Patriarchy is based on three key ideas: that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are a natural, immutable and exhaustive binary; that all males should be masculine, … - Shon Faye

Given the British media’s recent pained wrangling with the very idea of gender affirmation as a potential ‘slippery slope’, the fact that more straightforward access to medical transition and legal gender recognition was available during the Second World War than is often the case today is astonishing. The mainstream media’s presumption that strict ‘controls’ on transition are and have always been necessary relies on the suppression, and ignorance, of trans medical and legal history.

Trans people are not a burden to society or to the state. It ought to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around.

It may seem paradoxical that in a period where civil rights for LGBT people seem to be at unique risk – a time in which Boris Johnson, a man who once called gay men ‘tank-topped bum boys’ and equated gay marriage with bestiality, can be prime minister – there has never been more media representation for LGBT people or more companies happy to insist they support us. This is not out of the sheer kindness of corporate hearts. Brands have recognized that the rainbow flag lends them the goodwill of people who care about social justice. Corporations can purport to be part of a movement with countercultural and liberationist roots, package that movement as ‘aspirational’ for marketing purposes, and in doing so denude it of all the politics that threaten the capitalist status quo and sell it back to those who can afford it. The idea that conspicuous consumption is a route to sexual and gender freedom has been effective in allowing the LGBT movement’s muscles to atrophy. In a godless age, there are new ways to give the masses their opium.