Around a year ago Trans Media Watch was asked to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, a public investigation of standards in the British press.

Three of us had spent a couple of months beforehand collating evidence, much of it heart-breaking, lots of it that could never be released into the public domain. The invitation from Lord Justice Leveson came as a real shock, and involved much thinking about whether I should appear behind screens, or with the cameras switched off.

For a couple of days after I appeared in the Royal Courts of Justice, there was a sense of unity within the trans communities – a trans group had been brave enough to challenge the press barons – in public. It took a second submission, though, before press abuse significantly declined – only to resume again within a couple of weeks of Leveson releasing his report.

The news about the General Medical Council investigation into Dr Richard Curtis, the best-known private practitioner giving trans healthcare, triggered another wave of fury among trans communities. Parallels were drawn with the GMC’s investigations in Dr Russell Reid six years earlier. As a result the TransDocFail hashtag was initiated on Twitter, and within 24 hours hundreds of instances of discrimination and abuse of trans people by doctors, nurses and administrators had been revealed.

At the same time, however, newspaper columnist Suzanne Moore had commented that women shouldn’t have to aspire to have the body of a ‘Brazilian transsexual’. The already febrile atmosphere ensured this comment was picked up, and accusation and counter-accusation flew about, also on Twitter – not the best platform for reasoned debate. Within days Suzanne then wrote a piece that tried to explain her position and was subjected to, let’s call it, vigorous debate on Twitter, again.

Then the Observer published a piece by columnist Julie Burchill on the grounds of defending Suzanne against a perceived cabal of trans activists who were attempting to stifle free speech. Some of her phrases seemed deliberately designed to hurt. They did. And they will probably provide yet more ammunition for the bully in the street.

So trans is in the papers again – but for all the wrong reasons. Parts of the press have preferred to concentrate on self-referencing spats in increasingly vitriolic terms. Other parts have gone back to their old habits, of outing defenceless trans people and continuing to parody us as deviants and frauds.

Trans appearing as the butt of the joke occurs at least once or twice a week on television, with intersex starting to get a look in. Yet when a real story, about real discrimination and abuse happening to real people appears, the mainstream media once again turn a blind eye. Strange, that, in the light of the recent revelations around Sir Jimmy Savile.

Lord MacPherson, in his report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, spent a good deal of time discussing institutional racism. ‘In its more subtle form it is as damaging as in its overt form’. ‘It can be seen in processes, attitudes and behavior which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and … stereotyping.’ ‘It can arise from well intentioned but patronizing words or actions.’

Twitter’s TransDocFail hashtag shows that such institutionalized discrimination appears to exist at numerous levels within Britain’s National Health Service. Leaving alone the area of gender identity clinics, their protocols and access to them, when you have reports of trans people being forced to walk in excruciating pain to the operating theatre for emergency surgery because ‘we don’t fetch chairs for your sort’, when people are frightened to seek medical treatment because they are repeatedly called ‘it’ by nurses and receptionists – surely that’s where the problem really lies.

Trans people seem to have been repeatedly treated as sub-human – those for whom it’s acceptable to openly discriminate against and not care about it.

This institutionalized discrimination is at large throughout the media as well.

Serious media discourse is usually filtered through a self-referencing fascination with surgery or the ‘butterfly story’ – perceived as the only stories non-trans people can understand. Those who regret surgery also attract huge, one could say disproportionate, amounts of media attention – despite surgical regret for such procedures being astonishingly low. Yet programs such as Channel 4’s My Transsexual Summer showed that providing trans people a chance to speak for themselves can be extremely powerful.

The same issues are also throughout Britain’s civil service. While some politicians and civil servants are gallantly fighting the corner, they seem to be met with an overwhelming indifference and a refusal to understand that there even might be a problem – this ‘unwitting ignorance’ attitude possibly reinforced by the media coverage, or lack of it. This results in legislation and procedures that require a level of medical intervention – and so the vicious circle completes.

The atmosphere is changing, slowly. Some trans people are beginning to find a coherent voice. Some mainstream journalists are beginning to understand some of the issues trans people face daily. Some media outlets are prepared to engage with organizations such as Trans Media Watch. These are baby steps, and they should be encouraged. While the outlook is daunting, we must believe that things will get better.