Shared outpourings of rage and grief, guided by hope, can and do change the world.

On March 19, 2025, tens of thousands of people gathered to demand trans liberation across Britain. In London, our protest formed outside the imposing perpendicular facades of Parliament, as crowds also assembled in Dundee, Glasgow, Leamington Spa, Manchester, Plymouth, Sheffield, Swansea, Cardiff, Worcester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Hastings, Leeds, Brighton, Reading, Peterborough and Liverpool.

They did so in a decisive repudiation of the Supreme Court’s ruling that removed protections from trans women in the Equality Act. Lord Hodge’s ruling that gender is rooted in biology is a supremely reactionary move, dressed up as ‘common sense’. The full implications of this decision are yet unknown, but what is clear is that this attack, which took place without trans voices being heard, is a severe blow to a group of people who already face appalling rates of poverty, violence and institutional discrimination in this country.

Many of the stakes of this fight have been powerfully clarified by the work of Judith Butler, recently interviewed by Owen Jones on his YouTube page. But it is worth specifically underlining what makes this fight so critical, as well as pushing back against the often-repeated but ridiculous idea that the scale of the threat trans people face can be measured in the number of trans people. A group of people losing rights in a liberal democracy is an assault on every hard-won freedom the exploited and oppressed have made.

The anger also found international expression, with a group staging a demonstration at the British embassy in Brussels. This contradicts the notion that the subject of the actions can be viewed as a parochial concern. This is not just about a tiny minority group on an island famed for its prejudice against them. TERF island is a phrase that expresses a kind of British exceptionalism, one rooted in despair that makes British transphobia an assumed fact rather than a social problem.

Those who gathered in Brussels refused to follow that script. Likewise, the mobilisations of the unions, organisations representing millions in labour struggles. This included a range of trade unions, such as the CWU, UCU, Equity, PCS, UTAW, NEU Trans and Non-Binary Caucus, local and regional sections of Unite, NEU, and UNISON, as well as a number of others. The RMT originally agreed to back the protest, then withdrew its support for unclear reasons – a decision that LGBT+ members in the union will undoubtedly question.

Every cisgender person who showed up or expressed solidarity elsewhere was also challenging the notion that transphobia in Britain is a given. They do not face the sting of this oppression as immediately as I and other trans folk, and yet here they were, standing defiantly shoulder to shoulder with their trans siblings, talking to me and expressing feelings that mirrored my own. Why? There will be many motivations.

Some will be friends or relatives of trans people, those who are most directly invested in our lives. After the news, I had messages of support from many cisgender people who know and care about me, and these were touching reminders that the attacks (however horrible, however dangerous) do not express the beliefs of every person in the street, but are the result of the machinations of a few.

Others turned up because they believe they have a debt to the disadvantaged. They might consider it essential to be a good person who supports their neighbours even when they have no direct links to the struggle. They might have ideological reasons for being there, a belief in a specific social or ethical model that requires this behaviour.

Some have an even more direct investment. They are cis women who are taller than average or who have facial hair, and therefore are sometimes misread as trans women. They are intersex. They are L or G or B (or two of the above) and remember with a chill in their hearts what happened with section 28 when authorities interpreted the law as much more restrictive than its letter.

However, many thousands will be there because they understand the concept of solidarity. They might also consider this action as ethically necessary, and they might also know and care about trans people, but they are first guided by an understanding of themselves and their struggles that is inseparable from the struggles of others.

Solidarity is not charity, nor is it merely looking after one’s own. Solidarity is an aspirational and universal bond of shared hope that recognises that oppression – all oppression – is a barrier to a more liberated world. A world where flourishing and joy prevail over the accumulation of abstract value, a world that requires more than the rearguard action of defending one’s diminishing territory.

Solidarity recognises foremost that there can be no freedom without that universal hope, because every limit on anyone’s freedom is necessarily a limit on everyone’s. Solidarity, then, does not motivate cis people to defend and join the liberatory cause of trans people because they feel sorry for us, but because our diminishment is theirs, too. In our common humanity, if one person is oppressed, then we all are.

The British Transport Police gleefully responded to this judgment by declaring that men in their ranks will now strip-search trans women. This is a policy of institutionalised sexual assault against trans women, many of whom suffer from PTSD because of the high rates of sexual violence experienced by transgender women. To permit such an obscene normalisation of violence undermines the safety of every single person in this country.

Transphobia, but also critically transmisogyny (the hatred of trans women as trans women), is not parochial. It serves as a critical rallying point for the far right, which has gained traction in the mainstream. It is an attempt by bad-faith actors during a period of capitalist social crisis to resolve the contradictions of gendered oppression by using a vulnerable group. Our existence directly challenges the social order, which is structured by gendered power relations.

The movement we need

There is a contradiction at the core of the trans struggle. On the one hand, trans people are experiencing a profound crisis, often disabled, unemployed or underemployed, geographically dispersed, few and for all of those reasons an easy target for opportunistic demagogues and scapegoating politicians. We have been singled out because we are considered easy prey for unsophisticated hunters.

On the other hand, we express a way of being that is radically contrary to a key organising principle of existing class society – expressed in the false ideas, which any feminism of worth seeks to overcome, that biology is destiny, that bodily autonomy is socially dangerous, that organising social reproductive work on gendered lines is “natural”.

There are two ways in which that contradiction can be resolved. The radical threat of transgender life as expressed by particular subcultures or people, people who can be destroyed, might be crushed by the violence of the state, and the threat we pose is at least temporarily abated. Alternatively, mass solidarity can and should fulfil the threat by abolishing gendered power relations. This is achieved through the solidarity of the working class, a universal class that encompasses the aspirations for freedom shared by everyone.

This is not an abstract problem. Attempts to frame the working class as disinterested in the concerns of minority groups that are contained within it will transform that class into the worst form of identity politics, a reactionary nostalgia vision of workers championed by those with no ties to the labour movement at all. Fake prolier than thou politicians who affect the appearance of approachable ordinariness in a condescending caricature of workers. An absurd ahistorical view of the working class as a homogenised lump that apparently never had gender queer people, or gay people or drag queens among its ranks.

This kind of class reduction, which seeks to abandon trans people in the name of class warfare, is not liberatory; it does not make freedom its goal. Instead, it is a narrow, communitarian project often undertaken on behalf of the least oppressed of the exploited, working entirely within the constraints set by the logic of capital. It abandons the dream of overcoming class itself. It abandons solidarity, and the failure of solidarity is the failure of the socialist dream.

How we understand this struggle is not just an abstract problem, but also one that affects how we build what comes next. It is about the social forces we can muster. It’s about whether we can win at all, what winning means, and how we achieve it. These questions must be answered, or we cannot organise effectively. Our enemies seek to obscure these questions, creating confusion and discord to disrupt our movements before they can take hold. That is not only a problem for those who refuse to offer solidarity, but also for those of us who might be tempted to refuse it.

Faced with the shocking cruelty of such an attack, as trans people, we can be convinced to renounce hope before the situation is hopeless. We will find consolation in each other as we passively await defeat. Alternatively, we can build alliances with the broader movement, one that is emerging. The idea of separating off and seeking such comfort is attractive to anyone who has experienced oppression. But it is also a betrayal.

It is a betrayal of solidarity among one another. Many trans people suffer other oppressions, intersections of race, gender, and disability, which cannot be encompassed in a retreat from the need for a broad social movement. How is someone who faces many oppressions supposed to retreat if that retreat pulls them in many opposing directions? The Combahee River Collective, which is often maligned as advocating such a retreat, in fact make this point about the dual oppressions faced by Black women and the creation of a qualitatively distinct oppression.

It is also a betrayal of ourselves, of our capacity for hope, of all that we have accomplished as trans people whose existence has already required fighting against the odds. To transition in this country, to survive in this country as a trans fem, to flourish even, requires a strength that is hard to do justice. All of us express our hope every day as we face a world made hostile by the ghouls who would eradicate us. We are reminded constantly of the need for hope.

A universal human struggle

Against the despair of the ruling on April 16, the one note of hope was the unprecedented solidarity that was realised on the street just days after. This action was made possible by unions and socialists who organised. We did not stand alone. We were not abandoned. We were not even pitied. We marched alongside those who directly shared our oppression and those who did not, and we marched against all forms of oppression.

Trans experiences must lead the path forward; space must be made for us to gather and organise ourselves. However, if we are to win, we will then involve and welcome everyone into one struggle for a universal freedom, for an ecosocialism in which the oppression of trans people is rendered an impossibility. This means connecting with the struggles of the universal class – the working class in all its billions of people – who can fight to end capitalism and the oppressive hierarchies that come with class society.

That dream remains the only hope.

There will be no trans liberation without revolution!

There will be no revolution without trans liberation!