Transphobia & The Trojan Horse
on Rishi Sunak not having read his Virgil, the alt-right and the terrifying state of British transphobia
“Four times it stopped on the very threshold of the gate, and four times the armour clanged in its womb. But we paid no heed and pressed on blindly, madly, and stood the accursed monster on our consecrated citadel. Even at this last moment Cassandra was still opening her lips to foretell the future, but God had willed that these were lips the Trojans would never believe. This was the last day of a doomed people and we spent it adorning the shrines of the gods all through the city with festal garlands.” (Aeneid Book II, trans David West)
Shrieking. Sobbing. That’s how I spent the night the Tories won the election in 2019.
‘My friends will die because of this.’
My parents looked at me pityingly, with the sort of look you might give someone if they told you their favourite unicorn had been involved in a fatal car crash.
‘You’re being hysterical’.
Yes, I was inconsolable. Snotty, red-eyed and dehydrated from weeping, I was what I would now describe as a hot mess. The word hysterical has been used more times than I can count to describe my reaction to political events. Hysterical, crazy, ridiculous, frenzied, fear-mongering. The list goes on and on and on. The problem is that - unlike the majority of adults - I care about people deeply. Yes, even people I do not know and whom I share nothing in common with.
This week, Rishi Sunak - former Chancellor and the man responsible for the ongoing cost of living crisis - stated that the 2010 Equality Act was a ‘trojan horse’ which had allowed ‘every kind of woke nonsense to permeate public life’.
The Equality Act of 2010 is a piece of legislation which builds upon the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), Race Relation Act (1965), Disability Discrimination Act (1995 and 2005). In 2006, the Equality Act implemented the same equality for sexual orientation, religion or belief, gender reassignment and age.
Those of us who have experienced discrimination know that the Equality Act is the absolute bare minimum. It is vitally important in protecting a basic standard of humanity and equal treatment, ensuring that workplaces, businesses and services cannot discriminate against you. It’s a piece of legislation that needs strengthening, not knocking down. It needs to exist alongside a system of integrated support for those looking to seek free or low-cost legal support when their rights have been breached. However, the Equality Act also protects people based on gender reassignment and in the current space where anti-trans rhetoric, violence and legislature is rife, Sunak knows he can appeal to Conservative voters (although why he thinks this is possible given Liz Truss being instrumental in driving anti-trans hate, as per Kemi Badenoch’s praise).
Transphobia has been a problem for a long, long time in the UK. But it started taking a different approach a few years ago. Rather than saying ‘transgender people are a predators’, people began to say ‘I just want to protect women’s spaces’. Rather than ‘they’re forcing children to transition’, (spoiler - they aren’t) it became ‘I want to protect young women’. Though transphobia was driving these conversations, it was shrouded in the disguise of protecting women and girls. Instead of Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children Campaign, we had rich, powerful women championing a minority group by presenting them as a threat to women. We have a supposedly objective organisation in the BBC stating that trans women were predators after a single Twitter poll run by an anti-trans campaigner as legitimate news.
And now, to ensure that transgender people do not have legal access to basic rights, Sunak is happy to threaten to tear up all the established rights we have because it’s woke nonsense.
The deep irony to me is that Rishi Sunak clearly hasn’t read his Virgil. The Equality Act is not the Trojan Horse - he has it the wrong way round. Transphobia and in particular ‘gender critical’ ideology, is the Trojan Horse. They’ll pull it into the city - despite the protestations of a few who have already been dismissed as unbelievable - under the guise of ‘protecting women’ and celebrate the thwarting of trans people and the winning of a culture war.
Whilst you’re celebrating the win, from the belly of the beast spills out the racism, the anti-abortion legislation, the erosion of queer rights, the eugenicist policies.
Irrespective of what you believe about trans people - even if you vehemently hate them, even - would you allow the human rights of women, people of colour, disabled people and queer people to be placed under direct threat just to get your ‘win’? The Far Right are convinced you will, in fact, they’re betting on it. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center in the US found that:
For far-right extremists, the increased visibility of transgender people is a sign of the growing “degeneracy” of the nation, wrought by “cultural Marxists,” leftists, and Jews as part of an assault on white, Christian families and strict gender roles.
We’re already seeing it in practice. Scratch the surface of anti-trans advocates and organisations and what you’ll find is a slew of regressive politics, policies and practices. Anti-trans sports bans like the Fairness In Women’s Sports Act designed to from trans people have legalised the internal and external of children’s genitals - essentially state-condoned sexual assault. Numerous Black, cisgender female athletes have been banned from competing because their natural testosterone levels are deemed too high. The UK government refused to condemn transgender conversion practices despite the (eventual) acknowledgement that it was harmful to lesbian, gay and bisexual people. In the US, families are being forced to flee their state not only in order to ensure their children are able to access healthcare and education but because senior politicians have demanded the parents of trans children be reported for abuse.
I’ve been watching for years ago anti-trans accounts and far-right organisers regularly cross-post each other’s content online. Feminist and LGBTQ+ legend Judith Butler caused outrage amongst TERFs for correctly pointing out that they are fascists:
Although nationalist, transphobic, misogynist, and homophobic, the principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements. Indeed, in attacking “gender” they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents; they oppose protections for women against rape and domestic violence; and they deny the legal and social rights of trans people along with a full array of legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment and killing. All this fervor ramped up during a pandemic time in which domestic abuse has soared and queer and trans kids have been deprived of their spaces for gathering in life-supporting communities.
There are two ways I can look at Rishi Sunak’s comments on the Equality Act. Either he’s a naive fool who doesn’t understand that the people he is trying to win votes for are not simply people who hold conservative views. He doesn’t understand that TERFs represent a group of people who have been radicalised into alt-right beliefs by a movement funded through large anonymous donations, several of which have been traced back to American evangelical think-tanks. He probably hasn’t read this report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London found that ‘transphobia should be recognized as one of the major and most ubiquitous narratives around which the far right as a broad movement, recruits, mobilizes, and organizes.’
The other alternative is that Rishi Sunak knows this and endorses that message. I don’t know which is worse.
Where does that leave us?
Well, we’ll keep saying what we’ve been saying for years and waiting for the public to listen. I don’t know how much louder we have to be, whether it’s that people maybe subconsciously don’t want to believe that we’re sliding as far towards fascism as we are.
Call me hysterical, call me crazy - it doesn’t make me wrong.