Monday reflections on an atypical Sunday: an interview in the Times and an evening with Judith Butler.

I had to retreat under my grief blanket and write, after anti-trans heckling at this event last night left me in tears.

I agreed to be interviewed for the Sunday Times (ST) with a great deal of trepidation. I'm aware that they are a transphobic news outlet; the writings of their journalists and decisions of their editors materially contribute to the harms caused to the trans community. Several trans people warned me not to get involved, but others encouraged me. Strikingly they all said it was ultimately my choice, no one tried to enforce their views on me. Of course they didn't, trans people know what it feels like to be denied autonomy. I decided to go ahead.

You can read the whole article minus the paywall here.

What did I make of it? As each hour has passed I've liked it a little less. At first I felt a general sense of relief that it wasn't too bad. And the feedback I'm getting from cis friends and acquaintances, from friends of my mother who are not known for their progressive views on anything, from strangers who have reached out to contact me, tells me I was right to try and engage the ST readership. For why else have I written Her Name is Alice, if not to change hearts and minds? But really, much of the article is clunky, inaccurate, misleading and sensationalist.

There are the errors that are obvious to me, but won't be obvious to others, like the opening set up that places the journalist in the same kitchen where we first found out Alice might be trans. She was not in the same kitchen, my family moved the year before Alice died. It's a careless error, and I am sensitive to the slightest mistake. It shouldn't matter but it does, because it triggers my memories of the carelessness with which the NHS treated Alice and me, as we tried to access help.

There are so many exaggerations, because exaggerations engage readers, I suppose. I do not like the implication that my marriage almost didn't survive, based on my throwaway comment that my husband, Peter and I have been really struggling, and what I considered a humorous recounting of all the therapy we attend: individual psychotherapy, couples counselling, and group support at SoBS. It's a myth, that couples split up when a child dies, not borne out by research. And this note in the story just seems like a lazy nod to that myth, an embellishment to titillate. My marriage may not survive yet, but I hope it does, we are doing our best under the most difficult of circumstances.

But I am focussing on the little things, rather than addressing the bigger issues that bother me, which are two fold. Firstly I found the over-emphasis on my failure to support Alice's transition to be particularly wounding. I know I could have been better, but the blunt line from the contents table, that's missing in the online version: "Caroline Litman struggled for years to accept her trans child," is pure hyperbole. In the body of the article I compare Peter's acceptance to my initial doubts, "He just wanted to love her, whoever she was, and I was putting conditions on her very briefly.” It's described how I "gently and continually tried to coax (Alice) into opening up and fought for her to be seen by understanding doctors." It is the mismatch between the headline and the content that irks, perhaps because it echoes some of the problem with mainstream reporting on trans people. I am sensitive now, to the devices of editors, the sensationalist misleading headlines to get clicks, with mundane facts hidden away. But I wasn't so attuned to the level of transphobia in our press until after Alice died, and there's no reason why the ST readership should be any different. In this way a generation brought up to trust journalism is being roundly misled.

The regret and the shame that I will always own, is that BEFORE I even knew Alice was trans I expressed some views and concerns about trans people that are now anathema to me. Who were these men who wanted to say they were women and move within women's spaces? became a question I hadn't known to ask, until the seeds were planted. The transphobic tropes repeated endlessly by newspapers like The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and repeated on the BBC, on Radio 4, on Woman's Hour, seeped into my consciousness and I began to entertain the idea that they might be true. Whilst the ST article touches on this briefly with a quote, "I’d seen in the press how the reporting about trans people was getting more and more toxic", the journalist has her hands tied, cannot go further even if she wanted to and acknowledge her own employers contribution to the toxic environment for trans people. This is the best she can do. The smart reader can join the dots, the reason Alice didn't come out to me sooner, whereas her sister came out as gay aged thirteen, speaks to the notion that Alice was not afforded the same emotional safety in which to express her gender identity in her own home. For that I am entirely culpable. But regret and shame that I did not support Alice's transition. No.

Secondly, for an article that is purportedly about Alice's lack of access to healthcare and the impact this had on her mental health (as acknowledged in the coroner's prevention of future deaths report at Alice's inquest) it stings that the article should repeat the that the Tavistock was once "rushing children into medical transition." Alice was eighteen before she received any treatment for her gender dysphoria yet the article veers off into typical ST territory, riffing on the Trumpian idea that children are going to school one gender and coming home another. If Alice were alive today she would still be waiting for that first elusive appointment at an NHS gender clinic, over five and a half years since she was first referred.

I take some responsibility for this avenue of reporting , yes, I talked about Alice not receiving puberty blockers, but mostly I talked about the puberty blocker ban in the context of Cass and all the international opposition to it. To expect any of that to be published was naive.

There are other ways I was naive, the expectation that a cis heteronormative journalist has any true understanding of the difficulties facing trans people, is fanciful. Though maybe I am being unkind, the headline caption that accompanied the extract of my memoir, "Caroline Litman on how she struggled with Alice’s revelation that she wanted to be a girl",

would have been chosen by an editor, not the journalist herself. But the point remains, the casual cis reader will not see a problem with this headline, before Alice came out I would not have seen a problem with it either. Any trans person and well educated ally will immediately see how it suggests that being trans is a choice, Alice was not really a girl, it says, she merely wanted to be one.

But in only responding to the negatives in the article, I neglect all the positives, and these are being seen by others, those less close to the story's details than me, and this matters. Overall the piece was well received, not just by cis people I know, but by trans people too, one trans friend said, "I'm used to seeing such garbage from the Times that this sounded moderate." She's not wrong, but I was left feeling a little unsettled nonetheless.

Perhaps an evening at the Royal Festival Hall listening to the great Judith Butler would lift my spirits. I've never been to this venue before. It's vast and the auditorium was packed and buzzing with anticipation. As Judith began to talk I hung on their every word, I was totally focussed and eager to listen and learn, but then there was an interruption, a heckle from the floor. I didn't hear the words used but it was a challenge to Judith, and they chose to respond. I wish they hadn't. I wish Ash Sarker, who was conducting the interview, had issued a sterner warning, that if the interruptions continued the disruptor would be removed from the auditorium. Because after the initial interruption I lost focus. I thought perhaps it was the glass of wine I'd sipped in the fading March sunshine a few hours earlier, but on reflection overnight, I think it was something else entirely. I think, as the parent of a trans child who has died by suicide, I felt unsafe and became hypervigilant, anticipating another outburst at any point. It certainly left me in tears, though I pushed them away since I was in a shared box with two strangers. And sure enough my fears were realised. The anti-trans protester, from memory, heckled from the floor on at least four different occasions. It turned out to be a prominent activist and cronie of JKR. The following morning she boasted about her protest on Twitter/X in a classic example of DARVO, complaining about Judith's retaliatory comments to the abuse she had started. It was a horrible and it was a great shame it wasn't stopped and was instead engaged with. The person shouting anti-trans abuse at Judith Butler and in effect at the whole LGBTQ+ community who packed the auditorium, showed an astonishing arrogance and entitlement and a complete disregard for the attendees, so many of whom were women. The auditorium was full of all sorts of us, I was just one of them, but we were all impacted. How is this the feminism gender critical activists claim it is? And if it was really distressing for me personally, imagine how distressing it must have been for many of the trans people in the audience, some of whom may struggle to attend public events, but on this occasion felt they would be safe and seen. This is trans reality, having to go about one's life in constant anticipation of abuse. This is what I saw last night, abuse, plain and simple. Gender critical abuse. It may not have been a literal physical assault, but in its reach it harmed thousands.

And this caused a sadness in me, a sadness as to the harm's caused to Alice, some of which were inflicted by me. At one point in the evening Judith answered a question, the details of which I can't recall, but their answer was striking. To hugely paraphrase, they spoke about the responsibility of parents to allow their children to express themselves, that the simple phrase: 'you're not going out dressed like that are you?' is a trauma a child should not have to hear. A casual slight might be the first time they learn they are somehow unacceptable. I never used that phrase on Alice, but there were other ways she would have definitely known I was wary of her gender expression. The time I yelled at her 'why the hell would you want to be a woman anyway?' springs to mind!

So, the ST article was not wrong in writing about my regrets but it really missed the point. A point that a competing article in the 'i' online made beautifully. Whilst this article also included errors, it did not misrepresent the very essence of what I am here to say. In her closing paragraph Sophie Gallagher wrote: Of all the things Caroline wishes she could change, she says, along with reform of the treatment pathway, the main one is that Alice would have grown up in a household where being trans was talked about with the same “ease and grace” as anyone else on the LGBTQ spectrum. “I got it wrong with Alice and it tortures me. I’ll experience this self-recrimination, with varying degrees of conviction, until the day I die.”