Anti-trans feminists’ repeated claims that they were being silenced were in fact highly effective in getting their viewpoints aired on television, ra… - Shon Faye

The way we are all taught, from a young age, to make the link between visible biological sex traits and behaviour can be extremely powerful in shaping our intuitions about other people. This process of interpretation and the way it affects how we relate to and behave towards others is part of the system we call gender. Feminism, though, ought always to interrogate biological essentialism (the idea that a person’s nature or personality is innate; arising from, or connected to, their biological traits). The idea that anyone born with a penis is inherently more aggressive or violent because they have a penis is an anti-feminist idea: it actually suggests that male violence is linked to biological ‘essence’ and is therefore inevitable, immutable, perhaps not even truly men’s fault. Yet anti-trans feminism is forced to rely on biological essentialism in its insistence that there is too great a similarity between trans women and cis men for the former to be regarded legally and politically as women. Transphobic feminism often uses imagery connected to penises (imagined or real) belonging to trans women as a powerful rhetorical tool, to suggest that trans women are exhibiting aggression or entitlement or are a threat.

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 emblematic of wider, conceptual concerns about the autonomy of the individual in society. Their rejection of dominant, ancient and deep-seated ideas about the connection between biological characteristics and identity causes a dilemma for the nation state: whether to acknowledge and give credence to the individual’s assertion of their own identity in law and in culture; or to mandate that it, the state, is the final authority on identity, and to assert its power over the individual – by force if necessary. Attacking the very concept of trans people by imposing rigid and immutable definitions of sex and gender, as Orbán’s party has done, is the latest iteration of the way national governments embrace totalitarian ideology. After all, attacking trans people has been a part of fascist practice since the destruction of ’s Berlin back in 1933 by Nazi youth brigades.