Media organisations should take care not to misrepresent trans people or the issues facing them, and instead recognise trans people are people, not issues. Misinformation through clickbait headlines increases hate crimes and impacts the mental health of the trans community.

Negative rhetoric around the trans community is growing alarmingly, with articles written about trans people increasing by 400% over the past five years, in tandem to this we’ve seen in recent studies that 70% of trans people felt media transphobia impacted negatively on their mental health.

The trans community deserve equal access to healthcare. Currently, they have to wait on average 5 years for their first appointment - a figure that significantly exceeds the NHS waiting time guidelines of 18 weeks. These delays cost lives.

In contrast to neighbouring countries, as of 2022 Malta offers free gender-affirming surgeries with a 3-6 month waiting time for the first appointment, in the same year Ireland was reported by TGEU for having the worst waiting times in Europe of 7 years.

We want to change the legal gender recognition process to that of self declaration, allowing trans people to update their documentation without the demeaning requirement for a medical diagnosis; a self-determination model already exists in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland. When we look at ILGA Europe’s Rainbow Europe Index 2022 rankings based on legal gender recognition alone, the UK does even worse, sitting at 21st place, next to Slovakia and Russia.