
Them Superlatives are awards for our favorite people made up by our favorite people. Read more from the series here.
Trans Kids Deserve Better isn’t just a slogan; in fact, the anonymous young people who make up the U.K.-based direct action group see it as more of a demand.. The political situation for trans people in the U.K. has been particularly dire for years now, especially for youth. At the end of last year, the country banned the prescription of puberty blockers for trans youth, and is considering banning even private gender-affirming hormone therapy prescriptions for minors. In the face of such cruelty, Trans Kids Deserve Better has been orchestrating targeted direct actions against various government buildings for almost a year now, starting with an August 2024 encampment outside the Department for Education in London.
The scope of their demonstrations has only increased since then — the group reportedly released a box of live crickets at a transphobic conference, staged a die-in at Victoria Station to protest the puberty blocker ban, and scaled the building of right leaning newspaper The Daily Telegraph and dropped a banner calling it the “SMELLegraph,” just to name a few examples. The group’s tactics are bold, grounded in history (die-ins are a signature move by HIV/AIDS direct action groups like ACT UP), and perhaps most importantly, irreverent as hell. In the face of the kind of absurd brand of transphobia that has taken over the U.K., how better to respond than with even more absurdity?
To honor Trans Kids Deserve Better as part of our Superlatives package, we tapped Shon Faye, one of the U.K.’s foremost trans writers and journalists. Below, read her tribute to the group, including her own experiences at the encampments and what she’s learned from them, as told to staff writer James Factora. — Them
I first heard about Trans Kids Deserve Better them last year after Pride, when I learned that a group of trans kids were occupying the Department of Education in response to transphobic guidance in schools, and the withdrawal of puberty blockers.
My instant reaction was that I thought it was really great they were doing this. I also have to confess: I felt a little bit of shame as a trans adult that kids are the ones who have been stepping up and getting organized and doing the direct action first. I did feel, for a long time, that we needed more protest. There’s the Trans+ Pride march in London, as well as the recent topless trans protest on Downing Street, but I was impressed that it was a group of kids — though I was dismayed that they had to take time to encamp themselves outside government buildings.
They finished an occupation recently outside of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is a body that has put out some pretty transphobic guidance about bathrooms and gendered spaces in the U.K., and that is trying to bring in legal guidance that trans people should use facilities in line with our birth sex. I went down to that occupation for a day and did some flyering to people who were passing by. The kids had prepared flyers with the QR code, and they needed people to give them to members of the public to raise awareness of why they were and why they were occupying that building. As much as I might be frightened about the trajectory of the anti-trans backlash, there are ways in which I have agency as an adult. But school is kind of inescapable, and a lot of the posters at the demonstration that I was at said things like, “I shouldn’t be having to take time out of revising for my school examinations to have to protest for being treated like a human being.”
As much as they are speaking truth to power, I also think it is a lesson to other adult LGBT people to be willing to listen to the experiences of trans kids and not just project our own experience. Trans Kids Deserve Better have a very clear vision about what they’re doing and what their role is, and it’s challenged me as a trans adult. One of the things that I have been aware of for many years is that we always say trans kids are spoken over, and sometimes that is even by trans adults, because it’s just a case of adults speaking over children. I think we often get impassioned about protecting trans kids because we’re actually playing out a psychodrama where we want to protect our younger selves, and that’s somewhat different to the reality of being a trans young person in 2025. The only people who know what it’s like to be trans kids in 2025 and can speak to that are trans kids in 2025. The reality is that young people bring a kind of freshness and an energy and a passion to movement work — that’s been the case in the climate movement and the gay liberation movement, and so it would make sense that it’s the case with this movement.
I also love the fact that there is a playfulness in their direct actions, but there’s also quite a surprising awareness of history. They released bugs in the transphobic LGB conference, which has precedent in the history of U.K. protest. And in addition to playfulness, they also make the occupations kind of social. It’s not a particularly angry vibe when you go to where they are camping. On the day that I went, they were having an open mic later that night, and they’re doing activities throughout. There is a kind of kid-like energy to it, which I think is also important. I don’t want to say people age out, because there are people protesting at all ages, but I think there is a different dynamic when you’re young. There’s just a different energy there that perhaps even adults who have been politically active for a long time don’t retain.
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