Trans youth fight back: an interview with Trans Kids Deserve Better

rs21 members Felix Moore and Lisa Leak interview participants in the youth activist group, on their actions, strategy and the current terrain of struggle for trans liberation.

On 29 June 2024, a group of young trans activists aged between 15 and 17 scaled NHS England’s Wellington House building in London, calling for ‘access to gender-affirming healthcare for trans children and young people, protection from discrimination and disrespect in their daily lives and the right to be heard in all decisions that affect them.’ 

Their mostly spontaneous action led to an occupation lasting four days that received a groundswell of support from queer people across the country, culminating in a triumphant rally where the occupiers climbed down from the ledge into a cheering crowd. 

These young activists have formed an action group, Trans Kids Deserve Better (TKDB), which is run and made up entirely of trans people under the age of eighteen. In August, TKDB carried out a similar week-long occupation of the Department of Education (DoE), protesting the DoE’s official guidance that enables the bullying of trans children in schools. In October they spectacularly sabotaged a conference held by anti-trans hate group the LGB Alliance, releasing thousands of live crickets into the astonished audience and causing several later talks to be postponed or cancelled. 

To trans adults in Britain, it is no surprise that this extraordinary campaign has largely elicited silence from the British mainstream media. Throughout the explosion in organised transphobic agitation in Britain in recent years, British media outlets across the mainstream political spectrum have outright denied the existence of trans young people, instead constructing a narrative of helpless children being brain-washed by a sinister “trans lobby”. The remarkable reality of a group of trans young people formulating their own political demands, and pushing these forward in an ambitious set of actions, is something that, in the words of one interviewee, ‘doesn’t fit the narrative.’

rs21 is proud to use our platform and resources to publish and circulate the political insights of this group of young trans activists. This interview was conducted in August during the occupation of the Department of Education. It is a polyvocal interview in which a group of TKDB activists speak to two visiting rs21 members, ranging across various topics. We hope that readers will learn as much from the conversation as we did. 

Felix – rs21: I wanted to start with a bit about how the group came to be. How did you guys meet? How did it get started? 

Grin (he/him): The full start was me spending about 15 minutes reading up on the Cass Review and getting so angry I found a friend who was also trans and said, we’ve got to do a banner drop on NHS England. 

Joker (he/they): I was already very angry at the state of the world, and I’m like, oh my god, this is fate. Everyone had just expected [the banner drop from the NHS England building] would be a couple of hours and they’d be gone. And when it got to the point where it was looking like they were going to stay overnight, on a very spontaneous whim, I joined them. And from there, as more and more joined, it became an occupation for four days. 

Grin: After that, we got a hell of a lot of other trans youth signing up.

Felix: How would you describe the current situation of being a young trans person in Britain? 

Robin: It’s really dire. 

Chalky (they/them): Being a trans kid in the current state of our rights is a literal nightmare. It’s terrifying to exist as trans in most spaces that I’m a part of. 

Grin: It’s just pretty grim to watch everything that you thought could never fail, the courts and the politics and the media, fail when it comes to trans youth. There are so many safety mechanisms that are supposed to exist to stop emergency powers being used for things that aren’t emergencies, and to protect us from bullying in our schools. But all of those have either broken down or they’ve been deliberately put to the side just for us. 

Ace (ze/zir): I don’t know what to say that hasn’t already been said. It is terrifying. It’s very much life and death, you know. 

Grin: I also find it really patronising. I’m 17 years old. I started my UCAS application yesterday. I’m applying to universities. I’m old enough to make all of these decisions that will permanently affect my life, but I’m not allowed to consent to my own healthcare or decide for myself who I am or what my name is. 

Felix: Why do you think that trans youth are so much of the focus of the public and political discourse about trans people? 

Robin: I think a lot of it ties into figuring out just basically whichever group they can oppress and see it as a weapon that they can use politically, instigating a lot of fear around ‘they’re coming for our children’. We’ve seen it the exact same argument, obviously used against queer people in the past, but also we see it being used against migrants and asylum seekers. Trans youth seem like a very easy target. 

Grin: I think there’s also an element of wider attacks on bodily autonomy. It’s the exact same principles that protect our bodily autonomy as protect the bodily autonomy of cis women. It’s the exact same Gillick competence that protected our right to access gender affirming healthcare as young people, that protects the rights of cis women to access contraceptives and abortions. 

Ace: We always hear that ‘the children are our future.’ This turns us into a passive case. There’s something Angela Carter said, ‘To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case.’ That’s because we are seen as things to be protected, we’re not seen as people. And so when we try and make decisions about ourselves, we can’t possibly be taken seriously, because this isn’t something that adults have decided for us. 

Felix: Do you think the educational environment has changed since the government released its guidance on gender diverse young people in schools?

Grin: I came out in school five years ago. And my brother, who’s four years younger than me, came out a year ago, so we came out four-ish years apart. The difference in treatment between me and him is insane. We have the same parents, we go to the same school with pretty much the same teachers. The only thing that’s different is the political climate, and the difference in treatment that we’ve experienced is massive. When I came out, it was: Sure, cool. We’ll help you tell your classmates, we’ll send an email around, nobody cares. But the treatment for him at the same age, in the same place, same teachers, same parents, four or five years later, is that he gets questioned on everything. When I went on a school trip at that age, it was: okay, chill. What do you want to do? When he did it, it was: We have to contact all of the parents who are going to be anywhere near you, we have to out you to all of your classmates, to all of your classmates’ parents, to ask them if their child has permission to be in the proximity of a trans person while they’re sleeping. It’s been four years’ difference. The political climate has completely transformed how we get treated in schools. It makes me really, really angry. 

Chalky: Me and Grin go to the same school. And I’ve definitely noticed how things have changed. In my early couple years, I didn’t really know, but I started to come out to a few close friends and like one teacher, and then gradually that circle expanded, and as that circle expanded, so did the hate. The second time I tried to come out to a teacher, it ended up in me being outed to my mum, and also my head of year, deputy head of year, and just lots of people. And that was the first time that I felt like I couldn’t trust teachers. That was just the start of my issues. I tried to come out to another teacher. They downright refused. One teacher said that she wasn’t allowed to call me by my chosen name. Especially in the past year, things have been awful. I have had horrific rumours spread about me, and I have been bullied, and so have my friends and I’m honestly just shocked at how bad the schools are at protecting us.

From anger to action

Lisa – rs21: What if any prior organising were you involved in before Trans Kids Deserve Better, whether trans organising or anything else? 

Ace: Trans Kids Deserve Better is the first kind of activism I’ve ever been involved in. But I’ve always been interested in speaking up for people and myself whenever I can in my own life. 

Grin: I have done a lot of climate action work in the past, and there’s a massive over representation of trans people in those spaces. In all protest spaces, there is an excessive number of trans people in things that have nothing to do with being trans, such as the climate crisis, and it just kind of made me think, trans people are not disinterested in what’s going on in the world. Trans people are just not organising as trans people. 

Lisa: How would you guys describe the political outlook of the group, and any sort of strategic outlook you have? 

Grin: I strongly believe that almost all individuals do genuinely just want to do a good thing, but that urge to do good things gets misdirected. It gets misdirected partly by this whole idea that somehow trans rights and the rights of cis women are in conflict. But I think that what needs to happen is for that trick to be shown to be a trick. And if we can show ourselves as real human beings, and that as real human beings we know what is best for us, I think that people will listen to that. I think they just need to realise that we’re people, and once they can do that, I don’t think it’ll be very difficult, because people just want to be good human beings. Nobody wants to be a dick.

 Felix: Those of you who were on your first action, could you tell us a bit about what you took away from it, and do you feel like you accomplished what you were trying to? 

Joker: It was a very important step for me. I would almost say life changing, because taking that first action has helped me realise that this is something I need to do. No one else is going to do it if we don’t. 

Grin: We developed a theory in a run up to the first action, which was that the anger that trans people feel about our treatment, especially recently, has just been stagnantly sitting there because there’s been nowhere to put it. If the thing that really, really stresses you out is the climate crisis, there are places you can go to release that energy. Same thing if the thing that really affects you is the genocide happening in Palestine. But if the thing that really affects you is trans liberation, there’s been nowhere to put that energy. So the thing that I took away from that first action is that that was absolutely correct, because the number of people- trans young people, trans adults, some cis allies as well, saying, ‘I want to give you so much of my time. I want to help you,’ because they’ve been sitting there with that anger and they’ve had nowhere to put it- that was the big thing that I took away from that first action was, we are so ready for a fight. 

Felix: Did you have much interaction with the public [on the ledge]? 

Grin: That was the other really interesting thing was that we got almost no attention from the mainstream media. We had a journalist from a massive newspaper say that if it was a protest for any other cause- the exact same protest, but for the climate crisis or for Palestine, for any other cause, they would have reported on it, but they weren’t going to, because it didn’t fit the narrative. 

Felix: That was going to be my next question, why do you think it didn’t get media attention? 

Grin: That’s exactly why, because it doesn’t fit the narrative. It doesn’t fit the narrative that they like to construct about us being passive, and infantilized, and incapable of making our own decisions. There are no adults behind this network. It is just us. We’re doing this ourselves, and it doesn’t fit in with the narrative. 

Felix: Having had that experience with the journalist on the first action, did that affect your plans for this action, or how you’re approaching things now? 

Joker: Right now our main focus is we want to just get a community going. We want to meet new people. We want to be able to build a strong community so for our next actions, we can have different outcomes and different goals. But for the current one, we want to meet more trans youth who are just as angry as us. This is a chance for more trans youth to be able to build a network. 

Grin: That realisation has meant that we’re leaning very strongly into the community elements. Occupations work really, really well for creating a strong community. We didn’t really know each other before the ledge. By the end of that action, we were a tight knit community. Which is partly why we’ve taken another occupation, because it gives us the opportunity to actually get to know each other and to spend real time together. 

Organising in schools and the Department of Education

Felix: Can you tell us about why you chose this target? 

Grin: Part of the image of being a trans person is this incredibly medicalized image. It’s this impression of being trans as a pathology. But being trans is not a medical issue. Gender affirming care can help to alleviate some of the stress, but it’s just a fact of some of our lives. And another fact of some of our lives is education. A lot of us get treated really, really badly in our schools and in our colleges, because teachers and the institutions that we go to every day just don’t know how to support us. Which means that the small minority of actually transphobic people are allowed to do their thing as much as they want to, because nobody else really knows if they’re actually supposed to stop them. It’s the Department for Education’s job to issue that guidance on how you’re supposed to support your students. Because we’re also human beings who want to be able to go to school and feel safe and feel comfortable there.

Felix: What kind of action do you want teachers and people in the education system who want to support trans kids to be taking? What do you think would be helpful? 

Grin: I co-run the Rainbow Soc at my school, and we tried really, really hard to get a trans inclusion policy in place, because teachers just didn’t know what they were doing and were getting it wrong. And we got all the way up to the principal, and it was me and the other person that runs Rainbow Soc, who had spent the last six months talking to all the trans people in the school, so many of whom had been outed and bullied and harassed. And we were having this increasingly heated argument with the principal, and I ended up saying, look, the issue at this school is that there is a culture of transphobia that’s not being challenged. And she laughed in my face. I think the thing that we would really want teachers and other people who work in schools to do as individuals is to be unapologetic in their allyship. Being hesitant and apologetic means that people feel validated to take their transphobia out on us, because they know that the teachers aren’t going to be sure of challenging that either. The fact of trans people existing is being treated as a contested ideology, and that’s what does the real damage. 

Joker: I went to a different sixth form, and when I came out I had some issues because I had been outed at home, and that meant school had to get involved. And I remember being in the office with a safeguarding lead, and he sat me down, I had just reported that it’s a transphobic environment [at home]. And the first thing he said to me was, ‘Are you just a difficult child?’ I will admit, that broke my trust in authority, because not only did he say that, I was sent back to face transphobia at home, and I generally felt like I wasn’t heard or safe anywhere. 

Felix: What would you say to trans adults who want to support trans kids, but aren’t sure how? 

Grin: Well, transkidsdeservebetter.org. 

Joker: Listen to us. A lot of the time, trans adults have good intentions and they want to try to do what’s best, but sometimes what is best for us is just letting us speak and letting us be heard. 

Grin: Show us your joy, please. It is bleak being a trans young person. It’s really hard to believe what you can be if you don’t see anyone like you, but to see trans adults being happy is something really, really special. Like, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I climbed with someone who was non-binary and they were thriving, and to see someone happy, that was something really special. Show your joy to the trans young people, because Jesus fuck they need it. 

Chalky: What I’m gonna say is, uh, give us advice and buy us stuff. Because I was so lost when I found out I was trans, and I’ve been trying to do so much research on my own, and it would be great if people who are older than me, who have done all of this shit already, could just help us out, please. 

Ace: I think that the adults are gonna need to become comfortable with doing things that make other people uncomfortable. This system is built for people who are not like us. It is built to exclude us and so to support us, you need to get comfortable with bending the system. If you’re a trans-supportive teacher, and we need you to make a stink about a transphobic student or transphobic teacher, then you go talk to the head teacher or whoever and make that stink. 

Coven (she/her): Just existing, out and proud. There is so much power in just living openly and with pride. And it makes such a big difference to a young queer person to see that, because there is so little out there for us to look up to, to think, ‘I can get to that age. I can be a trans adult one day, it doesn’t stop here’. Because when you’re young and you’re scared and you’re vulnerable, you don’t know if you’re gonna make it. And just to see trans adults living openly, it can make a really huge impact.