How and why is our feminism trans-inclusive

By Echo Fortune, Ally Nuttall and Paris Wilder

When the British Supreme Court ruling, stripping Equality Act protections from transgender people, landed in April 2025, it came as a shock to many allies of the trans community. For most trans people who have not given up all hope and turned away from the news cycle in resigned horror, it felt like the logical continuation of a grim narrative that has been at play now at least since 2017. 

What happened in Britain?

It was the best part of a decade ago when Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act catalysed and gave momentum to a new hate movement against transgender existence, the gender critical cult. 

This vocal group of predominantly white, middle-class, straight, chronically online women and men seized on arguments popularised by reactionaries in the Vatican and later by Evangelical conservatives. They warned against so-called “gender ideology”, a term coined as part of the anti-abortion campaigns of the religious right. It found its symbolic leader in the children’s author and billionaire J.K. Rowling. 

The impact was often fear. Even those trans and gender non-conforming people who told themselves that they would not change their behaviour and flee the gendered spaces to which they have every right, must admit that it does frequently impact them. Trans people now face normalised threats of sexual assault from Transport for London (TfL) security (who insist that their male employees be allowed to strip search trans women) combined with the relentless weight of hate crimes (a 156% increase in four years). 

While it is true that the maximalist and devastating interim report interpretation of the ruling by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) did not get through, this supposed human rights body, fully captured by anti-trans extremists as well as those hostile to Black Lives Matter, achieved a key goal. Damage has already been done, with institutions and workplaces jumping to enforce the ban, even though it was never legal to begin with. It is true that many trans trade unionists and cis supporters have fought against the worst interpretations and continue to do so, but while there have been some small victories, the overall situation is definitely worse than before the ruling.

Like the anti-LGBTI+ Section 28 introduced by Thatcher in 1988 before it, the ruling and subsequent EHRC guidance allowed bigoted institutions to interpret it in the harshest way, bolstering the gender critical movement’s anti-trans agenda and putting trans people in even more precarious positions. 

They mastered the media story around the judgment to claim that trans people were no longer even afforded fundamental privacy rights, which the media itself and the British government happily augmented. Typically, media outlets have failed to report the EHRC’s U-turn in dropping their mandatory requirement for businesses to segregate toilets by sex assigned at birth; many organisations may still believe that they have no choice but to exclude trans people.

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party finds its position of power at Westminster to be increasingly tenuous, with the far-right party Reform stalking it in the polls. As a response, rather than using their massive majority to implement leftist policies such as a wealth tax, they look to scapegoat trans life and shore up their vote; a convenient answer to a government failing its citizens in the same way they attack migrants and disabled people. 

The Whip of Reaction

In times of economic crisis, a move back towards tradition and conservatism offers a false sense of power to an atomised and fractured working class by allowing them to punch down at marginalised groups, instead of punching up at those who deserve it.

This strategy is not wholly opportunistic, however; the managerial, paternalistic and increasingly authoritarian character of British centrist politics finds plenty to dislike in a marginalised community that flouts convention and demands a radical version of bodily autonomy. It is no coincidence that the increasingly right-wing Labour government has targeted disabled people alongside trans people. 

In both cases, the group being scapegoated is a marginalised community, already facing many obstacles to full participation in public life, whose very bodies and existences counter reactionary narratives of conformity to a disableist, cissexist “ideal”. And there is the fact that many trans disabled people exist.

What we are seeing is what Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, Phil Hears, and Seema Syeda described in 2016 as Creeping Fascism[1] coming to fruition. With a series of global crises that liberal politics can no longer address, and with the left often absent or weak, the ideas of those furthest to the right pull the rest of mainstream politics to their extreme. This is the character of the politics of Trump, Brexit, Johnson, Farage, but more globally of Putin, Xi, Meloni, Erdoğan, Modi and others.

Transgender people have become one of the leading lines of their attack. This has happened in part because of the double character of trans life and oppression. On the one hand, trans existence throws into question the entirety of the system of binary genders on which capitalist social reproduction depends; it is a radical challenge to society as we conceive it. If womanhood is not strictly tied to the ability to become pregnant, then it becomes much more difficult for regressive, ultra-patriarchal elements in society to limit the rights of cis women and other AFAB (“Assigned Female At Birth”) people based on adherence to this role. 

However, and relatedly, trans people and especially trans women (particularly when they also suffer other oppressions, as with Black trans women), are some of the most socially marginalised people. They are an easy target, lacking agency or power, generally impoverished, disproportionately disabled, unemployed or working in precarious and dangerous sectors of the economy. 

Poisonous ideology

At the same time, the gender critical cult has not been robustly challenged by many on the left. Too often, professed socialists have even joined it. This represents the collapse of the ability of much of the established left to assess and understand social oppression, as well as the intersectional ways in which various oppressions operate. After decades of defeat and retreat from the battles of the exploited and oppressed, these so-called socialists have succumbed to the inevitable pull of the ideas of the ruling class. It is only through engagement in struggle that this can be resisted. 

These ideas include the queerphobic notion that trans women are somehow men who are pretending to be women to predate on cis women; a notion that itself is built on no empirical basis, but a host of reactionary ideas about queerness as a form of contamination, of cis women as vulnerable to an enemy-within, of gender as an immutable, binary fact that exists outside of social relations and history. It is an obvious nonsense; as many have said, why would a rapist pretend to be a trans woman in a society that treats rapists better than it treats trans women?

This also speaks to the power of decades of deep-rooted misogyny and white supremacy within our society. The social footing of a woman’s place in society is perceived as so fragile that a fear of being “replaced” is pervasive, especially amongst white, cis feminists. The white, right-wing, cis women pushing this replacement theory continue in a long line of white supremacist thought, furthering the heinous lie that white women are at risk and without them, white society as we know it will be “outnumbered” by those deemed inferior.

Inferiority is reserved for those whose liberated existence challenges class society: trans people, people of colour, “illegal aliens”, etc. For this reason, the fight for trans liberation is coherent with the fight for reproductive justice, in that abortion rights, attacks on healthcare, and forced sterilisations are tactics to further the production of white babies and eliminate those who are deemed a threat. Trans liberation is a direct attack on the strict gender roles that are vital for the continuation of white supremacy. Reproductive Justice and Trans Liberation must be linked in struggle. 

Additionally, large numbers of liberal cis women are willing to ignore the evidence of the real perpetrators of male violence – cis men, husbands, brothers – in place of a threat of male violence from the trans community. They believe that “protecting” cis womanhood, by defining it as purely biological sex, means that they can appease the patriarchal capitalists and keep their fragile position in the social hierarchy. It is only through true liberation of all women away from patriarchal dominance and capitalism that women and all trans and queer people will be free to live how they please, and that the true perpetrators of male violence will be held to account. 

Conclusion

The ruling of the Supreme Court is not only one that restricts and condemns trans people to a life of isolation, but is one that restricts women’s liberation and undoes years of feminist struggle. The goal has always been to move away from the harmful idea that a woman is defined by her uterus, and that her main purpose in life is to have babies with cis men. 

Reproductive justice, women’s rights in the workplace, and a woman’s right to financial independence have all been fought for based on this understanding. Allowing the legal definition of a woman to be one of purely biology opens up a dangerous door to the far right and fundamentalist groups, who aim to limit women's rights along with those in other marginalised groups.

This is why our feminism must be trans-inclusive. Without a dismantling of the restrictive binaries that hold up hetronormative hegemony, serving only the richest and most privileged men in the capitalist class, we will forever be subjected to a system of oppression. Cis women must not be fooled into a scarcity mindset of “protecting” women whilst excluding those who wish to partake and engage in cis women’s struggle. 

Alongside this, trans men and those who present less typically ‘feminine’ are consistently excluded from the conversation, whilst receiving abuse for not conforming to typical gender aesthetics. Anti-trans “feminists” claim to protect all cis women from harm, yet their actions do the opposite, by policing further how “women” should present.

Instead of seeing gender expression and lived experience as scarce, we, as revolutionary, socialist feminists, must see the incredible power that comes from being trans inclusive. A world where ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are not opposing each other in conflict, but interconnected and fluid. We cannot know how this will play out, but the binary itself might one day serve no social purpose whatsoever. We all contain a mixture of traits associated with the two sexes we’ve been asked to fit into. 

What keeps us apart is the cruel socialisation practices and oppression asserted onto us by the capitalist class, which only runs smoothly off free reproductive and household labour from women, and ruthless dominance to uphold the system from men. A world where feminism is trans inclusive aims not to assimilate into these oppressive binaries, but to liberate women and trans people from them, allowing all of us to express ourselves the way we wish to and to our fullest.

Echo Fortune, Ally Nuttall & Paris Wilder are members of Anti*Capitalist Resistance

Notes

1. Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, Seema Syeda, Creeping Fascism: What It Is & How to Fight It (Public Reading Rooms, 2019).