The trans community can win the public’s hearts and minds again, despite the hostility of the UK media.
That’s the message of hope that the UK’s most famous trans couple, Jake and Hannah Graf gave to Pride Wide.
They’ve been on the frontline of the battle against transphobic coverage in a highly-hostile mainstream press for a decade.
Phenomenal and boring
But, working with Pride Wide, they’re promoting a simple message. Deep down, trans people are just like everyone else. Like all of us, they are “phenomenal” in their own way, but also “boring”.
In other words, “Trans is Human”.
Their first Trans is Human campaign profiled 13 trans people from across the UK, with a beautiful professional photograph of each of them, and a little snippet of their story.
Jake Graf told us: “We’ve got Leo who has struggled with cerebral palsy his whole life and now mentors and coaches other adults with disabilities.
“We’ve got Sarah who lost her sight at 42 and at 52 is just about to run the London marathon to raise money for Stonewall.
“We’ve got Murray who had racist bullying throughout his childhood and now mentors young people through music and brings young people up who’ve had a bad start to life and gives them a good start to life.
“So, you know, these people are phenomenal away from their transness.”
Hounded by the tabloids
If anyone knows about being treated as strange or exotic, it’s Jake and Hannah Graf.
Hannah’s a former Army captain who won an MBE from the Queen. But neither her record of service in the UK Armed Forces nor her inherent humanity was enough to get her respect from the British press.
The Sun outed Hannah on their front page just for being trans in the military. And when the couple wed, the same newspaper ran another front page splash under the mocking headline “Tran and wife”.
Paradoxically, it was also the media that brought the two of them together.
Hannah told us: ”I was in the military and that was a story that captivated the media. Jake, at the time, was in a film called The Danish Girl and doing the press tour. So we were both starting to have a voice in the media and that brought us together.
“We always say that being trans is a thing that brought us together but it’s not necessarily the thing that kept us together.
“We soon realized that just the concept of two trans people doing something as normal as being in a relationship, getting married, having a family, seemed to be bizarrely amazing to the mainstream media.
“And so we faced scrutiny every single step of the way. But equally it’s given us a lot of opportunity to have a voice and talk about what it means to be queer in a very normal and boring way, which is, I think, what we really stand for.”
And while the media was hostile, “normal and boring” people everywhere were prepared to give the Grafs a break. In that sense, the Sun’s sensationalism backfired on them.
The nasty headline that backfired
Jake told us about the moment they saw the “Tran and wife” headline: “My sister works in PR and had managed to find the headline the night before and she called me and she said, you know, brace yourself, it’s not good.
“And then we saw ‘Tran and wife’, which to some probably 60 or 70-year-old white guy sitting in a back office, probably felt like a stroke of genius. He was probably really chuffed with himself for that. But it wasn’t the headline we were hoping for around our marriage.
“But it really garnered so much support from the community. We were blown away. And it wasn’t just the community, it was beyond. We had politicians speaking out for us. David Lammy [then in opposition, now the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister] got very invested. There were a lot of people who were very, very angry about that headline.
“And the Times picked it up on the front page, the Daily Mail picked it up. We were having interview requests from Russia, Australia. Because it was also that trans people can do something as normal as fall in love and get married.
“So we have seen a lot of support from the beginning, from our community.”
Media boycott: A failed strategy
The Trans is Human campaign stems partly from those experiences. But there’s a far bigger force behind it.
As pretty much anyone who has read or seen the UK media in the last few years knows, the treatment Jake and Hannah Graf experienced is just the tip of an enormous iceberg.
Many UK broadcasters and publishers, even traditionally progressive voices, have turned transphobic. Impartiality has disappeared. Transphobic voices are promoted. Meanwhile trans people themselves don’t even get to comment on news stories about their lives.
Jake told Pride Wide: “As a trans community, we agreed mindlessly, I think, a few years ago, that we wouldn’t engage with the media because it ended up being battles, challenges, debates on morning TV. So we all kind of agreed amongst us that we weren’t going to engage in this debate.
“But all that meant was that it was just the anti-trans voices on these [TV studio] sofas and on these televisions and on all these panels. And I think, as a result, we have really, really dehumanized.
“So Trans is Human is something I’d wanted to do for a few years.
“We put this out an open casting on Instagram to see if we could get 20 trans people who’d never been in the media who wanted to talk about their stories.
“And we got about 250 people coming forward. We wanted our stories away from being trans. We wanted the inspirational and the mundane. We wanted the beautiful and the ugly and the boring and the and we got it all.
“And the 13 people that we eventually chose are all phenomenal in their own way but are all very boring and very human in their own way because we all are. And they are now the heroes, the stars of this beautiful campaign.”
The struggle for support
We’re proud to have supported the campaign. You can read all the Trans is Human stories for yourself on Pride Wide.
But they’ve been seen far further afield too. Working with Pride Wide and with other amazing partners, Jake and Hannah got Trans is Human into the living rooms of regular people around Britain.
It started with a launch at the UK’s biggest shopping mall, Westfield London where shoppers could stumble across mega-sized portraits of the 13 trans people and read their stories.
Britain’s top morning TV show Lorraine, gave Jake and Hannah a highly supportive sofa interview about the project. And the Metro profiled three of the stories in depth with first-person comment articles.
It hasn’t been easy. Trans is Human has benefited from beautiful photography world-renowned fashion and portrait photographer, Mariano Vivanco, who has shot front covers for GQ and Rolling Stone, and campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana. But everything has been done on a shoestring budget.
Hannah told us: “It has been really tough and I feel like it’s only getting tougher. We’re very fortunate that Jake and I have contacts. We have great support from Pride Wide and Transmission PR. But we’ve really had to beg, borrow and steal just to be able to get 13 photographs put up.
“People look at the way companies are pulling back from DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion efforts] as if it’s this sort of disease term. But as Jake says, the community on the ground were there in spades.
“What we really hope with this is that we’ll be a catalyst and people will start to take it on and own it themselves and they will tell their own Trans is Human stories.
“So we want every trans person in the UK and hopefully beyond to put up a picture of themselves and say, ‘Here is me and I am human and this is what makes me human’.
“And it’s not about them saying ‘I’m a big trans activist’. It’s saying, ‘I love board games with my kids’. And that is hopefully a message that anyone out there who’s got kids and enjoys board games will go, ‘That’s like me!’
“In that moment you’ve connected with a trans person on a human level. And if we continuously connect with people on a human level, then we can change people’s hearts and minds just as Pride Wide aims to do.”
“Utterly desperate” young people still offer hope
Trans and nonbinary Britons are under unprecedented attack – by the media, politicians and even the institutions that are supposed to protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile access to medical transition services has been choked off, with waiting lists for even the first of many appointments that process requires of four years or more.
But through harnessing the power of storytelling, Jake and Hannah are pioneering a way forward. By doing so, they are giving hope to many, and finding fresh hope for themselves at this very dark time.
Jake told us: “One of the things that gives me hope is that we are seeing more and more young trans people coming out and being themselves.
“These are young people that are utterly desperate. They have no hope to be themselves physically, they know they can’t medically transition, they know they can’t get that blockers, they know they can’t get their hormones. And yet they are still proud to come out, proud to come out to their parents, even proud to risk homelessness, as we’ve seen a lot.
“There is such a feeling of unity and of strength and of empowerment and of visibility that these young people are coming out in their droves.
“It’s just like what happened in the gay rights movement in San Francisco when [1970s pioneering gay politician] Harvey Milk was leading the charge.
“When that happened, the visibility that gave us, that gave that community… All of a sudden, there were gay men everywhere. There were lesbians everywhere. And now we’re seeing trans and gender non-conforming young people and older people everywhere.
“Our communities will continue to grow. At the moment it does feel worrying and a little bit hopeless to these young people. But there are still a lot of us that are going to keep fighting this good fight.”
Hannah adds: “Well, that’s it. As a community, we have done this time and time again all across the world. And I think it’s that sense of hopelessness that you’ve got to tackle.
“That’s what positivity and joy and telling human stories is all about. Because it sucks that the pendulum has swung back this way but it can swing again. It needs us to dust ourselves off, pick ourselves up and go, ‘Okay, well, what do we do about it? And how do we work together to get it done?’
“The only difference is that we live in a different information era. So we need to take the spirit and the principles of what we’ve done previously and think how do we apply that in a new and modern day? How do we battle that misinformation? How do we get our own communication and use those same tools?
“It’s in our gift, it’s in our power, we just have to come together and do it.”
Support more trans voices
Pride Wide is proudly supporting Trans is Human. We’re also proud that Jake and Hannah Graf are Pride Wide Ambassadors.
Working with them and many others, we’ll raise the profile of positive trans stories in the media and shift public attitudes. Find out how you can join us and support Pride Wide here.
