Trans rights: the shame of a state punching down
TetleysTLDR: The Summary
Britain’s war on the trans community is a manufactured moral panic, not a public demand. A tiny, vulnerable minority has been turned into a national punchbag by politicians, pundits, and a media class desperate for distraction from collapsing public services, rising inequality, and their own failures. Courts now dress prejudice up as 'risk' while cultural figures like JK Rowling legitimise hostility and hand bigots a moral alibi. Polling shows most Britons support trans rights, but the media’s distortion convinces people that cruelty is the norm. Even a small reactionary faction within the gay community is used to pit LGBT people against each other. This isn’t safeguarding; it’s scapegoating. Britain is punching down because it’s politically convenient. The treatment of trans people is a mirror: it shows a society mistaking harassment for principle and fear for morality. Trans rights are human rights: and our response defines who we are.
TetleysTLDR: The long bit
There is a sickness in modern Britain, and it is not the one our pundit class obsesses over. It is not a plague of pronouns or the rise of ‘gender ideology’. It is something much older, much more corrosive, and infinitely more familiar: the instinct to identify a vulnerable minority, weave around them a convenient mythology of threat and then congratulate ourselves for attacking them.
It is punching down as national sport: the rebranding of bigotry as common sense, the bullying of a group already living on the edge of society all under the pretence of safeguarding.
Right now, that sickness has fixed its gaze on one of our smallest and most precarious communities: trans people. The cruelty is not subtle. It is not implicit. It is proud, loud and broadcast nightly. Trans people are fewer than one percent of the population, yet they occupy a grotesquely outsized portion of our public conversation. They are dissected in newspapers, debated in Parliament, litigated in the High Court and mocked in comedy sets. They are called confused, dangerous, deluded often by people who have never knowingly met a trans person in their life, and the most tragic part? Many in our nation genuinely think this is acceptable. They believe, with a straight face, that they are the victims here. That the fragile British majority is under siege from a few tens of thousands of already marginalised people who want nothing more radical than the right to live without harassment.
In the months since the High Court’s latest intervention, we’ve seen institutions dragged, often visibly unwilling, into enforcing rulings they know will harm the very people they’re meant to protect. Schools, already stretched to breaking point, have been told to treat trans pupils as safeguarding risks rather than children in need of support. Local councils have quietly rewritten guidance for sports facilities and shelters, stripping trans women of access they’d previously offered without issue. Universities, terrified of litigation, have begun ‘pausing’ inclusion policies they once championed, citing legal uncertainty where none existed until the ruling manufactured it. Organisations that were once safe spaces like the Guides and the Women's Institute have been forced to close their doors. Even NHS Trusts, already caught in the crossfire of political culture wars, have felt compelled to tighten protocols in ways staff privately admit are discriminatory. These are not organic shifts. They are institutions coerced into enacting prejudice under the veneer of legal obligation - collateral damage of a judgment designed to legitimise suspicion.
We’ve been here before. We know exactly what this is. This is a rerun of Thatcher’s Section 28, this is the demonisation of travellers. This is the moral panic over gay teachers. This is the sneer directed at single mothers. This is every attempt to take a social anxiety and attach it to a hated group so the powerful can avoid scrutiny. This is an old cruelty wearing new clothes
And quite frankly, it stinks.
The High Court: Where Rights Become ‘Risks’
The increasingly hostile legal landscape facing trans people is not a natural outgrowth of public opinion. It is an artefact of orchestrated pressure. Every new ‘clarification’ of the Equality Act, every ruling expanding the ability of institutions to exclude trans women from spaces or restrict trans children’s rights is celebrated by the same small constellation of pressure groups: the ones whose influence far outstrips their membership and whose claims crumble when exposed to scrutiny.
Recently we’ve seen High Court interventions that legitimise the suspicion of trans people as a class. What would once have been recognised as prejudice: the assumption that a trans woman in a women’s space is inherently suspicious has been laundered into official policy. Judges, backed by a media ecosystem that has been clamouring for years to depict trans existence as dangerous, now articulate in legalese what the tabloids shout in headlines: that trans people are a problem to be contained. When rights become framed as 'risks', minorities become framed as dangers. Suddenly the question is no longer how we protect trans people from discrimination and violence, but how we protect everyone else from trans people. That pivot, from rights to risk, is the machinery of scapegoating. We’ve seen it used against migrants, against Muslims, against Gypsies and Roma, against benefits claimants. Now it is used against trans people and the courts, rather than standing as a bulwark against that injustice, have too often validated it.
The judiciary may dress its reasoning in the language of balance and proportionality but whenever the rights of a vulnerable group are placed on one side of the scales and the prejudices of the majority on the other, we know exactly which way British institutions tend to lean.
The Celebrity Crusader: JK Rowling and the Normalisation of Harassment
No cultural figure has done more to mainstream hostility to trans people in Britain than JK Rowling. Her transformation from beloved author to anti-trans crusader is one of the most depressing cultural developments in recent memory, not because celebrities should be paragons of moral clarity, but because she has become an avatar for righteous bigotry. Rowling is treated by her followers as a martyr to free speech, a lone truth-teller battling the ‘ideology’ supposedly capturing society. In reality, she stands atop one of the most powerful platforms in global culture and uses it to target one of the least powerful groups on earth. That imbalance of power matters. When Rowling quotes a fringe conspiracy theory about predatory men ‘posing’ as women, the world listens. When she amplifies accounts involved in organised harassment campaigns, they are emboldened. When she minimises the suicide risk facing trans youth, her words reverberate across every school, every household, every strained therapy appointment. This is not merely disagreement. It is a cultural permission slip.
When a famous, wealthy, influential cis woman spends years repackaging trans people as threats, she tells the country that hostility is normal. She tells bullies that their instincts are valid. She gifts the media the moral alibi it craves and she gives politicians the cover to legislate cruelty. Every time Rowling declares herself the real victim, the persecuted truth-teller, she performs a kind of moral inversion. Trans people, who face disproportionate violence, homelessness, unemployment, and hate crime are reimagined as oppressors. Cis people, who hold every structural advantage, become the oppressed. This is the logic of all moral panics. The powerful pretend to be powerless. The minority is framed as a dangerous monolith and the nation slips, almost unconsciously, into punching down.
And the human cost of this bigotry is not abstract. It is violence. Predictable, rising and entirely avoidable. It is trans people being harassed on buses, attacked in the street, hounded out of schools and denied healthcare until their mental health collapses. It is families grieving teenagers driven to despair by a country that treats their existence as a controversy. It is names read out every November at vigils that grow longer, not shorter. When public figures normalise suspicion, someone always decides to act on it. When newspapers scream that trans women are predators, someone believes them and when politicians legislate exclusion, someone interprets it as permission. The cruelty does not stay on the page it spills out into real lives, real bodies, real funerals. This is what moral panic produces: not ‘debate’ but blood and grief.
Brianna Ghey, just 16, was murdered because she was trans - a tragedy that would be unbearable even if she were the only one.
Perceived Public Opinion vs Actual Public Opinion
We are told constantly that 'the public has had enough of trans ideology'. The phrase appears in think tank reports, op-eds, and political speeches as if it were settled fact. Yet when actual polling is done, not the leading questions commissioned by lobbyists, but genuine attempts to understand public feeling, the picture is very different. Most people in Britain support the basic principles of trans rights. They believe trans people deserve dignity and equality. They support legal recognition of gender. They believe trans people should be protected from discrimination. They are not obsessed with toilets. They are not consumed with fear and they certainly are not demanding the government pursue a crusade against trans existence.
So how has the opposite perception become entrenched? Because public opinion as reported is no longer a reflection of what people think, it’s a reflection of what media gatekeepers insist the conversation must be. The more newspapers fill their pages with imagined threats, the more politicians repeat them, the more television debates treat them as legitimate, the more the public assumes hostility must be the norm. It’s a self-fulfilling distortion field: the public believes others are more prejudiced than they really are and behaves accordingly. People do not want to seem out of step with the majority and when the majority is portrayed as hostile, hostility becomes performative, socially acceptable, even expected.
The result is chilling: genuine support for trans rights is drowned out by the illusion of widespread transphobia. An illusion manufactured by those who profit from fear.
The Gay Community: Solidarity and Sabotage
One of the most painful aspects of the current backlash has been the presence of loud anti-trans voices claiming to speak for the gay community. Every social movement has its reactionaries, but the attempt to place lesbian and gay people in opposition to trans people feels uniquely tragic, given the intertwined histories.
For decades, trans people stood shoulder to shoulder with gay people during the darkest days of criminalisation, AIDS hysteria and police repression. Trans women of colour were among the first to fight back at Stonewall. Solidarity was not optional, it was survival.
Today, despite a vocal faction of so-called ‘gender critical’ gay individuals, polling consistently shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are among the strongest supporters of trans rights. This should not surprise us. LGBT+ people understand what it means to be scapegoated. They recognise the coded language, the moral panic, the tropes of predation and contagion because they were used against them relentlessly within living memory. And yet a minority of influential gay commentators have embraced narratives indistinguishable from those wielded against them in the 1980s. Their arguments, that children are being indoctrinated, that society is collapsing, that rights for one group erase rights for another are the same arguments used to justify Section 28. It is tragic to watch people step into the role once imposed on them by the homophobic press and wield it against another vulnerable minority.
These individuals are in a minority, they do not represent the gay community. They represent a reactionary subset amplified by the media precisely because they serve its narrative. “Even the gays oppose trans rights,” we are told as if one marginalised group’s discomfort justifies another’s persecution. Solidarity is not a zero-sum game. Rights are not slices of a pie and those attempting to split LGBT+ people from one another serve only the interests of those who would roll back all queer liberation.
Trans Rights Are Human Rights
This should be the easiest part of the argument, yet it is the one most obscured by sophistry. Trans rights are not a niche concern. They are not a fringe demand. They are part of the universal struggle for the freedom to live authentically and safely. When we talk about trans rights, we are talking about the right:
- to access healthcare without hostility
- to live free from discrimination
- to be recognised by the state
- to walk down the street without fear
- to work, rent, study, and love without harassment
- to exist
These are not special privileges. They are the foundation of human dignity. Whenever a government restricts trans rights, whether by undermining gender recognition, banning healthcare, or legitimising exclusion it sends a broader message about whose lives count. Authoritarianism never begins with the majority. It begins by testing the waters on those least able to resist. If society accepts their persecution, the door widens.
History warns us: the erasure of one minority’s rights is a blueprint for the erosion of everyone’s. When politicians declare that trans people are a threat to children, or women, or to the imaginary moral fabric of society, they construct a public enemy that does not exist. The only documented threat in this conflict comes from the hostility directed at trans people themselves: harassment, physical violence, abuse, exclusion, homelessness and a suicide rate that should shame every politician who has ever uttered the words ‘culture war’.
If we cannot defend the rights of those with the least power, then our commitment to human rights is conditional, shallow, and meaningless.
The Real Question: Why Are We So Comfortable Punching Down?
Trans people have lived in British society for as long as Britain has existed. Their visibility is not new only our willingness to acknowledge them is. So why, exactly, has Britain chosen this moment to launch a moral crusade? Because it is politically convenient. Austerity is collapsing public services. Wages are stagnant. Housing is unaffordable. The NHS is on its knees. The climate crisis accelerates while our leaders dither. Inequality widens, corruption deepens, and public trust evaporates. What better distraction than a manufactured threat? Trans people are the perfect target for a political class that fears accountability. They are small in number, frequently invisible and lack institutional power. They are the ideal group onto whom broader social anxieties can be projected and once the media ecosystem begins to amplify those anxieties, the cycle becomes self-perpetuating.
Britain’s persecution of trans people is not a reflection of an informed public demanding action. It is a reflection of a political and media establishment desperate to avoid scrutiny, eager to misdirect public anger, and entirely comfortable punching down when it suits them.
A Mirror, Not a Debate
The treatment of the trans community is not only a moral crisis. It is a mirror held up to our nation. It shows us what we have become: a society so frightened, so disoriented by decades of political failure, that we mistake harassment for principle and cruelty for reason.
A society willing to believe itself besieged by one of its smallest minorities rather than recognise the real enemies: inequality, corruption, environmental collapse and an economy rigged against the many.
Trans people are not a threat. They never were. The threat is a nation that convinces itself that bullying the vulnerable is bravery, that bigotry is biology, that prejudice is protection and that a human life is a debate topic.
We must choose, and choose quickly, what kind of country we intend to be. A nation that stands with its most vulnerable or one that sacrifices them to disguise its own moral and political decay, because history will record this moment and it will judge us not by how loudly we shouted one another down, but by whether we defended those who needed us most.
Trans rights are human rights and any society that forgets this has lost not only its compassion, but its soul.
Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK. A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.
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