Understanding Anti-Trans Politics: Transfeminist Perspectives

Abstract

Trans people have become central to the moral panics promoted by global anti-gender and far-right movements, but political scientists are poorly equipped to understand why. Opposition to so-called “gender ideology” involves challenges to trans civil rights—to legal gender recognition, gender-affirming healthcare, access to sports and “single-sex” spaces. In the UK, trans people are facing a human rights crisis, particularly following a 2025 Supreme Court’s ruling that, under the Equality Act, ‘sex’ is determined at birth. Across Europe, the human rights of trans people have been receded for the first time in over a decade (TGEU, 2025). Globally, opposition to LGBTQ rights is mobilised by authoritarian actors in autocratic regimes as well as consolidated democracies (Ayoub & Stoeckl, 2025). Research demonstrates the transnational nature of the contemporary far-right (Abrahamsen et al., 2024) and the centrality of “anti-gender” ideology to these mobilisations (Paternotte & Kuhar, 2018). Yet, while the global politics of gender has been analysed from feminist and queer theoretical perspectives, transfeminism remains a nascent approach within political science (Galpin et al., 2023). Emerging from third-wave intersectional feminism, transfeminism centres trans people, challenging the presumed alignment of maleness/masculinity and femaleness/femininity (Serano, 2013). It also addresses transmisogyny, involving harassment towards people expressing femininity considered to deviate from their assigned sex. Transfeminism is also decolonial, highlighting transphobia’s roots in the consolidation of colonial state power (Gill-Peterson, 2024). Transfeminism crucially demonstrates how transphobia is rooted in wider racialized and patriarchal structures of power and anti-democratic tendencies—the crackdown on DEI under the Trump administration highlights how opposition to trans rights is situated within wider far-right authoritarian projects. This panel includes papers that apply transfeminism to anti-trans politics in a broad sense. This includes theoretical papers that develop transfeminism to conceptual literature within political science as well as empirical papers on political parties, media transphobia, and on solidarity movements and community resistance. Through these papers, the panel will advance theoretical and empirical understandings of anti-trans politics within political science.

Title	Details
Organised transphobia and anti-gender scholarship: Hiding in plain sight	View Paper Details
Navigating Interlocking Oppressions: Patriarchy, Carcerality and Trans Youth Resistance in Contemporary China	View Paper Details
Isla Bryson and the burden of representation: inflammatory media coverage of trans women in the U.K. in 2023	View Paper Details
Constructing the nation as cis: Transfeminist perspectives on nationalism in Europe	View Paper Details
‘We know what a woman is!’ Anti-trans talking points and populist radical right rhetoric by the Conservative party	View Paper Details