When I saw that India Willoughby was going to enter the Celebrity Big Brother House #CBB, I thought this would be good for the trans community and help improve attitudes towards trans people. In the past, trans people have always been popular on Big Brother, and India already has a high profile as a newsreader and panelist for Loose Women.

Oh, how wrong I have been.

It has certainly attracted attention. But for all the wrong reasons.

I think part of the problem is that India has entered the house of Big Brother too early. This is something that Shane / Courtney highlighted in the conversations. I remember when I transitioned 15 years ago, it was an embarrassment to many people, especially my family.

But what’s worse, I really damaged my own reputation, and that has taken me a long time to repair.

The challenge was that when I transitioned, all the pressure of hiding in the closet was released and I was finally able to be the woman I always felt I was. But it was not easy. I didn’t have 50 years of experience of growing us up as a girl / woman behind me. I had missed adolescence, dressing well for a night out, wearing strappy tops and miniskirts.

I had to relearn life now as a woman and build some memories and experiences, which was fun, but frankly a bit embarrassing. I also had to unlearn 50 years of behaviors and experiences of growing up socialized as a man, which is not easy either.

I immersed myself in the world of women and found some new friends who would tell me the truth when I was wrong and I began to learn the new social and participation skills that I needed as a woman.

One thing that helped me a lot was going to college, shortly after the transition, to study Gender. Being in college meant that I socialized a lot with younger people, especially women, and I also got involved with the LGBT community, where I was generally well accepted despite my age. This whole process of re-socialization took me about 5 years and is still incomplete.

There are some experiences that I will never have, simply because I was raised as a child. I never experienced the risks of getting pregnant, having periods, or fear of sexual abuse. I never experienced the joy and pain of childbirth and motherhood. I experienced, although I didn’t appreciate it until I lost it, male privilege.

So I understand why some feminists get upset when trans women yell “I am a woman.” as if the transition made them like any other woman. It is not like this. But I’m not a man anymore.

There is no universal experience of being a woman or being a man and it is much more than the body we are born with. The binary system of men versus women is outdated and outdated. We need to rethink our entire approach to sex and gender, exploring the rich diversity of third gender options; it’s not something India Willoughby seems happy to do.

The mistake I think you are making is, in one breath, proclaiming aloud “I am a woman”, in the next breath, affirming: “I am a trans woman and activist.” If you want to identify yourself as a woman, that’s fine. I know some women who have not even told their husbands that they were born with a male body. And before crying, that is your right by law. It is a crime for anyone to reveal a person’s gender history without their permission.

But if you claim out loud that you are trans, don’t be surprised if people treat you as different from a man or a woman. India seems to be locked into the gender binary. She sees herself as a woman, not a trans woman and if she had walked into the house and been one of the women, this is how they would have accepted her.

Which brings me to the difficult issue of gender discrimination. Who knew that term before #CBB?

I am a trans woman and I am proud to be a trans woman. Currently there are only two legal gender options, so I prefer to identify myself as a woman. Both my driving license and my passport show me as a woman. I have a gender recognition certificate and my birth certificate shows me as a woman. So I hope they call me with feminine pronouns and title and call me ma’am, no sir.

However, my voice is quite masculine and I haven’t done much to try and change it. As a result, I am often referred to as a man, abused.

When it happens, I silently correct the person and we move on. If they continue to do so, I will be irritated and may correct them more publicly. If someone persists in referring to me as a man, I’ll probably take action because that’s harassment and it can be really embarrassing.

If there was an option to have a significant third gender on my passport and driver’s license, I think I could do it. It’s a new world and it will bring with it some challenges, notably the pronouns. Kate Bornstein came up with the idea of ​​the third gender pronouns ze and hir instead of he / she or he / she, but no one remembers them. The other option is to use plural pronouns them and their – which is difficult to get used to.

When writing, I use plural pronouns to avoid gendered text. My advice for using plural pronouns when addressing someone who identifies as bisexual or neutral is to think of them as two people, a man and a woman, in the same body; then it is easy to get the pronouns right.

The government is proposing to introduce a significant third gender into UK passports later this year. However, changing the law is relatively easy compared to changing attitudes.

What India still does not know is the great reaction against her and her beliefs in the #CBB groups on Facebook and Twitter. I think most of that is because she has positioned herself as different from other women by trying to claim that she is the same. It also doesn’t help that she can be very rude and aggressive, qualities that women especially dislike.

I have been teaching transgender awareness training courses since 2005 and I thought I was seeing a steady improvement in attitudes. Okay, 80% of my audiences are female, but at least I thought most of the women were going trans. Apparently not. I have been surprised by the level of vitriol expressed, often by women, against trans people in general.

It is clear that there is a much greater current of hostility towards us than I imagined.

The issue of “which toilets do trans people use” keeps coming up. This has been a big problem in the US with some states passing local laws prohibiting trans people from using gender-appropriate toilets.

I thought this was not really a problem here in the UK, but recent weeks indicate that many people are being swayed by horrible anti-trans campaigns on social media. Then I read an article by India Willough telling trans women not to use women unless they are in transition, and transitioning clearly means undergoing genital reconstruction surgery.

1 in 100 people is born transgender; This is around 600,000 people in the UK at the moment. However, fewer than 10,000 have had surgery. Most trans women cross-dress, and no matter how well they pretend or not pretend to be women, they won’t be safe using men’s restrooms. In the UK, it is perfectly legal and accepted by them to use women’s toilets.

The article from India incites harassment and hostility towards trans women and especially towards trans women who do not have a good time. What it seems to be doing is creating a distinction between trans women who have surgery and those who don’t, and that is discriminatory. Her comments about drag queens incline me to believe that she is also not happy with trans women who don’t have a good time or wear too much makeup or identify as transvestites.

Well, not everyone is lucky enough to pass; not everyone is obsessed with fitting into the binary. No matter what we look like, we all have the right to live without discrimination, harassment and victimization and without having to undergo invasive surgical and hormonal treatments in order to do so.

All trans people are different India – get over it.

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