Trans Awareness Week (13–19 November 2024) is a time to take action and advocate for the trans community. As the week comes to a close it's important to remember that the trans community needs allyship throughout the year However, it can be difficult to know where to start. We spoke to Siani, a third year Medicine student and co-founder of GKT LGBT society about her experience being an ally to the trans community during her time at King’s.
How are you an ally?
Firstly, I make an effort to respect people’s pronouns and introduce myself with my pronouns. I educate myself on different gender identities and experiences, especially the intersectionality of gender and other identities, like race. Intersectionality helps you to understand that there's a massive breadth of trans experience. Some people just understand it one way, but understanding of gender massively varies between cultures.
It’s also vital to challenge transphobic rhetoric as an ally. In my second year, I disagreed with something a fellow student said about trans people in class. As soon as I heard it, I challenged this ideology by raising it with faculty. We tried to brainstorm ways that we could make our curriculum more inclusive and that led to us establishing a reverse mentoring scheme, which we’ve just started. It’s where students mentor members of faculty about LGBT+ identities to challenge transphobia in different healthcare settings, which has a direct impact on transgender people.
Why is being a trans ally important?
Because you should care about other people. Trans people are certainly not the majority, so they need allies on their side to support them. I think it helps you understand your own gender identity, freeing yourself from restrictive ways of thinking about masculinity and femininity.
Transphobia also affects cisgender people. A lot of people are intersex and they just don't realise. If people aren’t allies and allow transphobic rhetoric, it means that intersex people are also discriminated against. Not to mention people who don’t adhere to the gender binary, like butch women or men who aren’t super masculine. It’s not just trans people who are affected by rigid gender norms perpetuated by transphobia.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a better ally?
Reading perspectives from trans people. You should actually make an attempt to like listen to trans people themselves instead of people talking about them. That’s how you find out what being trans is like and how you start seeing trans people as human, instead of just a label. Watching trans creators online or reading books written by trans people would be a great place to start.
Apart from educating yourself, challenge transphobia in your daily setting. As a cisgender person, you’re in a place of privilege to be able to protect trans people from attacks on their identity, which can feel really personal.