We’re just a sacrificial lamb that can be bled on the altar of the news cycle, to distract from scandals like the fact that Rishi Sunak has been investigated SIX times since coming into office as prime minister.”
By Ivy Taylor. Cover image by Oojal Kour
New figures from Ipsos show that the UK is one of the least friendly countries in the world for trans people. That may come as a surprise to some of you, but for those of us in the trans community it’s just the same shit we deal with every day.
The rise in transphobia over recent years has been precipitous. Sure, it’s often presented in this wrapping of “concern for the safety of women and girls” and claims that children are “being forced to transition”, but that’s just transphobic dog whistling completely unsupported by reality.
The real purpose of these baseless claims is to provide an air of respectability to the seething hatred that pulses in the heart of the “gender critical” movement.
Transphobia is the growing craze that is sweeping the nation. LGBTQ+ charity Just Like Us revealed that in the last year, nearly three-quarters of trans people have faced verbal abuse, while data gathered by Voda revealed that transphobia is at an all-time high. It’s the hot new thing, like Beetlemania only if it was backed with all the brutality of the state.
Like the new UK government guidance that could force teachers to out trans, non-binary and gender non-confirming pupils to their parents. Or the proposed reform to the Equality Act that would restrict trans people from accessing single sex spaces that align with their gender identity, including public bathrooms and domestic abuse shelters; a proposal that wilfully ignores the fact that trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cis people, and is almost gleeful at the prospect of making it worse.
Meanwhile in America there has been a wave of anti-trans bills. Such as Republican lawmakers in Florida passing a bill which could separate trans kids from parents who support and affirm their child’s gender. Let’s not also forget that we’re facing openly genocidal calls for the “extermination of transgenderism”. And yes, it is genocidal.. This really is just the tip of the transphobic iceberg.
By my rough estimation, transphobia comes in three distinct flavours, though it’s worth noting they can and frequently do overlap.
First is the politician. They’re ignorant, sure, but largely they don’t care about trans people one way or the other. We’re just a sacrificial lamb that can be bled on the altar of the news cycle, to distract from scandals like the fact that Rishi Sunak has been investigated SIX times since coming into office as prime minister.
Their one and only goal is to maintain that tenuous grip on power. Accounting for approximately one percent of the population, the trans community has zero political capital. Especially in the first past the post system. Therefore we are expendable.
Second are the pseudo-intellectuals, the ones who treat my right to exist as something that needs to be relentlessly debated in the pages of legacy media and who are too cowardly to own their bigotry. Your Guardian-variety transphobe, if you will.
Third are the hardcore and often violent bigots. The ones that hate. They see the existence of trans people as a personal attack, and presumably cannot stand the idea of anyone who takes responsibility for their own happiness. Because if such a thing is not only permissable, but encouraged, they might have asked themselves why they are so fucking miserable and they don’t want to know the answer.
These people are the foot soldiers in the war against the trans community. The sort of people who will beat up an 86-year-old woman with dementia because they believed she was trans. Or the kind of guys who stamp on a woman’s head because they freaked out after finding someone they flirted with was trans.
The politicians and the columnists rile up the hatred, with doozies like this one (linking a story about the article, rather than the article itself for reasons that should be obvious). They provide cover and legitimacy, because they themselves may not hate trans people with a violent fervour. They are mining a rich seam of discontent that runs through the core of the British public. We’re facing climate collapse, the cost of living crisis, wealth disparity, crumbling public services, and rising authoritarianism. We have a lot to be upset about.
Life under late stage capitalism is this ceaseless, interminable grind from which there is no reprieve. This line from We Sold our Souls by Grady Hendrix perfectly sums up my feelings here, “Eternity in the mud, crushed like a bug, whatever. Born with a squeal, die where you kneel, all that is real, crushed beneath the wheel.”
We are living at the mercy of politicians, media moguls, technocrats, oligarchs, plutocrats, narcissists and demagogues. They are driving us off a cliff while blaming everyone but themselves. So they find a convenient scapegoat into which they channel all of the hatred and dissatisfaction. Any group or culture that diverts from the social norm becomes the subject of hate. We have built a society that is so bereft of joy, so stripmined of meaning and purpose that we are becoming hollow.
Life is beautiful, but we let them steal that from us. These days hatred is baked into the core of British culture. We are trained to disdain, and loathe and judge. To see our neighbours as less than human because they fail to conform to some prescribed ideal that we did not ask for, yet readily accept. We are trained in obedience and subservience, living in a world where outrage is an overreaction, and compliance is polite.
Hatred is the foundation on which authoritarian power is built and maintained. The ruling class knows that if they don’t consciously direct it away from them, it will find its way towards them. A crashing tide of righteous anger that will drag them out to the ocean and drown them.
