In just the past few years, attacks on trans rights have ramped up massively across the world.
By Claudia O’Riordan
Billionaire figures are using their positions to spread harmful rhetoric, while using their wealth to support anti-trans groups. The richest man on Earth, Elon Musk has rallied against so-called ‘gender ideology’ and the ‘woke mind virus’. As the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Musk has encouraged anti-trans hate to run rampant on the site.
J.K. Rowling seems to speak about nothing else except how much she despises trans people. This seeming obsession has gone so far that Rowling has established a private fund to support any legal challenges that will exclude trans women from women’s spaces, or to defend anyone who faces employment tribunals due to discrimination against trans people in the workplace. There are, of course, also the media barons who only ever report on anything related to trans people if it can be used to demonise them in some fashion.
Stop the rollback of our rights!
This Labour government has completely capitulated to this pressure and indulged the rising transphobia we are seeing. The UK Supreme Court ruling last year, which defined “woman” as identical with sex assigned at birth, has gone completely unchallenged by the government. They have upheld the Tories’ puberty blocker ban and blocked Scottish reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. Meanwhile, the state of gender-affirming healthcare is deteriorating, with no sign of the government doing anything to alleviate it.
This government has shown itself time and again to not be a friend to working-class people. In order to cling on to power, they have attempted to emulate Reform UK, ramping up attacks on not just trans people, but also migrants, benefit claimants and others.
The threat doesn’t end there, though. The assault on trans rights is only the thin edge of the wedge. As a small minority of society, with very low levels of representation in almost all arenas, trans people make a convenient scapegoat, around which people’s anger can be diverted away from the very real issues we face in society today. But beyond that, sections of the right are seeking to use anti-trans attacks as a bridge towards a wider rolling back of rights for LGBTQ+ people and women more generally.
The right are increasingly talking about issues like birth rates, surrogacy, parental rights and ‘traditional family values’ to shift the focus to gay people, bisexuals and lesbians. They also seek to attack bodily autonomy. Many of the same arguments around access to gender-affirming healthcare will be used to attack abortion rights. ‘Pro-life’ demonstrators were celebrating outside the High Court when the puberty blockers ban was upheld in 2024.
War and oppression
The fight for LGBTQ+ liberation and the anti-war movement may not seem to have any obvious connection at first look. But during times of war, LGBTQ+phobia has been a tool used to define national identity, maintain military discipline, and enforce gender norms. Gay men have always been persecuted during war.
In World War I, MP Noel Pemberton Billing alleged a German ‘Black Book’ listed 47,000 members of the British elite as ‘sexual deviants’ who were at threat of blackmail. In the US during the Cold War, there was the ‘Lavender Scare’, where gay men and lesbians were said to be national security risks and communist sympathisers, which led to the call for their removal from state employment.
In the Ukraine conflict, the Russian state produces homophobic propaganda to rally support for the imperialist war around ‘traditional values’. The war in Iran and rising militarism around the world, besides threatening millions of lives, are also a threat to LGBTQ+ rights.
When Socialist Alternative are out campaigning against the war in Iran or against the genocide in Gaza, apologists for war will challenge us by asking ‘what do you think they would do to you in a country like that?’ But the truth is, as things stand currently, if I were an LGBTQ+ person in either Gaza or Iran, the greatest risk to me, my family and my friends would be Israeli and American bombs above anything else.
Socialists are opposed to the brutal, repressive Iranian regime and its attacks on minorities. But the only way to freedom is through the mass struggle of the Iranian working class itself – not through the bombing of innocent civilians by imperialism.
Not just a celebration
As we enter Pride season, thousands of LGBTQ+ people will be gathering in celebrations of love and identity. Necessary and wonderful as that is, celebrating is simply not enough when our rights are under attack. Pride also presents an opportunity for us to come together and organise. It can and should be a radical event.
In Huddersfield, Socialist Alternative members have helped organise their own alternative pride where the corporate character of mainstream pride is replaced by a spirit of resistance. We can make our own pride ourselves, without big-business backers. We can host mass meetings, involve the trade-union movement and fight back – not only against attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, but also against war and imperialism, for housing, jobs, healthcare and more.
We must take aim at the system of capitalism. Capitalism depends on division. Whether that be from race, gender, sexual orientation or religion, they seek to divide our class to make us weaker. Only in coming together and uniting our struggles into a working-class fightback can we defeat all oppression and exploitation.
