Evan Urquhart

I think there are ways that relatively privileged people who transition old get to retain that privilege much more than youngsters who often have to leave behind both any support they may have had from parents while at the same time no real safety net to have raised on their own.

This isn't a moral judgement, but it is a serious factor that plays in when, for example, we look at the class of trans people who are trans judges, lawyers, barristers, or otherwise have access to institutional power.

These people run institutions, design policy and law for the rest of the community. They get visibility and access to government. For journalists, though they take a huge career hit, their existing media careers give them access to the public. The inequality there is material.

I'm not trying to moralise this gap. I want for it to be recognised as a structural bias that we account for as a community when we approach how we set about designing policies and working together on campaigns.

When we have trans billionaires, who gets to be a trans billionaire? Not folks dealing with being cut off by their parents, that's for damn sure. And I'm not saying I want more trans youth billionaires, I want awareness that there's a structural difference to young transition.

There's a stereotype of well off white trans women working in tech. I work in tech. I got my first tech job aged 33, with literally every job before that on minimum wage, cleaning, bar tending, doing domestic work, doing night classes on the internet in my spare hours.

Others who transitioned after getting a PhD had a fundamentally different course to me, who despite being technically bright couldn't get even an entry level job because I started transitioning at 17.

This isn't "poor me". It's "most people with similar experiences to me doing get as lucky as I did, and don't get the same sort of representation".