Leeds' first Trans Pride

TRANSCRIPT

And even like sitting on the bus with my trans flag and the placard felt kind of radical and worrying. I wasn't sure what reaction we were gonna get ...nothing happened, but I felt vulnerable.

Yeah, and then we assembled outside the Town Hall, and we didn't know where we were marching, like none of - maybe the organisers knew [...] I didn't know where we were going to march. But, you know, we were gathering outside the Art Gallery, and then suddenly it became apparent that they were closing The Headrow, that we were marching down The Headrow, and this was...that just came as a complete kind of shock to me, like an amazing shock, but I just sorta hadn't, you, know, I thought of Trans Pride as being something where we'd all had to march on the pavement to get people's way, you know, I didn't think it was going to be something that was powerful enough to shut The Headrow down [laughs]...But, yeah, but they did and we, I ended up at the front because, because I was tall so I was asked to carry, there's a massive Trans Leeds banner that I was asked to carry...so there are a bunch of us quite tall people at the front with this massive banner, and suddenly we were at the front of a whole crowd of, yeah, a smallish crowd, but the crowd of people marching down a closed-off Headrow, and we were chanting, you know, Jamie Fletcher, who was at the time the organiser of Non Binary Leeds - she's not any more - she had a megaphone, I think Sophia Thomas - who was the organiser of Trans Leeds and isn't any more - she had a megaphone too, I think, and we were shout, chanting 'When trans rights are under attack, what do we do? Fight back!' and 'Trans rights are human rights', those were the things that we were mostly, and 'We're here, we're queer, we will not live in fear', all this stuff, and what was, it felt amazingly powerful. It was pouring with rain, it was freezing, it was 31st March, it was Trans Day Of Visibility, we were certainly very fricking visible! [Laughs]