Welcome to part 2 of my focus on what it means to be neurodiverse and LGBT. Join me as I speak with Sam Hope, a non binary trans person with a combination of impairments.
I've known Sam pretty much from the early days of my own gender journey and I continue to be challenged and inspired by what they have to say on what it means to be LGBT and disabled. Sam talks about their own experiences of being trans, non-binary and being diagnosed as being autistic and having ADHD. They discuss the many ways in which the various different aspects of their identity have impacted on their life and led them to working as a counsellor, trainer and equality advocate.
You can find out more about the work Sam does via their website www.sam-hope.co.uk and I would encourage you to do so.
Welcome to part 2 of my focus on what it means to be neurodiverse and LGBT. Join me as I speak with Sam Hope, a non binary trans person with a combination of impairments.
I've known Sam pretty much from the early days of my own gender journey and I continue to be challenged and inspired by what they have to say on what it means to be LGBT and disabled. Sam talks about their own experiences of being trans, non-binary and being diagnosed as being autistic and having ADHD. They discuss the many ways in which the various different aspects of their identity have impacted on their life and led them to working as a counsellor, trainer and equality advocate.
You can find out more about the work Sam does via their website www.sam-hope.co.uk and I would encourage you to do so.
Hi, and welcome to another episode of The Simply Equality Podcast, a podcast that seeks to foreground the lived experiences of disabled and LGBT people. In this episode, I'm going to have the second of my interviews that focuses on the correlation - or is there? - between being neurodivergent, and being LGBT. It's my absolute pleasure to have on this episode, a campaigner and trainer, an advocate called Sam Hope. I've known Sam for quite a while, pretty much since the beginning of coming out as trans, again through my transition, and knew them from when I lived in Nottingham previously, and was involved in some wonderful work with them. And they really have been a great inspiration in the work I now do in the world of disability and LGBT equality. Hope you enjoy the episode - we touch on lots of issues. And Sam has some really interesting things to say. So as usual, I will stop talking, and we'll get on with the interview. So welcome to another episode of The Simply Equality Podcast. I'm really, really delighted to have with us on this episode, Sam, Sam Hope. Sam is somebody I've known for quite a while pretty much since the beginning of my transition. And I'll let Sam introduce themselves. And we'll take it from there.
Sam Hope:Hi, it's nice to see you. I'm delighted to be here. Oh, gosh, I'm Sam Hope I'm a - I'm trans and non binary. I'm autistic have ADHD and fibromyalgia. And I work as a therapist and a trainer and I do some consultation work as well. Oh, and I wrote a book -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:- I was gonna say, come on, plug the book, Sam. Come on!
Sam Hope:OK, let's get the plug in, I wrote a book called Person Centered Therapy for Trans and Gender Diverse People.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:And I'd recommend you go and get the book.
Sam Hope:I think so.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:So obviously, this podcast is very much about that intersection of being disabled and LGBTQ, which I know is something that you very definitely, as you just described, identify with and talk a lot about. I mean, for you, would either part of that identity be the foreground, or is it literally just the both so intertwined it's hard to separate?
Sam Hope:Oh, gosh. Yeah, it's such an interesting question, actually. And I think that sometimes the two things sort of have kind of gone in parallel. I know, certainly, my kind of journey into recognising myself as, as having neurodiversity happened alongside coming out as trans, by simple virtue of the fact that I was thrown in with a lot of other neurodiverse people when I came out as trans. So, so there have been times when the two sort of stories have gone in parallel, and there have been times I think, when they've complicated each other, times when, you know, like, in my 20s, when I was so badly disabled from from what at the time was diagnosed as ME. You know, I couldn't function, sort of day to day, and you know, having deep thoughts about my gender and sexuality just wasn't really an option. It was more you know, sort of how can I manage to get the spoons together to get myself breakfast? So yeah, I think that there have been different times in my life when, you know, the story's been different, but I guess I don't feel like you can separate the two things out. I can't, I'm not a... Yeah, I can't separate being a trans person from being a disabled person because they kind of complicate each, and inform each other.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I mean, if we can just...just because we sort of started with it, in terms of you, your disability, your health, I mean, you mentioned issues in your 20s, does it stem back further than that for you?
Sam Hope:I mean, the neurodiversity is obviously a lifelong thing. So I wouldn't have necessarily recognised it as a kid, but it certainly, you know, it got me bullied, it got me excluded. It sort of created difficulties for me in schooling. And, of course, you know, being gender non conforming, also, caused me difficulties and got me bullied and excluded, so it's really difficult to go, you know, was I being bullied because I was autistic, or was I being bullied because I wasn't acting like the other girls, you know. So, or you know, because I was perceived as a girl. So I think it's really hard to sort of know which way round that is. And then, yeah, the health problem started in my late teens and just got progressively worse through my 20s. So I'm actually more well now than I was in my 20s, considerably. And I had a lot more sort of musculoskeletal pain, I had a lot more fatigue. And I just coped a lot less well with life, back then. So I guess, I guess that narrowed my world quite considerably.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, I seem to remember the first time I came across you was when we were both speaking in an event in Nottingham, and you had blue hair and you're using a wheelchair.
Sam Hope:Um, I wasn't using a wheelchair
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Ah, how memories can play tricks on you!
Sam Hope:I have managed to, yeah, I've managed to not... well, I mean, internalise ableism, there was a definitely a lot of time in my late 20s when I should have used a wheelchair and didn't, and we do things like take hours to get around the supermarket and be absolutely exhausted, but refused to, you know, sort of make accommodations for myself because of internalised ableism. But no, I have actually, I'm now actually relatively mobile. Thank goodness, touch wood.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Right.
Sam Hope:So yeah, things are much better.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:And so in terms of your autism, obviously, that's something you have been and will continue to be. But you mentioned that was a bit of a journey in terms of an awareness of it. And a diagnosis- when were you diagnosed?
Sam Hope:I was diagnosed with autism about three years ago, and ADHD three months ago, after a very, very long journey to get a diagnosis [laughter]. And yeah, it was interesting to, I don't know whether you're aware, but there's a crossover between LGBT+ people and neurodiverse people, if you're LGBT+, you're more likely to be neurodiverse. If you're neurodiverse, you're more likely to be LGBT+. It's not a causal thing. We're also more likely to be left handed and have all sorts of other interesting quirks, like the ability to smell colours. But what it did mean was that when I came into the trans community, there was much more, there were far more literate conversations around autism, not so much actually in the lesbian and gay community. Even though there's still a crossover, there, there isn't the sort of conversation about it, in the lesbian gay community, that there isn't a trans community. But in the trans community it's like everybody's just embraced their weirdness and gone, you know, what? I'm neurodiverse, I - these are my experiences. And it's great, because I certainly met empowered people talking about the fact that they were neurodiverse, and in a way that sort of helped me recognise that as, oh, that's me and, you know, sort of get past all the myths like, you know, autistics aren't empathic is one of the myths that kind of got in my way because I'm a counsellor. I'm very empathic and yeah, I suddenly discovered, oh, yes, it's a complete myth that autistics don't have empathy. So I yeah, I met the empowered, wonderful autistic people and recognised - started to recognise that in myself. And, and you know, I think also some of my cisgender sort of queer friends were also on a journey to recognising themselves as neurodiverse. I don't think I have many neurotypical friends to be completely honest with you. So I think that we were all a bit on a journey together. And maybe there's just increased awareness too. But yeah, so I was coming out to myself as a non binary person and coming out to myself as a neurodiverse person sort of at the same time, I did very much avoid getting a diagnosis until I'd got my gender dysphoria diagnosis, because I recognise that there's still a lot of barriers for autistic people within the trans healthcare system. So there's still a sort of stigma attached to being trans and autistic, and an idea that gender confusion is listed as a symptom of autism. So it can be very much seen as, you know, sort of a problem with autistic people, rather than just something that, you know, more autistic people just happen to be trans as well. And, of course, being non binary, we're still in a situation with the gender clinic where they're, you know, they're much better with non binary, but they're still on a kind of a growing journey around non binary identities. So wanting to go to the gender clinic and say, oh, I'd like some trans healthcare, please. But I'm not a trans man. And I'm autistic. I thought that that might be a bit of a stretch. So I, I kind of kept the autistic bit under my, under my hat until after I'd got my trans healthcare.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:How was that in the end for you then, going through the gender clinic process?
Sam Hope:I think it's unnecessary, unnecessarily gatekeeping. Unnecessarily pathologizing. I, you know, I'm a, I'm in my mid 40s. I know who I am. I knew what I wanted. And nobody goes and asks for surgery and hormones, without thinking really carefully about it. And, and I don't think actually a sort of psychological assessment process is necessarily the way to find out whether somebody is confused anyway. Because, you know, people just tend to dig in if, if they meet resistance. So I don't think it's a particularly helpful process, the sort of gatekeeping and, you know, are you really sure, and let's make you wait some more. Yeah, so I don't think it was a terribly helpful process. And I feel quite strongly that it's not a psychiatric diagnosis, and shouldn't be a psychiatric diagnosis. So, of course, I do also have another psychiatric diagnosis, which is gender dysphoria. But you know, the World Health Organisation have have just recently knocked that on the head as a legitimate diagnosis, and I'm very glad to see that. So hopefully over the next few years, we'll see gender clinics finding a different way to help trans people get health care, that doesn't involve telling them that they've got a psychiatric disorder.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, I mean, fingers crossed. It's interesting because for different reasons, but a similar parallel I found going to the gender clinic as somebody who was totally blind, whilst it didn't, I feel, affect their ultimate decision, I felt I was having to educate them on some of the issues around my my disability. Quite surprising that the more I've done this podcast, as you've said, the more there is crossover between disability and LGBT, human diversity, LGBT, yet...you really think the gender clinics should have a bit more awareness around this?
Sam Hope:Yeah, very much so. They, they're, I think, when I was under the clinic, they'd just started to develop a relationship with the local autism service. And were beginning to kind of develop their thinking but certainly, at the beginning of my process, it was very much understood that autism was a barrier to health care and it still very much is in some clinics.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Just one final thing on the the
autism:I've had a few people say to me, including on this podcast, that you're right, it's not a causal link, but being autistic, if you like, and that autistic way of thinking perhaps makes you more, not open to being trans, but more open to thinking, well, I don't care what society thinks of me or the norms of gender and sexuality? Do you think there's anything in that?
Sam Hope:No [laughter], I don't, I actually think that's fundamentally wrong.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Why do you think that?
Sam Hope:Because I think that you're just as likely as an autistic person to feel pressured into rule following. Because of autistic masking, you're more likely to fall into self denial, because of the pressure from society to conform to neurotypical norms. So I think it's just, there are just as many barriers for autistic people to find themselves in this process, as there are ways in which being autistic might liberate you from from societal norms. And also sort of from my own personal experience growing up, I very much did conform to gender norms, I just conformed to the wrong gender norms, I conformed to male gender norms all the way. So it wasn't that I wasn't picking up gender cues, it was that I was picking up the wrong ones because I was trans. So you know, I very much copied boys and men and followed what boys and men do. So I wouldn't necessarily say I was actually gender non conforming at all, I was just very conforming in the wrong way. So no, I don't agree, I hear that - people throw that theory around. And I think it's because they're trying to look for an explanation of why there are so many trans and autistic people. And I think the simple fact is that there is just a cluster in the population, because there are also lots of left handed trans people, nobody's saying, oh, well, you know, left handed autistic people, nobody's saying autistic people are left handed because they don't know how to confirm to right handedness, you know[laughter]. So I think, I think that there's all sorts of curious quirks in our little sort of cluster of the population, you know, sort of things like having perfect pitch, and high colour perception, and all kinds of little idiosyncrasies, none of which could possibly be caused by being non conforming. So I think it's just, it's just the thing, it's just a -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Fair enough. That's fair enough. I know. Thank you, I probably tend to agree with you. So if we can focus a bit more on your journey, in terms of your gender identity, you said that your sort of acknowledgement, realisation of being non binary, is a more recent part of the process. Can you perhaps take us back to where you would class those beginnings of your gender journey?
Sam Hope:Oh, gosh, yeah. So I mean, as I said, as a kid, I was very much - I'd never had that"I see myself as a boy". But I definitely didn't see myself a a girl. I set out - you know, I very much was socially orientated towards boys. I recognised my sort of romantic attraction to boys and girls from quite an early age as well. I was absolutely besotted with David Bowie and makeup when I was very, very young. And, and then Adam Ant, when I was a little girl. And so yeah, I definitely sort of concede that I had a queer identity sort of right from the get go. And I remember wanting to marry Lucy Mason when I was about five. If you're out there, Lucy... And then I, through my teens, I lost my dad in my teens to cancer. And long story short, my mother moved halfway across the country, I ended up homeless, and it was all a bit messy, so I kind of lost my teens to kind of just survival. Then I came out as bi in my 20s I tended to be... I tended to have really strong friendships with guys, I was a biker, sort of like, head to foot in leather, long hair, into all kinds of crazy music. And just doing my thing, really. But I don't think that, I think I'd experienced gender dysphoria sort of in puberty, but that had been obscured by other things that were going on in my life. And then, and then it didn't really, actually the kind of gender dysphoria stuff didn't hit until, until I started to age and my body started to change. So you know, it's one of the things about sort of like the physical side of gender dysphoria. So my gender had always felt very non binary, but in terms of wanting to transition that really didn't sort of hit until my early 40s. And I found it harder and harder to live in my body. So I, you know, I don't know if that's about fluidity or whether it's about my changing body, it could be all sorts of things, but -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Because I also know from you that there was a period when you were quite active with the lesbian community within Nottingham.
Sam Hope:Yes.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:How was that? And then how was that as you sort of transitioned through your own gender identity?
Sam Hope:Yeah, I just missed out the lesbian years didn't I?
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, I'm not gonna let you get away with that. Come on, talk about the lesbian years.
Sam Hope:So in my 30s I, it's really interesting, because I kind of did that bi erasure thing to myself where I pretended that it was bi now gay later, and that I was really a lesbian. And some of that was because I was just a bit done with men. And some of it was to do with the fact that I recognised people that I thought were like myself in terms of like very gender non conforming, quite politicised and feminist. And so I was drawn to the lesbian community, to women only spaces, and really felt like, from a distance that those were kind of my people. And then I got up closer and realised that the kinds of communities that I was reaching out to and becoming involved with were also just horrifically biphobic and transphobic, and that wasn't such a comfortable fit for me. And nevertheless, I persisted for many years in the lesbian community and then coming out as trans was quite a painful experience, because it meant a lot of condemnation, a lot of loss of community, a lot of, you know, the community that surrounded me wasn't a sort of diverse queer community, it was very much, you have to identify as lesbian, you have to identify as a woman. And if you have a relationship with a man, or you identify as anything other than a woman, then you don't belong here anymore. So that sort of lack of diversity of experience and diversity of identity ended up being kind of the downfall of that community for me, and it was very painful. Going through that sort of transition towards, you know, a different community, but I have to say, it has been really beneficial because I have, you know, I wouldn't really surround myself with people who say some of the things that I used to hear around me back then, and I think, my own sort of self esteem plays a big part in how much I was prepared to put up with people saying things about identities, that deep down I knew belonged to me. So I was habitually hearing really quite not-okay things about bisexual people and trans people, and just kind of accepting it as okay, and it wasn't.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I mean, what do you make of that whole side of feminism, which is still sadly, the very small but vocal minority that sort of espouses those views and is transphobic, biphobic?
Sam Hope:I just think they're the same bullies that used to give me a hard time in the playground, in a different guise. Yeah, I think it's really interesting how easily, you know, even in sort of left wing activist spaces, those kinds of voices ended up dominating. And I think it's really sad. But you know, we had in our, mine and my ex, because my ex came out as trans at the sort of same time as me, and he's a trans guy. So that really shook up the community.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I bet!
Sam Hope:Especially as we were quite kind of prominent in terms of lesbian organising. And, you know, we were prominent because we did things inclusively. And we're, you know, doing things differently, but we still very much organised in a kind of, you know, women's space orientated way. And I, you know, looking back, I regret that I was so focused on that, because if only gender was so binary and so simple that we could do that. But we we really can't.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:And obviously, as part of your work, and I know personally, you've done quite a lot of work trying to engage with the TERFS.
Sam Hope:Oh yes, we were talking about feminists
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:We were talking about feminists!
Sam Hope:My brain just went oh no, don't want to talk about that. Actually, I have quite significant trauma. Because there was somebody in our wider social group, who was an active campaigner for one of the two organisations, I can never remember, either Fair Play for Women or A Woman's Place, I really can't tell the difference between them. But she was very, very involved with organising anti-trans conferences, really involved in sort of anti-trans campaigning and trying to take away my civil rights, which of course, you know, over the last decade, she and others like her have absolutely succeeded in reversing trans rights and influencing government, and really making things incredibly difficult for trans people in the UK, who have influenced people like JK Rowling and Graham Linehan and done untold damage and cost untold lives. Let's not beat around the bush that people have died because of this toxic hatred. And I ended up trying to stand up to her in a social group that really wanted me to, to just quietly be trans but not rock the boat, and definitely not stick up for trans women, because trans men are just about acceptable, as long as they kind of include themselves in lesbian spaces and kind of misgender themselves. But it certainly wasn't okay to to be an activist and to, you know, say trans people should have civil rights and trans women are women. And so, yeah, I ended up actually quite traumatised by some of what went on, to the point where, I did get to the point where I couldn't even see the word TERF written down without having a quite a bad reaction. So it took me some time to be able to re-engage with that. I run a Facebook page called Trans Inclusive Feminism. And I took it down for a good few years, because I just, I couldn't do it anymore. But then I just - in the end, I felt it was too important not to do, and it is too important. And we do have to keep pushing it out. You know, I know that this sort of idea that if you're quiet and polite, then somehow the civil rights will just turn up on your doorstep. But that's never how anything works. We have to push and if we don't push, we're not going to get there. And there's always going to be a backlash when you push for civil rights. And there's always going to be people who say, you're not doing it right. You haven't been polite enough, you haven't been patient enough, you haven't been kind enough. But you know, that's what they do to try and keep you where you are. And you have to fight and yeah, it's it's been a hard lesson, sort of seeing people particularly just not engaging, just, you know, carrying on socialising with this person who was campaigning against my civil rights and simply not engaging in what was going on at all, and I think many of them probably don't even realise just how bad she was because they didn't go looking and they didn't believe me when I said this is really bad. They just went, well we don't want to know about that, we'll pretend that Sam's just making a fuss over nothing.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I think what people perhaps who aren't trans, non binary, don't appreciate, it's just the impact on a day to day basis. That just existing can have. And if you then, as you've done, as I do, choose to engage in some of that so-called discussion and debate around our identities. It's not just theory, this is our, this is our lives. This is our very existence isn't it, and it's a perpetual - what's the word - drain? Yeah.
Sam Hope:Yeah, it really is. And not just a drain, but you know, potentially traumatising. There's lots of studies that show that minority stress, you know, amounts to a kind of complex trauma. And certainly, when people are, you know, when you've got the kind of hatred that's levelled at a community that's happened to trans people, because, you know, at the end of the day, we do challenge the status quo, we do challenge the idea of a legal gender and sex binary. And, you know, we do need things to change in society in order for us to be able to exist. But, you know, actually, the things that needs to be changed, then it's not going to make that much difference to people, you know. Yeah. You know, it's the difference between like having individual toilet cubicles with locking doors and a sink inside, as opposed to, you know, two separate spaces, one says M and one says F, it's really not hard.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:How radical -
Sam Hope:[exaggerated gasp]
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:How earth-shattering would that be?
Sam Hope:How will people cope? Gender neutral toilets that they all have in their own home anyway? [laughter]
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Oh, gosh, I mean, just on that topic, not toilets but before that. I will always remember Sam, for you giving me that word, hypervigilance. I remember that one of the groups I attended, because I was listening to Sam, and her ex an others, including myself, wer involved in something calle Notts Trans Hub. And Notts Notts - gosh, I forgot the othe one! The other one, Trans Spac
Sam Hope:Trans Space Notts.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Trans Space Notts, that's the one, and that was really good. That still exists, that still happens. Do go and check it out. I'll put a link in the show notes. But one of the things I thought as somebody who was sort of trans and disabled is that sense that when you're out and about trying not to be sort of oversensitive and paranoid about how people respond to you, and thinking that they're going to misgender you and etc, etc. But as I said, I do remember you use that term hypervigilance. Yeah. And I think for me, that just really sums up, do you want to just mention a little bit on that?
Sam Hope:Sure. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, my master's was in trauma and minority stress and the trauma around that is kind of like one of my special subjects, possibly because it's happened to me. But the idea of hypervigilance, as opposed to being oversensitive or being paranoid is simply that if you are constantly subjected to a hostile environment, it makes sense for your brain to be on the lookout for hostility. So it's not, it's not a bug, it's a feature. If somebody is hyper vigilant, then it's because they've had more of the bad stuff than the good stuff, and it deserves our empathy rather than thinking, oh, you know, that person's expecting the worst and they're really negative, and we can be very apologising of that kind of attitude, but it makes complete sense when, you know, if the world is hostile to you, for you to start beginning to expect the world to be hostile and be prepared for that. And, you know, things like misgendering. And we know that - loads of studies that show that misgendering genuinely causes psychological harm, but we know that people make mistakes, and that's understandable. We do it to each other, we do it to ourselves. But that doesn't mean to say that it isn't undermining our very sense of self and our sense of, you know, sort of being recognised and legitimised in society, so it's still going to have an impact even if people don't mean it to, or they don't mean any harm. But you know, it's still going to cause tension within us, and we're going to become tense and hypervigilant towards that. You know, it's just normal.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, well, as I say I found that really helpful. And I hope others listening to this do too. So, some terms of this podcast, obviously, I'm looking at the intersection of the two areas of disability and LGBT. As somebody who inhabits those spaces, what do you feel the different communities could learn from each other?
Sam Hope:Ooh, that's a really good question. I mean, I think what I learned from how the lesbian community was organising at that point in time, sort of around that age group, and I know that the young lesbian community does things very differently. So I don't want to-this is not a sweeping statement about the lesbian community in its entirety at all, and I think it's also true of this older cis gay community, is just a lack of thinking about diversity and difference. And that's, I mean, I love the fact that we can come together under particular words that recognise our commonality. But I think that the problem with that approach, the problem with saying, we're all lesbian, or we're all trans, or we're all non binary here is that within those labels, there is such a huge diversity of experience. I mean, you know, even if, you know, one lesbian could be a lesbian, because, you know, she just really loves women, another lesbian could be a lesbian because she just really is turned off by men. And another lesbian could be like me, just really gender non conforming, and thinking these are my people, but it not being about their sexuality at all. And, you know, I guess that's - my sense is that when you organise, sort of under the banner of, we're all women, or we're all trans, or we're all lesbian, or we're all queer, what you then also need to do is go, okay, that word might mean different things for different people, and there might be a multiplicity of experiences within this space, in terms of how people process the world around them, and experience the world around them, what accessibility needs they have, what ways we need to make them comfortable, what ways we need to make them feel seen, and recognised, and understood, etc, etc. So I think, you know, and I think that goes for both communities is that we can do some, you know, basic stuff around disability access. And we do a lot with Notts Trans Hub around being really conscious of the kinds of disabilities that we might be seeing come to the group and need to be accommodated for, but you can't know what people are going to need. So actually, you really need to be very open to giving people the space to say, well actually, it's not like that for me. And actually, that word doesn't mean the same to me as it does to you. You know, one of my big journeys at the moment is trying to learn to remember to talk about the word trans and not - and recognise that not everybody under the trans umbrella recognises themselves as having a gender. And so it's no good saying trans is about gender identity, because some people are agender, and they don't have a gender identity at all. So it's stuff like that for me, of trying to be able to be mindful of just the breadth of people's experience and what they might need in terms of the words I use, the spaces I create, etc., etc.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I mean, I have to confess my experience of Trans Space Notts was just that, and it was really affirming and positive to see somewhere where, you know, because often I might go into a queer space and have to think, oh God, they're not going to know about my disability or how to be inclusive in that regard or vice versa. Whereas Trans Space Notts, I know, there was a lot of effort put in and still is to make sure that it is that inclusive space more broadly. So I guess I'm giving it a big thumbs up. I think it's a good model that other spaces could employ, because sadly, that's not always the case, we hear these stories about Pride events that are not accessible, and not just physically accessible, but in other forms accessible. So I think there's a good model there for people to check it out and find out more.
Sam Hope:Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of people put a lot of work into that. And I know, I'm not much involved in this at the moment. But I know that, you know, it continues to go on and just constantly be having those conversations and just be spending the time thinking about this stuff. Because it matters and accessibility matters. Because, I mean, it's not just, oh, we're going to miss people, if we're not accessible. Actually, what we miss is the really interesting conversations and the richness of community. So it's not like, it's not just a case of, oh, you know, some people won't be able to come. Actually, we end up with this really bland, homogenous mediocre experience and community if we're not really thinking about, you know, study, diversity and inclusion.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, and I guess it's not a problem, but the issue with that is that these people who are willing to go on that journey doesn't it, as organisations, as individuals, as community groups, to accept that there isn't just a one size fits all approach to disability or LGBT equality. It's a rich tapestry, it's a much broader framework. So in terms of, here we are Sam, you know, 2021, looking ahead, with Coronavirus still hanging over us... If you can look into your crystal ball, what do you feel about the future for disability and LGBT equality from where you sit/stand?
Sam Hope:So, I have great hope for the far future. I think the generation coming up now, I have learned so much from them that you know, if anybody wants to know how to make their organizations vibrant, then be mentored by the younger generation would be my advice, listen to the voices coming up, who've taken what we all learned and then built on it. And they just know so much more than we do. So I have huge hope for the future, when, you know, sort of the generation coming up come into power. But I don't have the best of hope for the next sort of five to ten years, I feel very frightened and very worried. And, you know, I know that I was hearing trans people literally afraid of filling out the census and declaring themselves as trans. Because they are that afraid of how bad things are for trans people in the UK, that they are on a shi -, they have genuine fears about there being a list of trans people. And although I don't think that that's a realistic fear, I think the government's ways of harming trans people are more insidious, I think. You know, obviously, their ways of harming migrants and Roma people and the Windrush generation are much more overt, but their ways of harming trans people may be deadly, but they're not - I don't think we're going to be rounded up. But I still share people's utter fear of how things are right now for trans people in the UK, and I know things will get better but we've got to look after each other through this bit, because I think things are going to be worse before they get better. I think we're very much where lesbian and gay people were sort of in the 80s with a sort of, you know, Section 28, hostile attitudes and really negligent healthcare practices and very hostile media attitudes and that can be really deadly. So yeah, we've got -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, sadly, I wish I didn't, but I totally agree with everything you've just said there. So finally then, if people want to get in touch with you, find out more about you, the work you do about that book, how can people get in touch to find out more?
Sam Hope:I have a website, which is sam-hope.co.uk. I have a contact form. And I'm more than happy for people to get in touch if they have any questions. There's also a blog on there a tonne of resources and free information sheets around stuff like trans inclusion and best practice guides and language guides and all sorts of things like that. So yeah, there's all sorts of free stuff on my website, and they can just go on there and have look.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Free stuff is always good. And not just free stuff, but quality free stuff.
Sam Hope:Hopefully!
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:No, no, no, it is, it is. I can vouch for listeners it is. Well, Sam, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you as ever for coming on.
Sam Hope:Thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.