weareoverqueer

[weareoverqueer]

Trans people are not a political football.

Trans and Genderqueer people are currently under attack by a government that has, once again, decided to engineer a moral panic in order to present itself as the hero that will swoop in and save the day.

by James Critchley

Moral Panics. We've seen them before in a variety of forms. Margaret Thatcher's attack on homosexuality in 1988 through Section 28, which banned the 'promotion' of homosexuality by local authorities, leading to devastating consequences for Gay children and teens, with teachers and other school staff being banned from having conversations on Queerness. Conversation around Section 28, which started during the 1987 Conservative election campaign, allowed the engineering of a moral panic to take place, making bold claims that Labour were trying to 'promote' homosexuality as a 'pretended family relationship' by allowing books with Gay content in schools. The creation of a moral panic worked, with the Tories winning a majority of seats.

We're currently seeing it again with scaremongering around refugees, with language such as 'swarms', 'illegal' and 'invasion' being commonplace in our media and our parliament. With the Tories polling far behind Labour, there has once again been an attempt to 'win over' the general public by scaring them at the cost of dehumanising vulnerable groups.

Simultaneously, Trans people are being used as a political football to create fear towards a group that are already among the most vulnerable in society. With scaremongering around Trans people in gendered spaces, the right to self-identify, and the emergence of anger around Trans people participating in sports, this government have made it clear that they will stop at nothing to try and win an election. With almost half of young trans people in the UK having attempted suicide before the recent attacks, the Tories are fully aware of the danger this creates, but they will never ceasefire when it remains a means to political gain. It seems now, with Keir Starmer u-turning on his commitment to empower Trans people by allowing self-identification, we won't get liberation from Labour either.

The basis of moral panics around Genderqueer and Trans identities are often extreme examples, such as questions over whether Trans rapists should be housed in prisons that align with their gender identities, which is almost always aimed at Trans women. The people making these claims seem to turn a blind eye to Gay men being sexually assaulted within prisons, which happens at a much higher rate than Trans women assaulting other women prisoners, or even the larger rate at which Trans women are assaulted when they are put in male prisons. When cases such as these happen, the gendered nature of the prison system is never questioned. If protection from harm was the real concern, we would be calling for all prisoners that have committed acts of sexual assault or rape to be monitored carefully to protect other prisoners, not just the Trans ones.

The absurdity of the engineered moral panic towards Trans people is not the first moral panic that has been launched at the expense of an already marginalised group, and it certainly won't be the last if we lead our lives by unfounded fear rather than looking out for others. But for now, we must stand up and shout back. Trans people have been here forever, will be here forever, and will not be your political football.