Hello everyone, my name is Michelle Snow and I am a journalist who makes a podcast in my bedroom with some friends of mine. We make this for the trans community and try to make an entertaining resource but today this is a desperate plea to be heard. Because we aren’t. You have to know what your minister for women and equalities has done to trans people.
On Wednesday and Thursday 3 LGBT advisors to the government quit in protest of their abhorrent refusal to ban conversion therapy. I am not going to parrot their claims about it. How they are hoping some day to do something about it. Every day they did nothing they made a decision to keep conversion therapy legal. But they attempted to look like they were going to ban it. They wanted to do nothing and look good doing it.
All three also mentioned the treatment of the transgender community by this government as reasons for the resignations. Regular listeners will know what I am talking about. Any trans person in the UK will know. Many cisgender people will know. I have to assume most cisgender people don’t know. The other option is just too depressing to think about.
Last year a month into the first lockdown Liz Truss, the minister for women and equalities, announced her intentions for trans people. Cisgender people heard the reasonable sounding we must protect under 18’s from irreversible healthcare decisions. Trans people heard She wanted to protect trans children from healthcare.
Cisgender people heard her say she wanted to make sure trans people were free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining proper checks and balances. Trans people heard that she wanted to make sure we had basic freedom but not too much freedom because that would be dangerous.
And cisgender people heard how she wanted to protect single sex spaces. Trans people heard that she wanted to protect single spaces from them.
If that seems like a leap in interpretation, keep listening and you will know trans people are right on this.
She said all of this to Parliament. And none of them battered and eye. Nobody even seemed to notice.
Trans people did. We just heard a representative of our government, whilst being locked in our homes during a terrifying global pandemic, say that us going to the toilet, our healthcare and our freedom is dangerous.
Two months later Liz Truss, and it absolutely was Liz Truss, leaked details of her plans for trans people to the Times.
Cisgender people read that she wanted to protect safe spaces for women. Transgender people read that she wanted to remove access that trans women have had for decades from domestic abuse refuges and public toilets.
Cisgender people read that she wanted to counter the rise of gender neutral toilets. Non binary people read that she wanted to stop a measure that stopped them from being humiliated every time they needed a piss.
Trans men didn’t get one of those for themselves. They were forgotten, like they often are.
So Truss was coming after our ability to use publically accessible facilities. How does a person work a job if they are facing humiliation every time they use the toilet? Because it is. It is a reminder that who and what we are is worth less. And our basic needs were portrayed as a danger that needed to be averted with legislation.
Thank god that never came to pass.
But what did happen was that she binned gender recognition act reform, something that would have actually done us some good. GRA reform would have meant that a trans person could update their birth certificate gender by filling in a form.
The current system requires that we apply to a panel who judge whether we should be allowed to change our own birth certificates, and they based this decision on banks statesments and doctors reports saying how we medically measure up to some standard of man or woman that cisgender people came up with.
In the end she kept the panel. But offered to give us the option to apply to the panel online. After everything she threatened to take away from us, our freedom, our dignity, she gave us email.
In December Liz truss made a speech where she promised to move away from dealing with fashionable societal positions like racism and homophobia. And here is what else she said.
Her islamophobia for raising a Tommy Robinson level dog whistle cannot be ignored.
But what also cannot be ignored is how she just said that the left had failed to protect single sex spaces from us.
And trans people using a public toilet is just as evil as anti-semitism and pedophile rape gangs.
She said that on the last Friday before Christmas.
So you will understand my actions that I am going to talk about now.
On Friday, now the heat was rising on the government after the 3 LGBT advisors had resigned and the media was starting to focus on the governments daily decsions to keep conversion therapy legal, Truss needed to make herself sound good.
So she repeated a lie she had been doing for a while now.
She said that the government had brought forward plans to improve transgender healthcare. They hadn’t.
There are 3 new gender clinics in the UK under an NHS Pilot scheme. They were commissioned by NHS England, not the government like Truss appeared to be claiming. She was using NHS England’s work to sell the fiction that this government and her have been anything other than psychologically abusive.
I couldn’t let her do it. Not after everything. So I called the government equalities office press team, and then emailed my question seeking clarification.
I got it confirmed. She was indeed claiming responsibility on behalf of the government for NHS Englands work. They provided a link to the NHS website which listed all the clinics.
But that website they sent me said that they were commissioned by NHS England. They had sent me proof of the lie with the lie.
I went and found 3 more things that further proved her lie. And I called them back and told them she lied. They said they would get a response back to me.
I got her. I may have stopped this lie from standing. This could be one small victory I report on my tiny bedroom recorded podcast that I make with my friends.
Then they called me back and asked which outlet I was with.
And I knew what was going to happen next. I told them I work on a podcast called what the trans.
I quickly got an email which said this: We won’t be issuing a statement in response to your questions, but I can say we wouldn’t agree with the assertion as the clinics were announced by Department of Health and Social Care.
I got that email at 1:41pm. I emailed back at 2:06pm asking for a link to this announcement.
I had told them I had a 5pm deadline. In truth that deadline was only with myself because I make a podcast in my bedroom with my friends.
After trying and failing to find anything on the health and social care website about new gender clinics, I got an email back.
The Department of health would be best placed for this.
I got this email at 4:50pm. They had given me ten minutes to find a 2 year old PDF in a department of health during a pandemic.
No.
Just because a government department put out a press release, it doesn’t mean this government gets to take responsibility for NHS England trying to improve trans healthcare. You don’t get to do that.
Liz Truss lied.
The government equalities office lied.
This government lied.
And they all did it to use trans people to make themselves look good after FINALLY it was becoming known how monstrous they have been to the LGBT community and especially the trans community.
Liz Truss said in back in April that her intentions for trans people were that we should be free to live as we wish, free of persecution.
She then spent the next year trying to revoke our rights whilst telling the UK our needs were dangerous.
She tried to get trans women banned from women’s spaces, she tried to stop non-binary people having toilets that weren’t humiliating and she compared trans women using a public toilet to pedophile rape gangs and anti semitism.
If she actually wanted us to live as we wish, why did she persecute us for a year.
Why did she psychologically abuse us for a year.
But when she needed us to save her own skin…there she was on ITV lying unchallenged.
She wanted to do horrible things to the trans community. And she wanted to look good whilst doing it.
Please share this everywhere.
