A bit about transphobia in the UK

In the UK, as explained by Sarah TC, "the GCs claim to be a feminist movement and claim that trans rights are in direct opposition to women’s rights and that the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act need to be repealed to protect women."

And yet (Sarah TC continues), in the US, despite the so-called GCs' self-proclaimed feminism, this is happening:

"They are happy to accept funding and support from the far right to achieve this. It is well known that the Christian right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, has supported the LGB Alliance. As well as supporting the anti-trans agenda, the foundation campaigns against the right to abortion — even in cases of rape. Add to this their leadership of Project 25, which threatens democracy and a possible return of Donald Trump, a known sex offender, and well, you honestly couldn’t write this stuff. When Roe v Wade was repealed, ending the constitutional right to abortion in the USA, the silence from the GCs on X was deafening. The few that did mention it either blamed trans women for 'diluting' women’s rights or described it as collateral damage in their war against trans women."

— "The language of the gender critical movement: recycled homophobia and sexism." (7 min read), Sarah TC, Medium, January 8, 2024. That's my Friend of Medium link: unpaywalled for you, earning $ for the author.

Lexi Bowen writes in "J K Rowling’s transphobic Britain" (Medium, March 7, 2024):

" The mask has been in freefall for a long, long time, and I think we need to start speaking about the Gender Critical crowd in more blunt, honest terms. A lot has been made about the radicalisation of young white men on the internet, the growing popularity of right-wing groups and organisations, of regressive thinking, nationalism, misogyny, and racism. It’s time we started to talk about the Gender Critical movement in those terms too. It’s time we started acknowledging that there is also a problem with the radicalisation of white women on the internet."

Bowen explains that, because Rowling draws attention, she keeps the extremism of her language "a fair few steps behind [that of] some of her more aggressive cultists." Unfortunately, while "hers may very well be the most public and publicised of declines" into anti-trans extremism, it's common. "What’s happened to Rowling is happening to people all accross the country."

Here's what's happening politically, as Bowen says:

"After Rishi Sunak gave his controversial extremism speech following the election of George Galloway, the Conservative Party found themselves tied in knots trying to define extremism in a way that didn’t also include snarling transphobes targeting and harassing trans people. Of course, rather than acknowledge that the issue is that, well, these things are just extremism, Tory ministers instead are trying to figure out how to reword the definition to exclude them."

Kaylin Hamilton, "Transphobia Will Dominate the Ballot in the UK Election," May 25, 2024, writes: "The UK is in a bad state economically and socially, largely as a result of the Conservative government’s disastrous policies, like austerity and welfare reforms, the mishandling of the Covid 19 pandemic and, of course, Brexit." So, "to distract from their failures...they’ve attacked every minority you could think of, from welfare claimants and the disabled, to migrants and asylum seekers, and, most recently, transgender people."

Hamilton goes on: "[Rishi] Sunak and his Equality Minister (oh, irony) Kemi Badenoch frequently parrot ‘gender critical’ anti-trans rhetoric, while attempting to restrict our basic rights and attacking trans school kids." Meanwhile, "Outlets like the Daily Mail or the Telegraph often manage more than one anti-trans story in a single day." They identify a single criminal who is trans and amplify her name, because, "in a moral panic, the actions of one trans person are enough to condemn us all, along with anyone who dares support us."

"Thus, a small minority of ‘gender-critical’ transphobes — moral entrepreneurs in the language of moral panic theory — have been allowed to mainstream their hateful view of transgender people by falsely asserting, among other lies, that we are a danger to (cis) women and children."

And this, Hamilton says, distracts from the fact that Conservative policies — not trans people — harm women and children. The Conservative party is probably going to lose the election. But will the alternative be much better for trans people? What is the alternative for trans people?

A reminder that their focus is not just on stopping under-18 access to hormones: "if they’re willing to attack kids I doubt they’ll have any issue expanding gender-affirming care bans to adults."

Maybe that makes it a bit clearer for a US audience.

Anti-trans hate is an intentional distraction from real political problems like the effects of austerity, says Rachel Saunders.

Previously, an Easter 2023 initiative to make teachers out kids to their parents:

@BadWritingTakes says on X (March 30, 2023) that "the Gender Critical movement & media are demanding removal of school safeguarding for trans children and the Prime Minister seems happy to sacrifice them."

@RoseSchmits on X (March 31, 2023): "There is no 'safeguarding' argument to be made for outing queer young people to their parents/guardians that isn’t rooted in transphobia"

@natachakennedy says on X (March 31, 2023) that "establishment oppression ... in the UK" is the Tories suggesting "transphobic 'guidance' for schools during the Easter holidays".

If you're in the UK, look up your MPs' voting history. If you don't know how you feel about transphobia, see what other political positions tend to coincide with it, which will give you a bigger picture.

Attack on children

In North Belfast, a trans man brought his two three-year-old twin daughters to a park, and a group of about ten 12-year-old girls attacked the twins, telling them their father was a girl. ("Toddlers attacked in ‘transphobic-motivated hate crime’ as campaigner reveals community fears after ‘horrific’ attack: Cops investigating as twin girls attacked in park while with their dad," Jason Johnson, Irish Sun reporter, 14 May 2024)

Broad overview of reactions to the 'gender-critical' movement

Steph Richards makes six points:

• Sept 2021: The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe said it "condemns the highly prejudicial anti-gender, gender-critical and anti-trans narratives."
• Sept 2022: The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention said the "gender-critical" movement is genocidal in nature.
• Summer 2023: Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, visited the UK and reminded everyone that LGBT people's "human rights — rights that are directly connected to their dignity and, in some cases, their very existence" were being undermined by "extreme pressure and hostility."
• May 2024: UN Women said that trans people's rights don't conflict with non-trans people's rights.
• June 2024: Kemi Badenoch, UK Minister for Women and Equalities, bragged on Twitter that her side had "intervened" by putting "gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health," so that the Cass Review could be commissioned and so that trans kids' healthcare could subsequently be shut down.

Richards's sixth observation is that Helen Joyce exists.

— “J K Rowling and the Gender Critical Movement,“ Steph Richards, Medium, June 23, 2024

Related

The UK now has a Far Right problem, just like the rest of Europe. Up to 30k attended a rally led by Tommy Robinson in London today, easily the biggest gathering of its kind, with a further 500k watching online. Robinson has now co-opted Christianity into his White Nationalist credo.

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— Mark Chadbourn (@chadbourn.bsky.social) Jul 27, 2024 at 3:06 PM

On puberty blockers in the UK

On July 30, 2024, the Scotsman published Why Scotland trans kids are at 'serious risk of harm' because of court ruling on puberty blockers by Rachel Amery. That link goes to the Wayback Machine because it was taken down within about a day due to anti-trans complaints.

Britain's local governments are collapsing (CNN, September 9, 2024)

See this thread:

I have yet to read a really good exploration of why the UK went full TERF and why TERFism has failed to take hold in the US (I have some theories about the latter, but the former remains a mystery to me)

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— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 10:57 AM

On the 1st question:

Well, they just destroyed their entire economy over thinly veiled bigotry through Brexit, so... Yeah.

— Dave Wilburn (@davemwilburn.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 11:05 AM

Transphobia took off here largely via already-powerful liberals with big media platforms (the UK religious right is more marginal). The same middle-class, mostly white, women (and their white knights) who misuse the idea of intersectionality to declare themselves victims. + bsky.app/profile/joca...

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— ordinary jo (@jocanib.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 12:51 PM

Many good theories here. I think it’s important to note that the NYT and P*mela P*ul have tried to make terfism mainstream among centrists here. So it’s not just that transphobia is more right-wing coded in the US (although it is).

— Lila 🏳️‍⚧️ (@lila-satori.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 12:36 PM

"My theory, fwiw, is US vs UK terfism get support from different places; the US one has always seemed more of an outgrowth of earlier homophobia from the evangelical right (with the premise being that targeting the trans community is the gateway to expanding that bigotry to an non "normative" groups)" (Bsky)

I think it's a combination of this and the fact that *most* US TERFy types are, well, explicitly just TERs and were also already super anti-abortion/hard right Christian, so it was harder for any of them to make the "feminism" part of the pitch or to seem at ALL normie.

— Morgan Fahey (@morganfahey.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 1:46 PM

On the 2nd question:

I wonder if it’s that it got coded as right wing early in the US so people of the mumsnet demographic susceptible to it in the UK were negatively polarized against it in the US.

— Res ipsa locutus of borg (@masbackward.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 11:00 AM

There are lots of trans-exclusionary people in America They are just not feminists In the UK, traditional conservative sexism is pretty much dead, so the people who would be evangelical 1950s-gender-roles people have to become TERFs

— Daniel Feldman (@dfeldman.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 11:50 AM

"I watched the initial rise happen in real time and it was honestly driven a lot by the liberal punditocracy who saw one of their own get monstered online after she defended Germaine Greer's ignorant nonsense. You could watch it spread from writer to writer like a virus, polluting entire publications
Obviously there was a hunger for it in the ruling classes, otherwise it wouldn't have mattered, ultimately, but that felt like where the initial spread began: aggrieved writers who felt attacked online, pitching transphobic "just asking questions" articles to inattentive editors for *years*" (Bsky)

The explanation that, as a Brit, I find most persuasive is the predominance of Dawkins-ish scepticism/New Atheism (generally and in feminist circles), which has a stark materialist view and so sees the gender binary as "simple biology"

— Andrew Carter (@cartoir.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 2:35 PM

I do also wonder about the network effects in the smaller UK of Germaine Greer resigning from Newnham over admitting a trans fellow in the 1990s as setting the bounds of acceptable prejudice

— Andrew Carter (@cartoir.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 2:43 PM

"The UK one tho seems more rooted in a wider social (little 'c') conservatism and is less violently-coded, more "polite", and more patronizing than its US cousin, and gets more buy-in from English institutions (including the media and govt) as a result which are (on the whole) very conservative." (Bsky)

"I think this is also why you see it expressed in different ways; UK terfism uses tools like the Cass review that are very institution-centric and long-form discussions of protecting children (because patronizing), vs the US where the rhetoric is much more exterminationist and focused on "bans"" (Bsky)

I have nothing to back this up, but my theory is that the built in preoccupation with analyzing strangers to know what class they belong to was a perfect setting for transvestigating everyone

— lyndsay (@magpie.tips) Sep 9, 2024 at 1:40 PM

the best explanation I read was the influence of the mumsnet message boards: theoutline.com/post/6536/br...

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— Justin Bronn (@jbronn.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 11:44 AM

Dr. Sophia Lewis Important factor- British feminism has always also been very, very white. American feminism has had to grapple with racism and directly confront a history of denying black and brown women their feminity. www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/o...

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— Armed Snail (@pourdecision.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2024 at 11:36 AM

Why is British media so transphobic? Edie Miller, The Outline, Nov—05—2018

The Independent

This is a fuck-you to new-right provocateurs www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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— Zoe Williams (@zoesqwilliams.bsky.social) September 16, 2024 at 4:33 PM

The international rights group UN Women refers to "gender critical" people as “anti-rights”.