people call the UK "TERF island" and while not exactly _wrong_ this doesn't reflect my experience of the day to day reality of living here

in my experience, nobody 'on the ground' gives a shit. cops, landlords, nurses, doctors, all of these had plenty of opportunity to be transphobic or interphobic and if they actually did it was rather well concealed

it's true that it is systemically and politically transphobic and GRCs are awful, but as someone who doesn't deal with those, it's... fine?

i expected worse. a lot worse, actually. i'm not generally very clocky, but i've given a lot of opportunity to a lot of random people to be awful, both intentionally as a litmus test, and because sometimes i'm too tired to care

it was fine. in my experience, the people here are, overwhelmingly, fine

assuming you have an F in the passport, and assuming your experience is similar to mine (these are both big "if"s, to be clear), I would not expect you to be at any significant personal risk from coming to the UK

(in my experience, this is also true of a few other countries with bad reputation)

am I asking you to like the UK? lord no. but I think it is very worth it to be aware of how serious the actual risks are

@whitequark what if you have an X in your passport?

@ariadne it's not recognized currently (which is pretty miserable), there is someone fighting to have it recognized but it is an ongoing and very expensive lawsuit (that I donated to as much as I reasonably could)

@whitequark so a person with an X passport would be denied entry to the UK? or?

@ariadne they just can't get an X in the UK documents even if they changed it elsewhere (the government argues it's too expensive to fix their systems)

I'm not aware of any active interference like denial of entry

@ariadne I can ask about the details if you'd like

@whitequark no i think i am aware of the person you're talking about

@whitequark @ariadne I have a separate plan for getting an X in my passport which I have been procrastinating actually trying, and as far as I can tell no-one has tried yet:

Section 46 of the Data Protection Act 2018 (the UK’s implementation of GDPR article 16, the right to rectification) requires that inaccurate personal data be corrected on request. My plan is to argue that the gender marker in my passport is inaccurate personal data and therefore should be changed to X. I think this would require first submitting the request to HMPO, then complaining to the ICO if that fails, and then a lawsuit that I don’t have the money for.

@noisytoot @ariadne good luck!