My name is James Morton I'm the
manager of the Scottish Transgender
Alliance which is a project
funded by the Scottish Government equality unit to provide good practice
guidance and policy development
assistance to public bodies in Scotland.
We also help build the capacity
of transgender people to understand
their rights and to help them engage
with public services, so today I'm
going to talk you through a little
bit of some of the terminology that gets used around transgender people and
then look at some of the issues that we
might encounter and have a little chat
about how people in schools can make sure that the space
is safe and supportive and inclusive of
transgender young people. When I use
the term transgender people or trans
people for short I'm using that as an
umbrella term much like you might use
the term disabled people or minority
ethnic people. It doesn't mean that everybody who falls
into that category is exactly the same
or has exactly the same experiences
there's a real diversity in the ways
that people describe their gender.
A transgender person is someone whose
gender identity or gender expression
differs from what they were saying at
birth and so your gender identity is
your personal sense of yourself, how you
see yourself as being a man or a woman
or perhaps thinking will actually do
either of those terms fit with me?
Everybody has a gender identity just
most of the time you don't have to think
of it separate from your social gender
because everyone else sees you the
same way, what was written on your birth
certificate, what your body looks like
all matches up with your gender identity
so usually it all blends into
one gender box but for trans people
you have to split up the gender box and
prioritize, recognizing how they see
themselves and then gender expression
that's all that external general
appearance and behavior that we use to
make that instinctive judgment
about whether we're walking towards a
man, walking towards women or starting to
get a little bit stressed about what
pronouns you might use because you're
not completely sure who you're walking over to.
There's actually a lot of people who aren't
trans but whose gender expression
doesn't fit into the classic
stereotypes of
masculinity or femininity but if
your gender expression varies in a profound way then you might
consider yourself to be trans. I just
want to say that there's a term
that's increasingly coming into common
use which is cisgender and that just
means not trans so you might talk about
trans people and cisgender.
You can just as easily talk about trans
people and non-trans people and the word
cis spelled CIS comes
from the idea of Latin for being on the
same side so your gender identity or
gender expression being on the same side
as the gender you were assigned at birth.
Sexual orientation and gender
identity are two different things I
think nowadays most people realize that. Everybody has a gender identity
your personal view of your own gender
then you have your sexual orientation
which is your personal view of who
you're attracted to and knowing is
something about someone's gender knowing
that they're trans doesn't tell you who
they're going to fancy. You might know someone trans but they
could be straight, gay, lesbian or
bisexual and sometimes it can be hard to
work out which sexual orientation term
would apply to them if they're trans
particularly if they've stayed with a
partner through a process of transition
and but the best thing is just not to
make assumptions and to just mirror
whatever language they use to describe
themselves. Going back to that idea of
trans as an umbrella term covering a wide
diversity of people, I'm going to talk
you through three kind of groupings. First we look at transsexual
people and the word transsexual is
falling out of popular use as you see more
people talk about
trans men and trans women so
trans men and trans women have an intense need to live fully in a different gender
so they're wanting to socially
transition and live their life
completely as a man or completely as
a woman.Often this will involve taking
hormones or having some surgeries but it
doesn't always and what you'd say to do
around your body is for you and your
doctor and your intimate partners not for
the general public and service providers
to worry about. There's lots
of different reasons why someone might
make different decisions. You might have
health issues that make it more
dangerous or risky to undergo certain
treatments or you might not be able
to access them easily and wherever you
are geographically located or you might
say well actually while I might wish
that I'd been born with different
characteristics but I've made my peace
with certain body parts and I don't
think going for the
surgery route would give me a good enough
result to make it worthwhile or wouldn't
be worth all the upheaval in my life
for my career and things like that so
there's lots of different reasons for
people making different decisions about
what treatments to access. The key
thing is if someone is living and
identifying as a woman you respect their
life and identity regardless of whether
they've had treatments likewise for a
man. So remembering which way round
to go is the way to remember which
direction is trans woman and which
direction is trans man is to think about
honoring someone's identity. I'm an
example of a trans man - someone who is
assigned female at birth but grew up but
first people thought or maybe just an
extreme tomboy but then as puberty
hit it became clear that' there's a much more
profound sense of disconnect from
my birth gender, a much stronger and
intense feeling that I needed to
live as a man in order to be true to my
sense of self. You honor my
identity as a man by calling me a man
first and foremost and if you need to
qualify and for some reason my
trans status is relevant then you can put
trans at the front but you don't start
going he's a female transsexual or
something like that because it doesn't make much sense
and so I'm a trans man in transition from
female to male and there's the other
direction trans women what you sometimes
find is that the media gets more
obsessed about focusing on trans women
than about trans men and that can be for
a range of reasons partly it's about
society sexism some people see it as
more surprising that someone would give
up the privilege of being a man to live as a
woman and also it's to do with the
fact that it can be harder to undo the
physical changes of a male puberty so if
by taking testosterone my voice
dropped, I grew facial hair and the hair on
top of my head went and disappeared
somewhat and with those changes I can
walk down the street and nobody would
remark upon me, nobody would single me out
and shout trans phobic abuse at me
whereas if you've gone through male
puberty already and your voice is
dropped and you've developed facial hair
and your hairlines receded then taking
female hormones doesn't undo those
things so it can be harder to get to a
position where nobody questions your
gender and it's really important to
respect someone's identity even if
there's physical characteristics that
they can't help that don't match up with
your assumptions and expectations about
that gender. For young people
transitioning earlier in life and this
is not as problematic if someone
starts their transition in their
teens then they won't have had many
years of hormones in the wrong gender so
it will be easier for them to get to a
position where people don't question
their gender. For non-binary people
there's not been that much in the media
about this group of of trans
people and if you think of gender as
a spectrum with men at one end and women at the another then for
me i was born female but i knew
that i needed to get to the other end of
that spectrum to be true to myself
but for a non-binary person they're
going well I know that my birth gender
doesn't fit me but if i transitioned and
lived completely as a different gender
then that might be uncomfortable in
other ways so living as a woman or a
living as a man neither is going to fit
comfortably neither is going to be true
to myself perhaps they could just be my
own individual human being with my own
unique mix of masculinity and femininity
aim and free myself from these
expectations of either of those two
binary boxes so this idea of seeing well
there's more than two options is why
it's called non-binary
and there's a really diverse range of
ways that people might then go on to
describe their gender in more detail and
and there's lots of different terms that
get used but non-binary is the kind of
umbrella for not fitting into simply man
or a woman and the other terms you might
come across the terms like genderqueer
gender fluid a gender non-gender there's
a whole range of different ones and I
wouldn't worry about trying to remember
and define each and individual one of
those terms instead just mirror what
someone is using about
themselves and respect what it
means to them and find out how they
perceive their gender and don't worry
about trying to kind of come up with the
term yourself. Non-binary people the
kind of key thing that they're usually
asking for is to try and avoid having a
male or female gender put on to them all
the time so society is very obsessed
about calling you a man or a woman instead of just being let's treat you as a human
being and and a non-binary person often
says can you just leave out the
he or the she and either use
my name or use the the gender-neutral
pronoun they and sometimes grammar
purists get a little bit upset about the
idea of a singular they. We use it
all the time when we don't
know much about a person so if somebody
has left their umbrella behind we tend
to go all someone's left their umbrella, we better go and give it to them do
you know who they are? We don't think
'oh my goodness I can't
possibly form those sentences' because it
might be a singular they and then and
it's just the case of going okay well we
know a bit more about this non-binary
person but we're still going to use the
singular 'they' because that feels most
comfortable and most respectful to them. My colleague Vic their non-binary
so I say
they're going to deliver the training
today
and they're a really great policy officer
and we're really happy that they're going to be doing this
session and things like that. Another
thing that non binary people often ask
for is to have a gender-neutral title so
just as we used to have only titles of
mr. miss mrs. but then women said well
why should my marital status be sign
posted by my title, why's that the first
thing somebody gets to know about me
when they look at my name and
campaigned and got ms/ms. Likewise
non-binary people said well why should
titles give away my gender and why
should I have to go get
a PhD or a medical degree to get a gender
neutral title, let's create a new one
let's create mx and that way it
doesn't reveal a gender from the
title. Other people they just say
well I'm not going to use the title I'm
just going to leave that field blank.
Non-binary people often want for people to acknowledge
the complexity of their gender and
they're not necessarily trying to change
their body or change the way they live
particularly just want other people to
recognize that gender is not as simple for
them as they might otherwise have assumed
but for some they do experience distress
about their body and their physical
characteristics that relate
to their birth gender and so they might
access some hormones or some surgeries.
Often that's to try and make their body
look more androgynous rather than for me
it was to make my body look very clearly
male and it can be really
important for them to be able to access
treatments if that's something
that's causing them stress.
Finally you've got cross-dressing people
and that's about gender expression
rather than gender identity. So someone
who occasionally cross dresses still
identifies with their birth gender they
just say well why should that mean that
I can only wear certain clothes and the
way I tried to get across to people why
it can be important to have options
about wearing more masculine or feminine
clothing is I'd like you to think of the
clothes you wear if you're going for a
job interview
versus the clothes that you'd wear if
you were chilling out at home at the
weekend and then the clothes that you'd
wear if you'd been invited to the best party
that year.
I'd love to meet the person, people who
wear exactly the same clothes in all
three of those situations. They're
probably pretty interesting got some
stuff to say about gender too but
most of us wear quite different outfits
in those three situations and if you
think about why we do that, partly
it's because clothes can make you feel
more confident or comfortable they can
bring out different sides to your
personality but they also can change
the interpersonal dynamic with other
people because clothes come with laden
with expectations and assumptions about
the person wearing them so by wearing
more masculine and feminine clothing you
can shape that interaction you can be
able to explore a different dynamic with
someone than you would
do if they were wearing
different clothes. So for people who
occasionally cross dress in public
it's that sense of personality and
interpersonal dynamics that's usually
the driver for wearing the different
clothes. If somebody is
cross-dressing in the privacy of their
home in the bedroom then that
may be more about sexuality or erotic
role play but if you're coming to a
public service it's much more likely to
just be about comfort, confidence and
personality. Then finally you've got
drag and it's really important not to
say to a trans woman for example
you're a drag queen because the
concept of drag is about performance
it's about performing artistically or
comically for an audience. Someone just
going about their life as a trans person
is not performing for the benefit of
others. There's nothing comical
about it so it's really important to
recognize that it's not the same thing
as drag and somebody doing a drag
performance that tells you nothing about
their day-to-day life or how they
actually identify. All it is, is our stage
character. Next I want to talk a
little bit about the concept of minority
stress so this is about recognizing
that being part of a marginalized
minority group
can mean that you experience stressors
that impact on your mental health and
and physical well-being. There's four kind of aspects that can
contribute to that harm to
well-being. The first one is pretty
obvious if you experience the external
stressful events that can have a
knock-on effect on your well-being so if
you're a victim of hate crime when you
get rejected by your family or when you get
turned down for a job because of
discrimination then that's going to
quite clearly impact on your sense of
self confidence or your self-worth in
your level of depression, social anxiety
and often the actual money in your
pockets and your stability of your
housing - all of those things that impact
on your physical well-being. However
even if those negative events
haven't happened to you, you can still
experience the impact on your well-being
because of your fears about those events
perhaps happening in the future your
expectations that you're at risk.
You might be a young person sitting in
school thinking 'I think I'm trans, can I
tell my guidance teacher, can I tell my
parents?' and you might have heard of
people having horrible reactions, of
people getting disowned, getting
bullied at school. So you might make all
kinds of assumptions that that's going
to happen to you if you tell anyone and
then you sit alone and depressed and
frightened not reaching out though it
may be your school would be completely
supportive, it may be your parents would
be fully on board but you don't know
that for sure. You're working on the
worst case scenarios and then you've got
this third aspect which is about your
internalization of negative social
attitudes. If you think about all the
negative messages that girls get about
being girls there's so many kind of
negative messages and then you should
think about being trans you get even
more negative messages about how
worthless that is in society how wrong
or freaky it is. You can end up
feeling that you don't deserve to be
accepted, that you are unacceptable.
That can be really hard to
overcome and then finally the fourth
aspect that can impact on people's
well-being is about the stress of
concealing an important aspect
of yourself to from others so this
would come into play before someone
feels able to tell anybody else that
they're trans. It can also come into
play after someone's transitioned and
wants to kind of leave being trans
behind but is still scared of people
finding out about their past and judging
them negatively for it. So if you feel
worried that if people find out
that you're trans they're going to hate
you or cease to be your friend or
bully you then you end up constantly
watching everything you say in case you
might give away that you're trans and
get that negative reaction. It can
make your friendships feel much harder
to sustain, mean that you don't reach
out and make those friendships in the
first place or if you do, they feel more
tenuous and always on this sort of
shifting, unstable base. All
those four things can contribute to poor
mental health and increased risks of
getting involved in drugs or alcohol
misuse for a young trans person. I've
got some stats, I'm not going to go into
them in detail, there's a handout available as well butthere's really shocking
statistics about the experiences
of trans people. These stats come
from a survey we held in 2012. We had 889 respondents and
of those respondents, three-quarters
had experienced transphobic crime and
four-fifths were saying that they avoid
various social situations because
they're scared of negative transphobic
reactions. That included people not
going out socially in the evenings with
their friends in case they went
somewhere and there was a drunk person
and they started give them hassle.
It involved people not going to their local
Leisure Centre to exercise because they
were scared of people objecting to them
being in the changing rooms. Sometimes
they even included people saying 'I'm
scared to go to my local supermarket so
I just order everything online and
try to avoid going out as much as
possible because every time I walk down
my street somebody makes a transphobic
remark at me' or 'when I try and just buy
shopping people mis gender me
and it just all feels too much' so
they hide away from almost everyone.
Two-thirds were saying that they felt
that in order to be socially accepted by
the rest of society they had to hide
that they were trans so that people
were not able to tell if they
were going to have a decent experience
and the majority had experienced some form
of employment discrimination.
Forty-six percent of the people who were
trying to access hormones or surgical
treatments were having difficulty
getting access to those on the NHS so
for example if you're a young person
who's distressed about puberty because
you're trans and you're wanting to get
some assistance you may have heard on
the internet that there's what's called
puberty blocking medications. It's the
same medications you give someone
entering precocious puberty and then you
might think okay I would really need
that, I really need my puberty put on hold so
I can get some breathing space and work
out what I want to to do longer term.
Then you go to your GP, first they're not
very sure what if any service is available
and then they find out there is a child
and adolescent gender identity clinic at
the Sandyford in Glasgow and they say okay
we're referring you. Then you get a
letter saying thank you you're on the
waiting list but it will be 11 months
before you get seen by anybody. There's only one part time child
adolescent psychiatrist for the whole of
Scotland dealing with trans young
people. A lot can change to your
body in 11 months and that can be an
incredibly distressing thing to to have
to wait that length of time just to be
seen. Even once you're seen
and getting access to to their treatments
and funding and getting those things
arranged, each thing has a further
waiting list. It can be a very slow and
distressing process. Social attitudes
back in 2010, the Scottish Government
asked a representative sample of the
Scottish public their attitudes towards
various minority groups and the question
they used was 'how would you feel if
a member of your family, not you yourself
started a long term relationship
with and they listed various
different minority groups. The trans
people came out as one of the most
discriminated against groups in
that question. Travellers
were the other group that had high
negative reactions so the majority of
Scottish people said that they would
be unhappy or very unhappy if
a family member had a relationship
with a trans person. This wasn't even 'would
you date them yourself?' but luckily in
2010 we did get the Equality Act so in
theory although it sometimes can feel
hard to actually uphold these equality protections in practice
legally trans people are
entitled to fair treatment and non
discrimination and employment and
service provision including in school
services. It's called gender reassignment
protected characteristic and it covers a
really wide range of different people, it
covers you from the moment you propose
to do any part of a personal process to
move yourself away from your original
birth gender, perhaps by changing your
name or your pronouns you use or perhaps
by accessing medical treatment. It
doesn't have to include medical
treatment and so you are protected from  the moment you propose that and it
also covers you if you are incorrectly
perceived as being trans and negatively
treated as a result, so for example if
you were just a boy who was a bit
feminine and you still saw
yourself as a boy you didn't see
yourself as trans but people started to
treat you negatively because they felt
that you weren't performing manly
enough and started being transphobic
to you, then that would count
as perception even though you're
not actually trans. Likewise if you're protected,  if you're discriminated
against because you're associated with
the trans person so for example if you
were a young person with a trans parent
and you're getting  less good
treatment at school as a result or if
you had a sibling who's trans and
consequently you were
getting hassle then that would
be protected as well. Then in
terms of changing your name and gender
on various documents you can just do
a statute declaration of change of name
and that would allow you to change
your name and your gender on everything
except your birth certificate. If
you're under 16 then some records
that could expect your parent or
guardian to give permission you
don't need to have every single person
with parental rights and
responsibilities agree, you just need one
person to say yep that's fine I'll authorise
these formal changes to documents.
If a young person under 16 wants to use
a different name but they don't have
support from anybody in their family
then you can still as a school use that
name for them in terms of interacting
with them socially, what name you call
out for them in class a lot of that
sort of thing. You just wouldn't be able
to change the formal records until
you have a parents consent. If they're
over 16 they can just
change it themselves. Some of these
trans status in any previous name and
gender details count as sensitive data
under the data protection act so the
best way of thinking of it is to
treat those on the same level of
sensitivity as you would any
confidential medical information about
somebody. If somebody's over 18 and
they've been living for over two years
with all their other documents changed
then they can get their birth certificate
corrected as well and that gives people
an additional layer of privacy
protection it kind of draws a line under
all the document changes and says
right that's all done and dusted in the
past there is absolutely no question
about what your name gender is and
also switches the kind of recourse
if you have a violation of your
privacy. If somebody hasn't
got a gender recognition certificate and
somebody ousts them without their
consent then you can take that as a
civil matter under the Equality Act or
under the data protection act. You would take a civil case whereas
if you've got a gender recognition certificate or if they have reason to think you
might have and they oust you without your
permission then you can actually get the
police involved and say this is criminal. 
So it switches from civil to
criminal but you shouldn't be outing
anybody without their permission because
at the very least you've got a civil
discrimination case that could come
about from it and then the simple way of
dealing with it is simply if you
think that there might be a
reason that a third party needs to know
about someone's trans status, sit down
with that trans person and say this is
who I think we should tell, this is why I
think we should tell them, this is how
it'd be helpful if they know. Are you
okay with that? Then just make a note,
write down on such-and-such day you
spoke to them yep they agreed that this
was fine to tell so and so and then
you're covered. It just don't go around
randomly telling people without checking
with the trans person, make sure that
their preferences are put at the centre. There's often ways that you can discuss
things anonymously,  if you want to get advice you don't
have to reveal exactly which person
it is, you can still talk about having
trans people and that's perfectly fine.
With SQA records there's now a
new procedure and you can look
at it online. There's also a handout
about replacing certificates if
somebody's changed their name and
gender since they did an exam. Also
schools can update the SQA record quite
easily if they've got a pupil who's
about to sit an exam and usually
if your stature declaration of change of
name is the most common document that
people use to show that they're
transitioning in but if they haven't
done a statute declaration you can take in the form of other
evidence and we're in
discussions with SQA at the moment about
their waiving the fee for
replacement certificates where it's for
gender reassignment and because it's not
that you've just let your
dog eat your certificate or anything
like that. If you've been long-term
unemployed
and you're trying to get a new job you
may not have the money to replace it but
as you saw before with the employment
discrimination rates against trans
people it's so hard to prove why they
decided you weren't the best candidate
it makes such a profound difference if
someone has all their documents in that
they can show to a new employer without
outing themselves as trans.
