I read a comment the other day from a trans woman responding to the UK’s recent legal rulings, and it’s stayed with me ever since. Her tone was wry, but the message was razor-sharp: “Fine,” she said. “If the law says only ‘biological’ men and women count, then I’m biologically a woman. My hormones, my body, my paperwork – all female. I don’t know my chromosomes, and neither do most cis women. So guess what? I’m cis now. Prove I’m not.”

She listed point after point – her passport, her birth certificate, her HRT records, her Gender Recognition Certificate – all of it aligning under this absurd legal regime to make her legally indistinguishable from a cis woman. And so, she concluded, “Until it’s safe to be openly trans in the UK again, I’m cis. I dare those GERM¹ lot to prove otherwise.”

It’s darkly funny, yes – but it’s also deadly serious. This is what survival looks like when your identity is legislated out of existence. When being visible is dangerous, invisibility becomes a shield. The cruelty of the UK’s legal shift isn’t that it prevents trans people from living their lives – it’s that it pushes them into erasure, makes authenticity unsafe, forces people to disappear or lie just to stay housed and employed.

This isn’t justice. This is cowardice wrapped in policy. And the people most affected are just trying to stay alive. So if someone tells you they’re cis, maybe don’t ask questions. Maybe just believe them.

1. [GERM]: Gender-Exclusionary Reactionary Movements – a conveniently infectious acronym for the UK’s anti-trans coalition. Think TERFs, but broadened: it includes not just certain “gender critical” feminists, but also reactionary think tanks, hostile media figures, and right-wing politicians. A motley alliance of moral panic merchants, united mostly by spite and the occasional column in the Telegraph. ↩︎