Christine Burns MBE is an author and trans activist. Her book, Trans Britain: Our Long Journey Out of the Shadows, is available now via Unbound.

As part of PinkNews’ year-end review of 2018, activist Christine Burns MBE reflects on the unprecedented hostility towards trans people in the last 12 months.

In May 2014, Time magazine featured trans actress Laverne Cox on their front cover and declared the arrival of a “trans tipping point.” American Vogue described 2015 as “the year of trans visibility.”

For someone like myself, intimately aware of the place of trans people in culture since my teens in the 1960s, and having been a leading campaigner for almost 30 years, these were monumental events and you might forgive me for thinking by September 2016, when pitching an anthology-based history of trans emergence in Britain, that I was going to be putting together a retrospective on a community whose story of emergence and freedom was almost over. We felt like the worst was behind us.

How could I have been so wrong, so prematurely relaxed? Read more via PinkNews