The trouble with Trafalgar Square’s transgender tribute

Seven hundred and twenty-six plaster face casts of transsexual, non-binary or gender non-conforming people were unveiled yesterday* in London’s Trafalgar Square. Mil Veces un Instante (A thousand times an Instant) by Mexican artist, Teresa Margolles, sits proudly upon the Fourth Plinth around Nelson’s Column. The casts are arranged in the form of a Tzompantli, or a ‘skull rack’, that exhibited the remains of war captives or sacrifice victims, and the art is intended to draw attention to the rights of trans people worldwide. But is it really necessary? As another Transgender Day of Remembrance approaches on 20 November with its pseudo-religious trappings, this imagery is not what London needs.

While trans people worldwide do sadly suffer violence, the risk factors can be overlooked. More than 320 ‘trans and gender diverse people’ were reportedly murdered last year. Almost half were sex workers. Yet while there is much talk about the persecution of trans people, politicians and activists seem more reluctant to talk about something that might help: making women and trans people safer by cracking down on the sex trade. Advancing the Nordic Model to make it a criminal offence to buy other people’s bodes for sex might help those numbers come down. Better gun control in some countries, too, might do more good than lamenting last year’s victims in a statue. Those are the arguments that need to be heard when trans allies gather with their candles to signal their virtue and hear yet another list of names read out on 20 November.

The sculpture is a memorial to Karla La Borrada, a trans singer and former sex worker who was killed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 2015. Margolles said of her project:

‘Instead of doing one piece in her memory, I wanted to do something to represent the whole trans community – a collective piece about that community hugging her’.

Teresa Margolles

To link the two countries – and two rather different trans communities – Margolles took exactly half the casts from Mexicans and half from Londoners. In a rather ghoulish and depressing project, the casts are expected to decay and disintegrate under exposure to both the elements and the pigeons.

Those whose faces were recorded are alive, but the focus is on death. Every murder is a tragedy, but it helps neither Mexico nor the UK to conflate two very different situations. In 2021, Mexico’s murder rate was 28.2 per 100,000 people, among the highest in the world. Britain’s that year was 1.2 per 100,000.

So how and why did trans people become the focus of Londoners’ attention on the fourth plinth? Ray Blanchard, the American-Canadian researcher who was head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Toronto gender identity clinic, recently pointed out the remarkable shift in the approach taken by campaigners over the past few years,

‘Early in this century, trans activists reframed transsexualism as a political problem rather than a clinical problem. Trans people were not to be seen as individuals with a circumscribed but painful mental disorder meriting sympathy but rather as an oppressed group deserving social justice.’

Ray Blanchard

From my perspective as a transsexual, it is a reframing I regret, and it is one that appears to have done nobody – beyond the activist lobby perhaps – any favours. In the UK, transsexuals have the same rights as everyone else, and a few more besides. We have no need to be anyone’s victim. Rather than being closeted in some community, we are better off standing on our own two feet as equal members of British society. Mexico is almost a different world, but it isn’t just trans people who are at greater risk; in that country, increased levels of violence pose an additional threat to everyone.

Will those viewing the sculpture realise that? Or will it simply add to the narrative that trans people are oppressed? That’s my worry – and the sooner the sculpture is replaced, the better.

The sculptures on the other three plinths have stood for almost two hundred years. The nineteenth century artists who made them built things to last. Maybe the time has come for our generation to do likewise. Margolles’s sculpture will come down in 18 months’ time. When it does, a less politically loaded artwork should take its place.

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Debbie Hayton is a teacher and journalist.

Her book, Transsexual Apostate – My Journey Back to Reality is published by Forum

* This article was first published by The Spectator on 19 September 2024: The trouble with Trafalgar Square’s transgender tribute.