Experienced sexual violence therapist Sam Hope examines how the UK is creating a safeguarding problem of massive proportions, and reminds us one of Epstein’s first whistleblowers was a trans girl.

Content warning for discussion of childhood sexual abuse, violence and grooming

In 2019 a research study in the US of high school students showed that trans teens are more at risk of sexual assault than their cis counterparts. Trans girls specifically were a staggering 149% more likely to be sexually assaulted in schools that excluded them from girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms than in inclusive schools. Another study showed there was no increased risk to women when trans women were accommodated. The fear-mongering rhetoric distracts us from the facts: trans girls are not a risk, they are at risk.

In the aftermath of Girlguiding UK (GG)’s decision to exclude trans girls, I noted a rush to empathy, but oddly not with trans girls at all, but for the “poor” organisation that was torn between “both sides” in an ugly culture war between the acknowledged unreasonable forces of the Gender Critical Ideology Movement (GCIM) who are trying to litigate for the elimination of trans rights, and the “haters” and “demanders” who were “unfairly” expecting GG to not contribute to the growing safeguarding issue trans girls are facing in the UK.

We have seen this hand-wringing time and again over the last decade from many people who would consider themselves opposed to “gender critical” ideology. They disagree in abstract with the extremity of their exclusionary demands, but quickly their minds move on from the safety and wellbeing of trans girls and women to the discomfort and difficulty of being “caught in the middle” of a culture war. It’s a move that takes our focus off those being injured.

Let’s talk about Jeffrey Epstein

In fact, let’s talk about Ava Cordero, a trans woman who was among the first people to accuse Epstein. Her transness was, of course, used against her, to undermine her case in the public imagination.

What magic trick does a culture perform to seed the public imagination with the idea that some of our most vulnerable girls are the ones we shouldn’t care about, should in fact sexualise, adultify, and even cast as dangerous, without any evidence or reason for doing so?

A few years ago, a chilling social media post did the rounds. A powerful “gender critical” spokesperson shared a picture of a trans girl, a minor, being interviewed by the press. She pointed out what was clearly just a fold in the girl’s skirt as her “visible penis” and made some very nasty insinuations about this young person’s motivations for being trans based on the “evidence” of what any reasonable person would have seen as just fabric.

I don’t see these same people commenting on the actual or imagined penises of underage boys. I doubt they’d get away with it, but this commentary was par for the course for trans girls. I don’t see the sexualisation-of-identity happening to boys in this same way. In other words, trans girls are not treated in anything like the same ways as boys. Despite how clinicians long ago debunked the idea that trans identities are a sexual fetish, the sexualisation of trans girls’ identities has been such a strong theme sewn through popular culture and re-enforced by the GCIM that it feels real to people.

I was 15 years old when family film Crocodile Dundee taught me in a now (to some) infamous scene that it’s funny to sexually assault a trans woman by publicly grabbing her genitals and she’ll probably enjoy it. Psycho and Silence of the Lambs taught me to equate trans-coded characters with threat. This is transmisogyny—the sexualisation and objectification of women’s identities in general leads to this bizarre imagining that an assigned male person’s femininity cannot be anything other than sexually motivated. It doesn’t matter how many times this idea is clinically debunked, it endures in people’s bizarre, oversexualised and often sadistic fantasies towards trans girls and women.

The level of dehumanisation makes it hard to get people to imagine the possibility of a trans girl as vulnerable and in need of our empathy and care.

We are collectively grooming trans girls into a horrific place in society

Right this second, multiple trans girls are online being told, often by women, that they aren’t girls, that being trans isn’t real, they don’t deserve the safety of women’s spaces and that their identities are a sexual fetish. In the absence of safely available information about their identities (thanks Labour), some will be convinced by this, despite the clinical evidence that it is simply not true. This makes them exceptionally vulnerable to being groomed by predators who are more than happy to help them “explore” their supposed fetish. I have seen the horrific aftermaths of this grooming and sexual exploitation of the young people nobody seems to care about. There are plenty of Epsteins happy to have such vulnerable girls under their power.

Here are the risk factors: isolated kids, already not being believed and often seen as “attention seeking” and with strained family relationships, adultified, imagined as inherently sexual and therefore impossible to imagine as vulnerable, innocent or worthy of protection, unable to seek services for girls because they are seen as a safeguarding “threat” instead of in need, and groomed by too many people to see themselves as sexual, fetishistic, dangerous, and in no way deserving of the safety and protection afforded cis women, in no way possible to conceive of as victims.

This is a dangerous social position to put any young person into.

A few years back, I helped organise a public listening event, where trans women and femmes were able to speak in conversation about their own experiences in front of an audience of cis women. It was a powerful happening. I’ll never forget one young woman making an impassioned description of what it was like to grow up believing her identity was not real but a sexual fetish—the damage that had done to her safety and wellbeing.

Trans girls are real and at risk

In 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed that transness isn’t a mental illness, that trans people are not deluded. Recent research from the Trevor Project confirms the WHO’s other findings: trans mental health is contingent on social acceptance. The project found affirming trans teens’ identities makes them 31% less likely to attempt suicide.

We know being trans isn’t a sexual fetish (not that we should be equating sexual fetishes with inappropriateness or criminality anyway). No study has shown any prevalence of sexually offending behaviour among trans women over and above, say, cisgender lesbians.

There are, alas, sexual predators in every female population on earth; I’ve worked with and known many victims of violent sexual assault by cis women. A statistically insignificant handful of offenders among the estimated quarter to half a million UK trans population is to be expected, but disproportionate media attention on each case exaggerates the associations in people’s minds, draws people to fantasise trans people as prone to sexual offending. These associations are distorted and abhorrent as I explore here.

Given trans women have always existed and have always needed inclusion, what gametes a person possesses should not supersede the safety, social wellbeing and measurable safeguarding criteria for a vulnerable population group. There are plenty of ways to create safety for young people without segregation, and they’re required because, in my experience, so much peer-to-peer sexual abuse is committed by cis girls against other cis girls. Thinking solely about gender ignores the ways certain groups face extra safeguarding risks—according to NSPCC, LGBTQ+ children and young people are one of these vulnerable groups.

Time to focus our care

Telling young girls harmful and untrue things about their identity goes way beyond free speech. The breathtaking inability of our culture to care about the safety and wellbeing of trans girls and women is, I believe, a reflection of the overarching misogyny of our society. Perhaps a chosen few women get to be protected, but I’m not seeing violence against women and girls being addressed in any meaningful way in this anti-trans and anti-migrant rhetoric, while this exclusion serves to subjugate a whole group of girls and women, making them ripe for exploitation.

Too many people are happy to actively sexualise and endanger trans girls, and many of the people doing this, talking creepily about the body parts of minors and grooming other adults into sexualising them and overlooking their vulnerability, are people ironically claiming to be in favour of the safety of women and children. Meanwhile, others stand by and talk about how difficult it must be for Girlguiding UK right now, and concern for these excluded girls’ safety gets forgotten.

Others still, the Epsteins of this world, who use illegal acts as a currency of power and influence, reap the benefits of easier access to vulnerable minors nobody is protecting or listening to.

Trans girls, and women, deserve better of us. This is not about being angry for its own sake but as an impetus to care and to listen to what they are telling us.

Sam Hope is a trans non-binary, queer, disabled writer, trainer and therapist, with a background working in survivor services, including trans inclusive women’s services.