We Have Always Been Here

We've always been here (The SAL Project Writings).

Every Wednesday and Sunday, I slap on a hormone patch I've waited years to access. The GP was sympathetic but nervous; the local gender clinic had a seven-year waiting list, so we navigated shared care by email, carefully and slowly, the way you might cross a minefield on tiptoe. I am one of the lucky ones. Many of my peers (trans women over 65) are not. Three in four of us report feeling isolated, cut off not just by bereavement or geography but also by the compounding weight of age and gender identity. We grew up when the word 'transgender' didn't exist. When we came out, there was no language for what we were. And now, in the final chapters of our lives, we are being told we don't belong. I want to address some of the myths doing the rounds not with anger but with the stubborn patience of someone who has been having this conversation for longer than most of my critics have been alive.

We have always existed. The claim that transgender people are a modern invention is historically illiterate. South Asian cultures have the Hijras. recognised third-gender traditions going back centuries, documented in the Kama Sutra and protected under Indian law. Indigenous North American communities had their Two-Spirit people, honoured as spiritual mediators. Thailand has its Kathoey. Samoa has the Fa'afafine. The Balkans had their Sworn Virgins women who lived as men for the whole of their lives, inheriting property and performing male social roles because the alternative – marriage to a man – was unthinkable.

In 18th-century France, the Chevalier d'Eon lived publicly as a woman for 33 years, having first served as a spy in men's clothing. The historical record is not ambiguous. Transgender people are not new. What is new (marginally) is the language.

So why, if we've always existed, would anyone choose to endure the particular cocktail of prejudice, legal complexity, medical gatekeeping, and social friction that comes with transitioning? Which brings me to the second point. It is not a choice. No rational human being subjects themselves to discrimination, marginalisation, and institutional hostility for a fetish. The suggestion that transgender identity is some elaborate lifestyle choice is not just wrong; it is insulting to every trans person who has lost family, employment, or worse in the process of being themselves. Simone de Beauvoir understood this intuitively when she wrote that women are not born but made. shaped by the social forces pressed upon them. Judith Butler deepened this insight: gender is not a fact waiting in the body, waiting to be discovered. It is performed, enacted, repeated, and made real through the rituals of daily life. When a trans woman lives as a woman, she is not pretending. She is becoming. The same forces that shape cisgender lives shape ours. The performance of gender is universal. We simply have the misfortune of having ours noticed. Now let us talk about women's spaces. because this is where the debate gets most charged and most dishonest.

The argument goes that allowing trans women into women's refuges, changing rooms, or hospital wards puts cisgender women at risk. Let me offer some numbers. In the UK prison estate, 94,000 people, approximately 230 are trans women. That is 0.2%. In the general prison population, 18% of all inmates are cisgender men convicted of sexual offences. Read that again. Eighteen percent. Against two-tenths of one percent. If we are serious about women's safety (and I am) then the data points clearly and unambiguously at cisgender men, not trans women. The horse is not merely out of the stable; it has been cantering around the countryside for years while we argue about the stable door.

And here is something else that tends to get lost in these debates: intersex people make up roughly 1.7% of the global population ? about 136 million people. The question, 'Can a woman have a penis?' is, statistically, not even particularly unusual. Nature does not sort neatly into the two-column table we were taught at school.

Rights are not divisible. This is the philosophical heart of the matter. When we extend protection to trans women, we do not reduce protection for cisgender women. Human rights are not a pie. Giving dignity to one group does not carve it away from another. The argument that it does is not a legal or philosophical position. It is a rhetorical trick, designed to make us fight each other for scraps while the actual threats go unexamined. I am 70 years old. I have lived long enough to watch fashions in prejudice come and go, and I have noticed a pattern: the groups targeted change, but the language of fear is always the same. Immigrants take your jobs. Benefit claimants steal your taxes. Trans women threaten your daughters. The script is familiar. What varies is who is reading it.

What I would ask of anyone still uncertain (anyone genuinely asking) about 'What is a woman?' is to sit with that question honestly. Not to ask it rhetorically, as a gotcha, but to actually sit with it. Because the philosophers have been asking it for a century, and the honest answer is: gender is complex, contested, and – for a significant minority of humanity – experienced as a profound mismatch between body and self. The appropriate response to that complexity is not a law, not a bathroom ban, and not a newspaper column rant. It is the simple, difficult, old-fashioned virtue of letting people live.

I am a trans woman. I have existed in some form for seven decades. I have worked, loved, taught, written, and contributed more to my community than most people who will read this column. I am not a threat to anyone. The statistics say so. History says so. And in the end, the argument will be settled the way all historical arguments are: by the steady, unremarkable fact of our continued presence. We are not going anywhere.