Following the British Supreme Court’s ruling that trans women are not women, Mila Edensor argues that this perfectly exemplifies a unique brand of British transphobia whose goal, against America’s strategy of upfront hostility and assaults, is the gradual exclusion and abjection of trans identities from public life.
Illustration by GAY45.In a way, at the very least a Republican will show you their true colours.
Spending nearly $215 million on TV trans attack ads in the last election alone, it is clear that anti-trans policies have become a core feature of the party’s national political strategy.
Many in the UK will look at this situation as if a world removed from our island’s politics. Just in 2017, we had a Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, supporting the right to self-ID without medical checks. Yet, in subsequent years, successive governments – Tory and now Labour uncomfortably alike – have presided over restrictions to youth and adult gender care, moves to erase the trans population from census data, and most recently, attacks against legal recognition for trans people.
True, UK politicians are yet to endorse events as overt as the ‘DeTrans Awareness Day’, observed by the US Department of Education this March. However, it doesn’t take long to see that the same undercurrents of hostility run deep across the Atlantic. Trans people have become rapidly disenfranchised in the UK, following a disturbingly Trumpian pattern.
The difference? The UK’s political class enacts its transphobia through the ‘neutral’ language of expertise, deferring all political and human accountability over to the purportedly apolitical workings of the system.
For when a system turns on a group, it crushes down like a slow-moving jaw. The public sphere in its constituent parts find consensus in the identification of an abnormal element to be fixed. In this case, violence is enacted through an algorithm, one coded without trans people as a viable category through its binary, mechanical logic systems. Consequently, we have seen our institutions approach the legitimacy of trans people with either dubiousness or abject denial.
Furthermore, with a brazen level of dishonesty, we have not only seen powerful British figures drive this systemic encirclement, but simultaneously claim that the trans community is not under attack.
Yet, experts are appointed by politicians, NHS guidelines are driven by ministers, and Supreme Court rulings are interpretations of laws that parliament can change.
Through comparison with the US state of affairs, it is possible to cut through the muted, stiff-lipped filters of British politeness. The UK’s anti-trans agenda must be exposed for what it truly is: dishonest, Trumpian, and insidious.
Legal Openings, Opportunities for Escalation
Take the recent Supreme Court ruling. On April 16, 2025, the UK Supreme Court declared that under the Equality Act, transgender women are not legally “women.” This means organisations and service providers are now legally permitted to exclude trans women from single-sex spaces.
Former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption was quick to clarify that this does not require exclusion – only that those who choose to do so will not face legal consequences. But such technicalities matter little when the symbolic message is so resounding.
This ruling came after, as Labour for Trans Rights puts it, “ceaseless lobbying from a well-funded anti-trans network.” The court further refused to hear from Victoria McCloud, a now-resigned transgender High Court judge, and excluded any transgender voices from its deliberations. McCloud is now seeking to take the UK to the European Human Rights Court over her exclusion. But even against this backdrop of systemic transphobia, the judgment insisted it was merely a narrow reading of the 2010 Equality Act, nothing more.
And yet, the political interpretation of the ruling has gone far beyond its legal remit. On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Sir Keir Starmer stated that the Prime Minister, “did not believe transgender women were women”. On the same day, the Equalities Minister implied that trans women should use the men’s toilets, sweeping assertions the court itself never made.
This is how transphobia operates in Britain: with the mask of neutrality, behind the veil of reasonableness. Starmer claims to want a debate conducted with “care and compassion.” Yet he is simultaneously amplifying the ruling’s most harmful possible interpretation, aligning state policy with the ideology of the lobby groups that brought the case to court.
It is here that we see institutional British transphobia at its most pernicious: not through explicit bans or brutal rhetoric, but through a slow, crushing pressure. One ruling becomes a soft spot, a moment of perceived weakness, and politicians press further in. What follows is a calculated campaign of plausible deniability, deliberate misinterpretation, and systemic erasure, rendering the country increasingly hostile to trans lives, all while insisting that no harm is being done.
Institutional Tone, Ideological Intent
Even before the Supreme Court ruling, steps were underway to erase trans people from the state’s conceptual and statistical landscape.
Commissioned by the previous government and published in March 2025, the Sullivan Review recommends that the UK record only sex at birth in census data, claiming transition to be irrelevant to state identification.
The language lacks Trump’s bombast across the Atlantic. On January 20, his administration issued an executive order with the pithy title “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”, declaring the US to recognise solely two unchangeable sexes, male and female. However, the conclusion of this review is chillingly similar: the erasure of trans identities from official recognition. For organisations and institutions, it explicitly advises against questions like, “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, insisting such questions “should not be used.” In their place, it enforces a binary – “Female” or “Male” – with strict guidance that “this question is about your sex at birth.”
Intersex people, a consistent and documented proportion of the human population, are casually dismissed as “a small minority of potentially anomalous cases.” Their existence is deemed irrelevant to legal or policy decisions – erasing the recognition of sexual diversity with but a side note.
And while the UK cloaks its policies in the language of expertise, the politics are plain to see.
Professor Sullivan – a researcher with a background in literacy rates – was appointed by the Conservative government as a “gender specialist.” She also serves on the advisory board of Sex Matters, a group that advocates for a strict definition of sex in law and policy, and which further argued against trans inclusion in the recent Supreme Court ruling.
The review now enjoys cross-party backing, with Streeting endorsing its recommendation that the NHS cease allowing trans people to change their gender markers. Shadow Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology Dr Ben Spencer has also cited the review in a recent comment piece and is currently advocating for an amendment to the Data Bill that would require all state agencies – including the DVLA and Passport Office – to revert and purge any sex data not aligned with sex at birth within 12 months.
Britain may not shout its intentions, but the message is loud nonetheless. Claiming to merely follow expert advice while making overtly political choices about which experts to legitimise, the state is drawing its own red lines around who is to be counted – and whose existence is to be erased.
The Impossibility of Trans Life
Central to these political attacks on trans recognition is the refusal to see a trans life as legitimate in either law or body.
In both the UK and US, bans on youth gender care have paved the way for restrictions into adult access. These attacks insist that trans people cannot follow a coherent, linear path into personhood, splitting them instead into two disconnected figures: the vulnerable child who must be protected from insidious “gender ideology”; and the corrupting, predatory adult who must the state must punish.
We see this when Trump describes the provision of youth care as “mutilation”, and when Streeting describes it as a “scandal.” In both countries, institutions are further castigated for recognising trans youth. US providers face prosecution; UK GPs are told in classified guidance to refuse even basic blood monitoring for DIY hormone users.
And in adulthood, access to care is further withheld. In the US, 27 states have moved to restrict adult access. In the UK, GPs are increasingly refusing to prescribe HRT to longtime patients.
Alongside this degradation of bodily legitimacy, the decay of legal protections now threatens trans participation in public life. Across the US, we have seen 13 states pass bathroom bans covering government facilities, schools, and public buildings. In Florida, we have witnessed a 20 year old trans woman handcuffed and sent to a men’s jail for the crime of spending less than 60 seconds in a toilet.
And now, in the UK, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has published interim guidance – not yet binding law, but a clear signal of political intent – encouraging hospitals, shops, restaurants, and workplaces to bar trans people from toilets, clarifying that trans women can be excluded from both the women’s and the men’s facilities.
Although the EHRC nominally advises that alternative arrangements should be made, in practice this guidance will make trans participation in public life far more difficult, cementing exclusion as the norm rather than the exception.
Across both contexts, a chilling pattern emerges. Trans people are not recognised as dignified subjects of the state but as contradictions: illegible, incoherent, and unworthy of belonging. And like any group historically marked as “anomalous,” they are targeted by powerful figures seeking to tighten the system around them, to cast them from the body-politic and to erase them from law, policy, and public life.
British Transphobia Does Not Need to Shout
British transphobia does not need to shout. It advances through a salvo of reasonable-sounding steps: an expert review here, a policy tweak there; a conveniently narrow legal ruling, an offhand comment to the press. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist and queer rights advocate Maria Ressa has recently talked about democracy’s death by one-thousand paper cuts in the West, each cut individually small, but amounting to a death all in the same. This has become Britain’s modus operandi in its desecration of trans life. One ruling inflames a talking point, a talking point becomes policy, and policy becomes erasure. And all the while, politicians insist that nothing has changed. They are just following the evidence. Just clarifying definitions. Just listening to both sides.
This is not neutrality. This is strategic ambiguity weaponised against a population that has already been pushed to the edge. It is a campaign not of overt bans but of slow eradication. Of rights, of recognition, and of reality itself.
At least Trump tells you what he’s doing. Britain insists it’s doing nothing at all. And meanwhile, trans lives are being quietly dismantled, piece by piece.
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