• Contact
  • About
  • Authors
DONATE TO BYLINES SCOTLAND
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
  • Login
Bylines Scotland
  • Home
  • News
    • All
    • Bylines Scotland Breaking News
    • Europe
    • King Charles III
    • Queen Elizabeth II
    • Scotland
    • War in Ukraine
    • World
    Go Dharmic charity with Martin Dover

    Putting compassion into action – Coronation Champion Award winner Martin Dover leads the way.

    Police Investigation

    There’s been a murder

    Heart of NHS

    Back to the future

    Women health inequalities represented by a heart and a cardiogram

    Women’s Health in Scotland: challenges and progress

    Oil in Scotland

    Oil, Margaret Thatcher and Dinnae Mess Wi Us

    Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh

    Scotland’s Road to Devolution

    Poverty in Scotland

    Poverty in Scotland 2022

    NHS Scotland

    A Healthcare System that delivers for people?

    Scottish political calls

    Liberté, égalité, fraternité

    Trending Tags

    • Democracy
    • Devolution
    • Brexit
    • Ukraine
  • Politics
    • All
    • Council Areas
    • Europe
    • Holyrood
    • Liz Truss
    • Rest of UK
    • Tories
    • United Kingdom
    • Westminster
    • World
    UK voting system First-past-the-post

    Why is the UK still locked into an obsolete political system?

    Scottish Parliament Party seats

    People like to back the winning side.

    Post Election Blues

    Post-election blues

    Labour Anas Sarwar cartoon

    The challenge for Labour in Scotland

    Hard Labour

    Hard Labour

    Edinburgh Military Tattoo mixed with EU symbol

    Great visionaries brought us two great institutions that made life better for Scots and Scotland

    Westminster Government

    Regimes are at their most dangerous in their death throes 

    Rupert Murdoch portrait

    Why Rupert Murdoch should support Scotland’s independence.

    Demonstrator on the streets of London

    Eggs, black shirts and unsettled Britain

    Trending Tags

    • Equality
    • Johnson
    • Scottish National Party
  • Business
    • All
    • Agriculture
    • Aviation
    • Corporations
    • Energy
    • Finance
    • Fishing
    • Natural Resources
    • Shipbuilding
    • Trade
    • Transport
    • Workers
    A crane in a port

    Forth and Clyde Drowned by the Thames and Mersey

    Scotland's green Freeport's

    Green freeports – gateway to sustainability or greenwashing with a tax avoidance cherry?

    Salmon covered by sea lice

    Anyone for sea lice risotto?

    Bakkafrost Barge

    The Story of the Bakkafrost Barge Sinking

    Fish farm in Scotland

    A deeper dive into the history of Scottish fish farming

    Fish farms in a Scottish Loch

    How farmed salmon is produced – stage one

    Dead salmons

    Death in our waters

    Fish farming, Isle of Sky, Loch Ainort

    Fish Farming in Scotland 

    Offshore wind farm

    How will local communities get a fair share of record investment from offshore wind farms?

    Trending Tags

    • Health
      • All
      • Assisted dying
      • Covid
      • Influenza
      • Polio virus
      • Respiratory
      • Scientific Research
      Illustration of an antibiotic running away from bacteria depicting antibiotic resistance

      Antibiotic resistance – a major global public health threat

      Slogan Still Home from Clinically Vulnerable Families group

      Covid-19 lockdown continues for many in the UK

      Tree representing lungs

      Where are the areas in Scotland most affected by lung conditions?

      Health service

      Funding the Scottish Health Service 

      A goose surrounded by avian flu

      Who is knocking our doors? A putative new pandemic?

      A woman walking in a field with a jerrycan of water on her back, spraying water on the vegetation

      The Ethiopia Medical Project

      Healthcare word seen in a scrabble

      “Leave no one behind” – the Health Foundation’s report into health inequalities in Scotland 2023.

      Sign saying NHS Greater Galsgow & Clyde in front of a hospital building

      Concern over patients waiting in corridors for free beds at Glasgow Superhospital

      A hospital corridor with trolleys on the sides.

      Glasgow hospitals halt non-urgent operations due to pressure

      Trending Tags

      • Environment
        • All
        • Air Pollution
        • Biology
        • Climate Change
        • Wildfires
        Balblair substation

        Desecrating the glens: the relentless march of the industrial triffids

        Salmon covered by sea lice

        Anyone for sea lice risotto?

        Diagram representing circular economy

        Local Authorities, communities and the circular economy

        Bakkafrost Barge

        The Story of the Bakkafrost Barge Sinking

        Fish farm in Scotland

        A deeper dive into the history of Scottish fish farming

        Fish farms in a Scottish Loch

        How farmed salmon is produced – stage one

        Dead salmons

        Death in our waters

        Fish farming, Isle of Sky, Loch Ainort

        Fish Farming in Scotland 

        Ardnish wildfire by Leslie Barrie, CC BY-SA 2.0 Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons'

        Fire threats in the Scottish countryside

        Trending Tags

        • Opinion
        No Result
        View All Result
        • Home
        • News
          • All
          • Bylines Scotland Breaking News
          • Europe
          • King Charles III
          • Queen Elizabeth II
          • Scotland
          • War in Ukraine
          • World
          Go Dharmic charity with Martin Dover

          Putting compassion into action – Coronation Champion Award winner Martin Dover leads the way.

          Police Investigation

          There’s been a murder

          Heart of NHS

          Back to the future

          Women health inequalities represented by a heart and a cardiogram

          Women’s Health in Scotland: challenges and progress

          Oil in Scotland

          Oil, Margaret Thatcher and Dinnae Mess Wi Us

          Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh

          Scotland’s Road to Devolution

          Poverty in Scotland

          Poverty in Scotland 2022

          NHS Scotland

          A Healthcare System that delivers for people?

          Scottish political calls

          Liberté, égalité, fraternité

          Trending Tags

          • Democracy
          • Devolution
          • Brexit
          • Ukraine
        • Politics
          • All
          • Council Areas
          • Europe
          • Holyrood
          • Liz Truss
          • Rest of UK
          • Tories
          • United Kingdom
          • Westminster
          • World
          UK voting system First-past-the-post

          Why is the UK still locked into an obsolete political system?

          Scottish Parliament Party seats

          People like to back the winning side.

          Post Election Blues

          Post-election blues

          Labour Anas Sarwar cartoon

          The challenge for Labour in Scotland

          Hard Labour

          Hard Labour

          Edinburgh Military Tattoo mixed with EU symbol

          Great visionaries brought us two great institutions that made life better for Scots and Scotland

          Westminster Government

          Regimes are at their most dangerous in their death throes 

          Rupert Murdoch portrait

          Why Rupert Murdoch should support Scotland’s independence.

          Demonstrator on the streets of London

          Eggs, black shirts and unsettled Britain

          Trending Tags

          • Equality
          • Johnson
          • Scottish National Party
        • Business
          • All
          • Agriculture
          • Aviation
          • Corporations
          • Energy
          • Finance
          • Fishing
          • Natural Resources
          • Shipbuilding
          • Trade
          • Transport
          • Workers
          A crane in a port

          Forth and Clyde Drowned by the Thames and Mersey

          Scotland's green Freeport's

          Green freeports – gateway to sustainability or greenwashing with a tax avoidance cherry?

          Salmon covered by sea lice

          Anyone for sea lice risotto?

          Bakkafrost Barge

          The Story of the Bakkafrost Barge Sinking

          Fish farm in Scotland

          A deeper dive into the history of Scottish fish farming

          Fish farms in a Scottish Loch

          How farmed salmon is produced – stage one

          Dead salmons

          Death in our waters

          Fish farming, Isle of Sky, Loch Ainort

          Fish Farming in Scotland 

          Offshore wind farm

          How will local communities get a fair share of record investment from offshore wind farms?

          Trending Tags

          • Health
            • All
            • Assisted dying
            • Covid
            • Influenza
            • Polio virus
            • Respiratory
            • Scientific Research
            Illustration of an antibiotic running away from bacteria depicting antibiotic resistance

            Antibiotic resistance – a major global public health threat

            Slogan Still Home from Clinically Vulnerable Families group

            Covid-19 lockdown continues for many in the UK

            Tree representing lungs

            Where are the areas in Scotland most affected by lung conditions?

            Health service

            Funding the Scottish Health Service 

            A goose surrounded by avian flu

            Who is knocking our doors? A putative new pandemic?

            A woman walking in a field with a jerrycan of water on her back, spraying water on the vegetation

            The Ethiopia Medical Project

            Healthcare word seen in a scrabble

            “Leave no one behind” – the Health Foundation’s report into health inequalities in Scotland 2023.

            Sign saying NHS Greater Galsgow & Clyde in front of a hospital building

            Concern over patients waiting in corridors for free beds at Glasgow Superhospital

            A hospital corridor with trolleys on the sides.

            Glasgow hospitals halt non-urgent operations due to pressure

            Trending Tags

            • Environment
              • All
              • Air Pollution
              • Biology
              • Climate Change
              • Wildfires
              Balblair substation

              Desecrating the glens: the relentless march of the industrial triffids

              Salmon covered by sea lice

              Anyone for sea lice risotto?

              Diagram representing circular economy

              Local Authorities, communities and the circular economy

              Bakkafrost Barge

              The Story of the Bakkafrost Barge Sinking

              Fish farm in Scotland

              A deeper dive into the history of Scottish fish farming

              Fish farms in a Scottish Loch

              How farmed salmon is produced – stage one

              Dead salmons

              Death in our waters

              Fish farming, Isle of Sky, Loch Ainort

              Fish Farming in Scotland 

              Ardnish wildfire by Leslie Barrie, CC BY-SA 2.0 Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons'

              Fire threats in the Scottish countryside

              Trending Tags

              • Opinion
              No Result
              View All Result
              Bylines Scotland
              No Result
              View All Result
              Home Rights and Freedoms

              Transgender Day of Visibility: what trans Scots want you to know

              On the Transgender Awareness Day, Jennie Kermode points out trans people feelings, some facts and how trans voices are rarely heard directly.

              Jennie KermodebyJennie Kermode
              31-03-2023 07:01
              in Rights and Freedoms, Trans
              Transgender Awareness Day

              Illustration by Patis Paton printed with permission

              182
              VIEWS
              Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

              Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, also known as Transgender Awareness Day. Though it’s rare now for a day to pass without trans people being in the news, you might think you know everything you need to know already, but hold that thought. While trans people are frequently talked about, trans voices are rarely heard directly.

              A study by Trans Media Watch found that The Sun published 188 stories about trans people between 1st August 2017 and 31st October 2018, and of the 123 which were negative, only 15% included any kind of trans perspective, with just six including comment from a named trans person. Other papers and current affairs programmes are not much better, so the chances are that most of what you think you know about trans people comes from other people’s ideas about them, and not from trans people themselves.

              Trans people are not all the same

              If you want to know what trans people themselves think, the first thing to bear in mind is that their views vary like anyone else’s. Whilst some opinions are more common than others, there is no one voice which represents all of them any more than there’s one voice for Asian Scots or one voice for women. Being treated as monolithic is a large part of the problem in the current climate, contributors to this article said, because it opens the door to stereotyping and then to prejudice.

              ‘Trans’ is, in fact, most commonly used as an umbrella term for groups of people who face very different challenges in life. That said, when members of those groups are asked what they would like their fellow Scots to know about them, several points come up repeatedly.

              Young group embracing each other
              Rights and Freedoms

              Trans community reacts to murder of teenager Brianna Ghey

              byJennie Kermode
              14 February 2023

              Being trans is not a fad or ideology

              First of all, trans people want you to know that they don’t identify as they do because of a fad. They point out that trans people have always existed, citing historic examples like the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, who adopted female terms of address and sought out the 3rd Century version of gender confirmation surgery; and the 18th Century Chevalier d’Eon, a soldier, tax expert, diplomat and noted duellist who managed to get his gender legally changed by claiming that it had been incorrectly recorded as female for inheritance purposes. Some trans people struggled for decades to find another way of living before they eventually came out. Others, who are still young, felt that their gender had been misunderstood from an early age.

              “We don’t ‘choose’ or ‘prefer’ or ‘acquire’ our gender. It chooses us,” said one trans woman, adding “None of us do this because it is fun or easy. It often takes a lot of internal struggle to accept who we are and then we know that we will be treated as second class citizens or worse by enough people to make day to day life often unpleasant at best.”

              Another contributor to this article felt it important to point out that being trans isn’t an ‘ideology’ – it’s widely accepted as a fact within the medical community and this is embedded in WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) standards of care. Transition is the only established way to end feelings of gender dysphoria which vary in strength from person to person but are associated with anxiety, depression, and a very high suicide risk. The American Psychiatric Association, whose manuals are treated as the gold standard for the profession in Scotland as well, no longer classifies being trans as a psychiatric disorder.

              Some people pointed out that just because we don’t know why some people are trans (and others aren’t) doesn’t mean that it’s made up, any more than being gay or left-handed is made up. One noted that left-handed people also used to be persecuted for being different. Attempts were made to force them to write with their right hands, which seems ridiculous to most people today. Thankfully, society has moved on.

              Others were keen to make clear that their gender has nothing to do with their sexuality, with gendered feelings tending to develop a lot earlier in life than sexual ones. Trans people have the same variety of sexual orientations as anybody else. Not one person could relate the claims that they had changed their gender in order to ‘become straight’, with some pointing out that for them it had been the other way round, and others saying that they think the abuse they receive for being trans is worse than abuse they receive, or have received in the past, for being gay or lesbian.

              Finally, almost every trans person who contributed to this article said something along the lines of “I just want to be left alone.”

              “I just want to live quietly and with dignity”, said one woman. “If you speak to me you’ll see I’m not some curiosity, but a fully rounded person with interests that are probably the same as yours.”

              “We don’t want to take away anyone’s rights. We just want to get on with our lives,” said a non-binary contributor, adding in jest, “We’re just like you are, only a bit cooler.”

                  Enjoyed that?  Why not buy us a coffee?
              Tags: TransAwarenessDay
              Previous Post

              Runrig – an enduring legacy

              Next Post

              Hunt the Gowk Day

              Jennie Kermode

              Jennie Kermode

              Jennie Kermode is an author and journalist based in Paisley who specialises in LGBTQ issues and film. Her work has appeared in the likes of New Internationalist, the New Statesman and the Independent, she is a commissioning editor at Eye For Film and her most recent book is Growing Older as a Trans and/or Non-Binary Person.

              Related Posts

              LGBT equality
              LGBTQ+

              UN representative “deeply concerned” over issues facing LGBT people in the UK

              byJennie Kermode
              22 May 2023
              USA LGBTQ+ rights
              LGBTQ+

              LGBTQ+ people’s fears grow as Kemi Badenoch meets Ron DeSantis

              byJennie Kermode
              4 May 2023
              Intimidation
              Discrimination

              The Department for Work and Pensions’ history of intimidation tactics

              byFiona Robertson
              26 April 2023
              Beltane The Pagan Festival
              Culture

              A new vision of fertility: Scotland’s asexual May Queen

              byJennie Kermode
              24 April 2023
              Equality, respect, dignity for all
              Rights and Freedoms

              Why is Scotland still failing intersex/VSC children?

              byJennie Kermode
              20 April 2023
              Next Post
              April Food's Day cartoon

              Hunt the Gowk Day

              PLEASE SUPPORT OUR CROWDFUNDER

              Subscribe to our newsletters
              CHOOSE YOUR NEWS
              Follow us on social media
              CHOOSE YOUR PLATFORMS
              Download our app
              ALL OF BYLINES IN ONE PLACE
              Subscribe to our gazette
              CONTRIBUTE TO OUR SUSTAINABILITY
              Make a monthly or one-off donation
              DONATE NOW
              Help us with our hosting costs
              SIGN UP TO SITEGROUND
              We are always looking for citizen journalists
              WRITE FOR US
              Volunteer as an editor, in a technical role, or on social media
              VOLUNTEER FOR US
              Something else?
              GET IN TOUCH
              Previous slide
              Next slide

              LATEST

              Go Dharmic charity with Martin Dover

              Putting compassion into action – Coronation Champion Award winner Martin Dover leads the way.

              28 May 2023
              UK voting system First-past-the-post

              Why is the UK still locked into an obsolete political system?

              27 May 2023
              Police Investigation

              There’s been a murder

              26 May 2023
              Brexit impact illustration

              Brexit Stock Take

              24 May 2023

              MOST READ

              UK voting system First-past-the-post

              Why is the UK still locked into an obsolete political system?

              27 May 2023
              Brexit impact illustration

              Brexit Stock Take

              24 May 2023
              King Charles Coronation and the United Kingdom Flag

              Coronation Chickens … coming home to roost

              29 April 2023
              Police Investigation

              There’s been a murder

              26 May 2023

              BROWSE BY TAGS

              Brexit Christmas ClimateChange Covid Covid19 Culture Defence Democracy Devolution election FishFarms Glasgow Halloween health History Holyrood independence IndyRef2 Johnson Journalism Labour LGBT+ Liz Truss Monarchy NATO NHS Nicola Sturgeon politics Poverty Pro-EU Public Health Putin Russia Sars-CoV-2 Scotland Security and Defence shipbuilding SNP Sunak Tories Tourism Twitter Ukraine UK Supreme Court War in Ukraine
              Bylines Scotland

              We are a not-for-profit citizen journalism publication. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in Scotland and beyond.

              Bylines Scotland is a trading brand of Bylines Network Limited, which is a partner organisation to Byline Times.

              Learn more about us

              No Result
              View All Result
              • Network
              • About
              • Authors
              • Contact
              • Donate
              • Privacy

              © 2023 Bylines Scotland. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

              No Result
              View All Result
              • Home
              • News
                • Scotland
                • World
              • Politics
                • Council Areas
                • Europe
                • Holyrood
                • Rest of UK
                • Westminster
              • Business
                • Fishing
                • Trade
                • Transport
              • Health
              • Environment
                • Climate Change
              • Opinion
              • Donate
              • Newsletter sign up
              CROWDFUNDER

              © 2023 Bylines Scotland. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

              Welcome Back!

              Login to your account below

              Forgotten Password?

              Retrieve your password

              Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

              Log In