago, via the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, because that was a thing, and we hung out and I had a very good time for about two and a half months. At the end of which, her horrible ex-boyfriend and she had a tremendous row about money, in the course of which… he worked as a salesman at Gucci and his boss was Mr. Salvatore, and Mr. Salvatore he had family, and he wasn’t allowed anywhere near family business because he was gay, but on the other hand, if Steven slept with him, which Steven did, Mr. Salvatore could arrange for my friend to be badly hurt, though not killed.

And Steven asked Mr. Salvatore to do this. And Mr. Salvatore, having the brains that he was born with had let this be known on the street that this had been arranged. So, we moved back to London, the pair of us, and for a while, she lived in the Kingsmead flat, and moved out shortly before I had to move out.

My life does inhabit this land of urban legends. So anyway, that is a very short version of what had happened in the States in 1978, except of course in the novel, it’s all a single trip, because that made a much better narrative arc. But so and then, I moved into… Haggerston, where I still live, and this wasn’t in the borough, but I got very involved in all of the stuff, all of the controversies around the London Lesbian and Gay Centre, in the mid 1980s.


Q. Can you tell us about that? [09:35]

RK. Right. They used to be, funded by the Greater London Council under Ken Livingston, a purpose-built, very snazzy London-wide lesbian and gay community centre. It was just by Farringdon tube. So, just outside the borough.

And there was a massive controversy, because the people who were the board of management had particular politics, and wanted to exclude bisexual groups and BDSM groups, from the Lesbian and Gay Centre.


Q. Why? [10:30]

RK. How long have you got?


Q. As long as you have. [10:34]

RK. This was all to do with the politics of a particular sort of lesbian-feminist separatism in the 1980s. It’s a period known as the sex wars, those you’ve heard of. There were very few trans people who identified as lesbian or gay as well as trans in those days. I mean, before I had my surgery, and for a couple of years after it, I still identified as attracted to men. I was historically bi. I’d had a number of affairs with men, and one affair with my best friend, pre-transition.

Around that time, I got bored with guys. 1979… the early 1980s were not a good time to be a lesbian-transsexual, because we were the devil. We were [11:42] trojan horses of the patriarchy, and all of that. But having sort of won the argument on trans people for a while, people like Sheila Jeffries, the feminist academic and scholar, mostly who in those days had tremendous clout in London, partly because she was having an affair with Linda Bellos, who was the head of Lambeth Council, and in those days… Linda is a great person, Linda and I got over all the … [2020.4.c_00:00]. This meant that Sheila could be the guru of a lot of things around the Centre and sort of laid down the law around “we must not allow bisexuals to action a bisexual because heterosexuality is the devil and women who could only sleep with women and don’t only sleep with women are betraying...” And BDSM was mimicking patriarchal sex models and crypto-fascist and all of that. There was a huge row about this, which resulted in a number of big public debates, as a result of which the management committee as a whole backed off. All of which was sublimely irrelevant because a few years later the GLC [Greater London Council] got shut down by the Thatcher government and shortly thereafter the London Lesbian and Gay Centre, which was running at a colossal loss for all sorts of reasons, many of them having to do with an awful lot of people regarding it as a gravy train from which they could steal with impunity; just saying, had shut down. But it was famous victory. So, I was very involved in all of that.

Q. Can you outline a little bit more about what your involvement was? [01:28]

RK. Basically, in the build up to these debates I’ve mentioned, there was a propaganda war. And there was a group running the propaganda war and running the fight against restrictions on who is allowed to use the Centre, which was an alliance of perverts that called itself Sexual Fringe. I became effectively minister for propaganda for Sexual Fringe. There are various leaflets in the historical archive that I wrote; it was a thing.

It was very much an argument, taking issue with the idea that people who wore black leather jackets were thereby participating in fascist iconography, and you can’t just say “oh for heaven’s sake”, you have to argue. This was a time when various fascist groups were quite rampant in London. It was really necessary to fight them. The strap line for the leaflet was ‘fight real fascists not your brothers and sisters’ because that’s the obvious strap line, right?

It was things like that, so it was a matter of writing propaganda leaflets because it’s a skill. One of the consequences of that was that a few years later I got involved in setting up…there was a point at which, do you know about Operation Spanner and the Spanner campaign?

Right, in the late eighties a group of gay male sadomasochists were busted by the police and charged with conspiracy to commit assault. Originally someone had been stupid enough to send a videotape of one of their parties through the mail and it got opened and looked at, and the police really thought they found a snuff movie. It was all theatre.

But, they did send a bunch of people to jail for two or three year stretches, for conspiracy to commit assaults on each other. They actually busted the bottoms for conspiracies to commit assaults on themselves. They got convicted more over. This led to a huge public fight. I got involved in getting Liberty [involved]. [05:00]

[2020.4d_00:00] I got involved, along with a number of people most of whom didn’t live in Hackney I’m afraid, but quite a few did, in making a fuss about this in the letter columns of the broad sheets. I talked the National Council for Civil Liberties into getting involved. Around that time, the National Council for Civil Liberties became Liberty, it briefly adopted a pro-censorship and anti-pornography policy, for quite good reasons. I mean, I’m not dissing the people involved, I just thought that in the aftermath of Clause 28, increasing censorship was probably not a very good idea, at a point when the police were regularly stopping lesbian and gay material, the police and customs were busting places for lesbian and gay material and citing Clause 28 as public policy. It didn’t seem to be terribly smart to make anti-pornography ordonnances policed by Trading Standards officers, the way forward. And at the same time, I wanted, and other people wanted, no part of the traditional free speech arguments being pushed by a lot of male civil liberties advocates. I mean, a lot of whose positions one agreed with, but they weren’t what we were interested in. And this did largely happen in Hackney because a lot of us lived in the borough.

The Feminists Against Censorship, which I believe still exists, but in those days it was very much a group within Liberty devoted to reversing that policy. It involved a lot of quite eminent and serious feminists like the late Mary McIntosh and Elizabeth Wilson, and Mandy Merck, who’s the professor of film in London. And it also involved a lot of rat scallions and scum bags, like myself, and we went through the process of… we successfully persuaded Liberty to reverse that policy, and by again, argument and propaganda. We actually got accused of secretly being funded by the porn barons, from a group who was actually getting public funding. We didn’t have any public funding. We didn’t have any porn barons funding it, it’s just that one of us was a professional cartoonist.

Several of us were professional designers. Several of us were professional journalists and academics. On an utter shoestring and out of our own pockets, we just produced professional-looking literature. It’s not very hard. But the consequence of all of this was that I ended up on the executive of Liberty, and then for much of the 1990s, deputy-chair of Liberty, with the result that, for quite a long period, I was doing a lot of LGBT related stuff, but I was doing it in the civil liberties context, rather than…which meant that in terms of the queer politics of the 1990s, I was working outside the LGBT mainstream, because it’s a period when Outrage! was doing a lot, when Stonewall was being set up.

And I was off doing other things, because you know, I was helping run Liberty, and also helping, fighting losing battles to stop Liberty being taken over by Blairites. And that also meant that I wasn’t terribly involved in Labour Party politics, because I resigned from the Labour Party, partly because I didn’t think it was appropriate while I was deputy-chair of Liberty, and partly because I didn’t like the way things were going in the 1990s. None of which is particularly relevant to your concerns, except of course that what I was also doing, which I did think was important, was by being involved in mainstream, anti-censorship and civil liberties politics as an out trans person, I was doing something quite important which was normalising. By not campaigning around trans issues, I was, you know… I was campaigning and there were other people, like the group Press for Change, who were doing specifically trans campaigning and I was their ally, but I was working in something slightly more mainstream, but as an out trans person who was also an out lesbian.


Q. I estimate it’s way back, but when you were growing up how aware were you of the possibilities of being trans or not straight? [06:10]

RK. Well, that’s an interesting point, actually. You see, if you’d asked me five years ago, I would say not until my early teens. But in fact, about three years ago, I got an email headed with the name of my infant school and said, “I think you are the person I used to know at infant school,” and it was the woman, now in her late 50s, actually early 60s by then, because this was not long ago, her being my best friend between the ages of five and seven. And I wrote back and said, one, “when we were both seven, I was told you’d died”, and two, “how on earth did you find me?” And she said “well, I’ll explain the whole business about being supposedly dead when we see each other, and how did I find you? I was looking for you, couldn’t find you, and then thought, hang on, Kaveney is probably trans,” because it made sense to her because she was my best friend when we were five, and she’d actually pursued the theory that I might be trans, so looked for someone trans with my surname, and found me pretty much instantly. She was the other really bright kid in my infant school. People from the Department of Education industry, as it then was, came and interviewed us when we were six and a half, because we were… This was this whole early 1950s, new Elizabethan age, clever kids are our weapon against communism, period.

And she asked me what I remembered from us both being interviewed, and she said, “Well, that’s important.” And she said, “what else do you remember from back then?” And I said, “I remember that I used to go around to your house for tea and your mother would always put out cakes that tasted odd.” She said, “That’s crucial,” because the cakes were brought in from the Austrian patisserie, because Ingrid’s mother was Austrian, and indeed an illegal immigrant who’d got into the country under forged papers in the aftermath of the war. And having grown up in Austria, during and after the Anschluss, the annexation by Nazi Germany, Ingrid’s mother didn’t much like the idea of her daughter being subject to a person of interest to the State. So, when we were all due to change schools, she simply told the authorities that her daughter died of meningitis over the summer holiday, which is what I was then told, which afflicted me with a load of grief, which is one of the reasons why apparently quite a lot of playing around with gender that had been going on with Ingrid between the ages of five and seven just got completely suppressed by my memory, because oh my god, I did these terrible things and my friend died as a result.

You know how kids are. So, I mean she is fine. I mean, her mother pawned her off to distant relatives for a while and made that permanent when she went back to Austria, and dumped Ingrid into the system, which was probably the best thing. Her mother was mad. So, in my teens I thought, oh dear, there is something not right about any of this. When I was 13, my family moved from London up to Yorkshire, and I was put in a class with kids who were on average, a year and a quarter older than me, and post-pubertal. And I was a very camp, feminine, pre-pubertal Southern ponce [11:00], and I spent my first year in the North getting the crap beaten out of me all the time by people who were colossally in denial about… I mean, there was a lot of physical handling going on, and you know if people handled me in groups, they didn’t have to face up the question, why are you spending so much time putting your hands on this person?

So, they all told me I was queer, and I went away being that sort of child and did a lot of reading about sex and gender, and thought, actually I don’t think I am homosexual, in that sense, because that didn’t seem to be the thing, but you know, I read a lot of gay literature. I came across odd references to trans people and so narrowed it down and realised, oh yeah, that’s me, because that was the point at which it made… And I did what people probably didn’t do in the 1960s, which was I thought, well obviously I know from these books that there is such a thing as people who have surgery, and probably they are doing entertainment or sex work, so they will [2020.4e_00:00] be in big cities. And you’ll probably be sensible to not do this anywhere near home, or find people anywhere near home, because I was living in Wakefield and going to school in Leeds, because that could have consequences. So, what I did was find a community in Manchester.


Q. It sounds like you’ve approached the whole thing amazingly level-headedly. [00:26]

RK. I was this… I was this horrible child [laughs].


Q. What were the books that you were reading at that time? [00:34]

RK. I was reading like John Rechy’s City of Night, which is a famous gay hustling novel. Obviously I read the Last Exit to Brooklyn, but City of Night gave me a lot of clues.

Q. So, did you have any kind of role models or figures that you looked to? [00:52]

RK. Well, I mean, I found them. I found these people. I found this group of women in Manchester. Ava and Sylvia and Karen, who were first cohort, post-operative transwomen who had been through the NH [National Health] system in its very early days and were basically sex workers, and in a couple of cases, slightly mad. Ava was pretty mad. And I used to go and hang out with them, and stay with them, and periodically, lived. And I lied to my parents a lot. Sylvia, bless her, persuaded me not to run away from home, but to buckle to and get my A levels and go to university.

She said, “Your life will be a whole bunch better if you leave it a couple of years.” She was a very sensible and responsible… She died some years ago, at a point when we weren’t in touch. And the thing about Sylvia is that I know at least two other quite significant trans women activists, one of whom does outreach at the Terrence Higgins Trust. One of whom runs the community up in Newcastle, who similarly were proteges of Sylvia. So, I guess she was one of my role models.

Then, while I was doing graduate work at Oxford, because I went to Oxford, I was regularly coming to London to work in the British Library on my thesis and got in touch with the Gay Liberation Front, which had just started in those days, and started going to meetings, if I was in London. I was also going to the Gay Action Group in Oxford, and I met my major role model, a woman called Rachel Pollack, who is quite distinguished actually, because Rachel, as well as being the person that ran the trans community in London in the very early 1970s, is also quite a well-known mystic and expert on the tarot, and award-winning science-fiction and fantasy writer. She was an American, she was living in London and I became one of her proteges. I’m quite good at being people’s proteges, you know. I have no pride.

So yes, I mean, Rachel was a role model and we’re still close friends. Now, in the early 1970s, in the UK and in the States, the trans community was very much part of the gay movement. What then happened gradually in the course of the 1970s, specifically in 1969, [04:42] at the Stonewall riots and a couple of years earlier, a similar riot, the Comptons Cafeteria riot in San Francisco, working-class trans women of colour, who were mostly sex workers, had very much been in the forefront of those riots that were the defining start of gay liberation.

What then happened, first of all in the States and then gradually here, was that as a lot of the gay male movement, either was aiming for respectability or was aiming for completely deconstructed sexual anarchy, trans people got slightly shoved to the side-lines. The respectable tendency didn’t want us, because a lot of us were… never going to be respectable, to quote a famous rock song. And the others wrongly regarded a lot of us as heteronormative. Why? Because they said so. So, there was a certain… hostility between people who identified as trans and people who were doing “radical drag” like the Bethnal Rouge commune, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. Well, the point is Bethnal Rouge wasn’t in Hackney or just down the road. I mean, literally, Bethnal Rouge had a commune just by Bethnal Green tube station, and that’s part of the connection out of which Blue Lips came, and I mean, dear Stuart Feather, dear Betty Borne, they mean so well and because they are not trans, they don’t get it. They sort of think they get it and think we are less radical than they are, because they are boys and boys know. You know.

So that was going on. Meanwhile, of course, partly because of people like Germaine Greer, partly because of Robin Morgan, and laterally, because of actual academics like Mary Daly and Janice Raymond, the anti-trans feeling in the women’s movement had become a thing, and this is my special subject on which I can bore the universe. So, we won’t go there. Just accept it’s a thing and it led, for example, to Sylvia Rivera, working-class, Chicano woman, who was one of the people throwing dustbin lids in the Stonewall Riot, literally being forced from the platform at New York Pride by a combination of gay men and radical feminists.

I mean, it’s on film. You can actually watch on film Sylvia being silenced. It is one of those great historical moments. One of my great regrets is I never met Sylvia. If I thought about it, I could have found her when I was in New York in 1979, but I didn’t think. I mean I met various people who’d been at Stonewall when I was in Chicago, but while I was in New York I didn’t think to find Sylvia, because I’m an idiot. Also around at that time… this is one of the reasons why I didn’t transition until my late 20s, because a lot of my close friends in feminism in Oxford talked me out of transitioning, persuaded me that I had false consciousness, and that I shouldn’t identify as trans, as a result of which I spent much of my 20s trying to be a boy.


Q. What were their arguments? [09:16]

RK. Oh, god. “You don’t know. This is a delusion”. You know, “there is an existential state of womanhood which you do not know, because you do not have the wisdom of the blood”. Fascist crap.


Q. So, when you did transition, what was that experience like? [09:38]

RK. It was great. It was, “Oh, thank god”. The thing is, I mean I’d had a brief period of a promising career in the civil services as an administration trainee and had managed to blow that by arrogance and obnoxiousness. I mean actually, I hit a real political issue with colleagues in the civil service, which is that the second time I had a crisis of conscience, I actually stuck to my guns. The first time, I let myself be...

I should explain. Back in those days, the civil service had this very high-powered training scheme, called the Admin Trainee Scheme, where you were basically being recruited after incredibly gruelling series of exams and interviews, and fast-tracked into quite senior positions. So, one of my friends who did stick with it, who’d done slightly better in the exams than me, was John Grieve who later on was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Deputy-Governor of the Bank of England. That was the sort of thing you were being groomed for. Only I thought screw that for a game of soldiers, I don’t want to do that. And it was partly also that I could see the way the wind was blowing. I could see we were going to have a conservative government in London, and I didn’t want to be in the civil service under a conservative government, and indeed, John… lovely man, one of my closest friends in university and afterwards, became a real scumbag, really. So, there you go.

Plus, I was having a complete nervous breakdown, because I knew what I needed to do and I was feeling politically raw, and then, books saved me again. I was reading an awful lot of feminist fiction and all of the stuff about not getting it and not identifying, and not having any completely separate identity. I was reading a lot of Angela Carter and I read a couple of the books Angela wrote around then. I went… that’s exactly right. So, you’re wrong, because… [2020.4f_00:00]. Later on I was actually friends with Angela and she was horrified, well not horrified in the sense of disapproving, that I was…but I had been a huge fan of her work since my teens. I spent my teens reading, which should have been a bit of a clue, as well as reading a lot of science fiction, I was also reading Carter, Lessing and Drabble and Byatt - bit of a clue really! So anyway, that was the thing. I was very lucky because, this was a point when I was living in Chalk Farm rather than Hackney, my local GP was very hip, very trendy, a man called Chris Beetles who was also a comedian and eventually gave up medicine and became an art dealer. This wasn’t his first time at the rodeo and he said “well I tell you one thing; you’re not going anywhere near Charring Cross!”.

The major programme in those days was, as now, based in Charring Cross. In those days it was being run by a psychiatrist called John Randell who was the person who talked the NHS into running gender identity services at all so kudos to him for that. His position on that was this is going to happen, these people are out there, what we need to do is regulate them and police them because otherwise wackiness might ensue!

One of the reasons Chris Beetles wouldn’t let me anywhere near John Randell was that I was over six foot and John Randell had made an executive decision that he wasn’t going to let any transition that was taller than six foot.


Q. What was the reasoning behind that? [02:27]

RK. Because women are short! I mean this is a man who literally…one of my close friends who was one of his patients and had done everything he said, had to go into to see him in an emergency over a weekend about something and she was wearing jeans, so he put her surgery back for a year to punish her. It’s another world!.


Q. How do you feel that things have changed? [03:08]

RK. Well I mean things have changed because not even the more reactionary people at Charing Cross would try and pull a stroke like that anymore. Partly because we’d have a picket line outside the unit if they did. How things have changed – one there’s an awful lot more trans people out there and there’s much more of a community, and we’re much more political and in the nineties the gender assigned at birth thing evened out. At the point when I transitioned in the middle to late seventies, the proportion of trans women to trans men; people who were assigned male at birth transitioning to female and people who was assigned female and transitioning to male, in the course of the nineties, that went from ten to one to five to one to four to one…now it’s pretty much levelled out because once people could identify as non-binary, people started identifying as non-binary which also levelled things out. A significant proportion of the community identifies as non-binary or is gender fluid or genderless or gender queer; a whole spectrum of non-binary identities. That’s pretty much evened everything out which wasn’t the case earlier on. I suppose one of the great indictments of trans people from some feminists is oh it’s obviously a “boys thing” because “women don’t do that.” [05:02]

[2020.4.g_00:00]

As a result of having an enlightened GP, I got sent to a psychiatrist who was much less directive. Because there was, in those days, a program working out of the Maudsley, down in South London, that were also working out of University College Hospital, rather than Charing Cross with the result that I have eventually had my surgery at University College Hospital, rather than at Charing Cross, which unfortunately had consequences, because the Old St. Pancras out-station of University College had a bad record on postoperative infection. That was the thing. Yeah, you were asking about religious faith.


Q. Yeah, yes. [01:04]

RK. Well, as I said, I was brought up Catholic. My mother was an Anglican. I was brought up, as a child of a mixed marriage. I went to Catholic schools. This isn't at all relevant, but it may or may not be relevant. I didn't think it's relevant. The school I was at in London, is a famous sexual abuse school. I wasn't sexually abused at all. I knew people who were. I and my best friend were physically abused by one of the monks who was a sexual abuser, because we weren't what he wanted. He just flogged us a lot. And as a result of that, we plotted to kill him.


Q. I read the poem. [02:14]

RK. You read the poem.


Q. I liked it very much. [02:16]

RK. Yeah, I mean, subsequently of course St. Benedict’s School has become the object of colossal scandals. But I was there in those years, that was the thing. At the same time, I mean, I did have a best friend with whom I remained close friends after I had moved up north, who was gay. I mean, we fell out in our 20s over politics and also over aesthetics. We are not in touch anymore. This is Peter, actually Peter Ackroyd --. I should mention because I think it's relevant, is that on paper at least, my life is terribly glamorous, not because I have ever been other than poor as a church mouse, not because I have ever been terribly, terribly famous, but because an awful lot of my friends have been people that went on to have glittering careers, whereas I am a well-known fuck up.

But, so literally, I mean, two of my Oxford flat mates, three are reasonably well-known figures. Christopher Reid the poet, Andrew Harvey the mystic, James Bartholomew the right-wing financial journalist who coined the phrase “virtue signalling”. I lived with all three of those in the same flat in the same year and other people too. Paul Griffiths, the musicologist was my flat mate the previous year. My life is sort of like, I mean, I just accumulate people as I go, which is a bad habit, and I am a bit spanky about it, which is also a bad habit. But it sort of, because my life has all these slightly baroque bits of low-life in it, there is also the glamour.


Q. How in general do you meet people? [04:57]

RK. Because I am charming, frankly. I mean it yeah. But I think that's probably the honest answer even though it sounds awful. I am capable of being quite charming, also I am someone who has always lived in a lot of villages because I got involved in science fiction fandom, as a result of which part of my career has been as a critic working in that field, which is why I ended up writing the Buffy book, I have published. But also it meant that, I met Angela, having been a devoted reader of her books. When Angela Carter was a Guest of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention, I was the obvious person to interview her. As a result of which we became friends, because I am quite good at glomming onto people.


Q. You mentioned both school and living with people and meeting people that way and then through work. What about just kind of general socialising ? [06:25]

RK. Oh but general socialising, like I said, the people that I knew through my flatmates who were part of Soho club life, were people like Boy George and Marilyn and Morrissey, but also I knew various other people through nightclubbing, I mean I know Brian Clarke, used to be quite good friends with Brian Clarke, the glass artist, and Andrew Logan, another glass artist.


Q. Where would it be that you would go? [07:04]

RK. Well I mean, Club for Heroes, Billy's. I was never, I never went to Blitz very much, I didn't like Blitz.


Q. What was wrong with Blitz? [07:15]

RK. Don’t know, didn't like it. It was smoky, I have asthma. The whole point about Billy’s, was that because Billy’s, which was one of the other clubs of that era [07:29]. Billy's was the Old Gargoyle Club on the corner of Dean Street and Meard Street and it's on third floor, you went up in a lift.


Q. In Manchester or London? [07:55]

RK. In London. It was pretty much a feature of Soho. Punk was over, new romanticism was just sort of starting, it was that period. Like I said, I mean the thing is, also has to be said before, one of the consequences of my surgery is that I put on massive amounts of weight. Up until that point, I was thin and glamorous. In fact, I mean it was very good for me losing that because it meant I stopped relying on it. I mean, I am still quite heavy, but I was a lot heavier in my 30s. I have actually shed some of the weight with years, having put on, I mean, literally my early 30s I put on 10 stone in 18 months. Sorry, that’s 140 pounds, that’s a lot. I mean it pretty much doubled my weight.


Q. And was that a result of --? [09:13]

RK. No, it was a result of I had a lot of postoperative infections, I was in and out of hospital. I had 25 general anaesthetics in two years, that's not going to do your metabolism very much good. It also turned out I was allergic to cortisone, and I had sort of like really bad steroid reaction.


Q. How long did it kind of take to figure those reactions? [09:45]

RK. They didn’t. What do surgeons know about bad steroid reactions, surgeons, lovely people --. It is my experience that surgeons don't understand the rest of medicine nearly as well as they think they do. But they’re surgeons, so they are the cream of the crops, obviously they understand everything.


Q. One thing that we had e-mailed about was, you were on the forum for the GRA [Gender Recognition Act] and if you can tell us about it? [10:20]

RK. Oh yeah.


Q. Can you explain it for those, us and for those who are watching who don’t know? [10:26]

RK. Right. Crucially in the early stages of the Blair Government, the trans community as a whole, of which I was one of the less respectable public advocates, was very fixated on law reform and specifically on people being able, which is a good thing, being able to change their documentation. Now, obviously some things you have always been able to change. You have been able to, at least, remove gender markers from your passport. You have been able to just change your name and have all of your tax affairs, shifted to your new name, which is fine if people don't look at it too closely.

People wanted, had been arguing for ages that you should be able to just change your birth certificate. The organs of the state had resisted that on the grounds that the birth certificate is a record of historical fact and we can't alter historical fact, or we can't change historical fact, because if we did that, cats would marry dogs. People said, “Oh for heaven's sake” and that went to Europe and Europe went, “hmm, you know” the European Court, “no this isn’t –". And one of the relevancies of this was of course that people couldn’t get married.

Now that goes back to the late 1960s when April Ashley, [2020.4h_00:00], who was a young trans woman who had been a show girl in revues in Paris and had had her surgery in Morocco. And was reasonably well known to be trans. Married a posh person. And that didn’t work out. And his lawyers had the bright idea that if they annulled the marriage, he wouldn’t have to pay her any alimony. So his lawyers argued that she’d never been female and that the marriage was therefore invalid. And this was basically rich people hanging onto their money. But it was a bit of a stitch-up because by the strangest of possible coincidences, the judge who heard the case was the one judge on the divorce bench who also had a medical degree. Pfft, how could that possibly be, of course complete coincidence - stitch-up! John Randell appeared for the husband and very much said: “well, trans people, pathetic specimens, they’re not really women”. I mean, this is the guy in charge of psychiatry at Charing Cross who people had to go through to get surgery and he testified on the husband’s side in the April Ashley annulment case. Just saying, not a nice man. [02:04]

So, it became incredibly important to the majority, the very small majority, of trans people who identify as straight that they be able to marry because remember, at this point, even civil partnerships were a couple of years in the future and actual equal marriage was a decade in the future. So, various of us were invited onto the parliamentary forum for gender issues, which had been running for a little while. It had been running for a while when I got involved. I and a couple of my friends set up an organisation so that one of us could be a delegate to the parliamentary forum. No, the organisation was doing other things but we had a small radical group that were publishing a journal, most of which was about publishing a small fanzine-like journal of radical gender theory.


It’s what some people involved in the group were interested in doing, but it was also so that they could stick me on the parliamentary forum. And that was interesting because one of the things that happened during the negotiation of the Gender Recognition Act was that there was a serious attempt by some elements in the Blair cabinet to adopt the sort of laws that they had in some Scandinavian countries and Germany, where one condition of recognition of change of civil status was sterilisation and destruction of genetic material. [04.08] Because obviously a lot of trans guys remain capable of giving birth. Most of them wouldn’t want to. Some, for example, it just happens that their partner is infertile, so they have the child for the family and revert to being father. I mean, I know a couple of couples where that happened.

Why were people in government, why were people in Scandinavia and Germany? Eugenics. “We don’t want these people in the gene pool, because that might mean there are endless strange mutant people around”. It was a hangover from eugenics, and Stephen Whittle and I, both of whom for different reasons have done a lot of work on the history of eugenics and compulsory sterilisation of the unfit managed to say, “I don’t think it would be a very good idea to be seen to imitate laws in Germany that are hanging over from a certain sorry period in the German past”. And the Blair government did think better of this idea. But it was a thing. You know, people came along and said, “a little bit of small print, it wouldn’t matter…”. We said: “no, not even slightly”. So that was a thing, and yes, we got… [05.56]

The trouble is that the GRA as it was eventually decided upon had some problems, which was that people had to, in order to change civil status, present a lot of documentation to a panel. They had to pay. They had to pay for the documentation, they had to pay the panel. That’s not necessarily what people want to do. It also meant that the panel could actually say no.


Q. Did they? [06.42]

RK. Yes. Because one of the other things that happened was in the interim between then in 2001 and 2003, and now, rise of non-binary people. And the panel was not geared up to recognise non-binary identities. It’s not geared up to deal with people who don’t believe in medicalising. The argument had been that trans people were mentally ill and surgery was about relieving symptoms, and we put up with that. But that is not how people see themselves. The argument very much now is, we are a standard variation in the human genotype. In a society which is hung up on these things, it is probably best for a lot of us that we have some adjustments made to fit. And certainly the argument would be, in a lot of other societies, people have found some way of adjusting their bodies to suit their minds. We’ve just got better technology to do that with.

That’s not something that necessarily goes down very well with a bunch of bureaucrats. And a lot of people don’t want to go through that particular system in that particular way. And there is a fundamental objection: Why should I have to pay significant sums of money, when in a lot of other countries, in the interim, the law has changed? And in Argentina, Eire you can effectively make a statutory declaration? Why do we have to shell out several hundred quid and fill in yay pile of forms? [08.57]

So that’s the current state of play. I’ve never got my GRC [Gender Recognition Certificate] because having listened to criticisms from other people in the community of the GRA as we negotiated it and as it went through, I came to feel conscientiously that I couldn’t take advantage of a flawed system which I’d been involved in helping to create. It was important we got something, and we took what was on offer, but it wasn’t satisfactory and my concession to the feelings of the community was that I didn’t take advantage of a system I’d come to regard as flawed. Which is not that inconvenient. It’s also, and this is a real problem, the Gender Recognition Certificate was never intended as anything other than a change of civil status, a piece of documentation that meant it was easier to sort out your tax affairs and your benefit affairs and your pension rights, that meant it was easier to engage in heterosexual marriage but there were problems.

One of the problems was that once the GRC existed, and even though it is utterly illegal for anyone to demand sight of your GRC or even to ask whether or not you have one, except in these very limited circumstances described in the law, an awful lot of people started breaking the law all over the place. [10.51].

There was a famous incident at Pride in 2008 when the security people who were running the loos at Trafalgar Square started saying: “oh well, we get to decide which loos people are allowed to use”. We go: “no, you don’t, City of Westminster has its own rules on this and there’s also legislation”. And they said “oh, it’s gender recognition”. No, it’s not, it’s the Equalities and Goods and Services Act, actually. And a cop got involved and he was an LGBT liaison officer and there was the famous confrontation... And of course, people had said, the security staff had said: “what are you going to do about it?” I said: “In ten minutes, within a quarter of an hour, there will be fifty trans people sitting on the floor of this loo if you don’t shut up”. And they scoffed. Ten minutes later, we’d managed to organise a sit in. I’d managed to organise a sit in. So the police get called and an LGBT liaison officer who was off duty.

[2020.4.i_00:00] In a state of heightened consciousness, probably caused by a couple of drinks and was very much laying down the law: “I’m an LGBT liaison officer and I know what the law is”. You know, “if you haven’t got a Gender Recognition Certificate, you can’t use the loos”. And I said “I’m terribly sorry, officer, but I helped write the law so I think I know better than you what it says”. And in fact, I also helped write the Equalities Act Provision of Goods and Services which is the relevant law in this case! And of course, I made him back down and then they backed down - except they didn’t back down. I mean, once we’d all gone away, they just went back to doing it. With the result, a young trans woman who was disabled came along and they let her use the disabled loos but they forced her carer, who was also trans, to use the male loos where she was sexually assaulted. So it’s all not funny. So this led to an endless row about this, which we forced The police backed down very, very fast and agreed that they would train people better, particularly liaison staff. Pride took a lot longer to back down and tried to misrepresent it in the press and so on, and eventually, you know.

And the security firm really took a long time to back down and in fact only backed down when they were stupid enough to libel us in an email that “accidentally” got copied to us [02.08]. At which point we said: “that’s libel, so you’d better fold now and say you won’t do it again now and make solemn and binding undertakings now, or we will sue you for a large sum of money because we can”. So that was a whole thing. None of this was terribly pleasant. But this was a consequence of what happens when people fetishise the GRC, because people know that the Gender Recognition Certificate exists, a lot of people don’t have it, it becomes the gold standard, which was one of the things we worried about when we were negotiating the law. And this is one of the reasons why people have been arguing for a change to a self-determination law, which of course is getting a lot of controversy in the press. Which is basically because the old system has been abused to oppress people and if they didn’t want nice things, they shouldn’t have done that. So that’s the story on the GRC and the GRA and the parliamentary forum as I remember it.


Q: And what changes would you like to see now? [03.35]

R: Well, better access to trans medical care, crucial. There’s a very good document that Stonewall are in the process of producing which hasn’t been published yet, and I was quite critical of the working document. Things that need to happen: 1. Self-determination written into law, rather that the elaborate system of the GRC 2. Easier access to medical care. Within medical care, a reversion to the old system. In the old system, with informed consent, you were talked through the consequences of taking hormone replacement and then a few years ago, for reasons that remain less than obvious, probably someone’s idea of saving money, people who are still having to do … you know, there’s this thing called the real life test, where in the early stages of transition, before people can go on a waiting list for surgery, they have to live for a period of … [2020.4j_00:00]


Q. And we start again, can you just summarize the, we are like testing --? [00:05]

RK. Yeah, there is this thing which is a carryover from the old Harry Benjamin Standards of trans medical care that makes people go, is fair enough. That people, before they can be put forward for surgery, have to spend some time living in their preferred gender, to check if that works for them. However, in the original Harry Benjamin Standards, and for a long time after the Benjamin Standards had been altered, people could get access to hormone replacement therapy on a basis of informed consent. Look, these are the consequences if you are taking HRT, in terms of its effect on fertility, and other aspects of health.

I mean, I actually started to take HRT even before I had transitioned socially because it made it much easier to transition socially. And certainly would have made it very much easier to adjust to transition. And the NHS a few years back shifted to only letting people have HRT after a second interview, well that was often sort of the case, but the point is your second interview happened almost in almost a year(?). Now people have to wait a couple of years for their second interview, during which time they are supposed to have transitioned socially, which leads to people self-medicating, without endocrinological --.

It's ridiculous nonsense that leads to people either being rendered much more vulnerable, because they are transitioning without endocrinological support, or to self-medication without endocrinological monitoring, which is not a good idea, especially for guys, because male hormones, if you are not taking…, it can mess up your liver. I mean, it's less crucial for trans women actually. But still, you don't want to be taking strong drugs without someone monitoring them. But if people are desperate, they are going to self-med and people say, “Oh, we will just stop people getting access to stuff on the internet”. To which you go, “have you ever heard of the black market?”

I mean it is a nonsense. Similarly, young trans people, there has been a lot of shock, horror stuff in the press and people are simply told a lot of untruths. The bottom-line is that young trans people don't want to go through puberty and there is a way of dealing with that, which is, nobody is saying that people should be able to make final decisions at 12 or 13, though many people make decisions at 12 or 13 that are final decisions, but some don’t.

Puberty, there are drugs that retard puberty. So no one has to go through the physical changes involved in puberty, if they don't want to. If you come off puberty retardant drugs then puberty proceeds as normal, a while later. Doesn't affect fertility, doesn't affect anything. But a lot of people have gotten to their head, children, people at 12, 13, 14 are too young to make up their minds. Yeah well we’re agreeing with that, we are saying people shouldn’t have to. Having your body change in directions you don't want is forcing people to --. So, what do I wish? I do wish that the New Statesman hadn't gotten a bee in its bonnet. I do wish that anti-trans journalists, who would identify themselves as of the Left would just let it alone. I mean, here we have a situation where right American fascism, let's call it by its name. American theocratic fascism is saying the same thing about trans people as supposed socialist feminists. It’s the way that people like Julie Bindel, Helen Lewis, Sarah Ditum, at a point where trans people are losing their civil rights in the states, are saying many of the same things as theocratic fascists, you got a death wish? There is utter blindness to what they are doing. I mean specifically on the rights of trans adolescents and trans children.

I mean, I don't know whether my life would have been better if I had been able to transition when I was seven, I think it probably would have been. Certainly be better if I had been able to transition in my teens. I am not saying it would have been better in every conceivable way, I am not saying everything would have been hunky-dory, because society is what society is.

One of the real problems is, and this is actually the biggie, is that people just need to accept that trans identities are valid, that we are not sickies who need to be tolerated. That we are just people who needs to operate on basis of equality. Which is one of the reasons why I have been having a lot of rep, I mean you may have seen my Twitter feed in a last couple of days, where a lot of my trans anarchist friends are going, “Oh, why are we defending the rights of American trans people to go into the military and blow people up in the third world?” Because equality isn’t divisible. The attack on trans people in the military is a step in the direction of removing all civil rights. It's something that was quite specifically demanded of Trump by his theocrat backers and what they want is never a good thing.

Yes, I don't particularly want to encourage anyone to join the military. At the same time, historically, I know plenty of people who, partly because they were resisting their own trans identity, joined the military. It's also if you are working class and poor in the states, particularly if you are working class poor and black in the states, joining the military is a way out of poverty. If you are trying to sort your head out in terms of gender identity, that may well be part of what happens and then you are stuck in the army, realising that “Oh I should transition.”

So it really is intolerable and I am quite rude to many of my young friends about this. Intolerable, that we don't defend people's rights. I mean it is important that the community actually start being internally loyal to itself. It was a lot easier in the days when there weren’t that many of us. I mean because when I was in my 20s, I knew, let's push it and say 30 trans people. Now I know or know of several hundred. Am in communication with, because of social media, because there are just a lot more people around.

I mean, one of the things that we discovered back in the 1990s, back in the 1990s one of the things that happened with there being suddenly an awful lot more trans guys around, was an awful lot of people who are coming out in the 1990s as trans guys, were people I already knew. I mean this literally, in the course of that decade, about seven people that I had known for years came out as trans guys and transitioned, and that's like in a comparatively small social circle.

There are just an awful lot more trans people around than anyone used to think, and I think that's one of the reasons for the backlash. The other reason for the backlash is that on lesbians and gay men, to a lesser extent bi people, the other side lost. They just lost and they kind of think, oh well, if we go after trans people really hard, maybe we can win on trans people and then start turning it around on everyone else.

One of the problems with a lot of people in the gay male and lesbian community is they have got theirs, and they think that's an inalienable victory, and they don't have to show any solidarity whatever, in fact, they would rather not. Well, guess what boys and girls, that's not how it works. Because our enemies are their enemies. If they let their enemies win, they will find themselves fighting on their own turf sooner or later, because that's how these things work. I mean I am genuinely worried.

[2020.4.k_00:00] Less about here for the time being, though I am worried about here, than about the States. I mean, literally, I am finding myself going to a lot of my friends in the community, in the States, “what's your exit strategy if it gets bad?” I mean, I do worry. One of the things we fought for a bit on the parliamentary forum when I was on it, which we didn't fight on nearly hard enough, because people made us a lot of assurances which weren’t worth very much, is asylum rights [00:43]. Because all over the world trans people are being murdered and trans people should be able to claim asylum if they are from countries where people are murdered, simple as that. I mean, you know about the Transgender Day of Remembrance?

Okay, sorry, there is on roughly November the 21st every year, the Transgender Day of Remembrance at which people hold a memorial meeting for every trans person who's been murdered in that year that we know of. Now, this is mostly working class trans women of colour, mostly in the global south. But we are talking 250 plus every year, trans people that we know to have been murdered. People that we know were trans we know were murdered. In the States it's going up and up, that's partly because of monitoring, but it's also going up. I mean, you know, we tend to run November to November, and it's late August and I think we just topped 18 in the States that we know of. It's never more than one or two here, usually less, but nonetheless, I mean --.


Q. But even to say one or two. [02:33]

RK. Yeah, I mean certainly I have not lost anyone close to me, to murder, that I know of. Of the people that I know of in this country that were killed, setting aside the one case where… actually no I can't say that, for reasons I will come to it in a second. They are all people that people I knew, knew. There was a woman in Brighton, I didn't know her, but I know people who did know her. There was a woman in London, I probably never met her, but my ex-flatmate knew her. That brings it home. Then there was a case where a psychologically disturbed trans woman killed another trans woman, who was trying to help her by throwing her under a train. I didn't know the victim, I did know the perpetrator. She subsequently died in jail in mysterious circumstances. Somehow she had managed to bind her hands while putting a plastic bag over her head, but the inquest said suicide so who am I to dispute this? Because no one ever dies in mysterious circumstances in jail and it turns out to have been murder, just saying.

But no, I mean, sorry, this is me getting, I know of --. And then of course, there is suicide. I mean, the harder it is for young trans people, the more likely they are. I mean, suicidal ideation is a thing for a lot of adolescence of all sorts. We don't know, an awful lot of young trans people report a past suicidal ideation before they came to terms with their identity and transitioned. Obviously, we can't know what proportion of teen suicide are trans kids, because the ones who actually literary kill themselves don't get to say, oh I was trans. We do know of some trans kids, well I mean famous Leelah Alcorn in the States a couple years ago whose parents were forcing her into conversion therapy and walked under a truck.

Now of course that's being used against us, because, oh well, “we have to stop them being in the military, because they are all suicidal”. The thing that produces trans suicide is stigma. Easy for me to say because I have never had a suicidal ideation, but no I mean, people who find their lives made intolerable are for whatever reason, are suicide risks, obviously. If people accepted then they won't commit suicide, probably.


Q. Going from that , would you have one last piece of advice for young people who are growing up now who are -- .[ 06:48]

RK. Yeah, I mean, don't kill yourself, look after yourself. Do the work, do prep, sort out the ground work, don't assume your parents are going to be cool about things automatically. Don't assume they are not going to be a cool about things automatically. Have an exit strategy. Do what you need to do to survive. I won't say it gets better, because it may not get better, but it probably gets realer. Don't die.


Q. Thank you, very much for your time. [07:41]

RK. I hope that was a help.


Q. That was amazing. There is so much that I have learned --. [07:48]

RK. I grew up and I got to do some interesting stuff, wrote books, did a bit of politics.

[2020.4l_00]

RK. No matter what I sound like, my background is working class. I suddenly thought, oh I ought to mention that, I come from working class.


Q. Where does the accent come from, Uni? [00:14]

RK. Uni.


Q. Yeah, uni. [00:18]

RK. Well school as well. I mean, being a social chameleon.


Q. It happens. [00:23]

RK. Also because, if you are potentially having to deal with EG social security clerks and the police, poshness is your friend.