Juliet Williams is a 38-year-old trans woman from Plymouth who chairs Plymouth Pride and has been out for eight years. Visibly trans and over six feet tall, she cannot blend in and has chosen not to try. She wears her identity openly because she knows other people are watching and finding the courage to do the same.

Twelve minutes into a shift

Juliet works in a supermarket in a town near Plymouth. Within twelve minutes of a recent shift, while she was helping a customer outside, someone drove past and yelled a slur at her. Twelve minutes. She had barely started her day.

"There is no need for it," she told the reporter. "If people let others get on with their lives, especially trans, their lives will not change in any way. There are no issues from trans people unless you make it an issue."

That sentence stays with me. It is as simple and as true as anything I have heard on this subject, and it is something Juliet has evidently had to explain, again and again, to people who have decided she is the problem.

She goes on to describe something that will be instantly familiar to many trans people, particularly those who cannot blend in: the management of public space as a constant, low-grade project. Project confidence, even when it is not there. Do not show that it has got to you. Get home, crash, start again tomorrow. "It can be very exhausting at times," she says, and I believe her completely.

The particular weight of visibility

There is a specific kind of exposure that comes with a body that does not allow you to disappear into a crowd. Juliet is clear-eyed about it: "I am aware I am over six foot and not a slight person. I am fairly obviously trans and do not try to hide it."

She could, theoretically, make herself smaller. Stay home more. Avoid the places where something might happen. She refuses. "I also refuse to not go out and enjoy myself because of what might happen. Nine times out of ten nothing will happen, normally that tenth time will be someone yelling something which is not fun but it only affects you if you let it."

What she says next is the part I want people to really hear: "I know I am stronger than that but I know so many people who don't have that."

She is not describing resilience as a personal achievement. She is describing it as a privilege, unevenly distributed. The thickness of her skin has been hard won, and she knows that not everyone gets there. She has watched members of her support group, Not Alone Plymouth, reach a point where they could not go on. The group holds a transgender day of remembrance each year. During the Covid lockdowns, people they could not reach in the usual ways died by suicide. She has not let go of that.

Why she stays visible

Juliet wears her colours proudly, she says, "because I know there are people struggling and being visible helps them." That is the whole calculation, stated plainly. The cost of being visible is real. The cost of invisibility, for the people watching from a distance and wondering whether a life like this is possible, is higher.

When Plymouth Pride was cancelled in 2025 due to a lack of funding, the response taught her something. "People were saying how disappointed they were because it was going to be the first time to come out as themselves, to show the world who they are, and they didn't get that opportunity." Pride is not a party. It is, for many people, the first occasion on which they exist publicly as themselves. Losing it means losing that moment, and some people wait years for the conditions to feel safe enough to take it.

The EHRC guidance, and what it actually does

Juliet has been using the women's toilets at work without question for eight years. Now, following new guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission on single-sex spaces, her employer is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds installing gender-neutral facilities across its estate. She understands why, and she does not dismiss the anxieties that feed the debate. But she names what the guidance actually does in practice.

"It's playing on the prejudice that trans women are men and is being used to stoke division and hatred."

The EHRC guidance has been widely and sharply criticised since its publication, including for the confusion it creates rather than resolves. What Juliet describes is what that confusion looks like on the ground: a woman who has simply been getting on with her life now navigating a policy conversation that treats her presence as a problem requiring a solution. The Equality Act 2010, the law that actually governs this, protects trans people through the characteristic of gender reassignment. A court ruling is one interpretation of that Act. The Act itself has not changed.

Juliet's response to all of it is characteristically direct: "Whether people want to accept it or not we are here."

Plymouth, broadly, is good

Juliet is not describing Plymouth as hostile. She describes it as broadly positive, full of "amazing, lovely people", and she names the organisations doing real work: Not Alone Plymouth, which meets weekly on Tuesday evenings; Cafe Momus; the Queer Bookshop; Love Army HQ; the Intercom Trust; The Swallow bar on the Barbican. The city now has many gender-neutral toilets. A first round table meeting has brought together people from under-represented groups, the council, the university, Babcock, medical experts, and other public bodies to work through the difficulties of living in Plymouth as a minority.

"It's unfortunate we have to have meetings like this at all but we do," Juliet says. "We need to get to a point where we don't feel anxious every time we leave the house."

That is the destination. Not a smaller life, not a quieter one, not a life spent calculating which spaces are safe. A life where the anxiety simply is not there, because it does not need to be.

Juliet is chairing Plymouth Pride, which is scheduled to return next year. She is working with the council. She is choosing not to align with a single political party because she wants to hold them all to account. She has found a position of influence and she is using it, quietly and consistently, to make her city a place where nobody has to develop a thick skin just to walk out of the door.

That is an extraordinary amount to ask of one person. That she does it anyway, and with this much grace, tells you everything.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans people and their families.