TERF Island: the embarassing truth about Britain's Trans Panic.

Condemning an entire category of people on the basis that one of them might commit a crime is the very essence of prejudice. And that prejudice plays straight into the hands of the far right.

Trans people and allies protest in central London against the Supreme Court ruling. With guest appearance from Millicent Fawcett.

The problem with declaring yourself a defender of all things normal and sensible is that you’re often the last to notice when you have, in fact, gone bananas.

This week in the UK, the Supreme Court ruled that - for the purposes of a specific section of the Equality Act - trans women are not women. The presiding Judge delicately suggested that this shouldn't not be weaponised against trans people - and was immediately drowned out by the sound of champagne corks popping. Billionaire author J K Rowling, who helped fund the lobbying group that brought the case, posted a victory selfie smoking a cigar from the deck of her superyacht.

It’s has been hailed as a triumph for common sense. Finally, we can stop tolerating the gender weirdoes and get back to a nice, neat, safe version of reality where we’re allowed to call trans people sex pests in the papers. But what the British public hasn’t noticed is that on this issue, we’re not being at all normal. When it comes to trans rights, we’re outliers. And not in a good way.

When I travel overseas, I’m constantly asked why British culture has become so openly transphobic. How our moderate, liberal society could have allowed this ugliness. Even bloody Americans bloody ask me this, and when I try to explain they look at me with the same pity and confusion I feel when they start talking about, say, gun control. Around the world, transgender people are being made scapegoats for every sort of social ill - but almost everywhere else, transphobia is the territory of religious crackpots and right-wing cranks. In fact, since Donald Trump stomped back into the White House, moderates who might once have been on the fence are now actively rallying to protect the trans community.

Only in Britain has the anti-trans moral panic taken over the liberal mainstream. In recent years, we’ve joined Hungary and the United States in pumping out petty regulations targeting trans and non-binary people. British schools are now explicitly required to discriminate against transgender students. Anyone who doesn’t make their birth sex clear to a partner, even by accident, can now be charged with rape. And just yesterday, in response to the Supreme Court, the Equality and Human Rights Council rushed out guidance that goes much further. Schools, workplaces, public institutions and even community clubs must now take steps to ensure that trans people are clearly segregated.

To be clear, there’s no precedent for this crackdown. Before this, trans women had been using the women’s facilities for decades without much issue - but now? Now every single trans person in the UK will face a humiliating choice between outing themselves multiple times a day on the way to the bathroom or breaking the law. Because all trans people are henceforth to be treated, first and foremost, as potential predators - identified and excluded for the comfort of normal people everywhere.

It’s stomach-churning stuff. And, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing.

It’s embarrassing that this petty, narrow-minded prejudice has been normalised in the UK. It’s embarrassing that the figurehead for all of this is JK Rowling, who was once a beloved cultural icon. The very best of this country. She was decent and kind and wrote books about boy wizards standing up to bullies. When pressed on politics she was moderate and dignified, even in the face of unfair attacks from hardliners on the left and right. Rowling, who also writes under the male pseudonym ‘Robert Galbraith’, was a legitimate national treasure- until 2020, when she joined the anti-trans ‘gender critical’ movement and started to become an actual liability. The genteel world of British publishing was in no way equipped for this. Our celebrities don’t normally go on this sort of ideological bender.

And look, I’m as surprised as anyone to find myself on team sensible here. I’m a pink-haired North London pronoun-jockey. Most of my friends are lesbians and transgender goths and vegan anarchists. Like everyone, we’re a lot more normal than we look, but on a purely aesthetic basis it wouldn’t be unreasonable to peg us as the troublemakers. Especially if you stand us next to, say, your nice friend in publishing, or the mums at your school gate. Or the MP for Canterbury.

But of the two camps, I promise you, we are not the ones spending our days obsessing, for example, over other people’s toilet habits. Part of why the bathrooms debate has been such an easy win for ‘gender critical’ activists is that trans people would rather not dedicate years of their lives to defending their right to piss in public facilities, for the very good reason that that is fucking weird.

The quiet bit, the bit that nobody wants to say out loud, is that a lot of otherwise reasonable people in this country have lost all sense of dignity or proportion. In the name of restoring ‘reality’, a minority of extremely dedicated obsessives have honed in on the few edge scenarios where there might be actual moral tradeoffs - say, sex-segregated sports - and concocted a fantasy where trans people are a pernicious sexual and existential threat to every woman and child in the land. And this fantasy has been indulged at the highest levels of government. It has dominated the press. It is so unremittingly vicious that the UN has declared the gender critical movement a hate group’. Meanwhile transgender people have slipped out of public life, has been such a surge in hostility that other nations have started offering asylum to transgender Brits. And it might all have the mouthfeel of common sense, but that’s not what we’ve been swallowing.

Where I come from, it’s still disgraceful to side against a stigmatized minority for the sake of a quiet life.

Everyone wants the world to make more sense right now. Everyone wants to feel like something might get back to normal. But it is not normal to dedicate all of your energy to bullying a minority group back into the closet. It is not normal to demand that the state step in to regulate gender expression. It is, unfortunately, still normal to point and laugh at weirdos and outsiders, but it isn’t normal to harass every politician and public figure who refuses to say that trans women aren’t women. That’s the sort of thing you might expect from the Trumpsick backwaters of North America, where sweaty men who babble about Pizzagate and the Antichrist are considered sane enough for public office. Not on, say, mumsnet.

But there is something particularly British about the unspoken agreement to pretend this isn’t happening. To settle for a kind of reality that’s neat and tidy as a window box. To trim the unruly hedges of humanity.

Reality, however, does not run in rigid lines. Reality is messy, and painful, and complex. Here’s what’s really happening.

It’s pretty simple. Throughout recorded history, there have been people who wanted to live in ways that challenged conventions of sex and gender. How dangerous it has been for those people to live openly, and how welcome they were in mainstream society, have fluctuated with the times. Recently, there was a brief window when liberal democracies decided to stop being quite so vile to trans people, and trans people started to make more of an impact on culture. Suddenly, being transgender was much easier and safer - which meant, unsurprisingly, that a lot more people decided to transition.

This has been a significant cultural shift. It’s absurd to pretend otherwise. It’s been fast enough to make some people uncomfortable, which is what normally happens as society adjusts to cultural change. But these are not normal times. The British have an eerie ability to plod along in the face of war, plague and absolute civil collapse, but imply that someone might be about to make a fuss, threaten us with the prospect of slight discomfort, and we’re guaranteed to go feral.

Transphobes have capitalised on that discomfort. And in fairness, from the outside, the trans community can be discomfiting. We have our share of oddballs. We have avante-garde academics developing conceptions of gender so abstract that they are impenetrable to any member of the general public who did not decide to get high today. We have traumatised, vulnerable people desperate for community. And we are definitely overindexed on tiresome twenty-one year olds who think the height of political praxis is making a neat sign in glitter glue threatening to murder your enemies.

But those people do not get to lead the movement. Those people, generally speaking, get taken aside by leveller heads for a quiet chat about optics.

By contrast, the more militant ‘Gender Critical’ activists are now embedded in the cultural mainstream - influencing policy at the highest levels.* Among the many fixations of the movement is a refusal to inhabit a reality where trans women are recognised as women. For them, trans women are men - and as such, they must all be considered potential rapists, murderers and molesters of little girls. Treating any other men like this would be politically impossible- but trans people are a misunderstood minority group who don’t have a lot of social power. It’s safer to accuse outsiders of every sort of male violence than it is to confront the powerful men who perpetrate that violence closer to. Immigrants and men of color have, at various points in history, been the chosen social scapegoats; today, it’s transgender women.

Condemning an entire category of people on the basis that one of them might commit a crime is, of course, the very essence of prejudice. Demanding that a specific minority group be treated like potential predators is an extreme form of that prejudice. And it’s a kind of prejudice that plays surprisingly well with the hard right.

Which is how all this got totally out of hand.

Over the past decade, as the hard right has groped for power, it has begun, coincidentally or otherwise, to mirror the rhetoric of the ‘gender critical’ campaign coming out of Britain. Today, when dictators crack down on feminists and queer academics, they do so in the name of rooting out ‘gender ideology’. When they sign laws cracking down on drag queens and transgender athletes, they wave the flag for ‘sex-based rights’. Even in this blasted, shell-wrecked media landscape, the two tendencies make strange allies- but oddly enough, there’s a small slice of common ground.

Both movements are committed to a strict vision of binary gender: men are strong, sexually dominant, and have all the power; women and girls are at their mercy, trapped by their reproductive biology, forced to negotiate for protection from male violence. The best anyone born female can hope for is to earn her place, through hard work and moral hygiene, in the magic circle of women who deserve that protection.

The difference, obviously, is that the far right think this is all marvellous.

Comparatively few ‘gender critical’ campaigners are themselves fascists. On the contrary - over the years, I’ve met many who are privately horrified to see their sisters in struggle chumming around with the Heritage Foundation. But private alarm has not stopped tyrants borrowing their language to launder common bigotry.

And there has, unfortunately, been a certain amount of bleed in the wash. Some ‘gender critical’ campaigners have openly praised Trump for his anti-trans agenda. Others, disturbed to hear their own rhetoric coming out of the mouths of monsters, have doubled down on blaming transgender people for provoking the whole thing.

Nobody is is denying that scaremongering about trans people and scapegoating queer deviants is a huge part of Trump’s platform. One of his first acts as president was to sign executive declaring that the US government has only two genders: male and female. And now Britain has done the same.

The actual Supreme Court ruling does not officially strip trans people of protection. But there is already mission creep, and that mission creep will be tolerated, largely out of collective exhaustion. Besides, anyone confronting the fanaticism of ‘gender-critical’ campaigners has to weigh up whether they really want to spend the next few years being bombarded with accusations of child abuse, woman-hating and worse.

For some reason, nobody talks about that part.

Everyone knows that prominent anti-trans campaigners receive some ugly harassment from an angry minority of activists. But in Britain, at least, the strategic bullying by the gender critical movement goes almost unnamed - perhaps because of how many people have already been hounded out of public life, including Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. The only reason I’m being this upfront is that it’s already happening to me.

Like a lot of minor public figures who are allies or members of the trans community, I’ve simply had to accept that, every so often, some famous transphobe will publicly accuse me of conspiracy to mutilate children. I’ve had to accept that respectable media figures - people I once looked up to - will pump out deranged speculation about my sex life on their substacks and spam me with scatalogical messages. As a young journalist, I was excited to meet these people. I never anticipated having to actively block their numbers. And I certainly never imagined that one day JK Rowling would take the time to personally accuse me, in front of her fourteen million followers, of “championing the removal of single-sex spaces for women and girls’.

Which is what happened last Saturday. And what happened next is what happened last time: a diverse mob of ‘gender critical’ transphobes, American evangelicals, and men called Alan with England flags in their bio buried my socials in an avalanche of vitriol. And then the Daily Mail piled in. The harassment is still happening. It has happened to an awful lot of people, and it will carry on happening, and because this is normal in Britain now, and it’s not going to end just because of the Supreme Court.

Keir Starmer has a bad habit of talking to the British public like he’s a hostage negotiator. You could see him threat-modelling under his Thunderbirds haircut as he tried to greyrock his way through the frenzy of last week’s ruling. In the end, inevitably, he was hectored into saying that he had changed his mind and doesn’t think trans women are women anymore.

When he’d finally said it, he practically sag with relief. It’s not that the Prime Minister particularly wants to see anyone with a crew cut frisked in the privy, but like everyone else, he’s sick of this. He has a lot on his plate right now. You could forgive anyone for deciding to throw the small minority of weirdos out into the cold if that’s what it’s going to take to stop the histrionics.

But I’m not minded to forgiveness, because where I come from it is still indecent to publicly side against a stigmatized minority for the sake of a quiet life.

If despotism does come to Britain, it will not be painting itself blue and breaking into Whitehall half naked. It will happen because nobody wants to make a fuss. It will happen because it’s socially awkward to stop it happening. Fear and loathing are powerful emotions, but in the end, there’s only ever a finite number of true fanatics. What tyrants really rely on is cowardice.

And small-mindedness.

And the insipid self interest that knows it’s just so much easier to let the bullies do their thing.

If it happens here, it will not happen because everyone hates the outsiders and gender freaks - but because too few of us have the guts to defend them.

*The Equality and Human Rights Commission is led by Lady Falkner, a member of the House of Lords who was investigated for workplace bullying after her clear ‘gender critical’ agenda led to a ‘toxic internal debate’ over trans rights.