Sometimes coming home can happen anywhere. It is when you are working together with your community for your community…..
Stephen Whittle tells of the day when the community took to one of the smartest streets in London and made its voice heard:
On April 16th 2002 around 100 trans people took to the streets of London to campaign against proposed new restrictions to accessing gender reassignment services and trans health care.
We had only ever taken to the streets once before and that was in 1997 when Press For Change delivered their petition to Downing Street and then somehow made their way through the streets to Parliament where they weren’t allowed to make their protest. But on this occasion we managed to get our message across.
The proposals were to be presented to a special meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine by psychiatrist Dr Brian Ferguson, of the Stonebridge Clinic in Nottingham. They would have taken us back to the dark days of the 1970s when the psychiatrists completed controlled our treatment, controlled our lives, told us what we could wear and who we could love. I remembered those dark days all too well to let this one pass.
Now it was 30 years later, and we had had enough and we called for the community to make their voices heard outside on the street. Robert Allfree made sure we had permission from the police for our peaceful protest and we liaised with the staff at the Royal Society of Medicine (1 Wimpole Street, London W1G 0AE) where the meeting was to be held. I actually think they were really chuffed to have something exciting going on for a change.
What had been expected to be an internal meeting of about 20 people suddenly turned into a very large meeting as trans people motivated their doctors and nurses to finally take an interest in the future of our lives.
When I arrived at the Royal College, like my PFC and FTM Network colleagues to take our seats in the meeting, I was just praying for a handful of people to have turned out. But I was amazed, I rounded the corner to see the street filled with trans people cheering us on. It was a sunny day, thank heavens, and it was just fantastic to walk down through the crowd and see so many of my trans friends had decided to turn out and make their point of view clear.
It was a real carnival atmosphere, with the PFC and FTM London banners, and lots of smiles and cheerful greetings going on as people recognised each other across the crowd.
Inside the meeting the hall was full, and it did not take long to realise whose side most of these medical professionals were on. There was one old doddery doctor who stood up and suggested that exorcism had a place here and could be very useful driving out the forces inside of these very sick people. As everyone’s mouth dropped open the air was thick with silence. I put my hand onto my PFC colleague Claire McNab’s arm and shook my head. This was one best left unanswered.
At coffee and lunch I went out to join the crowd – the police officers who had been sent to keep us on our best behaviour left out of boredom shortly before coffee, the peaceful party atmosphere just wasn’t what they had been hoping for. I just felt so amazingly good out there on the street; I was at home with my community.
Many of the medical professionals also came out, coffee in hand and chatted to the patients they knew. There were their current patients and their past patients and I could see all the news being caught up on.
We won the day, the proposals were dropped, a new working party was put together to consider what best practice might be in the UK (that working party hopes to report later in 2005. We left triumphant and went to the pub for a stiff drink and for all of us non-smokers to cadge a cigarette to calm our nerves down, and to prepare for the next stage of the battle.
It is a day I will never forget, it made me feel so proud. I had not been part of public trans activism like that since the days of Gay Lib in the 1970s (one day I’ll get to writing about that). Sometimes I hope we are not so successful in our campaigning that we never get to do that again.
Stephen Whittle