Dear Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck MP,
Can I come and chat about Human Rights please, perhaps next month if you are free. I am preparing an article as a Freelance Journalist and writer who is passionate about Human Rights, so would also be very grateful if you could perhaps give me a short statement or quote I could use. I will bring some information about myself too which you can read at your leisure.
As a Trans Woman myself I can confirm that I have been denied health care for a hormone deficiency as my doctor, Dr Churnside told me she has no expertise in treating ‘someone like me’. I was told a long time ago by an Endocardial Consultant to watch out for the signs and go and see a doctor when any of the symptoms and signs showed themselves. I did go to Doctor Churnside in 2019 but since I am Transgender she said she didn’t have expertise and could only offer Testosterone.
Some of the outcomes for the deficiency I have are very serious including suppression and eventual total failure of my immune system leading to death. I should have acted sooner but I was already on the waiting list to see the Gender Identity people and was told the list was only 18 to 24 months long so I decided I would just wait. I ring the clinic every year but the waiting time keeps going up by exactly 12 months so I doubt if the list is even real. This is the waiting time for a first appointment, form filling and such like. There is another 2nd appointment with a similar waiting time before being able to see proper doctors for actual medical health care.
When I rang the Gender Clinic this year I asked how many people they actually saw for a first appointment each year. The figures I saw some 5 years ago just don’t add up. Transgender people are far less than 1% of the population. Anyway they told me to put a Freedom of Information request in as they couldn’t release any figures apart from by using that route. They refused to even give a rough figure or even a hint of how many Transgender people are seen for a first appointment each year.
I have copied a letter from Stonewall below. The government has already told teachers to ‘out’ any child who speaks to them in confidence about their gender identity on at least two occasions. This is putting children at great risk of harm. This fascist regime are monsters riding rough shod over Human Rights, spurred on by Far Right Ultra Conservative misinformation, lies and propaganda in the MSM which they have a tight grip of.
Below is a plea from Stonewall.
I am writing to you as your constituent to ask you to stand up for our Equality Act, which has been helping to protect our rights and lives from discrimination since 2010.
I am alarmed by recent correspondence between Minister for Women and Equalities, the Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch MP, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which suggests that the UK Government is considering amending the definition of sex in the Equality Act to make it easier to exclude trans women from single-sex spaces.
The changes being discussed are unnecessary. The Equality Act 2010 has been working for over a decade. It already allows single-sex spaces to be provided. The EHRC’s new recommendations promote the exclusion of trans and gender non-conforming people, in particular trans women, from everyday public spaces.
It would open the door to all individuals’ appearances being judged at every turn, whether they are trans or not. From accessing public toilets to going to the gym, this proposal would not benefit cis women either – there is no way that these recommendations would be enforceable, or fair.
The Equality Act’s working definition of sex is ‘legal sex’, and the correspondence suggests this might be changed to ‘biological sex’.
There is no mention of how ‘biological sex’ might be defined, but it is clear that someone’s biological sex can’t simply be judged by their appearance, making the EHRC’s recommendations unworkable in practice.
Changing the Equality Act as the EHRC suggests would also be unfair. No government committed to LGBTQ+ equality should aim to exclude trans people from everyday life. This would represent an appalling rollback in LGBTQ+ rights and make it impossible for trans people and gender non-conforming people to exist without fear.
These actions by the EHRC have drawn widespread criticism already – internally, from UK human rights organisations, and from the international community. This May, the UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz issued a statement that called the EHRC’s recent moves “wholly unbecoming” of an institution created to “stand up for those in need of protection”.
More than 138,000 people recently signed a parliamentary petition in support of the Equality Act, due to be debated on 12 June 2023.
As my representative in Parliament, please attend this debate, speak up for our world-class Equality Act, and stand against potential rollbacks on trans people’s rights.
The UK Government should be looking to improve the lives of its LGBTQ+ citizens, rather than needlessly questioning legislation that has been working well for over a decade.
Yours sincerely,
Here is an article from James at Open Democracy read the article using that link and sign up to their mailing list to keep yourself informed. Open Democracy is not for profit and is an international publication (I think). I have copied the article below but there are no working hyperlinks. Please bare in mind that the Hungarian fascist regime is working to the same template the UK, Russian and USA regimes are using.
How trans people became Hungary’s latest target
by Blanka Vay
In Hungary, we want trans visibility. But not the kind that the Hungarian parliament imposed on us in 2020 when it banned legal gender recognition for trans and intersex people. Instead of erasing trans people – as the government originally intended – we have been forced to come out.
The new law replaced the term “sex” with “sex assigned at birth” in the Civil Registry Document, which is the basis for all legal documents in Hungary, making it impossible for trans and intersex people to change their documents in alignment with their name and gender identity. It was the first law passed during the Covid-19 pandemic after the government granted itself ‘extra rights’ to “react to the catastrophic situation” – despite the Hungarian constitution considering gender recognition a fundamental right.
This February, Hungary’s constitutional court issued a ruling that blocks new applications from transgender people for legal gender recognition (applications from before 29 May 2020 are still valid). In the UK, the Equality and Human Rights Commission proposed a similar move to redefine ‘sex’ as ‘biological sex’, in a letter to the government in April.
The law change has made those of us in Hungary with ID that doesn’t match our gender walking targets for hatred and harassment. Our freedom to choose to whom and how we come out as trans people has been removed.
There’s nowhere to turn because our legal names are everywhere – in schools, banks, workplaces and other public institutions, on identity cards and travel documents.
We’re out, and not always proud. Sometimes we’re out and embarrassed, out and ashamed, out and angry, or out, silently crying, and endlessly tired.
As one of the organisers of the Prizma Community (a support network for Hungarian trans and intersex people), I know impoverished students who refuse to buy discounted student metro tickets because they’d have to show their ID – and therefore their trans status – risking harassment on the subway. Out of concern for their own safety, they buy tickets that are more expensive but anonymous.
Great minds with useful university degrees work as pizza delivery drivers, because there they are accepted, and they have lost all courage to try, yet again, to find a job in a transphobic world with the wrong ID.
A trans woman I met in Debrecen, Hungary’s second largest city, told me that many trans women in the country have engaged in prostitution because they’re fearful of being attacked in the regular job market.
This was echoed by a Roma trans girl, who told me: “I’m forced to sell my body, to give control to aggressive perverts. Because I have to pay for my room, food and medical transition. It’s eating up my soul.”
She added: “Telling me ‘It’s just sex work, like a normal job’, feels like a slap in my face, a cynical insult – in the best case, it’s hellish stupidity.”
Transphobic legislation
One of the problems of a right-wing populist kleptocracy is that it will always have imaginary enemies to fight. After years of targeting migrants, the new imaginary enemy is the so-called ‘LGBTQ lobby’ and trans people.
In fact, the Hungarian government under prime minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling right-wing Fidesz party have a history of rolling out openly homophobic and transphobic bills.
Just last month, the government passed a bill calling on citizens to report ‘rainbow families’ – including same-sex parents and parents who respect their child’s trans identity – to authorities. Weeks before this latest bill, more than a dozen EU countries, including France and Germany, backed legal action brought by the European Commission at the European Court of Justice against Hungary over its anti-LGBTIQ laws, including one that effectively bans same-sex couples from adopting children, passed in December 2020.
Also in 2020, the government rewrote the country’s constitution (the Fundamental Law) to say: “Hungary shall protect the right of children to their identity in line with their sex at birth, and shall ensure an upbringing in accordance with the values based on our homeland’s constitutional identity and Christian culture.”
The following year, they launched a Russian-style hate campaign to ban LGBTQ-themed education in schools. In Orbán’s own words: “We are very tolerant, but there is a red line, not to cross: stay away from our children.”
The national media authority, whose president was nominated by Orbán, even investigated a Netflix cartoon because it contained a lesbian kiss. It found the cartoon had broken the law, and reported it to the authorities in the Netherlands, where Netflix’s European branch is based.
There are calls from politicians and the media to ‘protect’ children from so-called trans lobbies – yet they are silent on children in Hungary going to school hungry, or the country’s lack of teachers, or the fact children aren’t allowed to wear coats in cold classrooms in winter.
It is also forbidden to sell books that “do not represent traditional sexuality and gender roles” within 200 metres of schools and churches. Technically, this means that most plays by Shakespeare, as well as the Bible, should be banned because the description is not only foolish and evil but also vague. As a result, bookshops are wary and prefer to err on the side of censorship.
A few weeks ago, Hungary’s president Katalin Novák (a perfect example of gender-washing) pardoned and released from prison an infamous far-right activist, who had been convicted of terrorism. He and his friends often attacked LGBTQ events.
While the government actively pursues a severe misogynist agenda, vocal and influential left-leaning media outlets are busy criticising ‘transgenderism’ with ill-informed fears about trans people supposedly threatening the rights of women.
The government doesn’t always get its own way. In 2022, its homophobic referendum, which conflated homosexuality with paedophilia, backfired spectacularly when 1.6 million people – around 20% of registered voters – spoiled their ballots following a campaign by human rights groups. The referendum was declared invalid, with fewer than 50% of eligible voters casting valid ballots.
It’s a crucial reminder that good people are everywhere. The problem is that they are certainly not in power in Hungary.
As a trans person, it’s not easy to be a battleground in the culture wars between different left and right political groups. We have to live our lives carefully and cautiously. That’s not in our interest, I can tell you.
AcadooGhostwriter.com
