When New Internationalist dedicated an issue to transgender rights in 2015, our concern was that the topic affected too small a percentage of the population to be of general interest. Little did we know that an extraordinary backlash was about to break.
Fierce resistance to trans people’s right to gender self-identity, primarily expressed in far-right, evangelical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, found its way into the British mainstream as part of ‘anti-woke’ sentiment. But it also grew in other, less predictable, crowds. Concerted efforts (in part funded by the US far right) were made to separate the ‘T’ from the LGBT+ movement. What was once a fringe and largely unsuccessful attempt by some radical feminists to exclude trans women from women-only spaces morphed into a ‘gender critical’ movement with many prominent female academics and writers taking up the cause. Their blanket objection to gender recognition fixated on the rare possibility of violent men gaining access to women’s refuges or prisons by self-identifying as women.
Such concerns, along with those around trans teenagers receiving puberty-blocking treatment, were
