For immediate release: 28 August 2025
Since the Supreme Court ruling (FWS vs The Scottish Ministers) in April 2025[1], trans people and their families have been making plans to flee the country, hide their identity, avoid going to hospitals, and find other ways to make a living if they can no longer have dignity in their workplaces – our latest research finds.
Individuals have told us how they are afraid to go out; how they spend days at home in tears, and how they no longer know how they can safely care for their children as society applies – and in many cases, misapplies – “the new rules”.
The report, A Community Living in Fear, is published by TransActual. It is sister document to Trans Segregation in Practice (published 19 August 2025) and bears witness to how trans people, but also intersex individuals, and cis folk who do not present ‘conventionally’ in their everyday life are responding to the UK’s historic backslide in civil rights for LGBTQ+ people.
Commenting on the report’s release, Keyne Walker, Strategy Director for TransActual said:
“Today’s report adds yet more harrowing documentary evidence of how this government has terrorised the trans community to an extreme degree, and the toll this has taken on people, families and communities.
“Some politicians bury their heads in the sand and say that they are acting in the interests of our ‘dignity and compassion’. But I challenge them to read these reports full of the harm they have inflicted and are hellbent on worsening, and then tell me again how they’re contributing to our dignity and safety.
“Trans people shouldn’t have to bare their souls like this for politicians to acknowledge the hurt they are causing. But I’m very grateful to everyone who has done so to make these reports possible.”
The report provides testimonials from individuals, trans, cis and intersex alike, who are just barely coping with the way in which UK society appears to have turned on them. People tell how:
- They fear losing their job
- They are suffering panic attacks and, in many instances, are afraid now to leave their home
- They are going back into stealth and, in some instances, giving up on transitioning
- After years of living peaceably in their local community, they are contemplating self-harm, even suicide
- They are planning to leave the UK
The Community Living in Fear report is published today, 28 August 2025. Click here to download your copy.
Further Information:
For further information, email jane fae via press@transactual.org.uk
Endnotes:
[1] The Supreme Court Ruling, on 16 April 2025, held that for the specific purposes of the Equality Act 2010, trans people should be treated according to their biological sex, which is now widely interpreted as their sex ‘assigned at birth.’