We are now in a period of British political life when hostility to the oppressed is no longer couched mainly in the hyperbole of a far-right culture war Tory Party. Instead, that hostility, overtaken by Starmer’s managerial centrism, takes the guise of a humane paternalism that seeks to oppress the oppressed on behalf of “their” wellbeing.

The NHS is hiding trans youth suicides that have increased since the Conservative Party’s pre-general election blanket ban on puberty blockers following the Cass Review (and following a series of earlier bans since an overturned court decision in 2021 and the Review’s interim report in 2022). These bans are nakedly discriminatory since they do not apply to cisgender children seeking help for precocious puberty. 

After Labour’s electoral victory in early July, Wes Streeting, the new health secretary, seeks to make that ban permanent, as the Good Law project explains. This heinous decision confirms the worst expectations of trans people from this new government, i.e. an intolerable business as usual, in which those in power freely harm our interests and lives.

A New “Consensus”

An acceptance and encouragement of trans death is now a political consensus thanks to the positioning of Britain’s two main parties. This is facilitated by a broader project of manufactured consent in which even substantial portions of the “radical” left are implicated. From the media to the public to the official institutions of the state, trans people find few avenues for hope and must rely on a strategy of resilience and endurance.  

Against that backdrop, a subtle but crucial shift in anti-trans rhetoric in Britain now presages a more substantial change against effective trans liberatory struggle. This new element is a disturbing barrier to trans people and our friends; it undermines the solidarity so necessary within our nascent movements.

What was once a pseudo-preoccupation with free speech has transformed. Now, instead of primarily lamenting a lack of “debate” about trans life, critics of the anti-trans position are framed as deserving the silence to which we have, in fact (albeit unacknowledged), always been condemned. 

Because this silencing is explicit, it is more dangerous. Starmer’s government and the media now not only seek to eliminate trans perspectives from a conversation about us but aggressively defend that elimination rather than merely obscuring how trans people are rendered unable to speak.

However, the substantive danger of this new emphasis is in why our perspectives are alleged to be outside the parameters of liberal toleration. That is, in the further notion that our demand for speedy access to transition care for all who seek it, including trans youth, amounts to willful child endangerment. The threat of this framing has long been effective at damaging solidarity between generations of trans people – and its increasing deployment is a serious, if bad faith, challenge.

There is a desperate need to oppose this tactic robustly. Trans people and our friends should confidently reply that far from holding a genuine concern for children, transphobes (willfully or not) seek the harm and deaths of trans children. Moreover, transphobes operate in a broader system and logic of domination in healthcare that also harms and murders many other children. 

This is especially true of other marginalised children who are structurally disadvantaged by a healthcare system that lacks a co-productive, democratic basis. We can see this, for instance, in the denial of bodily autonomy to disabled people, in the lack of research into health conditions that mainly affect some groups of racialised people and more generally, in the underfunding of a health system which therefore fails to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged most sharply.

The emphasis on children is a long-standing staple of all anti-queer politics. It is also a successful tactic of division within queer movements. In the fight for same-sex marriage, for example, those who wanted to campaign centrally for parental rights and access to reproductive technologies were told explicitly and implicitly by those with a homonormative horizon that they were rocking the boat. Sometimes, those seeking such gains were fobbed off with the notion that these ‘additional’ rights could come after the primary battle – which predictably did not happen.

Moreover, acknowledging this shift from free speech to silencing does not mean transphobes are altogether abandoning free speech as a performative concern. Nonetheless, the new focus in the post-Cass and Labour government context is more explicitly authoritarian and censorious. We are seeing the adoption of a tactic that intends to shame trans humanity to the relative invisibility of the past. 

This is showcased in how The Sunday Post positions even consulting or discussing trans policy with trans advocacy groups as outrageous, suggesting through the mouthpiece of anti-trans hate groups that the denial of any of the recommendations of the Cass Review should remove someone from the discussion on trans healthcare. 

Meanwhile, in a similar mode, Wes Streeting dismisses criticisms of his anti-trans turn and overall mendacious approach as being directly dangerous to children. And having a gay man making such pronouncements is helpful to Starmer, while it is undoubtedly not the only reason for putting Streeting in this role.

All this is intended to silence growing criticism in light of the Cass Review’s many weaknesses, which is the core justification of Labour’s anti-trans policy and regarded as a key victory by the anti-trans so-called Gender Critical hate movement. They recognise that they have achieved a triumph against trans life, but simultaneously understand (sometimes better than pro-trans forces) the precarious basis of that triumph.

A Freedom of Information request has now revealed that the report’s chairing was handed to Dr Hilary Cass (someone with no relevant expertise in trans healthcare) without any other individuals being considered. The Cass Review is increasingly and transparently a discredited stitch-up that retains the dogmatic backing of most of Britain’s political and media institutions. Without that institutional basis, it would crumble.

The implications of this shift from free speech “concerns” to a demand that some viewpoints (trans viewpoints) be eliminated from the conversation are self-evident. The moral panic against trans humanity was never a “debate” in which we could evenly and neutrally participate—it was not a civil discussion between trans liberationists and our enemies. (Indeed, there can be no equal discussion between the oppressed and their oppressors precisely because there is no position of equality.) Instead, if there was an argument, it was mainly between alternative forms of managing trans elimination. 

Liberation from “Consensus”

We are confronted with the next stage of the anti-trans project, and it needs new rhetoric since it is one where trans suffering and death are fully normalised and naturalised rather than left hidden. Our deaths and social misery, whether through structural or literal violence or other indirect consequences of social marginalisation, form the “common sense” notions of how we should be addressed (as objects for technocratic solutions). Our voices are intolerable to that approach.

Within this eliminativist logic, trans horizons are also plain. Detransition is the only viable path before us, with trans existence otherwise merely a “public” health problem to be humanely managed by enlightened politicians and doctors. To this, the dubious ideas of trans social contagion and perversion (in the forms of the pseudoscience of rapid onset gender dysphoria and autogynephilia, respectively) supply the necessary myths.

Our response requires trans people over 18 (or 25, since Dr Cass also seeks to extend trans childhood) to be in unconditional solidarity with trans youth. 

Despite this hostile situation, the trans community increasingly attempts to form a movement; examples include direct action from the Trans Kids Deserve Better network (TKDB) and similar groups throughout the country. These projects are crucial to any sustainable goal of trans liberation; they represent the hope that trans people can insist on and assert agency over our own lives.

However, such attempts to cohere a response must overcome two significant obstacles. There must be a process of building broader solidarity between trans people, workers’ struggles, and other oppressed groups. First, this needs to happen so that trans demands reflect the voices of all trans people, including those whose multiple oppressions also qualitatively shape their oppression as transgender people.

Second, it must happen because trans people require the support of the broad working class to achieve lasting victories. This is not merely the duty of trans people but a shared obligation; organised workers abandon sections of the class and universal humanity at their peril. In doing so, in this instance, they allow the far right critical victories in restoring the repressive gender binary that undermines us all.

Most major trade unions have policies in support of trans liberation through their LGBT structures and their support of resolutions to the TUC LGBT conference. However, mobilising in support of these resolutions, particularly at this critical time, must be the responsibility of all trade union activists. The role of the trade union self-organised groups is to be the educators about the attacks and the importance of resisting them – not the only ones to turn out on the streets.

Such a movement has little time to gather itself, but in TKDB and others, it has its fundamental building blocks.

Main Image >> Steve Eason

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