Policing Personhood through Punitive Pleasure: affect and abolitionist responses to regressive gender politics

Anti-trans ideology – the notion of gender as ‘fixed identity […] predetermined by bioessentialist, white colonial standards’ (Alexander, 2023: 233) – has come to dominate the UK’s legislative and socio-political landscape when it comes to gender. So-called ‘gender critical’ left feminists and TERFs have aligned with those on the far right who are similarly invested in upholding cis supremacy (Horton, 2024: 2), policing gender and punishing those who transgress its arbitrary and artificial boundaries. This paper examines how affect and carceral logics work together to uphold cis supremacy through an examination of UK anti-trans coalitions. We examine publicly available statements from several actors/organisations associated with the anti-trans movements in the UK, mapping the discursive connections between far-right and left feminist/TERF anti-trans statements. We show how an attachment to the pleasure associated with the policing of (gender) boundaries works as an affective ‘glue’ which binds together otherwise disparate ideological groups. We focus on a previously under-examined dimension of the interplay between anti-trans ideology and affect in the policing of gendered personhood; the pleasure people derive from policing, surveillance, control and punishment, or what we term punitive pleasure. Punitive pleasure draws on the work of Carvalho and Chamberlen (2018: 17) who argue that the reason people ‘are motivated to punish, is because we derive pleasure from the utility of punishment. Simply stated, punishment pleases.’ We argue that thinking with carceral affects like punitive pleasure helps us to understand why anti-trans mobilisations have been so successful in (re)shaping UK gender politics and legal frameworks, and why ‘gender critical’ feminists have become so deeply attached to the carceral and punitive logics of anti-trans ideology. In developing this conceptual analysis, we aim to contribute to abolitionist arguments that propose a fundamental decoupling of punishment (along with control, policing and surveillance) from notions of (gender and race) justice.