Nothing About Us Without Us: Trans edition
Recently (Saturday, 26th of April), I gave a speech at the Not Your Scapegoat protest in Liverpool against the transphobic UK Supreme Court ruling. Reproduced below are my speakers notes. If you have some strange urge to see and hear me, you can get the speech in the form of an Instagram reel here.
Hi everyone, my name is Sarah. I’m a trans woman, a researcher for Trans Safety Network and a member of Merseyside Disabled People Against Cuts.
There’s a slogan you hear a lot in disability activism; “Nothing about us without us.” And I think trans people can learn something from that.
In the last few years we've seen more and more decisions being made about trans people’s lives. About what we can do with our bodies, where we can go, what kind of services should be there for us when we need them. Those decisions aren’t being made by trans people.
About one in every two hundred people are trans. Out of the 650 MPs voting on legislation affecting trans people in this country, not a single one is trans. On Tuesday Labour’s equality minister Bridget Philipson addressed the commons about the Supreme Court decision that brought us here today. A room full of cis people gathered round to discuss exactly when and where we’re allowed to take a shit.
Multiple trans advocacy organisations tried to intervene in the Supreme Court case. The court refused to hear from any of them, but they did listen to so-called “gender critical” organisations. Organisations like Sex Matters, whose director of advocacy Helen Joyce says that we are “A huge problem for a sane world.” That’s who the highest court in the country thought it was important to listen to when it comes to trans rights.
The mainstream papers publish an almost constant stream of scaremongering and bile about us. The trans journalist Lee Hurley tracked mentions of trans people in national newspapers for the last year, there were 1,075 national newspaper articles about trans people from April 2024 to April 2025, about 20 articles every week. Almost none of them were written by trans people. A lot of them didn’t quote a single trans person.
We hear a lot about the trans debate, the trans issue, the trans question. And it seems like it’s a debate between cis people, an issue cis people have, cis people asking each other the question “What can we do about these troublesome transgenders?”
We can't afford to be quiet while cis people make decisions about trans lives over our heads. We need to be loud, we need to be direct, we need to make ourselves heard. Nothing about us without us.
