We’ve been told repeatedly by the Labour government that the Supreme Court judgement that reversed decades of equality law, threatening trans people’s rights and safety, is final and must be respected: any Supreme Court judgement is carved in stone, permanent, impossible to change.
Today, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves “is considering overruling the Supreme Court over a £44bn car loan commission scandal after lobbying by some of the UK’s biggest lenders,” The Guardian reports.
There’s a good piece on the higher education site Wonkhe by Anna Bull: Safety must shape policy on single-sex spaces. And pushing trans and non-binary people into the wrong toilets and changing rooms is not the way to do that. The focus here is on educational institutions but the point is true more widely: we’re much more likely to be the victims of abuse than the perpetrators of it.
Trans and non-binary people are much more likely than cis people, including cis women, to be subjected to sexual harassment and violence. This is a well-established fact, evidenced by national studies of 180,000 students in the US; 8000 students in Ireland; and 43,000 students in Australia, as well as studies focusing on staff-student sexual misconduct (p.277) or on specific disciplines; and studies across campuses and that compare different sexual and gender minority groups.
…Taken as a whole, the Supreme Court judgement, and the EHRC’s interpretation of it, risks making trans and non-binary people even more unsafe by revealing their identities when it may not be safe to do so, and by creating a climate where targeting them for abuse on the basis of their identities is more acceptable. As a result, the figures given above on the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment against trans and non-binary people are likely to grow even larger.
There’s a good piece in Assigned Media: “A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream. It’s about the US but relevant to the UK too: our media is just as captured, and their reporting is helping the right-wing attacks on trans people’s human rights and healthcare.
It takes one pseudoscience peddler and uses their activities to show:
“the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.
This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.”
One of the anti-trans groups favoured by health minister Wes Streeting is the Bayswater Support Group, some of whose members advocate child abuse in order to make children “accept biological reality”. And in a new, heartbreaking report by Trans Safety Network, some of those kids describe how the group radicalised their parents into increasingly cruel behavior and opened the door for far-right extremism.
A very familiar pattern emerges: increasing alienation, paranoia, cruelty and conspiracism as people get drawn deeper into radicalisation and further from reality.
I’m in the new issue (issue 19) of Somewhere: For Us, Scotland’s LGBTQ+ magazine, talking about music and joy and the power of Pride. It’s a great magazine and I’d really recommend the print version: the ink it uses smells amazing.
Imagine an alternate timeline where the media and political anti-trans panic didn’t happen, Scotland passed its proposed gender recognition reforms, and the sky didn’t fall in: none of the problems predicted by genital-obsessed weirdos arose, and ten years after the legislation introduced gender recognition by self-ID it was crystal clear that the weirdos’ scaremongering about trans people’s documentation was entirely groundless and based on bigotry.
That’s the timeline in Ireland, which today marks the tenth anniversary of self-ID.
During her appearance in front of the Women and Equalities Committee last month, EHRC head Baroness Falkner told MPs that the EHRC had an 81% approval rate; the implication, which Falkner did not correct or clarify, was that this figure represented public polling.
Thanks to another freedom of information request, we now know that it doesn’t: the figure comes from the EHRC’s own “media sentiment analysis” which “measures the tone and favourability of media coverage about EHRC, not public polling”.
In other words: the newspapers that hate trans people are pleased that the EHRC is actively helping their war on trans people.
“Positive media sentiment has improved from 35.2% in 2021-22 to 80.6% in 2024-25”. When that media is waging war on a marginalised group that the EHRC is supposed to protect, that should be cause for resignation, not celebration.
A powerful anti-rights movement is growing in the UK, threatening to roll back our hard-won freedoms and rewrite the rules on whose rights, bodies and lives deserve protection.
…These groups spent a staggering £106 million between 2019 and 2023, an increase of over 33%. All with the aim to undermine our freedoms, restrict access to essential healthcare and roll back the rights we’ve fought hard to win.
…The growing anti-rights movement in the UK, emboldened by what is happening in the US and increasingly well-funded, is targeting reproductive freedoms, access to abortion and the rights of LGBTI people. Their end goal is to roll back our hard-won rights, undermine equality protections and rewrite the rules on who deserves dignity and freedom.
We must name this threat for what it is: a deliberate and coordinated attack on human rights, led by actors who are weaponising misinformation, fabricating moral panic about abortion care and LGBTI people and exploiting existing prejudice to sow divisions and distract us from the real issues that matter.
Thanks to freedom of information requests, we can now see how the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been captured by anti-trans lobby groups via its own anti-trans employees – including the Commission’s head. As TACC.org.uk reports:
we obtained a trove of correspondence between EHRC senior leadership and the gender-critical lobbying group Sex Matters, with repeated appearances by Transgender Trend and its director, Stephanie Davies-Arai. These aren’t brief emails from junior staff. They include private meetings arranged with the EHRC Chair and CEO, backchannel lobbying, and full acceptance of policy proposals well beyond what would be expected in a public consultation.
…This isn’t just about emails. This is about a public body entrusted with safeguarding the rights of all of us, especially the most marginalised. And it’s about that body allowing itself to be steered by one political faction, behind closed doors, while hiding behind procedural language and vague promises of balance.
Sharing the article on Bluesky, TACC wrote:
Sex Matters and Transgender Trend were given privileged access: private meetings, letter exchanges with the Chair, and the right to bypass consultation rules. Their language appears, almost verbatim, in EHRC policy… This is not independence. It’s regulatory capture. It’s bias in plain sight.
BBC: “A council has removed all transgender-related books from the children’s sections of its libraries, its leader has announced.”
It’s Reform, inevitably, and there’s lots of questions about this particular story: my gut feeling is that it’s social media posturing, because the only book I’ve seen cited wasn’t a children’s book and wouldn’t have been in the children’s section of any library. But there is still an important point here:
Creating a moral panic around children’s books is how Section 28 started.
As I wrote in Fierce Salvage, the anti-trans panic is bringing bigotry back to the mainstream:
While hate crimes against the entire community continue to rise, the media and ministers tell the nation to fear the victims of hate, not the people purveying it. And when you listen to the callers and contributors to Scots radio shows or read the columnists and commenters on Scots newspaper websites, something becomes clear: if the Section 28 ballot were happening today, too many of our politicians, public figures and peers would be voting to keep it.
Bringing bigotry back has been the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos all along.
We’ve been saying for years now that history is repeating: the anti-gay, anti-lesbian demonisation of the 1980s has simply been wrapped in “gender-critical” ribbons. And this is a very clear demonstration that book-banning by bigots, a key part of trying to eradicate LGBTQ+ people, is not just a US phenomenon.