Explaining backlash to trans and non-binary genders in the context of UK Gender Recognition Act reform

Abstract

This paper analyses responses to the 2018 Gender Recognition Act reform consultation in the UK, exploring reasons behind the widespread anti-trans sentiment in this context. It compares the conservative Christian roots of traditional opposition to LGBT+ rights, which is still the major source of anti-trans politics in the US, with the rise in prominence of a specific feminist opposition to trans rights in the last few years in the UK. It then explores why the beliefs of relatively small groups have had such a compelling influence on a wider audience in the general population. It argues that the gendered socialisation we all experience through education, media, and political institutions creates a baseline belief in gender determinism and oppositional sexism, and as many people’s main source of information about trans people is the recent surge in related media, a trans moral panic propagated through mainstream and social media easily creates misinformed beliefs about trans issues. A major conclusion of this paper is that trans people have been constructed in the public imagination predominantly in terms of threat- threat to investment in gendered norms, threat to one’s own gender identity, and for marginalised groups including women and also other LGBT+ people, threat to their own in-group resources and desires for assimilation into mainstream culture. Anti-trans sentiment is therefore not only about ideology, but also has important emotional components that should not be overlooked when considering ways to tackle transphobia.