Winding Back Trans Liberation

What a thoroughly depressing set of statistics. Thursday saw the publication of the annual British Social Attitudes survey, which for the last 40 years has provided robust opinion data based on in-depth interviews with a large random but representative sample. One of the trends it has picked up over the decades is the increasing liberalisation of social attitudes. Acceptance has increased on sex before marriage, family forms that don't conform to the nuclear ideal, minority ethnicities, same sex relationships, and abortion. As you might expect if you've followed discussions of values and age on this place and round and about, the younger one is the more likely you are to accept the social liberal consensus of mutual tolerance and respect, and hostility to overt manifestations of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Unfortunately, increasing acceptance does not apply to everyone.

As the survey reports, positive attitudes towards transgender people have gone into reverse. Following a preamble that described what is meant by trans, the sample were asked two questions.

1. How would you describe yourself ... as very prejudiced against people who are transgender, a little prejudiced, or, not prejudiced at all?

2. How much do you agree or disagree that a person who is transgender should be able to have the sex recorded on their birth certificate changed if they want?

In 2019, 82% said they were "not prejudiced" against trans people - the same as it was when the question was first asked in 2016. However, in 2022 this had fallen to 64%. On changing the sex recorded on the birth certificate, in 2016 58% agreed that trans people should be able to do this. In 2019 it had slid slightly to 53%, but last year it had collapsed down to 30%. In general, women were more accepting than men (71% vs 53% on 'no prejudice', 33% vs 27% on birth certificates). In age terms, no prejudice was relatively close for all the under-64 cohorts (65% for those on the cusp of retirement, 69% for 18-24 year olds). There were greater gaps on changing birth certificates. 26% in the older working age cohort agreed, vs 43% for the youngest.

The report's conclusion argues that the moral evolution of British society is more complex than a simple extension of liberal attitudes, as the attitude to trans people demonstrates. Perhaps for the simple theory of change offered by the BSA. They suggest liberalisation is driven by more education, "societal practice", and changing individual behaviour through encountering people from diverse backgrounds in everyday life. The difficulty here is this does not explain why trans people and trans liberation has suffered a significant reverse. When there are more trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people out and visible than at any other time in modern history, you might expect the everyday contact argument to reinforce a trend toward liberalisation. Indeed, the greater levels of acceptance among younger cohorts goes part of the way to explain age discrepancies, seeing as younger trans people are more likely to have understanding and supportive peers. However, we don't need to scratch our collective heads to explain its reversal.

For the best part of the last decade, trans panic has engulfed pretty much all of centre right politics, their media, and not a few figures among the centrist establishment. What was once the pet hatred of a pathetic minority has been relentlessly mainstreamed. Arguments fielded by so-called feminists and progressives have been taken on wholesale, to the point where so-called "gender critical" concerns are indistinguishable from "traditionalist" right wing attitudes toward gender. For both sex and gender are immutable, and their alliance rests on a cast iron agreement that polices women and men according to conservative ideas of femininity and masculinity. GC doesn't stand for gender critical.  The more appropriate label is Gender Cops. These views have been used to justify a barrage of hate, and it has been utterly relentless. The right wing press dredge up any story it can, and the Tories feed off it with their entirely conscious anti-woke strategy. And Labour have cowardly stood aside and let this happen. Under the guise of not wanting to get involved in "culture war issues", like with so many other things Keir Starmer has completely capitulated to right wing framing, which has given the anti-trans brigade in the PLP carte blanche to either join in the carnival of reaction, or purse their lips together for enough dog whistles that does not leave their loyalties in any doubt. The result has been making trans people's lives a misery, transforming one of our most vulnerable communities into a political football, and causing untold amounts of completely unnecessary anxiety as hate crimes against trans people keeps edging upward. This is costing lives.

It also demonstrates something about the background trends in popular culture. It's long been my argument that the march of social liberalism isn't about "enlightenment" or woke educational institutions, it's a direct consequence of the labour process dominant across all the advanced (post)industrial economies: immaterial labour. With most of the work force employed by the so-called service sector, the character of work is defined by the production of intangibles: knowledge, services, experiences, care, identities, relationships. These are harnessed by capital for the usual purposes of surplus extraction, but the consequences at the level of everyday "spontaneous" consciousness is an orientation toward sociability, networking, and tolerance. When work is about building and producing relationships between human beings, it's not surprising there's a strong tendency toward the acceptance of difference (but this isn't to say everything is a bed of roses, it comes with its species of alienation too which, interestingly, anti-trans discourse feeds off). Therefore, as Britain and other advanced countries have outsourced their industrial bases and/or largely liquidated the manual working class, those who have entered the work force in the 1990s and after were more likely to experience work as a "socialised" immaterial labourer than those who went before, which also helps explain the values divergence across age groups. These are the attitudinal imprints of class cohorts, the moral sediment bedded down by their experience of a world transitioned away from manufacturing and the cultural dominance of the (masculine) industrial worker.

This is a strong trend. There is a real momentum and direction to greater tolerance, but what the war against trans people tells us - not too different from the permanent campaign against refugees - is that where a designated out-group is small, they can be isolated further by a press-led campaign that crosses party lines, where prominent voices in defence are ostracised and the costs for their speaking out are increased. This atmosphere with its constant recurrence of confected outrage, and the conscious building of an attention economy that awards provocateurs, in short when a significant section of the political and media establish a united front and hammer it endlessly public opinion can be moved against the cultural flow. This is why transphobia and the fight against it is an acid test for the left. The attacks on trans people is an attack on the rest of us. They are refining new bigoted technologies of divide and rule, of establishing and cementing new scapegoats. A point so obvious that it shouldn't really need saying, but here we are. The collective effort of the establishment at demonising and traducing trans people has placed them and their community on the front lines of 21st century class struggles. It's a wedge wielded by elites to maintain elite rule and roll back real progress. If they are able to affect a permanent change of attitude backed by the sorts of legislation the Tories keep toying with, who are they going to come for next?

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