This is an election year. You will have already noticed this. And in election years, we’re overloaded with information about what’s working (rare), what’s not working (common), what we should care about and what our representatives promise will get better if we just trust them with our votes. You might expect, then, the lion’s share of column inches to be dedicated to things like hospital waiting lists, housing shortages, underfunded schools, fair wages, immigration… However, this is the UK, where a small group of disproportionately vocal people have decided that the country’s true poison, its most important issue, is that some people are transgender.
In 2021, only 0.5 per cent of the British population – equivalent to 262,000 people – identified as transgender. You’d expect a higher number, if you read the ceaseless press attacks from the so-called “gender critical movement”. Research from the Independent Press Standards Organisation back in 2020 revealed a 400 per cent increase in coverage of trans issues in a five-year period, the kind of coverage that “generates broad, sometimes heated debate, and raises complex questions around balancing reporting freely on important societal issues with the potential impact on vulnerable individuals.” A year later, CNN wrote about how anti-trans rhetoric was “rife in British media”. Last year, research from PinkNews counted 75 negative articles about trans people in a single month from the Telegraph, with a further 115 from the Daily Mail. Reporting on the figures, Novara christened the UK “Terf Island”.
Terf is a term for the so-called gender critical (from the shouty acronym TERF, for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), a label disliked by Terfs themselves, perhaps because of the association with unflatteringly short fringes and the insinuation that they enjoy posting on forums and read the adult crime fiction of JK Rowling. Of course, there is nothing radical or feminist in deciding who gets to be a woman and who doesn’t. Particularly not when the main arguments rest on the tedious ephemera of the Terf-approximation of female experience: namely, whether you have periods, or think the only gender-neutral bathroom you should ever experience is the one in your own home.
Unsurprisingly, this rampant transphobia in the press meant our politicians quickly pandered to the hysteria, twisting their platforms into ideological knots in the process. Keir Starmer recently promised that, if elected, Labour would both ban all forms of conversion therapy, while Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting pledged that trans women would have separate wards from cis women in hospital – conveniently ignoring the fact that neither would be admitted to hospital in the first place, given current waiting lists and lack of staff. Rishi Sunak pushed ahead with his own conversion therapy bans in October last year, the same month in which he claimed: “A man is a man, a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.”
There is nothing radical or feminist in deciding who gets to be a woman
The result is not just a country becoming ever more criminally un-chic and reactionary. It’s also one where real lives have become a punchline for newspapers, a gotcha-question for politicians, and an endless source of distraction for extremely online weirdos. (Nobody is more extremely online than a Terf). So there’s a reticence to confront the question of why exactly they have this weird obsession with other people’s bodies.
If you criticise or question transphobia, you expose yourself to a sudden and impenetrable Terf-wall online, a wave of doxxing so unrelenting, their skills can only have been honed through years of complaining about DHs on Mumsnet. The great irony of Terf Island, though, is that Terfs believe they’re the victims: hounded, attacked, denigrated and denied the chance to express themselves. Result: they’re continually, inexhaustibly, expressing themselves online.
The negative impact of that constant online chatter is that anyone sympathetic to trans issues has become wary of airing their views. The other night at the pub, a friend (a young cis woman, if you want to be technical) grudgingly admitted that she avoids posting in solidarity about trans issues after having been attacked for criticising JK Rowling’s recent book. The week before, a male writer had been forced to delete all his social media accounts after being accused of misogyny for saying he thought the Robert Galbraith books weren’t well written and were over-long. Even though he was expressing a literary rather than a political opinion, it became tinder for Terfs to while away a tedious January afternoon.
It’s difficult not to deduce that Terfs are a group poised to spring into action and alienate anyone who hasn’t already been radicalised by internet brainworms and middle-aged boredom. Their claim to defend “anyone who is being persecuted”, does not in fact include those “having a life expectancy of 35, largely because of transphobic violence,” according to one horrific statistic (OAS).
When I was a teenager, battling the usual demons of internalised and externalised misogyny, the best compliment you could receive was that you were “not like other girls”. Being “different” implied you were better than the other girls, because you weren’t trying to conform to the usual feminine expectations. “Feminine” implied a collective experience of womanhood and female solidarity that was anathema to us. And though a lot has changed since then for millennials and zoomers, there are always new ways in which to castigate anyone who’s perceived to be separate or different to the female stereotype.
Róisín Lanigan is a writer and editor based in Belfast and London
