Let me take you to the fictional trauma ward of a fictional New York hospital in the fictional mid-2010s. It’s got flip phones, bad haircuts and patient dilemmas taking second place to the personal lives of the doctors. Yes, it’s a hospital TV drama: Nurse Jackie. 

In today’s episode, Jackie is dealing with a patient, Lonna, who’s been admitted with fainting spells and cramping. Jackie warns her that she’s about to give her an injection and her patient cheerfully replies that she’s been having injections for years and doesn’t feel a thing. Lonna is a trans woman, played by Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, who went on to star in Pose.

When Lonna is told it might be the oestrogen she’s taking causing the trouble, she muses: “Wouldn’t it suck if the thing that makes life worth living is the thing that’s making me sick?” 

Spoiler alert: It is the oestrogen making her ill, and the doctor tries to get her to stop taking it. Lonna discharges herself instead: “Y’all wake up, throw on lipstick and some Louboutins, and no one asks if you’re really a girl. I’ve got five years of injections and two years on the pill. So don’t ask me to go backsliding, ‘cos I won’t.”

Lonna is a bit of a stereotype, sassy and wisecracking, but she has a poignant storyline and some good lines.  

There was a point at which the media treated trans people like people – not like objects of wrath, ridicule or fear – and it wasn’t that long ago. In the 2010s, it was the norm to see decent trans storylines with sympathetic trans characters, played by trans actors. 

Journalist and author Paris Lees, the first trans presenter on Radio 1 and Channel 4, wrote about TV’s improved treatment of trans people in the Guardian in 2015, noting that TV had turned its attention from sex changes to more wide-ranging storylines: “It turns out trans people are not just sets of floating genitals that do magic tricks for fascinated viewers – they’re full-bodied human beings with bigger stories to tell”.   

If people see other trans people able to go about their lives safely, able to experience acceptance, it makes coming out less scary

Chay Brown, Director of TransActual

This increased visibility of trans people in popular culture in the early 2010s was called the ‘trans tipping point’. Trans people were on magazine covers, talk shows and TV. Chay Brown, director of healthcare at advocacy organisation TransActual, says it was a time in which “the press seemed to be getting better at talking about trans people. 

“But it’s gone backwards — increasingly rapidly in the past five years — to the point where things are scary for trans people.”

Trans representation in TV and film has decreased — there were no trans characters or storylines in any of the big films last year. And negative news coverage about trans people is at an all-time high. The language around trans people has changed too: The BBC stopped calling trans women ‘trans women’ last November, and now calls them ‘biological males’. 

In May 2025 Transgender Europe (TGEU) published its trans rights index and map – which tracks legal rights of trans people across Europe. It announced a ‘new trans tipping point’, an “unprecedented reversal” of trans rights: “For the first time in its 13-year history, setbacks in human rights of trans people across Europe and Central Asia now clearly outweigh progress”.

Against this backdrop, how are the politics of representation affecting the lives of trans people in Bristol?

Things were better then

Chay was 31 when he came out as trans. When he was growing up in the 90s, trans representation on TV was limited to Hayley Cropper on Coronation Street. 

If I started transitioning now, my life would be so much harder

Graeme

Though played by a cis woman, she was still the first trans character in a British soap and the first permanent trans character in a TV drama. “It was pretty groundbreaking,” says Chay. 

“But I didn’t see trans men. And by the time I did start seeing trans men represented, I’d already done such a good job of suppressing things, I didn’t even know it was an option for me.”

Chay lived in Kent, “which is not famously progressive”. As a primary school teacher, he was terrified of coming out. “I couldn’t find any UK examples of primary school teachers who’d come out, apart from Lucy Meadows,” he says, referring to a trans woman who died by suicide after a campaign of harassment by the Daily Mail. 

Even so, things were better then than they are now. “I can’t tell you whether my decision to come out would be the same today as it was in 2017,” Chay tells me. “Because it’s just hard.” 

Disappearing from both directions 

Graeme, who lives in Bristol and finally got surgery this year after a 14-year wait, agrees. “If I started transitioning now, my life would be so much harder,” he says. He feels society was friendlier to trans people when he first came out. 

He says that the increased pressure on trans people to not be trans is disappearing trans people from both directions.

“Trans people who are earlier on in their transition, or who don’t pass as well, are basically being forced to not be trans. They’re being forced back into the closet, being forced back to go into the toilets of their sex assigned at birth. 

“And trans people that do pass and are further along in transition are being forced to not be trans by not telling people their gender history. It’s pushing trans people into not existing, in different directions.” 

Chay says it’s taking people back to the early days of the gender clinics, when trans people were advised to keep their transness a secret. “You transition and then you blend in. You don’t tell people you’re trans,” he says.  

“I’ve got a sense that people are increasingly living stealth again”. Stealth is when no one but the people closest to you know you’re trans, a practice that was encouraged by gender clinics from the 1950s until the 70s. 

Trans visibility ‘makes coming out less scary’

For Chay, the solution to this is visibility. “If people see other trans people able to go about their lives safely, able to experience acceptance, it makes coming out less scary.” 

Emma is a young trans woman who moved to Bristol recently, specifically choosing the city for its queer-friendly scene.  “I think that for a lot of queer people, that’s a big factor, because there’s loads of towns that just aren’t a fun place to be,” she says. “Especially if you’re less confident, [or] newer to being trans, [choosing a city is] not a decision that you can just make lightly.” 

For her, trans visibility is vital in showing cis people they’re just normal people. The goal is “for the average person to have seen and talked to enough trans people that it stops being an issue for them, they just don’t care any more,” she says. 

“The same way that it’s become fairly normalised now to just be around gay people. There’s a lot of people who still are bigoted, but the general consensus is that it’s not okay to be homophobic.” 

Transness just becoming normal for everyone is “the end goal for trans rights,” says Emma. “The legal stuff is important, but … It [becoming] just a part of their daily life. That’s the real goal. 

“I think that all these laws serve to work against that goal, because they are working specifically to make it harder to be trans.”