Silence, although important, I suspect is more harmful in the long term than making your voice heard. The challenge is making your voice heard in the first place; with the sense that it’s easier to keep your head down and fit in, to not challenge the status quo, to be compliant, submissive and otherwise ordinary and unremarkable.

Yet, I can’t sit with this level of discomfort. To me, to be silent is to be complicit in injustice, that it’s almost better to take a stance on something and be wrong, than to not take a stance at all. It’s impossible to be apolitical, all the more so when human rights are concerned.

This is much more apparent with the seeming silence from my employer on the most recent Supreme Court ruling in the United Kingdom, defining that “woman” under the equality act means sex assigned at birth. This ruling has emboldened people to harass and intimidate transgender people much more openly, a group that’s subject to disproportionate levels of violence becoming marginalised further and at increased risk of harm.

Despite this hatred directed solely towards trans women, the result of this ruling is harm to everyone, further reinforcing misogynistic stereotypes and expectations of how people are supposed to look. Masculine presenting women will be confronted in bathrooms, transgender men (who are regularly overlooked in these conversations) at much greater risk of harm and violence, not to mention trans kids caught up in the resulting actions by a group of individuals hell bent on making society progress backwards.

This decision is another example of a reactionary group provoking a moral outrage against a problem that doesn’t exist, gaining influence and investment along the way to silence marginalised voices, and use systems that disproportionately harm these communities to their own advantage. These people fail to recognise that rolling back rights for LGBTQ+ groups is the first step in dismantling rights for all, and we’ve seen this play out as we said it would in the U.S. with Roe vs Wade.

I understand that the geopolitical climate is challenging and the behaviour we’re seeing from a sitting president is alarming, but staying silent emboldens these people to keep going. Resistance, despite being told otherwise, is not futile. People claim comparing this backwards slide both at home and across the Atlantic to Nazism, but Fascism is fast becoming a celebrated viewpoint to hold and practice. I always wondered as a child how the people of Germany let the Nazi’s cause as much harm as they did, and now I understand...

Leading through fear, causing widespread confusion by flip-flopping on government policy, spreading disinformation, blaming marginalised groups for the failings of the elite, book banning, dismantling education, removing funding for science, criminalising immigrants and anyone who was otherwise “different”... all things happening now that allowed for the rise of the Third Reich, Nazi Germany and the resulting conflict in the late 1930’s. The fact that these people who target us can’t see this playing out the same way baffles me, and when their rights start getting dismantled they’ll be begging for our help. My fear this time is that it will be too late. That those in power are much more powerful than before, and with the rise of AI, the risk of harm to us all is unprecedented.

And so, with all that being said, I will make my voice and position on this perfectly clear.

Trans Women are Women. Trans Men are Men. Non-Binary people exist, and they all deserve protection and to live in peace, equally.