The Closet That Should Never Have Been Opened

By Bea Groves-McDaniel and FAYE-9000

There's a lot of racism, a lot of transphobia, a lot of disability hatred, and a lot of misogyny expressed in the UK. I don't think this is new. I think it's always been there — hiding in the shadows, simmer simmer, waiting for its moment. And that moment, I'm sorry to say, has well and truly arrived.

What we're seeing isn't the invention of these prejudices. It's their normalisation. It's the cultural equivalent of a secret that's been festering for decades suddenly being told out loud at a dinner party — and nobody at the table flinching anymore.

The shame that used to work

Here's the thing about social shame: it doesn't make bigotry disappear, but it does keep it contained. Before the great 'free speech' reckoning of the last fifteen years or so, expressing certain views publicly was — whisper it — a bit embarrassing. Not illegal, you understand. Nobody was getting arrested for thinking terrible things. But there was a sense that if you said the wrong thing in the wrong room, you'd be corrected, excluded, or at the very least, silently judged.

That changed. And it changed systematically.

The transformation didn't happen by accident. It happened because people with platforms – journalists, politicians, broadcasters – decided that 'provocation' was a brand, that 'asking questions' was the same as scrutiny, and that everything should be 'debated' regardless of whether the thing being debated was someone's right to exist.

The debate that isn't a debate

Let's talk about the word 'debate', because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting in these conversations. When someone calls trans people's access to single-sex spaces a debate, what they're actually doing is folding two completely different things into one package. One side is a marginalised group asking for basic dignity. The other side is a coalition of people who want to deny that dignity — and calling it a debate pretends there's a genuine intellectual question at stake rather than a political campaign to roll back rights.

The same trick works with the 'immigration debate,' 'benefits debate,' or any other flavour of human rights you fancy. The framing is everything. "Debate" implies two reasonable positions. It implies that the person raising objections is operating in good faith. It implies that the thing being 'debated' is genuinely uncertain.

It isn't. It's people who have always held these views suddenly feeling they don't have to pretend otherwise.

Freedom of speech as a shield — and its limits

John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859), argued that free speech should be protected because silencing opinions we find objectionable is a form of tyranny.

He was right. But Mill also argued that speech has limits – when it moves from opinion to action, when it causes harm or incites violence. Mill's framework was never 'say whatever you like without consequences.' It was "protect the exchange of ideas, but recognise that some speech is itself a form of harm."

Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), gave this problem its sharpest formulation. He argued that if we are tolerant without limit, we will end up tolerating the destruction of tolerance itself. His famous formulation: we must therefore claim the right to ban those who try to abolish tolerance, lest we be left defenceless against the intolerant. In other words, a society that refuses to draw lines will eventually be taken over by those who draw them aggressively on their own terms. Please think about 'Reform UK' and 'Restore' at this point.

This is Popper's Paradox, and it matters enormously in the current context. When someone invokes free speech to defend their right to express racist or transphobic views, they are — whether they know it or not — using tolerance as a weapon against itself. They want the protection of an open society while simultaneously working to close it. And the people who suffer first are never those with the loudest voices. It's the most vulnerable — the people being described in those views — who absorb the cost.

"I should be able to say what I think, and nobody should be allowed to call me out for it."

But here's the thing about free speech: it protects you from the state. It does not protect you from people thinking you're a bigot. It does not protect you from being criticised, challenged, or deplatformed by private entities. The law in the UK — the Human Rights Act 1998, Article 10 — protects your right to express opinions. It does not require anyone to provide you with a microphone.

Section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986 (as amended) does create offences for intentionally stirring up hatred on grounds of race, religion, or sexual orientation. But the threshold is high — proving intent, proving actual stirring rather than mere expression — and prosecutions are rare. The legal framework, such as it is, is a blunt instrument. Most of what we see in public discourse doesn't cross it. It doesn't have to. It just has to be loud enough to change the weather.

The infrastructure of respectability

It's not just individual voices, though. The shift we're seeing has infrastructure behind it.

For example, look at the British press. When newspapers run front-page stories about trans' women accessing women's toilets for nefarious reasons — a scenario that, statistically, is vanishingly rare — they are not reporting. They are manufacturing a moral panic. And they have been doing it, systematically, for a decade. The Telegraph, the Times, the Mail, the Sun — all have published stories that treat trans people's existence as a social problem requiring a solution rather than a natural fact requiring only tolerance.

And when newspapers do this, they create permission structures. They tell people that expressing transphobia is not only acceptable but reasonable. That the person raising concerns is the sane one, and the person asking for basic respect is the one with the mental problem.

Stuart Hall, writing about how racism operates in the UK, described what he called "racism without race" — the way that racial hostility could be expressed through cultural signifiers rather than explicit racial categories. The modern version is similar: you don't say "I hate black people," you say "I'm concerned about institutional bias." You don't say "I think trans people are delusional," you say "I'm just asking questions about women's rights." The vocabulary has been cleaned up, but the impulse is the same.

The disability angle — so often forgotten

If racism and transphobia have received considerable attention, disability hatred has largely been forgotten in these discussions. And yet the language of 'scroungers,' 'skivers,' 'cheats,' and 'fraudsters' has become thoroughly normalised in political discourse over the last twenty years, particularly around benefits and the social security system.

The death of Michael O'Leary, the head of the Employment and Support Allowance campaign, said in 2014 that people on disability benefits should be 'ashamed.' I don't recall him being censured in any serious way. The Sun ran stories about 'health tourists' and 'benefit cheats' for years. The Department for Work and Pensions under Iain Duncan Smith reframed disability as a failure of individual behaviour rather than a fact of human biology.

And when you spend decades telling people that disabled people are scroungers — when ministers are caught saying it, when newspapers say it, when comedians joke about it — you create a culture where disability hatred becomes background noise. It becomes the thing people don't notice because it's always been there.

What we lose when we normalise

The argument, I suppose, goes something like this: it's better to have hatred in the open than to have it lurking in the shadows. At least when people are honest about their views, you know where you stand.

I think this is wrong.

When hatred is normalised — when expressing racist, transphobic, misogynistic, or ableist views is treated as a legitimate position rather than a failure of character — we lose the social mechanisms that kept it in check. We lose the idea that these views are not merely unfashionable but shameful. And shame, for all its problems, is one of the things that holds societies together in the right way.

I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of polite concealment, where people held these views in private and pretended otherwise in public. That wasn't good either – it was exhausting, and it meant that the people experiencing the hatred had no way of knowing who around them actually believed it.

But there's a difference between concealment and normalisation. Between people feeling they must be careful what they say and people feeling they needn't be careful at all. Between 'I know this is an unfashionable view' and 'this view has been validated by the prime minister, the Telegraph, and several of my neighbours.'

The old bigotries never went away. But for a while — not that long a while, really — expressing them openly was seen as a failure of basic decency. That was the one thing holding the lid on.

The lid is off now. And I genuinely don't know how we put it back on.