“We are feeling so done with being used” – talking to the British transgender kids who stormed the NHS England headquarters
First, the ledge. Tomorrow, the world.
2024 was tipped to be a particularly tumultuous year in politics, and so far it has surpassed even the most cynical predictions. When a former President in America is surviving an assassination attempt, it’s easy to forget that the field in Western Europe was experiencing a major shake-up. The Netherlands was swearing in a brand new cabinet that took seven months to form among the country’s right-wing parties, while the United Kingdom and France both had elections that saw mainstream conservative parties losing ground to both the left and an ever-encroaching far-right.
Whilst a backlash against the mainstream is nothing new in politics, this trend has been particularly frightening as far-right ideologies have gone from political outsiders to genuine major contenders. The discourse surrounding immigrants and queer kids has gone from bad to worse, and a comprehensive backlash against the conservatives in the UK didn’t stop an announcement from Labour’s new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, that puberty blockers would be banned in accordance with guidelines proposed in the… contentious Cass Review.
But while writers and analysts are working through our frustration by hiding behind keyboards, some kids decided to take matters into their hands. On Friday the 28th of June, two young trans activists from the Trans Kids Deserve Better network scaled the NHS building on Waterloo Road and held aloft a sign which read “we are not pawns for your politics”, while letters stuck to the windows of the NHS offices spell out “trans kids deserve better”.
Other teenage protestors affiliated with the Trans Kids Deserve Better action network joined the activists on the ledge, with others building support from the ground.
‘We aren’t allowed to speak for ourselves in the media’
I had the pleasure of talking to Zeds, who represents the group who scaled the NHS. They may not have got their fair share of airtime in the notoriously transphobic mainstream press, but Trans Kids Deserve Better are for sure getting our attention for their amazing demonstration at the headquarters of the National Health Service in Central London over the election cycle.
When I asked what sparked their decision to stage the protest, Zeds didn’t hold back:
“As it stands now there is effectively no legal way to access gender affirming healthcare, the government is in the process of creating guidance telling our school teachers not to protect us from transphobic harassment, and our voices have been deliberately removed from all the decision-making procedures. We can’t vote for a start, but the evidence we offer in legal proceedings gets rejected, we aren’t allowed to speak for ourselves in the media, and we don’t have any other mechanism to defend ourselves. The Conservative party was trying to use us to win an unwinnable election, and the rate of awful news was only accelerating. It just felt like we were reaching a breaking point.”
The National Health Service, or NHS, is England’s publicly funded healthcare system, formed by the Labour Party in 1948, and which was once famously described as “the closest thing the English people have to a religion”. The love the British public have of the NHS is so great that a survey conducted in 2016 placed it at number one on “things that make us proud to be British”, ahead of other quintessential British things such as the Royal Family, democracy, and the BBC. But despite this, the NHS has famously fallen into disrepair and controversy of late, particularly on the subject of transgender healthcare.
British trans content creator Abigail Thorn made a video detailing her mistreatment by the NHS last year, and reports have found that trans patients can face waiting times of more than five years, well above NHS recommendations.
‘We never expected to be there much longer than a few hours’
Zeds explained that the group’s decision to stage the protest at the NHS HQ was very deliberate:
“We were looking for somewhere with a key link to harm done to trans youth, which would also have the physical space to let us be very clearly visible, in order to do a big banner drop. We did a bit of searching and found that the NHS central offices were in Central London and had this lovely looking ledge. After scouting it out in person, we thought we’d be able to climb up to it. We were originally planning to travel light and get up there with some help from a neighbouring construction site, but ended up buying a ladder and going straight up the front.
When we first went up, we never expected to be there much longer than a few hours. We assumed we would be arrested, but the police showed no intention of doing that, so we decided to stay and make our statement. We ended up staying for four days. The occupation developed into something bigger than we ever expected. The amount of love and support from the community was beyond what we could have imagined, and it felt unbelievably powerful.”
Speaking of Abigail Thorn, she was amongst the many high-profile trans activists in the UK who threw their support beyond the group of teenagers. Queer lobby groups Stonewall, Gay Liberation Front and Trans Legal Clinic all threw their support behind the demonstration, it got its airtime in Pink News and Natasha Devon’s slot in LBC.
And yet, as Devon explains, there was “tumbleweed” in the British media. Front pages given to trans people accused of sexual assault, but zero to trans kids fighting for their rights. This silence is one part of what is perceived as a complete distortion of trans issues in British narratives, and Zeds has a theory for this:
“We really don’t fit the narrative they’ve constructed for us, and they decided to hide it rather than give weight to our voices. I do think people are starting to listen though, and the people we really wanted to reach were the trans people who haven’t felt able to take action yet. On that count we succeeded more than we ever imagined possible before we got up on that ledge.”
Despite the tumbleweeds, Zeds remains optimistic that the protest reached the people that they wanted it to reach. They say that it is only the start of a fight against trans issues being used as a political football in British politics, and across the world.
“We’re trying to become more of a network than an organisation, meaning we want to be able to give trans kids the skills and the backing to take their own actions. We’re currently working on contacting all the people who signed up to support on the website, and I’m sure there’s going to be more. Actions like this are so much more powerful when they’re personal, and if we end up creating a worldwide liberation network by trans youth for trans youth then we’d be completely unstoppable.
We’ll stop fighting when we’re not actively being harmed by cis institutions. We’re fighting for the day where we can be heard and listened to, which is going to take a lot of work from trans youth and our supporters.
All trans people deserve and desperately need liberation. We’re aiming to keep hold of this momentum and spread it as far as possible so that people in power can’t possibly ignore us.”
Natalie Feliks is a writer and activist originally from Adelaide, now living in Melbourne. She's written for the likes of Junkee, Crikey, and Overland, and spends her time listening to pop music and eating chocolate.
The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!
