We hear a lot about privilege these days. It seems that everyone want to prove that other people have more privilege than they do. David Cameron thinks that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, while men’s rights activists are convinced that men are far more oppressed than women. There are even quizzes you can do to prove to your friends how little privilege you have. But what is it actually like being at the bottom of the social pile? Well readers, let me introduce you to Monica Jones.

Monica is a trans student in Arizona where they have a law against “manifesting prostitution”. Ostensibly it is a means of cleaning up the streets and “rescuing” women from the sex trade. The practice is, of course, very different, because all it takes to be found guilty of this crime is for a police officer to decide that you look like a prostitute. And what does a prostitute look like to an Arizona police officer? Obviously she’s female, she’s not white, and probably she’s trans.

Monica was brave enough to speak out against this law. Not long after she was arrested. Yesterday she was found guilty, solely on the word of the arresting officer. She has been sentenced to a minimum of 30 days in prison, and a $500 fine. As a trans woman, she will be sent to a men’s prison.

The silence about this from the white, liberal feminist media is deafening.

That’s what it means to be without privilege. You can be arrested simply for walking down the street, convicted without any evidence of wrongdoing being required, and subjected to what in any civilized country would be described as a cruel and unusual punishment. And the supposedly liberal media doesn’t fucking care.

Oh, and before anyone starts saying, “that’s just America, the UK is so much better”, read this.

Update: I’ve had people on Twitter asking whether there is anything that can be done about this. The most important thing to note here is that there are trans women of color who are all over this, and have been since Monica was arrested. There are very high profile people such as Janet Mock and Laverne Cox involved. What the rest of us need to do is keep an eye on what they are doing, and lend support where it is requested. The hashtags being used by activists are #IStandWithMonica and just #StandWithMonica. Checking those on a regular basis should keep you up to date with what is happening.

I thought that for Trans Day of Visibility I should talk a bit about why some older feminists hate trans people with such passion. Many of my younger feminist friends are very confused by this. Of course I am not a TERF, so I can’t actually know how they think, but I was around in the 1970s so I have some idea of the political climate of the time.

The main thing that you need to bear in mind about radical feminists in the 1970s is that many of them believed very much in sexual difference, they just felt that it shouldn’t matter. That is, they believed (and appear to still believe) that humans come in two types: men (who are evil) and women (who are good). When they talked about gender, all that they meant is gendered behavior. That is, they believed that how women dressed, how they behaved, what jobs they were allowed to so, and so on, were all the result of a con trick pulled by men.

An unfortunate aspect of this is that they tended to fetishize masculinity. That is, they assumed that socially coded feminine behavior was fake, and socially coded masculine behavior was real. Consequently they preferred male gendered appearance. The idea that women might enjoy wearing their hair long, having pretty clothes, using make-up and so on was anathema to them. There’s a passage in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man where the heroines express surprise that trans women learn how to beautify themselves, despite being raised by men. I guess Russ was thinking about the issues, even then.

These days we know a lot more about the biology of gender. We know that the default state of humanity is female, and that becoming male is a complex process than happens in the womb through many different biochemical pathways, any or all of which may not perform 100% as expected. Intersex people are real, and transsexuals, despite huge amounts of social pressure to conform, have proved just as resistant to “reparative therapy” as homosexuals. Indeed, one possible definition of a transsexual might be an intersex person whose lack of conformance to socially-defined gender norms is not yet fully understood by biological science.

Of course transsexuals are by no means all of the trans community. Indeed, we are probably a minority, because these days trans has expanded to cover all sorts of aspects of gender non-conformance. We haven’t yet got to the point where men can wear dresses and make-up to work without being laughed at, but women (at least in Western countries) can dress much more as they please. One of the interesting consequences of this is that young women who reject traditional femininity no longer say, “I am a woman, but I won’t behave like that”, they say, “I’m genderqueer, not female” instead. To people who have grown up in a political philosophy that is very much about opposition between males and females, that must seem a terrible betrayal.

A far more serious threat, however, is posed by trans women. Back in the 1970s, being a radical feminist often meant being a lesbian separatist. Creating a safe space for women meant keeping out men, all men, even the male children of your less-radical friends. Anyone who wants to get an idea of some of the debates that have gone on in feminism around the idea of lesbian separatism should read Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, which go into them in depth.

For a radical lesbian separatist, being assigned male at birth is form of Original Sin for which no absolution is possible. The idea that someone can be assigned male and then apparently “become” female is entirely foreign to them. The idea that someone who may even still have a penis can call themselves female and enter “women only” spaces is often described by them in highly charged terms as “sexual assault” or “rape”. That’s what happens when you are wedded to a binary distinction between male and female, and you have built a political philosophy around the idea that “penetration” is evil.

These days we understand that the social pressures to behave in traditionally feminine ways begin the minute that one is assigned female, or self-identifies as female. Obviously the amount of social conditioning that you receive, and the amount of male privilege from which you benefit, can vary a lot depending on when you begin to self-identify as trans, and when you begin to transition, but there is no either/or to it. Speaking personally, I know I studied fashion mags and practiced make-up whenever I could, while I was still at school. My interest in fashion isn’t something I suddenly adopted when I transitioned.

So when a TERF talks about ending the gender binary, she doesn’t mean ending the distinction between men and women, because you can’t be a lesbian separatist if you don’t believe in a fundamental difference between men and women. All she means is putting an end to feminine gendered behavior.

Something else I have noticed TERFs do is accuse trans-supportive people of being homophobic. This will probably sound completely bizarre, especially if you are aware that many trans people are also homosexual. However, it too is rooted in attitudes from the 1970s when the gay and lesbian communities were very much anti-trans. That’s because, back then, encouraged by psychiatrists, people tended to believe that the primary reason for gender transition was sexual. It was assumed that all trans people were in fact homosexuals who were so desperate to be straight that they would mutilate their bodies to allow them to mimic the opposite sex. Amongst gays and lesbians, trans people were assumed to suffer from an extreme form of internalized homophobia.

These days, of course, we know better, or at least some of us do. Scan the comments section of any article about a gay or lesbian trans person and you’ll find at least one person asking “what’s the point”, as if getting to have straight sex was the only possible reason for transition. Of course for lesbian separatists the idea of a lesbian trans woman can be even more horrifying, because it leads to thoughts of people who are “really men” stealing their girlfriends.

All in all, therefore, we have a right mess. I can quite see that if I were a cisgendered radical lesbian separatist I might be very worried about trans people. Nevertheless, I also know very many lovely lesbians who have entirely come around to the idea that being female is not wholly defined by what a doctor says when you are born. I also know lots of fabulous people who understand that the “enemy”, such as there is one, is not men, but Patriarchy.

This is the point where I should bring in CN Lester who, by virtue of identifying neither as male nor as female, has a more interesting perspective on such matters. Read this, it is good.

My hope is that in a generation or so’s time TERFs will die out, because the ideas that gave rise to their attitudes have also died out. Then again, while we continue to live in a Patriarchy, the conditions necessary to create those attitudes will always exist. All I can say is that few people are better equipped to understand the reality of male privilege than those who have given it up. How anyone can be a trans woman and not a fierce feminist is a mystery to me.

Anyway, as I said, there are plenty of lesbian feminists, particularly the younger ones, who are fully supportive of trans people. For today, the good folks at Autostraddle have published a list of ways in which you can be supportive too. Here they are.

Last night much of my Twitter feed was full of people (mostly gay men) discussing Channel 4’s expose of reparative therapy treatments (otherwise known as “gay cures”). A few people had horror stories to tell about aversion therapy, a form of “cure” that basically involves torturing people until they agree to say they are not gay any more. Thankfully most people in the UK these days accept that being homosexual is not a mental illness and cannot be cured.

Meanwhile another substantial part of my feed was taken up with a furious argument between trans people and white, cis feminists (all of them proudly left wing). The feminists were insisting that any trans person who was unwilling to “debate” the ideas that being trans is indeed a mental illness, and that gender reassignment should be banned in favor of reparative therapy, was guilty of “censorship” and was “violently anti-free-speech”. I note that I put debate in scare quotes because it is rather difficult to have a debate about something when the other side’s position is that you are insane and that nothing you say about yourself can be believed.

White feminists, eh? Thank goodness for women of color. People like Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks are very happy to share sistership with trans women. I can’t think of a single high profile cis white feminist in the UK who isn’t a former sex worker of whom I could say the same.

With LGBT History Month coming up, people are taking an interest in LGBT politics again, and I have been asked to explain this weird “Spousal Veto” thing that trans people keep yelling about. Well, it is a strange piece of legislation added to the England & Wales Marriage Equality Act which is profoundly homophobic in nature, and yet which only inconveniences trans people. Bear with me.

Generally the Marriage Equality Act is a good thing, even for trans people. It takes away the requirement that we have to get marriages annulled prior to transition so as to avoid a same-sex marriage, though it still rankles that no restitution was made for those people who were forced to destroy their marriages in previous years.

However, the government added a new requirement to the Bill to the effect that, if a trans person is married, and wishes to get a Gender Recognition Certificate, then they must supply a letter from their spouse giving permission, otherwise no GRC can be granted, hence the “Veto”.

Note that getting a GRC is generally seen as a basic human right for trans people. Indeed, the whole Gender Recognition Act was forced on the UK by the European Court of Human Rights. Ireland is going through a similar process at the moment. Getting a GRC is, I believe, the only human right in UK law which you can only get if you have your spouse’s permission.

I should make clear that this is nothing whatsoever to do with the actual process of transition. You can’t actually apply for a GRC until you have completed that process. You can’t normally get a GRC until you have been living in your preferred gender for at least 2 years. You may well have had surgery, though it is not a requirement. Mostly what the GRC does is changes your legal gender.

Nor does his have much to do with the majority of marriages. As you can imagine, if your spouse is unhappy about the direction your life is taking, they will probably ask for a divorce long before you get anywhere near applying for a GRC. And if you and your spouse do want to stay together, then getting the required letter should be a formality. Who, then, is the Spousal Veto there to protect?

The only case in which the Veto makes any sense at all is if your spouse is in denial about your transition and is determined to preserve a marriage to your pre-transition self. Said spouse is likely to be angry and vindictive, and doing their best to derail your transition in other ways too. The nice people at Westminster felt that spouses like that needed more ammunition with which to pursue their vendettas.

But why? What is so horrible about the GRC? Other than simple joy in causing further distress, why would anyone want to wield the Veto? Well, the thing about the GRC is that it doesn’t just change your gender now, it retroactively changes your gender. I have a birth certificate saying that I was born a girl. I am very proud of it.

But consider. Suppose you are in a heterosexual marriage to someone, and that person then gets a GRC. That means that history has been changed to say that you were party to a same-sex marriage. You have been retroactively made gay. And that is why people are prepared to fight tooth and nail to prevent their spouses from getting GRCs.

A few people at Westminster recognized what an injustice this was. As Sarah Brown explains here, people like Julian Huppert and Liz Barker lobbied passionately on our behalf. But the Civil Service adamantly refused to budge on the issue, and ministers took their advice. In stark contrast, although a similar clause was introduced into Scotland’s Marriage Equality bill, as soon as the issue was explained to them the Scottish Parliament’s Equal Opportunities Committee voted unanimously to scrap it. The important difference, of course, is that in Scotland the trans community has the support of LGB lobbyists, whereas in England & Wales the usual tactic by S’onewall is to offer us up as a bargaining counter: the sacrificial lambs to be persecuted at will so as to give the bigots a victory to cheer about.

So that’s what’s what a Spousal Veto is: a nasty piece of homophobic legislation allowed to pass in Westminster because it only affects trans people.