The Epoch of Reaction

HubMP2012

AUGUST 15, 2025

The attack on trans rights is part of a broader right wing offensive and can be resisted by unifying all the struggles against it, argues Alex Burt.

Throughout the election campaign last year, progressive and socialist voters were repeatedly told we were to vote Labour to ‘get the Tories out’. LGBT+ people with concerns about the speed at which our Party had capitulated to Telegraph columnists were hushed away with a simple phrase: ‘It will be worse under the Tories.’

The sneering arrogance of a narrow clique who felt they were ‘owed’ progressive votes off little more than 14 years of Conservative austerity has now transitioned. It has gone from an inconvenient truth of two-party politics that there will always be a lesser evil, to a sense that change merely meant a new colour of tie cracking off-colour jokes about womanhood at the dispatch box while a new set of power-obsessed cabinet ministers lament in the columns of the right-wing media that common sense has died and that ‘trans rights activists are silencing the voice of a ‘sensible majority’. The simple answers to complex questions have not gone away under a Starmer ministry: in fact, they have only got worse.

As a Party and as a country, we have entered an epoch of reaction. Government is not run by the elected representatives of the people, but by an obsessive media class where outrage farming and an old world struggling to die make an alliance of convenience to cling on to relevance and power in a socioeconomic landscape that has long moved past them. Long gone are the days of neoliberal affluence; now there exists a politics fractured among a vast and growing working poor who know something is broken, but cannot agree on what or how to fix it.

It is in this climate, where the government feels out of control and where it feels like nothing ever works or will work again, where reactionary and far-right politics can thrive so well. It is a common critique of ‘Starmerism’ that it lacks a unifying vision or purpose, one that most voters in the country would agree with, and it is an ideological void which is filled by a reactive approach to government. Rarely has this administration set the agenda; instead it has reacted to events around it in increasingly desperate attempts to cover the growth of Reform. It does not recognise that the growth of Reform is precisely because they have a vision of what they believe the UK should look like beyond the current crises.

In very few areas is this more patently manifest than in how the government has approached ‘culture war’ issues, particularly its vicious approach towards the ‘trans debate’. Our 2024 manifesto promised to “remove indignities for trans people”, alongside a promise for a trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban. The latter was mentioned in the King’s Speech in what looked to be a legislative flurry in stark contrast to Tory inaction. Over a year later, a bill including that ban has not been introduced, and the indignities have been far from removed…

Cass, Courts and Cruelty

The Cass Review, published on the eve of the general election, was an immediate opportunity for us to view what “removing indignities” would look like. The Tories had introduced a ban, upheld by the high court, on the prescription of puberty blockers for under-18s. Wes Streeting would go on to extend that ban ‘indefinitely’ until the results of a proposed study into the social and biological impacts of puberty blockers can be held. It should be mentioned at this point that this proposed study is seen as wildly unethical by the medical community, on grounds ranging from consent to control groups. So much for “removing indignities” so far then…

More sinister than this though has been the day-to-day impact of the Cass Review on the provision of care to transgender people. Not long after the publication of the review, some GPs began refusing to fulfill prescriptions for HRT, even where they had been made previously, citing a lack of confidence or training that, as an observer who is not a medical professional, seemed to suddenly appear after Cass undermined 40 years of consensus on best practice for treating gender dysphoria.

The Good Law Project are also reporting that, in the wake of the Cass Review, social services have begun investigating families who seek puberty blockers via private provision for “safeguarding concerns”. One family told their story of a CAMHS session with their brother being used to interrogate him about his sister’s care, as part of a safeguarding investigation into the use of puberty blockers where a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria already existed prior to the Cass Review. Health and social services have been cocked and readied as weapons of the state, under the watch of a Labour Government, limiting our access to care with one hand and criminalising any attempt to use the private sector with the other.

All of this is without mentioning the Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland vs the Scottish Government which left Gender Recognition Certificates significantly legally weakened. The ruling, as an interpretation of the Equality Act, has effectively re-written it. Transgender people have lost access to services that match their gender identities, of particular significance within abuse services (where transgender people are disproportionately victimised), even when they have been through the laborious process of gaining a GRC.

It is also noticeable that since then, the trans-exclusionary lobby have been targeting organisations and individuals who have spoken up for trans inclusion, continued to operate trans-inclusive policies (at the behest of members), or even workers they accuse of being trans, with escalating threats and abuse. EHRC guidance in the wake of the ruling has brought very little clarity, ruling that access to facilities should be made via sex at birth, without ruling how this can be checked and established.

The reality of this has left trans people functionally excluded from public life, forced to out themselves if they wish to engage legally or having to live in a constant legal grey area. Many groups, including our Party, have chosen to simply abolish women’s structures or cancel elections where gender-balancing is complicated by the terrifying presence of a trans person. Keir Starmer, it should be remembered, welcomed the ruling for the clarity it provided.

Where Next?

There is so much more I can say about this last 13 months and the way in which trans rights have been deliberately undermined or neglected, but it ultimately distills into one primary fact: our Party is reacting to events. When faced with accusations that the EHRC guidance is unclear, we defer to the Supreme Court. When families with transgender children try to access support, we defer to Cass. Constitutionally, the executive in the UK is a manifestation of its parliamentary support and Parliament is the ultimate authority in all UK political life. Looking at the facts and events I have laid out in isolation, you would not get this impression.

The executive does not use its massive Commons majority to fix some of the obvious flaws in trans rights policy: it defers them in the hope of appeasing a maniacal media class that knows its political dominance, and the grip of neoliberal capitalism more broadly, is breaking. They offer us good headlines; in return we do their cultural bidding.

What they will never have is a movement from below. The anti-trans movement has an outsized influence and voice, but it has no human touch. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, thousands and thousands took to the streets to show their solidarity. In Leicester we organised something far bigger than any of us could have anticipated. In London, Manchester, Edinburgh and many other cities it was a bigger mobilisation still. We cannot let this anger fizzle into hopelessness as happens so often. Our challenge now is to challenge misinformation and embed into all our struggles the mantra that we cannot win unless all of us win.

The media playbook against trans people is the same one which it pulls against refugees. Its ignorance of trans voices in favour of transphobes matches its preference of Israeli voices to Palestinians. Though it may not seem it, our individual struggles against the forces of reaction and media conservatism are linked, both by playbook and by purpose. The dominance of the post-Thatcher consensus and of neoliberal affluence is collapsing and old media are collapsing with it. As the old world dies, the new world struggles to be born – and if we want that new world built by workers liberated and freed from the social determinisms of the past, then we must pull our disparate movements together as one class, the working class, united and unbowed.

Alex Burt is East Midlands Officer for Labour For Trans Rights.

Image: https://www.liberationnews.org/uk-court-ruling-on-trans-childrens-care-puts-bigotry-before-science/ Creator: Ted Eytan Licence:CC ATTRIBUTION-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL.