How the UK Establishment Crushed Trans Rights

On 15 April, judges at the UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act, a woman (and a man) is defined by ‘biological sex’. The ruling, swiftly followed by updated Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance on trans inclusion, was celebrated by ‘gender critical’ campaigners. Already, the decision looks like a huge setback for trans rights, which have been under attack in the US, Hungary, Russia, Romania and elsewhere. But how did we get to this point, and where might we go from here?

In December 2011, Trans Media Watch submitted a report to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the British press. It focused on tabloids – the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Express – and their tendency to ‘out’ trans individuals and monster trans people as a group, often relying on false information.

The first part of the long-running inquiry, triggered by revelations about the News of the World hacking a murdered teenager’s phone, heard plenty about collusion between the Murdoch press and both the Labour governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and the Tory government under David Cameron. It recommended that the media improve its self-regulation as the Press Complaints Commission was not fit for purpose. However, its main effect was to make the tabloids determined to avenge themselves upon the Cameron administration for the humiliation they experienced, and to stop any politician from initiating the second part, which would investigate the nature of the relationship between journalists and the police.

The Labour government had reluctantly passed the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a trans person’s inability to change the sex on their birth certificate constituted a breach of their Convention. Five years later, Trans Media Watch formed, out of a sense that with certain legal rights secured, our next priority should be to tackle print and broadcast media that systematically dehumanised us. 

Various trans writers were tired of discussions about us mostly being conducted on hostile terms – in the Guardian (memorably, a column by Julie Bindel on the passing of the Act entitled ‘Gender benders, beware’, which concluded that ‘shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s does not make you a man’) as much as in the Sun. I was one of them: starting in 2010, I wrote a blog for the Guardian documenting my transition, hoping to show editors that there was an audience for trans people sharing our experiences. I also hoped to open up space for other trans writers to discuss issues such as health, housing or employment, as well as our history and culture, rather than having an endless, ultimately unwinnable ‘debate’ with people who insisted our identities were invalid, gleefully using slurs to do so.

For a couple of years, I felt this project was making headway, despite considerable resistance. There were still plenty of hostile voices in the media but trans writers got platforms to counter them as part of an emerging wave of progressive journalists. There was also the wider emergence of trans actors and advocates in the UK and US. In 2013, the Observer published and then took down an op-ed by Julie Burchill that received hundreds of complaints for its openly transphobic language. A few months later, trans teacher Lucy Meadows took her own life days after the Daily Mail published a column about her by Richard Littlejohn, about which she had written to the Press Complaints Commission. The Commission had recently declared that Burchill’s article didn’t breach their code that forbids ‘prejudicial or pejorative’ references to gender as it targeted a group rather than an individual.

After Meadows’ death, I cautiously hoped for some contrition from the media, not least as the coroner rebuked them at the inquest, but the anti-trans backlash intensified. Across the liberal and rightwing press, from the New Statesman to the Spectator, there was a barrage of op-eds about how ‘gender-critical’ voices were prevented from raising ‘legitimate concerns’ about ‘gender ideology’. These articles simultaneously cast trans people as a tiny minority who would crumple if anyone dared question their identities, and as a mafia who had captured the media and would organise against anyone who stood up to their rigidly-enforced orthodoxy.

The response of most trans writers, including me, was to withdraw. A hostile environment had been created for us: what was the point of working in mainstream media if we couldn’t justify doing so without wasting our energy on repetitive arguments, even if the Burchill fiasco had forced our opponents to push bad-faith lines slower but more often, in more ‘respectable’ language? I went into arts criticism and academia, writing fiction and making films. Over the next few years, most trans voices got shouted out of politics journalism.

In 2017, both prime minister Theresa May and Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon launched public consultations into reforms to the Gender Recognition Act to make the application process easier and cheaper, and remove the need for medical professionals to validate it, instead allowing trans people to self-identify. These consultations proved to be a lightning rod to recently formed anti-trans pressure groups, who pushed the line that the rights of trans people to use ‘single-sex spaces’ were in conflict with women’s rights, resting on the assumption that trans women were men and therefore inherently threatening, and that the masculinity of trans men also made them dangerous. They found more than enough newspaper columnists willing to help them manufacture consent for this idea, as a step towards diminishing both trans visibility and rights.

A year later, the Guardian published an editorial on the situation. It lamented how ‘toxic’ the ‘debate’ had become, without considering who had set its terms, but took its framing and talking points from anti-trans organisations, who celebrated its publication, praising it as a summary of their position.

The proposed gender recognition reforms were put on hold – and parliament decided by just five votes that the long-awaited second part of the Leveson Inquiry, which Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn had demanded, would not happen. After May’s resignation, Liz Truss became new prime minister Boris Johnson’s minister for women and equalities, and in 2020, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times reported that Truss wanted to scrap the reforms and bring in legislation that would exclude trans women from women’s spaces and prevent young trans people from accessing puberty blockers. There was a protest at Parliament Square, and amidst criticism from across the political spectrum, Truss’s plans were dropped – along with the plan for self-identification – with the process of applying for a gender recognition certificate becoming easier and cheaper as a compromise.

By then, Keir Starmer had replaced Corbyn as Labour leader, standing on ten pledges that promised, vaguely, to stand for equality, social justice and migrants’ rights. We now know, as many suspected, that these were lies. Having been the parliamentary voice of the astroturfed anti-Brexit movement that intended to blow up Corbyn’s anti-austerity coalition, Starmer was always the choice of the media: a managerialist politician who had held a position of state authority, who could be relied upon to change Labour from a member-funded mass party to a corporate-controlled cadre, taking its direction from a pundit class committed to the neoliberal realignment that took place under Thatcher, Major and Blair. He could also be relied upon, it seems, not to reopen the Leveson Inquiry. 

Recent books have made it clear that Morgan McSweeney and Starmer were plotting a Blairite recapture of the party with journalists in 2018, after Corbyn’s performance in 2017 looked to render them redundant. Starmer’s government has proven as close to corporate interests as many expected, but its level of social conservatism and willingness to adopt whatever position the rightwing media demand has surprised all but the most pessimistic of observers.

A big part of that recapture was an all-channels media campaign to accuse Corbyn and the left of being antisemitic, due to their support of Palestinian liberation. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, founded under Blair, investigated the party over the allegations, with the media treating both the groups making the accusations and the EHRC itself as neutral, good-faith actors, despite the latter being stuffed with rightwingers over a decade of Conservative rule. 

Even so, the EHRC report only found two cases of the Equality Act being breached in a party with 500,000 members, and it did not consider evidence that Labour’s internal bureaucracy had sabotaged both efforts to deal with antisemitism and the 2017 election campaign. The leadership immediately used it as an excuse to expel Corbyn and accept the media narrative about the evils of the Labour left, and as a prompt to reorient the party towards an Atlanticist foreign policy. By the end of 2023, this had led them into an alliance with an Israeli government carrying out a genocide in Gaza, which they have maintained since winning the 2024 election.

The Labour right’s use of the EHRC as a factional cudgel has also prevented them removing the appointments made under the Conservatives – including its head, Baroness Falkner, whom Liz Truss selected specifically for her anti-trans views. Whistleblowers told Vice about trans guidance being changed or scrapped as the EHRC board built links with anti-trans pressure groups such as the LGB Alliance, which was set up to exclude trans people from campaigning, mirroring the US Christian right’s strategy of trying to separate trans people from lesbian, gay and bisexual organising, with a view to setting back the rights of all of them. 

The LGB Alliance has barely campaigned on any issue besides trans exclusion from public spaces and had its registered office on Tufton Street, alongside rightwing think tanks from the Taxpayers’ Alliance and BrexitCentral to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which campaigns against net zero policies. Under the final Conservative administration, the Alliance was granted charitable status and received a surge in donations.

The Supreme Court case that decided that for the purposes of the Equality Act written by the Labour government and passed by the Conservatives in 2010, trans people should be treated as their assigned (or ‘biological’, in the Court’s parlance) gender, was brought by For Women Scotland. A limited non-profit company founded in response to the Gender Recognition Act reforms in 2018 and boosted considerably by JK Rowling, For Women Scotland secured their desired result at the third attempt, with photos of a handful of older white women celebrating being amplified by the BBC and the rightwing press. 

The media repeated the line that the judgement brought ‘clarity’, ignoring the fact that the Gender Recognition Act granted full rights for trans people in their chosen sex (the same as gender in the Act) on getting a certificate – something that would have been brought up if any trans people were allowed to testify. The EHRC had its response ready, with Falkner instantly telling the BBC the ruling would mean hospital wards and sports would have to exclude trans people from single-sex spaces.

Two days later, trans people and allies mobilised a huge protest in London, along with numerous others across the UK and outside the usual metropolitan centres – 50 people turned out in Orkney. To forestall a similar response, the EHRC put out its updated guidance at 10pm on Friday night, making a Saturday protest unviable with a Sunday one at Parliament Square impossible due to the London Marathon. 

This vicious Orbánite bullshit bars trans people from using toilets that match their chosen gender, and from being part of men or women-only organisations of any size – with the assumption that it will be stampeded through parliament. The logistics of this have been questioned by everyone from soft-left Labour MP Dawn Butler to Tim Martin, the Brexit-backing owner of Wetherspoon’s (whose customer service reaction to the guidance has been one of the few bright spots in this sorry affair).

Meanwhile, the Guardian have published a few pieces about the impact of the ruling on trans people, including an interview with the activists who pushed for the Gender Recognition Act. It’s far too late: the paper played a significant role in legitimising anti-trans arguments, and in securing Starmer’s ascendancy to the Labour leadership. It came as a surprise to nobody when he declared that “trans women aren’t women” after the Supreme Court ruling. 

No one was shocked to see, either, that this was not enough for the ‘gender critical’ lobby, who swiftly demanded he apologise for ever saying otherwise, and to the vocally anti-trans former Labour MP Rosie Duffield (who didn’t mention trans people, for once, in her resignation statement). Several anti-trans voices, including Bindel, soon stated that the verdict hadn’t made them happy – not a surprise to anyone who has been following the global far-right who have used anti-trans sentiment as a recruitment tool and binding agent, and who never seem to be satisfied with any win, no matter how big. 

This is partly because the Supreme Court result has not just failed to secure the apologies they think they’re owed from people who got sick of their obsession, but also as trans people still exist, persist and resist. We re-emerged after Nazism; we can survive a gaggle of (mostly) expensively-educated newspaper columnists.

Besides pivoting to anti-migrant sentiment, the transphobes will make more demands, however the EHRC guidance ends up looking after going through parliament. There is a sense amongst trans people that the Supreme Court verdict was extremely unjust, if not an outright stitch-up, and that the EHRC’s reaction represents serious overreach, preventing an opportunity to push back. 

Ideally, I’d like another Leveson Inquiry that takes in the EHRC in an investigation into how our media and major parties have been captured by rightwingers who consistently unite to manufacture consent for legislation that makes the lives of the working class, migrants and minorities worse, for the gain of the wealthy or simply out of spite. The rightwing press have made it clear that they will smear and bully anyone who tries to stand up for people, castigating Starmer for ever knowing anyone ‘pro-trans’ – and in this instance, he absolutely deserves it.

With no help coming from the Labour frontbench – with women and equalities minister Karin Smyth demanding Theresa May apologise for ever supporting trans rights – or the courts, it’s up to trans people and to everyone else who is sick of things only ever getting worse to fight back. This means grassroots organising and protesting, of course, but it also means getting our hands dirty and struggling, once again, to change media outlets and political organisations that have done us harm. 

Our enemies didn’t look at publications that were platforming trans people or parties that were supporting trans rights and then vacate the battlefield – they drove us out and made our sympathisers afraid to speak up. Transphobia cuts across the ideological spectrum – but so does pro-trans sentiment, with the advantage that our side is younger and far better at turning out numbers for demonstrations. It’s possible to make this unjust, unenforceable verdict into a tipping point: it might take years of fighting on every front, but if we want to stop the fascism that has swept the global north before it’s too late, the struggle for trans rights and representation is one that should concern us all.