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Far right trans panic
It has been a running theme of trans discourse since 2016 to panic about trans bodies, especially when a news cycle needs filling and an election is upcoming. The US and UK Supreme Courts are currently hearing cases related to trans people in society, brought by gender critics who have stoked trans panic on the back of baseless accusations and assumptions. Voices like J K Rowling, Majorie Taylor Greene and Helen Joyce have pivoted into trans panic because they believe it keeps them relevant, and all the while those court cases are causing actual bodily harm to trans people because of their greed and hunger for publicity.
No trans person has achieved the social relevance as J K Rowling, and since 2018 no trans person has successfully defended their rights at law to exist in an unqualified way within US or British society. Even successful cases such as Gavin Grimm’s bathroom win were caveated or limited. Trans panic has been used by the far right to justify exclusionary behaviour, denial of healthcare, and stripping of basic dignity precisely because trans people lack both the media power and the fiscal resources to successfully push back against the narratives.
Like other minority groups targeted by the far right, such as Muslims and Jews, trans people have been dragged down to the level of child abusers and other moral degenerates in the extremist propaganda. In the UK Muslim grooming gangs have been splashed across the tabloids for over a decade, and trans paediatric healthcare has been targeted using the same language. Antisemitic tropes from the 1930s have been recycled by gender critics and the far right to paint trans women as predators preying on vulnerable women without a shred of evidence to back it up.
This is where media literacy is so vital in trans narratives. None of the attacks on trans people are new. Trans panic has been going on since the 1850s in the UK, when it was gay cross dressing men who were hauled before the courts. Current gender critical discourse has attempted to white wash the pernicious history of such rhetoric, but now that Trump has been re-elected the gloves have completely come off. To be trans is now akin to being a Jew in Nazi Germany. The language is the same, the memes are the same vile caricatures used to frame Jews, and the insinuation is that anyone aiding trans people is a traitor to the cis…
