Standing firm against transphobia: CWU LGBT Conference 2019

Equalities February 13 2019

A major new drive to support trans rights and to raise awareness of trans issues amongst the wider CWU membership began in earnest at last week’s CWU’s 2019 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Conference.

Amid heightened concern at a rising tide of hostility towards one of the LGBT community’s most embattled groups, delegates in Liverpool delivered a resounding message of support to trans people who have faced an exponential upsurge in both physical and verbal attacks following the launch of a Government’s consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act of 2014.

Delegate unanimously passed a motion committing the LGBT Advisory Committee (LGBTAC) to work with the National Executive Council to ensure the union adopts a more prominent role in supporting transgender right just minutes after hearing a searingly frank personal account of the emotional roller-coaster ride of transitioning by guest speaker Emma Preston, author of Being Transgender

Proposing the motion, Des Gibbons of Nottingham & District Amal Branch explained: “2018 saw an unprecedented rise in transphobia, creating a hostile environment for the transgender community, and a large part of this was fuelled by misconceptions arising out of the GRA consultation. Several small but vociferous groups have formed with an anti-trans message – and one such group even disrupted the 2018 London Pride event.

“Even before this current escalation in transphobia, Stonewall reported in 2017 about the huge level of abuse that trans people face in the UK. In the previous year two in five transgender people had a crime committed against them, and two in five young trans people had attempted suicide. One in eight trans people had been physically attacked by colleagues or customers at their place of work. One can hardly dare to think what the statistics will be in 2018.”

Tara Morgan of Greater Manchester Branch continued: “I don’t call myself a trans woman. I just call myself a woman because I should have been born a woman – I was born with a deformity and I had to have some surgery, but that seems to offend a lot of people.

“The last year has been absolutely horrendous. We’ve had 369 trans women murdered, and three weeks ago a friend of mine committed suicide because of all this shit. We’ve been accused of being everything from child molesters to god knows what else – but if you look at the stats, trans people are the most passive community. Women are in more danger from other other women, and the statistics prove that.

“The events at London Pride were really shocking to a lot of my lesbian friends and, in response, Manchester Lesbians organised themselves at Manchester Pride and what they did was really moving: At the front of the march there was this huge banner reading ‘Manchester Lesbians – Stand By Your Trans’. We’re not having people coming to Manchester trying to divide our community.”

Maria Exall of Greater London Combined added: “It’s important we’re clear sighted about this as LGBT-plus and equality activists – because we’ve always stood for there being no ‘hierarchy of oppression’.

“As someone who is a lesbian I was upset there were lesbian activists disrupting the Pride march in London in the name of lesbian rights, when actually they were just being anti-trans.”

Sarah Pitt of Eastern No.4 agreed: “They call themselves radical, but it’s not radical to be phobic – it’s fascist. These people should be ashamed of themselves and we should disassociate ourselves from them in whatever way we can.

“I’m lucky because I come from a delivery officer where we have three people who are transitioning – two much more advanced than myself who are fully women now – but there are lots of other places where people are no their own, don’t know what to do and the thoughts come all the time about suicide.

“So please, we need education for our members, and especially for our reps. CWU reps could be our trans people’s best friends – our biggest support.”

The theme of trans-awareness training had earlier been raised by CWU national officer for equal opportunities, education and training, Trish Lavelle, in her opening address to Conference.

Revealing that her department was already committed to “working with the LGBT Advisory Committee to produce a workplace negotiators’ guide on trans issues, which will clearly explain the issues that can arise in the workplace,” Trish added: “This will be in addition to the trans awareness course that has been designed.”

LGBT Conference delegates, however, resolved that even more was required, unanimously passing a motion calling for the development of a comprehensive campaigning strategy to support trans rights, including training for union activists, and a trans awareness programme for rolling out in all 10 of the union’s regions.

Proposing that motion, which delegates subsequently voted to forward to April’s CWU General Conference, Jasmin Parsons of Greater London Combined recounted how her own experiences had convinced her of the need for taboos surrounding transgender to be broken.

“A lot of myth and a lot of mystery still surrounds trans people, whether they are trangendering from male to female or female to male – and the concept (behind the motion) is that the membership needs to be made more aware. We need posters and things like that, and safe places for people to talk so they can better understand where we come from.

“When I changed over I was in an office where no-one was (trans) aware. Because people were walking on eggshells I had to tell them to stop, because they were making me nervous. I asked them to just be themselves, and for us to all carry on working as we had and for us all to just move on  – and that helped remove a lot of the tension.

“The important thing here is that people have their own ideologies. I lost my son for over five years because he immediately talked to someone else who filled his head with a load of crap and instead of talking to me, and listening to the facts, he chose that line.”

 

Mainstreaming LGBT issues through Redesign

Another big talking point at the LGBT Conference were changes being made to the union’s existing equalities structures under the on-going CWU Redesign initiative.

Setting out the rationale for the changes in both his keynote address and an innovative ‘panel’ session where questions from the floor were answered direct by the leadership, general secretary Dave Ward insisted the fundamental driver of Redesign was the need to create the most effective possible campaigning organisation to challenge a “balance of forces” that is increasingly stacked in favour of the rich and powerful and against the interests of ordinary working people.

“It’s time for everyone in this union to recognise the reality of the forces we are up against, and that’s why it’s absolutely crucial we bring the various elements of the union and the movement together and that we get behind the Labour Party’s agenda for major change in this country,” stressed Dave.

Pointing out that the political right is “on the march across the whole of the globe”, Dave cited both the horrific attacks on gay men in Chechnya and the upsurge in open hate crime against trans people in the UK as reasons “why it is our job to unite people, bring people together and to make sure that our values are asserted in the workplace and in wider society.”

He continued: “When you hear us talking about ‘mainstreaming’ equality it isn’t to walk away from equality – but to take those debates right to the heart of the workplace, something which has never really been done properly in our union before.”

The importance of ‘mainstreaming’ equality was further developed by NEC member Steve Halliwell in a passionate speech opposing a motion that would have challenged the landmark decision of November’s Special Redesign Conference to replace the four separate Equalities conferences (Women, Black Workers, LGBT and Disability with a whole day devoted to equality issues at CWU Annual Conference – had it not been voted down by a majority of delegates

“This is elevating the importance of equality and making it mainstream,” he insisted.

Responding to concerns expressed in the Panel Session that equalities issues risked being squeezed out of General Conference on account of packed industrial agendas, Trish Lavelle stressed the Equalities day will be fully “ring-fenced and protected”.

 

Busy agenda for the year ahead

In addition to the motion on transgender awareness that LGBT Conference delegates voted to send to CWU General Conference, two further motions were selected for forwarding for debate in Bournemouth in April.

One was an LGBTAC motion demanding that the proposed collective defined contribution (CDC) pension currently in development at Royal Mail, or any variant thereof, fully honours the ‘expression of wishes’ of deceased pensioners who specified their pension rights should transfer to a same sex partner. That motion will now be included in the Postal Conference agenda.

General Conference, meanwhile, has been forwarded an LGBTC motion seeking an end to the NHS postcode lottery which means PrEp – a drug that helps prevent HIV transmission – is not universally available across the UK.

Other motions passed by LGBT Conference delegates included:

• A South West Regional Equality Committee motion committing the LGBTAC to work with the NEC to provide a comprehensive report back on the union’s efforts to get ‘gay conversion therapy’ outlawed in the UK
• An LGBTAC motion calling for the huge increase in CWU involvement in Pride events across the country in recent years to be maintained and built upon post-Redesign.