What Are We Up Against?

By Bea Groves-McDaniel, July 2026. Research by SAL-9000.

Abstract

In the summer of 2025, Britain achieved what might charitably be called a position of international distinction: a global survey by Ipsos placed the United Kingdom last among all G7 nations in its support for transgender rights. More than half of all Britons polled opposed allowing trans people to use toilets or changing rooms consistent with their gender identity. Three quarters opposed gender-affirming healthcare for trans young people. The country that once exported the concept of civilised conduct to the world had become, by the measure of its own citizens, the least hospitable place in the G7 for transgender people to exist.

This is not an accident. It is the product of a decade-long moral panic, assiduously cultivated by organised opposition, amplified by large sections of the media, and facilitated by a political class that discovered, to its quiet delight, that trans people made ideal proxy villains for a generalised anxiety about social change. This piece examines the forces arraigned against trans dignity, safety, and inclusion in Britain today: who they are, how they argue, why they cannot be reasoned with, and what might be done about it.

The central argument is this: the struggle for transgender equality is not primarily a battle of ideas. It is a battle of power, and power is currently on the wrong side. That can change. But only if we understand what we are actually fighting.

Introduction: Why This Matters

Transgender people in Britain are not merely controversial. They are, by the consistent testimony of official data, among the most vulnerable members of society. The Scottish Social Attitudes survey of 2025 identified trans people as one of four groups at "particular risk of discrimination" in contemporary Scotland. Police recorded 4,120 transgender hate crimes in England and Wales in 2024/25. The Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests the true figure is far higher, as the majority of hate crimes are never reported. Since the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of 'woman' in 2025, reported harassment of all women, including cis and trans women alike, has risen sharply.

And yet the lived experience of trans people is not the story that dominates the headlines. The story that dominates the headlines is about the threat that trans women supposedly pose to 'real' women: in toilets, in refuges, in prisons, in sports, in schools. The threat is, in every meaningful sense, a manufactured one. The evidence for it is negligible. The harm it does is enormous.

As the legal analyst Ian Dunt observed of the EHRC's code of practice following the Supreme Court ruling:

"The Code is a labyrinth of nonsense, an unworkable, illogical, irrational, hopelessly befuddled mess of competing urges, moral panic and institutionalised anxiety."

This piece argues that the same verdict applies to the entire architecture of 'debate' that has grown up around trans people in Britain. The urgency is real. The arguments require answering not because they are good, but because they are being used to justify real harm to real people. And the first step towards countering them is understanding them clearly.

The Opposition: Who They Are

The forces opposed to transgender dignity and inclusion are not a monolith. They have different motivations, different levels of commitment, and different degrees of intellectual honesty. Treating them as a single undifferentiated mass is a mistake that leads to poor strategy. A more useful analysis divides them into four overlapping groups.

The Hardened Core: Gutter Rationalalists in Feminist Clothing

The smallest but most influential group consists of committed Gender Critical feminists, operating in academia, politics, journalism, and activism. They are not the majority of feminists, or even the majority of radical feminists. But they are organised, credentialed, and well-connected.

Their defining characteristic is a complete willingness to deploy arguments that would be instantly recognised as bigoted if directed at any other minority group, while insisting that their position is one of rational principle. They argue from 'biological sex' as though biology were a simple binary that settles every question, ignoring the existence of intersex people, the complexity of endocrinology, and the broad scientific consensus on gender identity. They invoke the language of women's rights while allying with some of the most reactionary political forces in contemporary Britain.

As Bea Groves-McDaniel wrote at her blog in July 2026:

"What TERFism and the contemporary far right share is a worldview in which certain categories of people are defined by their bodies, in which the threat narrative is always about the Other, and in which the preservation of a mythical homogenous 'us' justifies almost any political alliance."

The hardened core uses anti-trans feeling to raise their diminishing influence within feminism and wider public life. They have understood, with a cold strategic clarity, that trans people are a politically convenient target: small in number, lacking in electoral power, and already sufficiently stigmatised that attacking them carries little social cost. The gutter rationality is not a failure of their thinking. It is the point.

The Fellow Travellers: Loyalty Without Enquiry

Larger than the hardened core, but intellectually dependent upon it, is a layer of people who have absorbed Gender Critical arguments without examining them deeply, and who repeat them because they do not want to let the feminist side down. They are the equivalents of the 'useful idiots' of older political movements: genuinely well-meaning people who have been sold a version of events that flatters their sense of themselves as rational and principled.

The fellow travellers are not the enemy. They are the audience. And they are, in principle, reachable, because they arrived at their position through social belonging rather than ideological commitment. Many of them would be horrified to discover the company they keep. The challenge is reaching them without triggering the defensive reflex that comes from feeling one's good faith has been questioned.

Male Followers: Kudos and Concealment

There is a contingent of men who have attached themselves to the anti-trans furore for reasons that have nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with personal status. These men use the controversy to perform a particular kind of masculinity: they are the defenders of 'common sense,' the protectors of 'basic biology,' the voices of evolutionary realism against trans ideology. In practice, this means they get to occupy the culturally elevated position of standing up for women, while simultaneously reinforcing the broader social structures that actually harm women.

The dynamic is useful for them in another way as well: it provides a convenient smoke screen. A man who is publicly very concerned about the threat posed by trans women in changing rooms can deflect attention from any number of personal failings. Outrage is an excellent form of self-promotion.

The Mystified Majority: Uncertainty in the Cost of Living Crisis

The final and largest group consists of ordinary people who know very little about transgender people, have given the matter limited thought, and have formed opinions that are more shaped by media coverage than by personal experience or careful study. They are not hostile by temperament. Many of them would, if asked directly, say that trans people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. But their support is shallow and their anxieties are easily manipulated.

Research from YouGov in December 2024 found that only 38% of Britons personally know someone who is transgender. Among those aged 65 and over, that figure falls to 26%. Where trans people are unknown, they are easy to fear. The Mystified Majority's opinions on trans rights are not deeply held convictions; they are the product of whatever information happens to have washed over them most recently. And for the past decade, the information washing over them has been overwhelmingly hostile.

This is the group that the tabloid press, the culture war politicians, and the Gender Critical activists have between them spent considerable energy cultivating. They are told that trans women are a threat to women's safety, that children are being 'groomed' into transitions, that women's rights are being 'erased.' They are not in a position to evaluate these claims. Most people are not in a position to evaluate most claims. They believe what they are told by sources they trust, and many of those sources have been lying to them.

As Groves-McDaniel noted in her analysis of moral panics:

"The utility is the important part. Because moral panics do useful work for the people who promote them, even if they don't help anyone else. They rally the faithful. They shift public attention away from systemic failures and onto individual villains."

The cost of living crisis has been a significant factor in keeping the Mystified Majority distracted and anxious. When people are struggling to pay their rent and feed their families, they have less cognitive bandwidth available for evaluating claims about gender identity. Politicians who cannot solve the cost of living crisis can, and do, redirect attention to a smaller and more convenient target.

The Spreading Moral Panic

The anti-trans moral panic in Britain did not arise spontaneously from public concern. It was manufactured, in the precise sense that Stanley Cohen described when he coined the phrase in 1972: a condition in which "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests."

The manufacture followed a clear pattern. A genuine or constructed alarm is identified by moral entrepreneurs, who recruit media amplification and political opportunism. The alarm then resists correction in the face of evidence, because the panic is doing useful political work and evidence is not the point. Eventually it peaks, and then, as the thing that was supposed to destroy civilisation did not in fact destroy it, it quietly dissipates.

We are currently, if the pattern holds, somewhere near the peak. Maximum media coverage, minimum factual accuracy, and a supine political class that has found the issue useful for rather too many purposes to want it to go away.

The language of the current panic is recognisable from every previous episode. Gay men were a threat to children in the 1980s. Asylum seekers were a threat to British culture in the 2000s. Trans women are a threat to women now. The words change; the structure remains. And as with previous panics, the people targeted by this one are not the ones causing the harm that the panic narrative describes. The panic itself is the harm.

The Ipsos global survey of 2025 placed Britain at the bottom of the G7 for trans rights support. Asked whether trans people should be allowed access to single-sex spaces such as public toilets or changing rooms, 54% of Britons said no: the highest opposition of any country surveyed. These numbers did not come from nowhere. They were built, over years, by a coordinated effort involving politicians, media, and organised activist groups. They can be undone. But not by pretending they were not built.

The Arguments: A Field Guide to the rubble

The anti-trans position deploys a recognizable repertoire of arguments. Each deserves a direct answer, even if the answers are unlikely to move the people using them. The exercise matters because the Mystified Majority may be listening.

'It's the Children'

This is the most emotionally potent argument, and therefore the most dangerous. It invokes the figure of the endangered child to bypass rational scrutiny entirely.

The claim is that children are being encouraged or pressured to transition, that puberty blockers are handed out carelessly, and that impressionable young people are being swept up in a social contagion.

The reality, as documented by the Cass Review and every reputable clinical body, is that gender-affirming care for young people is cautious, evidence-based, and subject to rigorous clinical oversight. The NHS halted the routine prescription of puberty blockers to under-18s following the Review's recommendations. Hormone treatments are available only from age 16. Surgery is available only to adults. No mainstream UK advocacy group campaigns for lowering these thresholds.

The claim that children are being transitioned casually, or that children who would otherwise have been happy in their birth gender are being recruited into transition, is simply not supported by the clinical evidence. What is supported by evidence is that gender-affirming care, where properly provided, dramatically reduces the elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality that trans young people experience.

YouGov found in 2024 that 75% of Britons oppose puberty blockers for under-16s and 78% oppose hormone treatments for under-16s. These figures reflect the success of a sustained campaign of misinformation, not the findings of clinical science. The argument works not because it is true, but because it terrifies people about children, and terror is not a rational state.

'Trans Women Are a Threat to Biological Women'

This argument holds that the presence of trans women in women's spaces creates a measurable increase in risk of harm to cisgender women.

The data do not support this claim. Trans people, and particularly trans women, are far more likely to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators. The 4,120 police-recorded trans hate crimes in England and Wales in 2024/25 represent one direction of harm, not a source of it. Trans women in refuges, prisons, and other spaces are not statistically significant vectors of violence against cisgender women.

What the argument actually does is construct trans women as inherently suspect and automatically suspectable of predatory intent, on the sole basis of their birth assignment. This is not a women's rights argument. It is a circular construction of a threat, used to justify excluding the threatening group.

'You Are a Man, and Men Should Not Be in Our Spaces'

The essentialist formulation of the argument rests on a prior commitment to the view that gender identity is secondary to birth assignment, and that a trans woman is, in any meaningful sense, a man who has adopted an ideology.

The argument is one of brute assertion. It asserts rather than argues. To the question of what makes someone a man or a woman, it offers as answer the question itself: they are men because they were assigned male at birth, and they are women when they cease to claim the identity they were assigned. This proves too much: it would classify intersex people, people with androgen insensitivity, and the entire range of human biological variation into categories that their bodies do not comfortably occupy.

More importantly, the argument refuses to engage with the question of what harm is actually caused by trans women using women's spaces. It treats the existence of a trans woman in a space as harm in itself, regardless of her behaviour. This is not a safety argument. It is an essentialist prejudice that has dressed itself in the language of safety.

'We Do Not Want Male-Bodied Individuals in Our Spaces'

A refinement of the above, this argument focuses on physical characteristics rather than identity, which is why it is sometimes used by people who claim not to be hostile to trans people as individuals.

The practical question it raises is how one identifies a 'male-bodied individual' in the absence of intrusive checking. The EHRC's code of practice, as criticised by over 650 businesses in an open letter, would require exactly that: staff asked to police toilet and changing room access on the basis of appearance. As the Old Nun's Head pub noted in its response, implementing such a policy would require hiring additional staff, at cost, to perform a function that has "never" been a problem in its premises.

The 'male-bodied individual' argument is unworkable in practice, because the category it seeks to protect cannot be reliably identified without violating the privacy and dignity of all users of shared facilities, including cisgender women who do not conform to stereotypical expectations of female appearance.

'Women Should Have Their Own Exclusive Spaces'

The final formulation elevates the principle of sex-segregated spaces to an absolute, ignoring the long history of how those spaces were won, and for whom they were originally won.

Women's refuges, rape crisis centres, and domestic violence shelters were not created to exclude male-bodied individuals. They were created to provide safety from male violence. The question of who qualifies for access was never primarily a question of chromosomes or gonads. It was a question of who needed the protection, and who might pose a risk.

Trans women, as a group, do not pose a statistical risk in any of these contexts. Treating them as presumptive threats to the very spaces designed to protect women from male violence is a distortion of the original purpose of those spaces. It is also, as the rise in reported harassment of all women since the Supreme Court ruling suggests, making those spaces less safe for everyone.

Why Reasoning With the Hardened Core Doesn't Work

It is tempting to suppose that if the arguments against trans inclusion are factually wrong, then correcting the facts will change minds. The evidence from a decade of attempting this is that it does not work with the Hardened Core, and only partially works with the Fellow Travellers.

The reason is structural. The Hardened Core's opposition to trans inclusion is not primarily an error of fact. It is a commitment that has become load-bearing for their broader worldview, their professional identity, and their social position within the Gender Critical community. Conceding that trans women are women would require reconstructing that entire structure. People do not readily abandon load-bearing commitments, even when shown that the foundations are sandy.

This is why the Gender Critical movement has proven so resistant to evidence. Evidence was never the mechanism by which they formed their views. The mechanism was belonging: belonging to a community, a political faction, a tradition of feminist thought that had already committed to a particular analysis. Facts that contradict a community's foundational commitments are not processed as evidence. They are processed as attacks.

The practical implication is that arguing with the Hardened Core is not a strategy for changing their minds. It is a performance for the audience: the Fellow Travellers, the Mystified Majority, and trans people themselves, who deserve to know that their humanity is not in dispute. The goal of argument is not conversion. It is demarcation, and it is the slow and patient work of changing the environment in which opinion is formed.

Public Organisations: The Retreat of Nerve

The response of British public institutions to the trans furore has been, with notable exceptions, a study in the failure of moral nerve.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, theoretically the guardian of equality law in Britain, published a code of practice in 2025 that critics, legal analysts, and more than 650 businesses agreed was "unworkable." The code, drafted in response to a Supreme Court ruling on the definition of 'woman' under the Equality Act, effectively invited service providers to exclude trans people from facilities consistent with their gender identity, on the basis of appearance alone. The EHRC showed no apparent concern for the practical consequences: the staff training programmes that would be required, the checking infrastructure that would need to be built, the inevitable intrusions into the privacy of cisgender women who do not present in stereotypically female ways.

As Oscar Davies, the UK's first out non-binary barrister, noted at the time:

"The Equality Act is meant to be a shield rather than a sword. It's not meant to attack people and get rid of their rights."

Stonewall, Scottish Trans, and numerous other equality organisations have challenged the EHRC's interpretation as inconsistent with the broader architecture of equality law, including the Public Sector Equality Duties and the Human Rights Act. Legal analysts have noted that the Supreme Court's ruling was based on a partial reading of the Equality Act that omitted or misconstrued relevant provisions.

The political class has been, in the main, worse than useless. Both major parties have spent the past five years attempting to out-flank each other on the right in relation to trans people, apparently on the calculation that there are more votes to be gained from performing hostility to a small and powerless minority than from defending their rights. The Labour Party, to the quiet bewilderment of many of its own members, has found itself unable to mount a serious defence of trans equality. The Conservative Party has made trans people a central plank of its culture war offer. Reform UK has promised to "ban transgender ideology in primary and secondary schools."

The signal this sends to trans people, and to everyone watching, is unmistakable: you are not one of us. Your rights are negotiable. Your access to public life is a privilege that can be revoked if the politics demand it. This is not a debate. It is a demonstration of power.

What Trans People Can Do

The scale of the challenge should not be underestimated, and neither should the agency of those facing it.

Build alliances with groups who share the stakes. The Scottish Social Attitudes survey of 2025 found that trans people were not alone in facing increased discrimination: Gypsy and Traveller communities, people with severe and enduring mental illness, and older people were also identified as at particular risk. The politics of solidarity are not optional extras. They are survival strategy. The same structural forces that target trans people target others. The feminist movement that has allied itself with the right against trans women is not a reliable ally on any other front.

Know your rights, and say them clearly. The Equality Act 2010, for all its recent instrumentalisation by the EHRC, contains robust protections against discrimination in employment, services, and education. These rights exist. They are not always enforceable in practice, but they are real, and they are regularly invoked successfully. Legal literacy is a form of resistance.

Cultivate the ordinary. The YouGov data is unambiguous on one point: personal familiarity with trans people is the single most powerful predictor of support for trans rights across every question asked. The Mystified Majority who know a trans person are systematically more permissive on every aspect of trans rights than those who do not. This means that visibility, ordinary visibility, is not a luxury. It is one of the most effective tools available. Coming out, where it is safe to do so, is not a political statement. It is a human act that changes the environment.

Insist on the full picture. The framing of trans people as threats is not a neutral description of a public debate. It is a distortion that serves particular political interests. Every time the question is posed as 'trans rights or women's safety,' the framing itself has already done the work of the opposition. The full picture includes the violence faced by trans people, the documented harms of the current institutional environment, and the evidence that inclusive policies do not produce the harms they claim to prevent.

Do not internalise the panic. The moral panic about trans people will end, as all moral panics end, with the discovery that the thing that was supposed to destroy civilisation did not. The Cass Review, the Supreme Court ruling, the EHRC code, the political grandstanding: these are episodes, not endpoints. They will pass. What will remain is the community that refused to be erased, and the solidarity that was maintained while the panic ran its course.

Summary

The opposition to transgender equality in Britain is real, organised, and well-resourced. But it is not as large as it appears, and it is not as solid as it tries to seem.

The Hardened Core is small but influential: credentialed, networked, and strategically deployed. They are not reachable by argument because they did not arrive at their position by argument.

The Fellow Travellers are larger and potentially reachable, but only through belonging and example, not through confrontation.

The Male Followers are in it for status, not principle. Their commitment is contingent and can be withdrawn when the social winds shift.

The Mystified Majority are the prize. They are not hostile by nature. They are anxious, misinformed, and easily redirected. Their opinions are more shaped by media coverage than by personal experience, and they shift when the coverage shifts.

The arguments against trans inclusion are factually false, legally shaky, and ethically indefensible. They do not need to be demolished. They need to be seen clearly for what they are.

The institutions have largely failed in their duty of care. That failure is a choice, and choices can be reversed.

The single most effective intervention available is ordinary human visibility: trans people known, trans people visible, trans people present in the lives of people who are not trans. Every personal connection made is a small permanent increment against the panic.

Bibliography

Ipsos/Globescan Global Survey on LGBTQ+ Rights, November 2025. Ranked Britain lowest of all G7 nations for trans rights support. Found that 54% of Britons opposed trans people accessing single-sex spaces, 47% opposed gender-affirming healthcare for trans young people, 52% opposed changing gender markers on government documents, and 61% opposed trans athletes competing in their gender category. Cited in PinkNews, 26 November 2025.

YouGov Transgender Study, December 2024. Found that 49% of Britons believe people should be able to socially identify as a different gender, down six points from 2022. Found that 55% believe allowing trans women into women's spaces "presents a genuine risk of harm to women." Found that 38% of Britons personally know someone who is transgender, with that figure rising to 53% among 18-24 year olds and falling to 26% among those aged 65 and above. Personal familiarity with trans people was the single strongest predictor of support for trans rights across every question asked.

NatCen Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, 2025. Identified trans people as one of four groups at "particular risk of discrimination" in Scotland. Found that around one in three (31%) of respondents agreed that "sometimes there is good reason for people to be prejudiced against certain groups," up from 22% in 2015. Found evidence of a "majority" group who hold some discriminatory attitudes in specific contexts but who may be willing to adjust their views.

Home Office Hate Crime Statistics, England and Wales, year ending March 2025. Recorded 4,120 transgender hate crimes in 2024/25. While this represents a decrease from the peak of 4,889 in 2022/23, the figure remains elevated compared to pre-2020 levels. Since the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of 'woman,' reported harassment of all women, including cis and trans women, has risen sharply.

EHRC Code of Practice on Services, Public Functions and Associations, 2025. Submitted to government in September 2025 following the Supreme Court's ruling in FWS v Scottish Ministers. Criticised by over 650 businesses as "unworkable" in an open letter coordinated by Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and Safe Space UK. Described as "a labyrinth of nonsense" by legal analyst Ian Dunt. Legal challenge ongoing as of July 2026.

The Cass Review: Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People, 2024. Commissioned by NHS England. Found that the evidence base for gender-affirming care for young people was "weak" and that the clinical approach had "deviated" from standard paediatric practice. Led to the halting of routine puberty blocker prescriptions to under-18s. Cited by both sides in the debate; its methods have been contested by clinical bodies including the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Psychological Society.

Dunt, Ian. Legal analysis of the EHRC code of practice, 2025. Source: Politics.co.uk.

Groves-McDaniel, Bea. "Satires 1: What's Wrong with TERFs?" Being Bea, July 2026. Available at blog.beagmcd.net. Relevant for the analysis of the political trajectory of the Gender Critical movement and its relationship to the far right.

Groves-McDaniel, Bea. "Satires 3: Let's Have a Good Ol' Panic!" Being Bea, July 2026. Available at blog.beagmcd.net. Relevant for the analysis of moral panic as a political technique and its historical precedents.

Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. MacGibbon and Key, 1972; 3rd edition, Routledge, 2002. Foundational text for the analysis of moral panic as a social phenomenon.

Serano, Julia. Excluded: How Sex and Gender Constructs Shape Society and Pertain to Violence. Seal Press, 2013. Context for contemporary gender panic dynamics and the relationship between gendered constructs and violence.

Stonewall UK. "The EHRC's Statutory Guidance and the UK Supreme Court Ruling." Policy briefing, 2025. Available at stonewall.org.uk.

Scottish Trans. "Our Response to the EHRC's Code of Practice Consultation." July 2025. Available at scotishtrans.org.