AS THE STATE DOUBLES DOWN ON BINARY GENDER, TRANS RESISTANCE CHALLENGES THE MACHINERY OF CONTROL FROM BELOW ~ Blade Runner ~ On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the term “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refers exclusively to so-called “biological sex”. The case—For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers—challenged the inclusion of transgender women with Gender Recognition Certificates in the legal definition. The court deemed such inclusion “incoherent”. While trans people remain formally protected under provisions for “gender reassignment”, the ruling clarified what has long been true in practice: the law is anchored to a rigid binary, recognising only two sexes and two genders. Labour leader Keir Starmer welcomed the decision, aligning the party—and the British state—with an exclusionary transphobia. This decision, met with UK-wide protests, reaffirmed that the gender binary isn’t just a cultural norm—it’s a foundational tool of social control. Inscribed across law, medicine, education and culture, it organises life from birth to death under systems of elite power. From re-routing the world’s largest trans pride to accommodate far-right marches to Scottish rulings pandering to gender-critical lobbies, the British state’s culture war is advancing. This is not neutrality—it’s an authoritarian tactic: delegitimise dissent, break solidarity, enforce the status quo through law. In the US, dozens of states are rolling back trans rights through bans on healthcare, education, and public participation, often coordinated by Christian nationalist and far-right networks. At the same time, US-based groups are exporting these policies abroad—funding anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns and legislation in Europe, Africa and beyond to entrench binary gender norms and authoritarian control. The idea that patriarchy, inequality and authority stem from human nature has long justified domination. From religious doctrine to state bureaucracy, textbook history to anatomical pseudoscience, patriarchy seeks constant validation—from biology, from tradition, and now, from the courts. Gender is imposed before a person is even named. A foetus becomes “he” or “she”, blue or pink, boy or girl. Centuries of stereotypes land on a body still taking shape. Schools reinforce the split. History teaches a parade of “great men”. Toys and language discipline us. Even play becomes a site of control. This isn’t just about identity. Like race and class, gender reproduces power through expectation, repetition and fear. We’re told to view the world “as it is”, but live as if we’re free. Often, conformity to a gender norm is simply the ‘least punished path’: patriarchy is not fixed, it is enforced. And like all forms of enforced domination, it can be resisted. The state’s enforcement of gender norms is deliberate. Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin writes, “The state exists to preserve and protect the rule of a minority class over the majority. Any form of liberation must challenge and ultimately dismantle this structure”. That includes the binary categories it polices so fiercely. Dean Spade reminds us that “Trans politics needs to be about changing life chances, not just legal categories”. Recognition in law may offer relief to some, but it can’t undo the structures that criminalise, exclude, and punish gender nonconformity. The law is an instrument of order, not freedom. Trans communities have always been central to radical movements. From Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria to figures like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy — who all fought police violence and gender conformity — this is our shared history of resistance. Today, groups like LGSMigrants, Action for Trans Health, and Bent Bars show how gender freedom connects to prison abolition, migrant justice, care and mutual aid. These aren’t side issues—they are the heart of collective liberation. The idea that trans identity conflicts with feminism relies on a fiction—one that reduces womanhood to anatomy and erases the feminist struggle against exactly that logic. Murray Bookchin argued that hierarchy is socially produced, not natural. Patriarchy, he wrote, was the first system of domination—a blueprint for later forms of class rule, racial supremacy and state power. Binary gender fits a broader logic that splits the world into opposites—man/woman, mind/body, reason/emotion, subject/object. Abdullah Öcalan built on Bookchin’s thought to name “civilisational sexism” as a deep structure of domination, calling patriarchy the “first colony”. From this analysis emerged Jineology—not just a science of women, but a method for rethinking life and knowledge. It begins with lived experience, with resistance, and with the refusal of domination. Gender here is not a fact or a legal status, but a terrain of struggle. Womanhood is not lack or deviation, but a site of resistance and becoming. Under capitalism, gender’s disciplinary role deepened. As Silvia Federici showed, capitalist economies were built on the subjugation of women’s reproductive labour. The witch hunts, enclosures, and nuclear family relocated autonomy from commons to household, from collective to man. Gendered labour divisions, morality and bodily control were essential to this process. Anarchist, decolonial and abolitionist feminists have shown that gender is not essence but relation: structured by labour, shaped by violence, open to transformation. The panic over toilets and sports isn’t about safety — it’s about control. Trans people don’t threaten public space. Surveillance, policing, and stigma do. Inequality in sport comes from class, funding, and access — not trans participation. Blanket exclusions mask these truths and weaponise fear. Across the world, people have always lived beyond the binary—showing us a system already breaking. As Susan Stryker discusses in Transgender History, challenging the rigid alignment of sex and gender is crucial for expanding the possibilities of identity and freedom for all individuals. We’re already building something different — in clinics without gatekeeping, in classrooms that restore stolen histories, in spaces where care replaces coercion. In our movements, we don’t ask permission to be free—we practise freedom, increasing visibility and inviting others to join us. The Supreme Court’s ruling shows that the law will not lead us to liberation. But it also reveals the cracks. The binary may still rule in law and language, but in life, it is breaking apart. What matters now is what we create in our spaces—new ways of relating, healing, and organising. Ways that don’t demand conformity for safety. A world beyond normal and other. A world where gender is no longer a cage but a spectrum, a refusal, a possibility. No gender or all genders. Against who the law says we are, we become who we are—together, in struggle. The post Beyond binaries: Gender, law and the reproduction of power appeared first on Freedom News.

PROTESTERS ACROSS THE UK WERE A DIVERSE CROWD, WITH SLOGANS RANGING FROM PLAINTIVE TO MILITANT ~ Kell w Farshéa ~ Mass demonstrations took place across the UK yesterday (19 April) protesting the Supreme Court decision on the interpretation of transgender people’s rights under the Equalities Act. A march in London drew between ten and twenty thousand people, and large demonstrations were also reported in Edinburgh, Swansea, Sheffield, Brighton, Reading and many other cities. The Court on Wednesday issued a ruling according to which the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act “refer to a biological woman and biological sex”. This means transgender women with a gender recognition certificate can be excluded from single-sex spaces if this is “proportionate”. Britain’s equalities watchdog says the ruling means trans women cannot use single-sex female toilets, changing rooms or compete in women’s sports. The ruling, in response to a petition by the Scottish group For Women (significantly funded by J. K. Rowling) was received with transphobic celebrations. The group Trans Kids Deserve Better, along with a collection of Trade Union groups, Trotskyist fronts and other organisations announced the emergency march to protest the erasure and discrimination. Several thousand people turned up to the march in London. They brought traffic to a standstill as they spilled out of Parliament Square and into the streets. Protestres were young and old, cis, trans and nonbinary, ethnically diverse and included many disabled people.  A breadth of placards ranged from the emotional to insulting, and the chants were loud and defiant. Brighton Some overtly criticised health minister Wes Streeting, who banned all trans healthcare for under 18s with slogans such as “Wes Streeting’s doorstep is a gender neutral toilet” and “Wes Streeting, You Shit, You’re Killing Trans Kids”. Sheffield Some chants focussed on the inequitable healthcare system that has trans and nonbinary people waiting a decade for treatments or surgery, including “HRT, HRT, Over the counter and completely Free”. And alongside the plaintive “Trans Rights are Human Rights” there were also subversive anti-state messages: “Fuck the State and Burn the Courts—We dont want your fucking laws” , and “No Borders, No Nations, Trans Liberation”. Edinburgh As the London march moved into St. James’s park the energy did not disappate, instead a thousand trans oeople stood and sat in an impromptu open-air meeting, taking turns to make speeches, lead chants and show each other love. And whatever the TERFs think they won on wednesday it was clear today that the trans community will not dusappear quietly. In fact they are out and defiant.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Additional reporting and photos: Caruna Bambuna, PH, SC, RdMC, JF, EF The post In pictures: Thousands march for trans rights appeared first on Freedom News.

TRANS PEOPLE MUST FORM COALITIONS TO FACE A GOVERNMENT JOINING THE SIDE OF CRUELTY ~ Kell w Farshéa ~ From the genocide in Gaza to refusing to apologise for the enslavement of millions of Africans, from the two-child cap to banning all trans healthcare for under 18s  – Keir Starmer’s government is showing us that it is obstinately determined to place itself and its leader on the side of reaction, cruelty and fascism. Anarchists have become hoarse shouting over the din of electoral propaganda that voting will not set you free, but the Starmer government waited just eight days for Wes Streeting to defend the Tory government’s removal of NHS-funded and privately prescribed gender-affirming healthcare for under 18s. This has left children and young people denied access to peer-reviewed quality healthcare and educational information — a situation unseen since the days of Section 28. In May, Chalmers GIC & NHS Lothian in Scotland ‘froze’ referrals for gender-affirming care for adults aged 18 to 24, citing The Cass Review. This may be the first step in transphobic mission-creep where, having successfully removed therapies, treatments and prescriptions for children and young people, the next target is adults. It certainly exposes the fact that is isn’t and was never about pre-pubescent children. It has always been about the eradication and silencing of the entire trans population. It’s just that pre-pubescent children were the easiest, most emotionally charged place to start. In the light of Cass and the lead taken by Streeting and Starmer, activists are reporting an uptick in GPs deciding they will stop prescribing HRT to trans adults. With the collapse of Gender GP earlier this year the options for trans adults to access HRT therapies has already been significantly reduced. ], it is now clear the going thourgh the courts is not an effective way to fight for care and treatment options for trans populations in the UK. But more is on the way. In August, NHS England announced that it had appointed Dr David Levy to head a review of adult trans healthcare services in line with recommendations by the Cass Review. Trans activists fear it will replicate the same flawed approach to research that characterised the Cass Review. Levy’s new review scares trans, nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people because it threatens to tear up even the most basic provisions we have in law, medicine, and our social lives. FEARLESS SOLIDARITY I am three months away from my surgery date. I get my oestrogen via an NHS prescription. This past weekend I was at a family do where a person who likely sees themself as a trans ally questioned my anger about the years I have spent on a surgical waiting list by comparing my transition to having cancer. If I had cancer would I want the resources of the NHS to be spent treating that and not worrying about a secondary consideration like gender-affirming surgery? I bit my lip because I was at an important family event celebrating a diamond wedding anniversary of a couple who always make an effort to get my name and pronouns correct. What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was that actually no: if I got cancer tomorrow I would still want my gender-affirming surgery first before any surgeries for cancer because if I was lying in a ward recovering from cancer I’d want to be treated with respect, not treated as an object of disgust or amusement. I spent far too long being afraid to be who I am and no one, not Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch nor Dr David Levy gets to tell me any day for the rest of my life who I am, what healthcare I need, what my name is or what my pronouns are. I was reminded of Dr James Barry who rose to become one of the foremost surgeons in nineteenth-century British medicine. He left clear instructions that after death his body was not to be stripped, washed and dressed but that he should be buried in the clothes he died in. He had good cause. Sadly, his wishes were not followed. On removal of his clothes, he was discovered to have a ‘female’ body. For decades he was described as a woman who succeeded in a male profession by disguising himself as a man; he was heralded by herstory feminists claiming him as a shero. It is only in the past few years as trans and nonbinary people have started to insert ourselves into the debates that people have begun to ask whether James was in fact someone we might now describe as trans. That maybe he was living his best life as a man in a male profession and in male company. Maybe the reason he didn’t want to be undressed after death is same reason I would prioritise gender surgery over cancer treatment: because in life and in death he and I want to be seen as who we say we are – and not what people assign us based on our genitals. My life has been a contradiction of fortune and sadness. It took until I was 54 for me to finally realise that the solution to my terrible gender dysphoria was not being solved or addressed by identifying as a feminine man or ‘an effeminate homosexual’ and that in fact I had spent 40+ years of my life trying to gay the trans away. I spent decades of my life othered by society, by the lesbian and gay community, by the medical professions and by the media and political class. I was fortunate because in 2020 I was able to self-refer to a pilot scheme in London called Trans Plus at Dean Street that fast-tracked me through the appointments, milestones and waiting lists. So I am only a few months away from surgery, having only been in the medical process for five years. Many people wait that long just for the first assessment appointment. I spent my teens, twenties and thirties picketing shops, media outlets, police stations, local authorities, and government departments over issues as diverse as police deaths in custody and the AIDS crisis. Yes, we made people feel uncomfortable when they took bigoted decisions! From marches through Mansfield and Orgreave to anti-fascist actions, hunt saboteurs and lesbian and gay rights we got out of those siloed identities and the boxes made for us by the state, electoral politics and old simplistic binaries and instead built coalitions of resistance across the lines. We built connections and communities of resistance, we found friends and co-conspirators. We should take courage from groups like ACT UP and less from third-sector charities like Stonewall. We need to break the model of unaccountable. Transgender Action Block have been out there picketing TERFs for some time and building offline networks of resistance and recently the excellent Trans Kids Deserve Better have begun pickets of government departments, and have also been directly taking the fight to Wes Streeting’s constituency office. They have created the Instagram account @KidsAreDyingWes, where you can download a coffin design & create a message for Wes Streeting, health secretary and the most senior out LGBTIA politician in British political history. Streeting has chosen a red-box ministerial career over his own community and sold out trans kids. Every day they leave one or more coffins outside his constituency office to remind him. The post Labour’s anti-trans health betrayal appeared first on Freedom News.