On this page we are showing some of the comments we are have seen across social media about transgender people. All names etc have been removed for confidentiality purposes as we do not want anyone to be identified with this. First quote I have witnessed people say is:
“Trans women are not women and Trans men are not men!”
This is one of the most common comments I see, trans women are not women, trans men are not men…
Firstly ask yourself “what makes a woman?” and “what makes a man?” and with that, who is anyone to tell another person what gender they are or are not? Biological sex is different to gender and they can be complete opposite to one another and that’s ok. Regardless of your views and opinions on this, it’s not ok to say this publicly to someone else. Image if you had such hate crime, every day of your life… every day you had to wake up in the wrong body, every day you faced discrimination from your family, friends, people in the street, every day was a constant battle, it was exhausting, to the point you want to kill yourself because of it all… and then you go to someone you should trust (healthcare professional) and they say this to you? Your comment as small as it may seem in your opinion could be the final nail on someones coffin. Be kind, be respectful to others and don’t forget your NMC / GMC code of conduct.
Equality Act (2010) “gender reassignment” is a protected characteristic under this, along side the others: Sexuality, sex, age, race, disability, marriage, civil partnership, pregnancy, religion. However the words gender reassignment gets confused out there. Under the Equality Act (2010) it states:
“To be protected from gender reassignment discrimination, you do not need to have undergone any specific treatment or surgery to change from your birth sex to your preferred gender. This is because changing your physiological or other gender attributes is a personal process rather than a medical one”
(Equality Act, 2010)
In addition to this the Equality Act (2010) states:
“Harassment is when someone makes you feel humiliated, offended or degraded because you are transsexual (also transgender). For example: a transsexual woman is having a drink in a pub with friends, the landlord keeps calling her ‘Sir’ and ‘he’ when serving drinks, despite her complaining about it”
Equality Act (2010)
So just with those pieces of information, if you are going to publicly voice your concerns around a trans woman or trans man NOT being a woman or man… that is legally classed as discrimination / harassment. So please stay kind to others and show some support.
Next phrase I hear a lot is:
“Transgender isn’t real… “
Actually it is a very real thing and it has been around for centuries! It’s not a sudden over night phase that people are going through. In fact, history dates back to 200BC for trans and non-binary people! Along side this, there has been some research done on the brain vs the body in trans people which showed the brain of a trans woman matched that of a woman and the brain of a trans man matched that of a trans man. Which just shows there is a genuine miss match and people were put into the wrong bodies at birth. Additionally, if you think about the question “Why do men have nipples” – when we are all a foetus in the womb, our nipples are the first things to be created before biological sex is assigned to us. So you could say we are all born ‘gender neutral’ or ‘female’ whichever way you look at that… However, it is in this stage, in my own personal opinion, that I think is where there is a mis-match between the brain and the body and people are born into the wrong body as a result. That’s just my own theory, I can’t find any scientific research on this (Claire Carmichael, 2022)
“Transgender people are sex predators”
This is another comment I have seen across social media platforms, one that has recently been said by a nurse! Which is shocking. As healthcare professionals we should not be judging other people and we certainly should be going by evidence based practice. So, I looked into the statistics behind this comment and hopefully it will educate you here with this one too.
- There is an estimate of around 600,000 transgender / non-binary people in the UK alone (Stonewall, 2022)
- The FairPlay For Women (2020) website gathered ‘freedom of information’ to show the statistics of how many transgender people in prison have committed sex offences in the UK. They found that 81 transgender prisoners had committed some form of sexual offence conviction. 81 people out of 600,000 transgender people. Which is around 0.0135% of transgender people in total, not as many as people think!
- I wanted to compare these statistics with how many cis-gender women were in prison for sex offences. I found that around