Britain should be a country whose borders are open to all who are fleeing persecution. It also should be a country where trans people are not subject… - Shon Faye

Above all, anti-prostitution feminism argues, men’s demand for the right to purchase sex should be condemned and criminalized. Given the extreme violence to which trans people, particularly trans women, who do sex work are subject worldwide, it seems tempting for trans politics to join with this condemnation of male violence and, consequently, with the condemnation of men who purchase sex. It is true that many sectors of the sex industry, from pornography to street sex work to managed brothels, rely on the exploitation of trans sex workers’ financial and social vulnerability by cisgender men for profit. Yet the converse argument – for pro-sex-worker trans politics – isn’t intended as a moral absolution of the client or unethical industry practices; it isn’t concerned with morality at all. Rather, it recognizes that trans sex workers exist in a society in which money is necessary for survival, and that sex work is one of a limited number of options available to the marginalized in this society – and so, regardless of any condemnation or criminalization of clients, trans sex workers will still need to sell sex. Accepting this reality turns the focus from ‘ending demand’ for sexual services, to harm-reduction for the worker. It is on this basis that full in all its forms must be a central tenet of the movement for trans rights.

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.

Reliance on policing to solve transphobic hatred among teenagers and young adults, instead of questioning the underlying causes of their hate, is what some radical activists call ‘carceral logic’: a punishment mentality, which is more concerned with being seen to punish violence with greater force than with working towards the creation of a less violent society. Preventing a culture from developing in which hatred towards trans people is normalized is much more likely to reduce harm than the ineffective use of hate-crime legislation and police powers.