This month, updated NHS England guidance confirmed that single-sex wards, toilets and changing rooms in England hospitals must now be used in line with “biological sex,” meaning that trans women cannot access women’s facilities in hospitals, nor can trans men use men’s facilities. (“Biological sex,” here, refers to sex assigned at birth; U.K. law does not recognize that biological sex can be changed.) This is part of a chain of policies enacted after the 2025 U.K. Supreme Court judgment that decided that the words “woman” and “man” in the 2010 Equality Act refer to an individual’s assigned sex at birth. 
 

Various institutions in the U.K., from the British Transport Police to the notorious Equality and Human Rights Commission, have interpreted this specific judgment as a wider confirmation that trans people should legally be considered their assigned sex at birth, and have changed their policies accordingly. The anti-trans movement have proclaimed this a triumph of “reality” over delusion. This is, of course, a smokescreen—trans people are real, and trying to sort people by assigned sex is unworkable. But these policies are a very effective way to excuse deliberate mistreatment as common sense.
 

I am part of the U.K.’s small cluster of working trans journalists. I have seen how inhospitable the U.K. press is for trans people; it is part of the reason that I often write for publications in North America. Over the course of my career, I have grown irritable about how some non-British people treat the escalating anti-trans movement in the U.K. Things are bad here, and erratically so, which can be destabilizing in itself. We lack resources. Some of us are leaving, or making plans to leave. There is a tendency for Americans in particular to act like we are all already dead or recloseted, in a way that disregards the liveliness of U.K. trans culture and the sizable public opposition to governmental transphobia (London Trans Pride is said to be the biggest trans Pride event in the world, not that you’d know it from the newspapers here). But escalating anti-trans policies don’t stop trans life happening; they don’t make it impossible. What they do is make it precarious. Pain and destabilization come for more of us, and they get harder to avoid.

The problem is that the only thing standing between any of us and the violent revocation of our dignity is, frankly, luck. 
 

I have a fair amount of autonomy, right now, as a trans adult in the U.K. I’ve secured decently robust healthcare through a mixture of accessing private care and waiting an inhumanly long time (my first appointment took five years to get) for NHS care. My employer is actively pro-trans, and I have a good support network. There are lots of trans people in my city, and some of us are thriving. We’re all aware that we have been stripped of various kinds of gendered legitimacy by the courts, but most of us don’t have to interact with the letter of the law too often. The problem is that the only thing standing between any of us and the violent revocation of our dignity is, frankly, luck. 
 

Being trans in the U.K. means constantly being aware of the chance encounters that could, temporarily or permanently, ruin your life. Don’t get into a car accident or develop a condition that requires hospital stays. Don’t become financially dependent on an employer that won’t let you use the bathroom. Don’t encounter a transphobic customer at work who becomes hell-bent on getting you fired. Make sure you pick the right partners, friends and housemates, so you don’t get trapped in a spiral of abuse, gain a reputation as unsympathetic or unstable and become dangerously isolated. Keep a lid on the anger and depression so you can retain your support network and your employability. And definitely don’t find yourself interfacing with an institution that is shaped by anti-trans governmental policy and has near-complete power over you, such as a prison, psych ward or school.
 

Experiencing nearly a decade of everyday, low-level transphobia has made me reactive and fiercely protective of my own dignity. I do not like thinking about being dependent on people and institutions who seek to hurt and demean me. It’s a precarious reality I share with other trans and non-binary people: we’re all on a thin bridge, hoping a gust of wind doesn’t throw us into the pit of transphobic treatment, where we’re villainized, dehumanized. Most of us take a fall into the pit every so often, then we climb out. Some of us, however, get trapped there by stigma or state control. Black and brown trans women, and trans people who are incarcerated, disabled or poor; trans youth and people experiencing domestic violence—all are particularly vulnerable to cycles of mistreatment. Constant discrimination changes you. It can kill you. It can make you feel like you will never be a full person again. All transphobic practices can cast you into the pit, but official policy can tell you that you belong there. 
 

Anti-trans policies, in most cases, formalize violations that were already informally happening. They do not necessarily enact a dramatic material change—there will still be grey areas, confusion and individual actors trying to do their best within the law. But every official policy change is a narrative victory, and one that seeks to make harm against us invisible. Even as state actors in the U.K. pay lip service to caring about everyone’s needs, they are trying to entrench the acceptability of outing, forced disclosure, harassment and misgendering as acceptable. Reacting appropriately to escalations in anti-trans state action across the globe requires more than cataloguing specific policies and grieving their impact on trans people. It requires a constant, multi-pronged fight against the imposition of a violently anti-trans normality. We cannot let this be normal, anywhere, for anyone.