Trans People’s Experiences With Services and Top Tips for Providers

Florence Oulds, Policy and Public Affairs Officer for Scottish Trans, shares with advice providers key findings of their Scottish Trans and Non-binary Experiences Report, alongside top tips for providers when supporting trans people.

Trans People’s Experiences With Services Across Scotland

Last year Scottish Trans (the trans project of Edinburgh-based LGBTQI+ charity Equality Network) published our Scottish Trans and Non-binary Experiences Report, based on a survey of 571 trans and non-binary people living across Scotland. We ran the survey to find out more about the trans community’s experiences with a range of services and different parts of life, and ask people how they think these could be improved.

The report includes detailed sections on public services, GP practices, neighbourhoods, housing, homelessness, work, benefits, and the cost of living, with specific recommendations for organisations, service providers, local authorities and the government on how these can be improved. We also produced a shorter summary version which gives you the key findings at a glance, and have uploaded a webinar we hosted recently that summaries these point.

Across the different sections, our headline findings include:

• 61% of people had avoided at least one public service for fear of being harassed, read as trans, or being outed, and 54% had has at least one negative experience while using them.

  
  

• 23% of those who had responded had been homeless at some point, with 35% feeling that their trans status had in some way contributed to this.

  
  

• 38% did not have a job, and 26% had not had a job in the past 5 years.

  
  

• 86% of respondents said that raising costs had affected their lifestyle over the past 12 months, with 52% saying that they had been forced to make a decision between essential household purchases and costs related to their transition.

  
  

What was clear is across the different services we asked about was that trans people did not feel supported, able to be their true selves, or confident that services would be able to engage with issues relating to their identity sensitively.

Some of our top tips for supporting trans people include:

• Use person-centred approaches: While we may have specific issues related to our identity, we are people just like anyone else, and the skills you use to help others will help us too.

  
  

• Don’t assume all problems are because of identity: Trans status can complicate some things, but not all of our problems stem from it. It’s important not to overly focus on or make presumptions about how a person’s identity affects other parts of their life.

  
  

• Review your systems and processes: If a trans person were to use your service today, what issues would they encounter? How could these be addressed in advance?

  
  

• If you need more information, ask privately and politely: If you need information relating to a person’s transition for your work, make sure you ask in secure and private settings, and be clear about why this information is necessary, how it will be stored, and who will have access to it.

  
  

Finally, as part of our survey, we asked people if other aspects of their identity also impacted their experiences, and the most common problems we heard about were issues arising from the intersections between people’s trans identity and their disabilities. For many people, it was hard to find, services, houses, jobs, or other forms of support that were respectful towards their trans status as well as being accessible to them, and disabled trans people we heard from often had much worse experiences than non-disabled trans people.

This is an important reminder that people do not live single issue lives, and that when we are thinking about accommodations for different groups of people, it’s important to remember those who might be part of multiple groups at once, especially as they are often those most in need of our support.

If you have any questions about how your service could be more inclusive of trans and non-binary people, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: florence@equality-network.org