Policy alone is not enough to protect trans rights. If we’re going to tackle anti-trans toxicity, we need to win the social and media battles first.
That’s the message from Helen Belcher OBE — a software entrepreneur, campaigner, and co-founder of Trans Media Watch.
Helen was speaking to Pride Wide co-founder Tris Reid-Smith at our Create Hope event, hosted by Samsung KX in London on 3 April 2025.
Together, we explored how the trans community can move from existential debate back to a narrative of shared humanity.
From Facebook to Ofcom: The birth of Trans Media Watch
Tris: Helen, your journey into media advocacy started long before today’s “culture wars” reached their current fever pitch. Take us back to how it all began.
Helen: It was back in about 2008, when “dinosaurs still roamed the earth,” that a small group of us got together on Facebook and started bemoaning the state of the British media. There was a lot to bemoan. This informal group eventually managed to secure a meeting with Ofcom.
At the time, I owned my own software company and was used to going into organizations to try and “speak some kind of sense”. One of the key members of the group decided they needed someone with a business-like approach, so I went along as one of five people to that meeting.
It became obvious very quickly that the group needed structure if it was going to go anywhere. We applied for an EU grant, which required us to become a real organization, and since I’d set up a company, I thought, “I can set up a blooming charity”.
Lessons from the same-sex marriage
Tris: You’ve often looked at the journey of the wider LGB community as a blueprint. How did the media landscape change for them around 2010-2012?
Helen: Around 2010-2011, we had the Equality Act, and then the same-sex marriage debates started. If you remember the media coverage at the time, it was often: “Let’s get someone like Ben Summerskill from Stonewall and get him arguing with a radical Christian preacher about whether gay people should even exist”. That was the tone of the debate on mainstream media.
However, we saw that narrative change as gay and lesbian people were “naturalized”. Suddenly, the media showed that they could get married, they loved each other, and they even got bored and had rows just like everyone else. That “usualization” of those groups did an awful lot to cement their rights. You win the argument that people are “like everybody else” in the eyes of the mainstream media.
The “tipping point” and the backlash
Tris: For a moment in 2015, it felt like the trans community was reaching that same level of acceptance. What happened?
Helen: In 2015, we had Laverne Cox on the cover of Time magazine — the “Transgender tipping point”. Even Joe Biden was saying this was the big human rights issue of our time. But that was exactly when the backlash started.
You had figures like Jenny Murray writing that you can “call yourself a woman if you like, but you’ll never be a real woman”. It gave voice to a small group of people who learned from what we had done and decided to get jobs in the media to frame the narrative themselves.
Winning the narrative
Tris: Given how toxic the conversation is now, particularly on social media, how do we move forward?
Helen: The toxicity is driven by a mixture of fear and political imperatives. It has been incredibly difficult to get our voices out to counter some of this stuff. Someone once said to me that engaging in the current debate is like “walking into a room where two people have just stopped throwing crockery at each other”. You ask a simple question, and suddenly it sparks the almighty row again.
This is why Pride Wide’s mission is so important. We can have all the policy advances we like, but if we don’t carry people with us, those policies won’t stick. We have to win the social battles first. We need to bring up social acceptance through engaging with mainstream media and winning people’s hearts and minds.
Our place in culture
As Helen’s insights reveal, the fight for trans rights is no longer just a legal one — it is a cultural one. By moving from the “big stick” of complaints to the “cajoling” power of storytelling, the Pride Wide movement aims to reclaim its place in the mainstream narrative.
Find out how you can join Pride Wide and support this fight here.
