Stephen Paton: Those who dismiss transgender people as a fad ignore history

Analysis on clusters of artefacts buried with each body identified that roughly 20% were entombed with a mix of items that otherwise were strongly correlated to either the men or the women. For this civilisation, it strongly suggests there existed a third category outwith male and female.

Leaping forward in time we arrive in the year 204CE, at the heart of the Roman Empire. There lived the Emperor Elagabalus, who referred to themself as a woman, and actively sought the help of physicians at the time to provide them with a vagina.

It’s thought to be one of the earliest recorded instances of someone seeking gender affirmation surgery – although it wouldn’t be until the 1950s, about 1700 years later, that a successful surgery of that kind could be carried out – around about the same time that Michael Dillon was qualifying as a physician and began working in a Dublin hospital. Dillon is recognised as the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty, the construction of a penis.

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There are examples through all of recorded history of people who, through a contemporary lens, would be classed as transgender or non-binary, from the galli priests of Ancient Greece to the recognition of a third gender during the Edo period of Japan.

Of course, there are sometimes thousands of years and miles between our modern understanding of what it means to be transgender and the cultural norms and understandings of the past and any such analysis should be viewed with that caveat.

The point is, however, that, had we had access to an education system that acknowledged the existence of gender variance throughout history, and across the world’s many ancient and contemporary cultures, it would be less likely the case that ignorance on the topic could lead anyone to believe that transgender and non-binary people today can be dismissed as a passing fad or trend.

The same argument applies to the history of lesbian, gay and bisexual people throughout the world, who have so often been either misrepresented or excluded entirely from school curriculums and from history itself. Even if named, their stories would often find themselves at the whims of the censor’s pen, with huge swathes of their lives disappearing from record.

An infamous, yet cynically hilarious example, is obvious lesbian lovers throughout history being relegated to really good gal pals when their relationship is quickly passed over in textbooks, skipping with care around an explicit acknowledgement of their shared love. I’m not asking the straight community to know the ins and outs of queer culture, nor to be able to recite the names of our various historical figures by rote – but even a basic understanding of the complexities of gender and sexuality would go a long way to strangling the roots of bigotry before they take hold.

Ignorance is, after all, an empty room that easily fills with assumptions when education is absent.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to constantly hear people outwith the LGBT+ community weighing in on topics with little understanding of them, and even more so when those opinions are platformed as equal to those with lived experience of what is being discussed.

IN a particularly relevant example last week, Labour MP Rosie Duffield caused anger in the LGBT+ community after a blatant display of bi-erasure while speaking about queer issues on the radio. Duffield claimed that men who were married to woman, and who called themselves queer, were appropriating gay culture. Had Duffield had a little understanding of the topic she chose to speak on, she would have known that bisexual people are still bisexual even when in a relationship that, to a stranger, would appear to be “straight”. The attraction to more than one gender is not dependent on a relationship, in much the same way that being single doesn’t mean you no longer have a sexual orientation.

Yet Duffield had the arrogance to remove agency from bisexuals who, in her eyes, were not being queer in a way that satisfied her definition of the word. Plenty of queer men are married to women, as plenty of queer women are married to men.

For as long as people like me have been vilified, straight politicians and commentators have spoken with confidence on our lives, even being portrayed as experts without even the most rudimentary knowledge of our lived experience – much in the same way that the overwhelming majority of published and broadcast discussion about transgender people today happens without us.

So it’s with that in mind that I was pretty excited to see Time for Inclusive Education’s success in moving Scotland’s curriculums toward a position that better reflects the diversity of identity and relationships in our society. It’s an important step toward undoing the toxic legacy of Section 28, and Section 2A.

Children now will leave school with a better understanding of the world around them than those of us who lived with the legacy of Thatcher’s bigoted education policies – and importantly will know that our lives, loves and identities are far more interesting and complex than some would have you believe.

I doubt that the current moral panic around trans liberation could ever have reached its current heights had education and knowledge had time to fill the space that ignorance pads out with mistruth.