For Brianna...

Some thoughts from the Brianna Ghey vigil and a message of love for the trans community...

It’s a strange sort of silence. We’re in central London, Soho, on a Saturday afternoon so, rationally, I know it can’t be silent. There will be the whoop of a hen party, the blare of a car horn… But I can’t hear anything. I can feel the hammering of my chest. The breath of those around me. 

Over the weekend, I stood shoulder to shoulder with my best friend and hundreds of strangers. We were attending one of the many Brianna Ghey vigils, standing together for the murdered teenager. Her friends say the 16-year-old loved pink, gaming and “was so proud of being trans.” In her picture, the one now known around the world, she looks like a wonderful person, in oval glasses and a rich, full smile. 

I’ve had these words swimming around my head all week. I’ve been reluctant to put them down on paper. I don’t want it to look like I’m trying to take a tragedy and create ‘content’ around it. Or that I’m trying to take up space on a matter when other trans voices should be the centre. I don’t like to use other’s blood as ink for my pen. 

But, more than all of that, I wanted to do something, however tiny, to let the trans community know how loved they are. I want to add my words to the outpouring of sadness and solidarity on social media right now. If I stay quiet it might look like I don’t care. When the opposite is true. 

I’ve often lived with a heightened sense of fear. The small buzz in my head that tells me “something bad is going to happen.” It’s amplified, always, when transphobia in the UK is rife. You could say it’s been going off like a klaxon recently. I try to squash it down, and not place that fear on my dad’s shoulders. But it’s there. This fear that she will be attacked, for simply being who she is. 

Of course, attacks come in many forms. She once arrived at my house in London, her phone lighting up with jabs and swipes on Twitter. She’d been named one of Scotland’s coolest women, and the TERFs of the internet didn’t like it. They bitterly name-called, piled on. Took this achievement and soured it. That day, dad said to me, “for the first time in a long time I looked in the mirror and saw a man staring back at me.” Their words stripped her of her identity. There have been other incidences like this, denials and misgendering and not allowing her to use the right toilet, pointless incidences of cruelty. I won’t go into them. I don’t like to think of her reading them, reliving them. 

These attacks are awful, I don’t want to undermine them. But that fearful buzz in my bones? The call that I dread? Physical attack. Statistics have long confirmed these fears. Last week’s news cemented them in the back of my throat. Brianna’s family received the call that no one should have to receive. 

When I heard the news of Brianna’s murder, I tried to kid myself it might not be a hate crime. That it could be something else. We won’t know until the trial in July but, considering the brutal bullying Brianna was experiencing in school it seems incredibly likely.

I feel this strange mix of wanting to say that her death has to have been a one-off, that it can’t be linked to the growing transphobia in the UK right now. Denial is often needed as a form of protection. While also screaming, look, look this is the reality of your poisonous printed words, this is the reality of your strange, cult-like Twitter TERF wars. Please, something has to change. 

The first feeling, of wanting to minimise this, I know is impossible. I can’t minimise a tragedy. It would also be cruel of me, seem as if I’m trying to deny a very valid, very real fear. But I feel this way is because I don’t want anyone to live in fear. How I feel will be tenfold for the trans community, for their own lives, their own existences. This murder, the reality that transphobia has reached this dizzying, terrifying peak could have them staying in the safety of indoors, of the closet. Stopping them from living their lives. The knock-on impact of this tragedy, rippling through the community. 

I can’t take that fear away. I want to. But I can’t. What I can share is some words of my dad. Words that I tattoo across my own anxieties, when the panic arises. 

One day, after not wanting to burden dad with my worries, I opened up to her, asking: “are you not scared?” And she replied…

“Yes, but I spent fifty years hiding my true identity, pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Living like that, the anguish it caused, believe me… that was so much scarier than now. I’m no longer being attacked from the inside. I’m happy within myself.”

It’s deeply sad that this is what I use to comfort myself. That’s not a trade anyone should have to make - hide who you are and face mental torment, or become your true self and face attack from strangers. But I’m sharing it now as I think it showcases how much strength, and how much beauty the trans community have. How strong and beautiful and brave Brianna was. 

After the vigil’s two minute silence, pigeons causing chaos in an otherwise still, grey sky, one of the speaker’s urged us to turn around and tell a stranger we loved them. My heels sinking into the grass I swivelled left, then right, hugged people I don’t know, will never see again. Told them I loved them. 

I do. I so do. 

It’s been hard to write this letter, as really, what use can my words bring? When hope feels impossible to find. But all I can say, all I can try to say, to the trans community right now is harness that strength and beauty inside. It holds so much power. 

And I, along with so many other allies, will be beside you. 

I love you.