Feature image by perinjo via Getty Images

Each week we all play a game. The game is: Which country is safe now? My friends and I keep tabs open in our browsers — visa requirements for Spain, Argentina, Japan. We think about the relative stability of that country, its ranking on the annual collation of murder rates towards us, what languages we might reasonably be able to learn. As one country falls to authoritarian rule, another declares that Pride marches are illegal. Russia threatens to drop a bomb on us, while the US gleefully disappears legal residents in an anti-migrant fervour. Anywhere I pick for the week is certain to be out of the running shortly thereafter. No clear answer emerges. Even Canada, my erstwhile home country, is under pressure — no amount of ‘elbows up’ing seems likely to defend the longest land border in the world between a military superpower and it’s folksy northern neighbour.

This morning I boarded a train to Newcastle for a final bit of trans 101 delivery on behalf of the LGBTQ org from which I — along with more than half of its remaining staff — was recently made redundant following cuts to USAID and a relentless seven year campaign of attack by homegrown anti-trans forces. As the train passed through Darlington, a town now indelibly linked in my mind to a group of nurses (“the Darlington Five”) currently waging a legal campaign to harass a trans doctor colleague out of her job, my phone lit up with the news. Another case. The UK’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that trans women are not legally considered women.

At least, not for the purposes of sex discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, the main piece of human rights legislation in our cursed island nation. The case had been brought forward by an assortment of the usual ghouls, and funded in large part by J.K. Rowling. Exactly what this ruling means for trans people remains uncertain. The Court stressed that trans people remain protected from discrimination and harassment under the ground of Gender Reassignment, not that that has stopped my mentions on the app formerly known as Twitter from filling up with violent memes and gloating transphobes calling me a “rapey troon.”

The case hinged on the apparent complication between two pieces of legislation — the aforementioned Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which allows some trans people to legally change our gender. If the GRA makes someone like me legally a woman then, argued the ghouls, how could women’s services exclude me from their single sex spaces? The Equality Act actually already allows for such discrimination under the single sex exemption clause, which lets organisations discriminate against trans women if it is a “proportionate means to achieving a legitimate aim.” So if, for example, they wanted to run a menopause support group it would be reasonable to exclude trans women given that we do not experience menopause.

Why bring a case if this is already (woefully) enshrined in law? In practice, this has seen trans women increasingly excluded from all manner of services — including domestic violence refuges, a particular cruelty given the staggering rates of intimate partner violence and homelessness affecting trans women and girls. The Darlington Five are intent on making it illegal for trans women to share changing rooms with cis women. And this latest case is trying to make it illegal for trans women to sit on public boards in positions reserved for women in Scotland.

The Supreme Court case was decided in favour of the anti-trans organizations, a decision reached after deliberately excluding any trans voices from the case. Of the four intervenors in the case, three were anti-trans — and only anti-trans intervenors were allowed to give oral evidence. A retired trans judge named Victoria McCloud was shut out from giving evidence. Show trials, in which the innocence or guilt of a person is already decided, are a defining feature of authoritarianism, but at this point what isn’t?

One question plagues fascist movements the world over: What makes a woman? The Supreme Court today decided that woman refers to “the ordinary meaning of [that] plain and unambiguous” word — a meaning so ordinary they did not define it themselves. Is a woman chromosomal, hormonal, or genital? Which is the plain and unambiguous defining characteristic in a human world that includes not only trans women but intersex people, women with PCOS, and natural variation in nearly every aspect of our physiology from height to hair distribution to genital size and shape? Much as US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart argued about pornography in the 1960s, apparently the UK Supreme Court will know women when they see them.

No longer being legally women, we un-women are left to wonder: Will we face arrest for using public toilets? Is there any purpose left at all to legally changing one’s gender via the Gender Recognition Act if it has no effect on any aspect of how we are treated in law, in prisons, or even in which hospital ward we are placed in? What will life be like for those who now exist outside the law — who will we become and how will we live?

How this ruling will play out in the everyday lives of trans people across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland isn’t yet understood, but what is expected is that this will open up revision of the Equality Act, an important goal of Britain’s far right and their happy collaborators in the Labour government. By opening the door to revision on one characteristic of our primary human rights legislation, all will eventually fall. Sex, disability, race, religion — all for the taking. The irony that this challenge was brought forward by a group ostensibly trying to protect sex based rights sure will surely sting when it eventually causes all women to lose their rights entirely.

Getting off my three hour train ride, still scrolling through the endless stream of reactions of my friends to the emerging news, I realized with annoyance that I needed to use the public bathroom. Realistically, most people in the UK are blithely unaware that this decision has been made, despite it grabbing front page headlines in every major news source. And yet there I was feeling hesitant and uncomfortable about doing something I have done hundreds of thousands of times over the past twenty-two years of my life as an out trans woman. This is the intended effect: making trans women afraid, shutting us out from public life in its most basic forms.

The clarification that trans women do not legally count as women is only the latest in the rights erosion speedrun being orchestrated both within and outside government. Only a few days ago, Health Minister and professional villain Wes Streeting instructed GPs to deny blood tests to trans youth receiving hormones, and soft launched advice to do the same for adult patients. Each time I renew my prescription I wonder if it will be my last, in this country.

It doesn’t stop in the UK, of course. We live in a world of meanwhiles now. Everywhere we turn new horrors present themselves. Across the Atlantic, anti-trans wins appear on a near daily basis in courts and schools and sporting events as Democrats shrug their shoulders wondering what they could possibly do to help without lifting a finger. No safe harbour there. I trade voice notes back and forth with one of my Good Judy’s in Brooklyn about the politics behind why no country will take American or British trans people as political refugees — to do so would be to denounce that country on the international stage, something no one is willing to do. Asylum claims are more political stances than human rights cases, at the end of the day.

One cannot even open up TikTok in peace without being non-consensually shown the terrifying final moments of Sara Milleray, a Colombian trans woman whose arms and legs were broken by a group of men before being tossed into a fast moving river and live streamed for all to see. None of us can ever unsee these images, reposted by a cis influencer trying to raise awareness in the least aware way possible.

Where to go to escape all of this? Spain, Argentina, Japan? War is on the horizon across Europe, as the EU instructs citizens to stockpile seventy-two hours of food and emergency supplies in case Russia attacks critical infrastructure. Javier Milei is another of the world’s mad kings, destroying everything in his path. And one good earthquake and Tokyo will be underwater, says the Japanese government. In fact, nearly everywhere is sure to be devastated by climate change within our lifetimes. There is nowhere safe, but I can’t stop looking. We’re all earning our own personal master’s degree in work visa studies because the course of history seems set now. We cannot stop it, only hope to outrun it. We are heading toward an inevitable collapse, not just as trans people but as a planet. There’s a maddening futility to all of it that Travis Alabanza captured perfectly when she wrote, “You’re going to be shouting ‘what makes a real woman’ as the world is on fire, which is just as well, as no one can afford to heat their house.”

I want to be brave enough to stay and fight alongside my friends and lovers. I want to survive what is coming, to feel the rush of joy that finally winning promises — a promise I doubt it can make good on, a win I am not sure will exist. I want to run like a fool out of one disaster and into the arms of another. There is nowhere to turn and no one is coming to save us. And perhaps there never was anywhere safe to begin with, only a brief historical mirage that made some few of us in the global north think we might be protected.

We only have each other, at least for as long as it takes for them to disappear us, too. But what I know they can never take, what cannot be stolen from me or pressured out of me, what is inalienable is the knowledge of who and what I am. A woman, illegally.

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