A Conversation with historian Jack Doyle

Queerious #3 : An interview series with queer community leaders

Creeping in to making our yearly appearance in your inboxes and phones - hello, and Happy Pride!

We’ve been clutching our (fake) pearls and hanging on to our sanity with copious media consumption and tea, which is only to be expected in the present global political climate. We hope that you lot have been finding your happy places to go to. With rhetoric and measurable action turning more ominous towards trans and queer people, keep your loved ones close and know that you are never, ever alone.

To commiserate with us over the rising transphobia and other -phobias in these dark days, and to find ways of resistance, we spoke to historian, community organiser and trans masc daddy Jack Doyle, for the third edition of our interview series Queerious.

If you’d like to read earlier issues, we have the first one with journalist Ellis Ng and the other with Jeet of Yes, We Exist.

Originally from the United States and now settled in London, UK, Jack obtained a DPhil from Oxford University in History and then threw himself into organising in the local community. We caught up with Jack over Zoom. While the hope is to put the conversation up as a YouTube video one day - for now, here is our chat with Jack in good old textual format.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

QA: You've been involved with community work in the UK for a very long time. Talk a little bit about your work.

J: I wear a lot of different hats. I have some background in community organising, doing queer mutual aid work, trans health work, along with migrant support in the UK and some internationally.

I am from the US originally, but I came to the UK when I was 18 to study, and then I ended up carrying on with academia. I'm a historian by training, of war and empire which is modern history, not specifically a queer historian - but because I was doing a lot of community work on the side while in academia, I also was upskilling and learning queer and trans history.

I worked as Oxford's first named lecturer in LGBTQ+ history a few years ago. I'm now no longer in academia, but I still do a lot of community education, work and community history. I've run trans health advocacy services, basically supporting other trans people to access healthcare in our increasingly completely broken healthcare system here in the UK.

I spent a lot of time as a teenager…having to kind of create these networks of support that didn't exist in my life, which I think is very common experience for a queer person.

QA: How was that experience of being at Oxford while being openly queer. Did you find the system to be helpful or did you find it to resist you?

J: I've now very deliberately left academia and that institution for political reasons, but when I was a student there, it was a strange double-edged sword, because within Oxford itself, if you are a white person, that space and culture allows for a lot of gender ambiguity and gender non-conformity and certain cultural kinds of queerness.

I used to take my students around the city and show them statues of famous queer colonisers, like Cecil Rhodes and James the Second. There have been famous trans people like Jan Morris and Michael Dillon who were living in Oxford and doing their thing.

But I was doing my PhD there when we started to get this really targeted moral panic happening in the UK. Myself and a lot of other younger trans people in the city and the university were having to do a lot of self advocacy and facing a lot of very institutional transphobia, which is still present there. That's around the time I started really getting involved in trans community work.

QA: How would you say your identity as a trans macs person intersected with your work, whether it's with academia or with what you do now?

J: My PhD was on pilots’ experiences of violence and combat in the First World War, and many of them were gay. It's kind of interesting. I've been out to myself as trans since I was 14, and I'd say my gay identity and my trans identity are very closely wrapped up together.

I've been thinking about it a bit more recently, since I started to actually teach trans history and queer history, I suddenly felt like even though I'd been a person who has been out in academia for a long time, I felt like I was an old person in trans years. I don't want to claim elder status, but I've been in these spaces since the early 2000s so I started teaching stuff that I learned - not in academia, but for friends, online, or just community gossip, or pictures that I saw in somebody's LiveJournal in 2005.

QA: So a lot of lived experience work went into your teaching?

J: Yeah, I'd say so, but I’m also always navigating that, because when I teach I don't always come out to students unless I need to make a very particular point.

I grew up very online. I was the very online queer kid, and that's how I accessed community for a long time, and doing that served me a lot, I think, when switching into support work and crisis work advocacy, because I spent a lot of time as a teenager doing suicide interventions for my friends who lived in other countries, or having to kind of create these networks of support that didn't exist in my life, which I think is very common experience for a queer person.

QA: At the moment, what sort of community endeavours are you involved in and why are they important to you?

J: I’ve been politically involved in various sort-of leftist organising work since I was a teenager. But as the world is increasingly on fire and we’re living through time of multiple genocides, I've been trying to change the trajectory of the work I'm doing.

I've tried to help out a lot with queer solidarity organising with Palestine - to me, these liberation struggles are completely entwined. In the UK, where a lot of really important anti-racist work is being done, I tapped out of trans health work for a while because I got burnt out doing it. I went back into academia, which wasn’t an easy choice.

I'm now trying to use some of my skills and knowledge to just community-build for the moment that we're in. I try to do a lot of skill sharing with other oppressed groups about accessing health care. Lately I've been trying to do knowledge and community sharing between the US and the UK, where we’re trying to respond to the acceleration of fascism and the anti-trans stuff that’s impacting all of us.

In the past year, I tried to do a lot of resourcing for some Palestine encampments in the UK, where we were recognising that students are being uniquely targeted right now for political work. We were handing some knowledge down to younger people about knowing their rights and de-escalation. I also did some practical skill building stuff across communities, like young, white queer people working with straight cis Muslims - what does that look like? And how do we listen and understand each other's struggles about co-opting?

As a historian, I sort of see a lot of the roots of this in a certain type of white middle class feminism, in histories of really tight regulation of gender and sexuality through law, through empire, through violence, subjugation, and racialised people and propaganda.

QA: The UK is going through a period of radical transformation with regard to all queer people's rights, to an extent, and even the Labour Party being in power is not really helping. Why do you think that is?

J: I've been asked this a lot and thought about it a lot. I think there's a lot of different dimensions to it, but one is that this is a sort of global phenomenon that is happening right now which has been generated by various far right movements. A lot of the original organisations in the UK that were anti-trans were getting funding from right wing evangelical groups in the US, like the Heritage Foundation.

But I think there’s also something really culturally specific about Britain, because we've had this happening for a long time. As a historian, I sort of see a lot of the roots of this in certain type of white middle class feminism, in histories of really tight regulation of gender and sexuality through law, through empire, through violence, subjugation, and racialised people and propaganda.

I always think about the big moral panic of 2017-2018 where a group of British anti-trans feminist campaigners tried to go on a speaking tour in Ireland, and a group of Irish feminists pushed back and really explicitly called out the kind of colonial feminist aspects of this and the categorisation of womanhood, because it is trans women who are at the centre of this.

QA: Did you ever work with the Tavistock Clinic?

J: I’ve worked against them very actively! I worked in grassroots trans health for a long time. I set up an advocacy service at Spectra, which is a charity based in London doing trans health advocacy. What we would be doing there is supporting trans people who are struggling to access care. The gender clinic system in the UK, it’s the same system that’s been functioning just as it was set up in the 1960s. The Tavistock clinic, or Charing Cross, as we call it, because it used to be based in Charing Cross Hospital, that's the biggest gender clinic in the UK. It was the first one.

So when I first started doing advocacy work, I would accompany people to the clinic for appointments. Then I stopped doing that, because functionally, the clinics do not operate anymore. They claim to have wait times of a couple of years. But if you decided to transition today, like you are currently looking at like a 30+ year wait.

The UK and Ireland model of care for trans health is very heavily psychiatric. In many other countries where gender affirming care is legal, including some parts of the US, they operate more on informed consent models. If you want to transition, you go in, you tell the doctor you want to take some hormones, and the doctor says ‘ok, this is what they do, here are the potential side effects, and here's how we're going to do this.’ On the day, then, you can pick up the hormones and get started on your transition.

Whereas in the UK and Ireland, they still have a model where you have to go through a series of psychiatric assessments to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and there's lots of different reasons why the wait times are so long. A lot of people assume that it's to do with funding. But the clinics have funding. What's happened is that a lot of the clinicians who work through the National Health Service, they also have spent years working in private clinics. So DIY end up being the only way that you can really start transition, and not wait for like 30 years. These clinicians then have a serious conflict of interest, because they’re making massive paychecks but there's not a lot of incentive for the clinics to reform the system, especially in this kind of really intense media and political transphobia that we've had.

QA: So what do you think can be done to resist what's going on? Is it education? Is it fighting in the streets? What do you think can be done?

J: I think something we've learned a lot in the UK that I tried to communicate to the Americans is that (there are things that are) not a good use of people's time - like arguing with fascists.

I think increasingly, offering resources and community with any skills that you have, even if you're not a trans person, is a really big way to help. I’ve told a lot of American friends recently, who've been worried, to make friends with their neighbours, make community outside of queer community. You can try to help create communities of care that can operate outside of the state.

DIY networks like this are quite big in the UK. It's how a lot of people get their healthcare, and that's been true for a long time. So doing harm reduction work, helping people source hormones and injectable supplies, and also being really clear and unequivocal about not trying to engage with the anti-trans media framing of the issue being a debate or being a question. Call transphobia what it is, call anti-trans campaigning what it is, and link it with other groups that are being attacked.

QA: Can you tell me about some of the activists that you personally find to be an inspiration across these communities?

J: There’s lot of the people who just jump to my head that are not super well known, they're just people in local community who I wouldn't maybe necessarily want to put a spotlight on. I mean, everybody has different parts to play, right?

I guess people who I've seen on a wider scale like Indya Moore, you know, whose career has tanked by their very vocal pro-Palestinian activism, and the fact that she's sharing that in such a public way online. But she’s doing some really important work connecting trans and Palestinian anti-colonial struggles.

Mental Health Resources

• Sahaya Help Line: 080-223 0959

Operates: Only on Tuesdays and Fridays, 7 pm - 9 pm

• Sappho Helpline: +91-9831518320 

Operates: 10 am – 9 pm 

• Space: (toll-free tele-counselling helpline) 1800111015

Operates: 10 am - 6 pm every day.

• A list of other places to call if you need help, clarity, or just someone to talk to.

• Need a mentor in the workplace? Try Qonnect, a career development peer network. They hold mentorship programmes and fireside chats to help you find out how to be a functioning queer human at work. 

Donate to the community 

The Naz Foundation’s donation page is active. Donate today to help them with their activities, which includes creating support groups and counselling services for queer people in the National Capital Region.

Queer Quote of the Day

That is how I learned that if I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

— Audre Lorde

Thank you for reading, and see you for our next letter!

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