Content warning: This story contains implications of suicide.
We speak every day. She’ll record me a video message, telling me what she’s been up to, how she’s feeling. Normally, she’s laughing. Or showing me the color of Edinburgh’s sky, the birds that flock around her window. April 16th was different. She messaged: “I am just so tired of having to prove that I exist.”
She exists. She, like all trans people, has always existed. She is my dad. And she’s the strongest, most wonderful woman that I know.
But the UK's Supreme Court—which ruled on Wednesday that the legal definition of a woman is rooted in biological sex and does not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates—would disagree. “As far as the UK’s Equality Act is concerned,” Dad said that morning, "I am a man.”
People find it odd that I call my dad "Dad" but also use the female pronouns. I don’t. It makes sense to us, to our family, to our lives.
She transitioned when I was 19 years old, in 2005, when the Gender Recognition Act made it possible for transgender people to change their legal gender in the UK. She had been wearing women’s clothing long before then, I’d come home to find her in velvet skirts, jade earrings hanging from her lobes.
I’ve been calling her "dad" all my life, it’s her relation to me. But it doesn’t make her any less of a woman. And neither does this ruling. Judges, who refused to hear from trans people themselves, do not know an individual's identity, who they are, better than trans people themselves, than their loved ones who spend time with them each day.
I look at my dad and I see her for who she is: a vibrant, beautiful, wise woman. The first person I turn to for guidance, someone who I laugh with every single day. If you met her, you’d agree just how lucky I am to have her in my life—she is so full of joy. She’s so alive.
Yet, if she were forced to live as a man, I don’t think she would be here today.
Looking back on my childhood, I can recognize the conflict that my dad was in. We were so happy, she hid her inner turmoil well. But, make no mistake, it was turmoil. Could she keep living this way? In a body that did not fit? Could she survive?
I have memories of friends of hers, coming to our house, or names that floated in the air. People that did not survive. People who wanted to live, who were loved, but who could not keep breathing in the body they were forced to exist in. They are sadly not alone: a survey carried out by Pace, a mental health charity for LGBTQ+ youth, found that 48 percent of trans people under 26 said they had attempted suicide. Another study, carried out by a charity called Just Like Us in 2023, found that 88 percent of trans people had experienced suicidal thoughts.
One of Dad’s friends once said to her: “Eventually, you have to choose between living as a woman or dying as a man.” This friend, this wonderful woman, drank herself to death.
It can be incredibly hard to exist when, at every turn, you’re being told you’re not who you feel on the inside. That no, you don’t belong in the women’s bathroom, you have to go and pee with men, align yourself with the gender that absolutely does not fit who you are, or how you feel. This disjointed dysphoria that clouds how you see, and feel about yourself.
This is why the ruling has left me very, very afraid. This decision is going to legitimize hatred. Hatred that trans people may already feel for themselves, pushing them further into shame and into the closet. It will also give power to transphobic bigots. Hate crimes against the transgender community are already at an all-time high.
I know this community is strong, that they, along with their allies, have each other’s backs. That together we will find a way through. We will protect each other. But still, this decision is going to cause so much damage. It will kill people. And yet, I’m looking at pictures of women, outside the courtrooms, celebrating. They think this is a victory for (cis) women. But it’s absolutely not. This decision is going to have a huge impact on everyone’s lives, not just those within the trans community.
Defining women by biological sex means reducing women down to chromosomes—pieces of DNA you can't see without genetic testing. This new ruling therefore opens the doors for people to discriminate against those who don't look the way they think a woman "should" look, because you can't actually see XX chromosomes by looking at a person. At the end of the day, it's going to push heteronormative beauty standards, and force everyone to fall in line in order to be deemed worthy, and have access to safety.
Some women view this ruling as a victory for our rights because they're afraid. Violence against women and girls is an emergency in the UK; 2 million women are estimated to be victims of violence each year. But this violence isn't perpetrated by trans people (estimated to make up somewhere between 0.2 and 0.7 percent of the population in the UK), it's perpetrated by cis men, and most often by partners or former partners. Trans people may dominate headlines and governmental debates, but they're being used as pawns in a power ploy to distract from the ongoing failings of this epidemic. It's easier to blame an already marginalized group than it is to put the much-needed funding back into domestic abuse services or address the radicalization of young men online.
On the 16th, when I read the news, I flung my phone across the room. I decided that I wasn’t going to engage or read anything. It made me too sad, too angry, too afraid. Today I don’t feel this way.
Yes, this decision is going to amplify the voices of bigots, but that just means we have to be louder and bolder with our voices, our love. Because this ruling, and the people celebrating it, do not represent the majority of the country. In fact, a YouGov poll saw concerns about trans people ranking last in a list of 16 issues that the UK public felt most strongly about, with just 2 percent of the general public identifying trans people as their top concern. What the majority of us want to see action on is what we’ve always wanted to see action on: health, education, security, and housing. We can’t let the government successfully use trans people as a smokescreen for this.
There’s been an outpouring of solidarity on social media for the trans community, and we need to keep that going. Not just online, but off. Those of us who aren't in the community must keep showing up and shouting that trans women are women, and they always have been. This ruling does not change that.
I'll also be holding close the other words my dad said to me after the ruling: “It’s important to remember that love is stronger than hatred, and kindness is stronger than fear.” It's scary...but together, we stand strong.
Catriona Innes is the Commissioning Director at Cosmopolitan UK. You can follow her on Instagram. She writes about grief on her Substack, Crocuses In The Snow. Her dad, Jo Clifford, writes on her Substack, The Light Inside.
Need support? The Trans Lifeline is available by calling 877-565-8860 in the U.S. It is run by the trans community, helping to connect peers to community support and resources. It is completely divested from police.
Catriona Innes is Cosmopolitan UK’s multiple award-winning Commissioning Editor, who has won BSME awards both for her longform investigative journalism as well as for leading the Cosmopolitan features department. Alongside commissioning and editing the features section, both online and in print, Catriona regularly writes her own hard-hitting investigations spending months researching some of the most pressing issues affecting young women today.
She has spent time undercover with specialist police forces, domestic abuse social workers and even Playboy Bunnies to create articles that take readers to the heart of the story. Catriona is also a published author, poet and volunteers with a number of organisations that directly help the homeless community of London. She’s often found challenging her weak ankles in towering heels through the streets of Soho. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
