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Beyond the Binary: Confronting the Interlocking Oppressions of Transphobia

  • Fearless Futures
  • July 18, 2025
  • 20 min
20
  • Edited 6 months ago

Table of Contents

Credit: David Geitgey Sierralupe “Protect trans youth”

We are living in a moment of relentless assault on Trans and Non-Binary people. Trans children are cast as victims of a dangerous ideology; Transfeminine people are painted as predators in toilets and sports. These narratives arrive in sync with legal changes, bans on books in schools, restrictions on healthcare, and new rules in elite competition. They do not emerge by accident; they are designed to legitimise constraint.

On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court rewrote a single word, “Woman,” to mean “Female at birth” wherever it appears in the Equality Act 2010. What might seem like narrow statutory housekeeping is, in fact, a design decision that re-anchors public administration and daily life to a biologically essentialist baseline.

Just three weeks after the ruling, the National Police Chiefs’ Council issued draft interim guidance on strip and intimate searches. It states that such searches must be conducted only by officers “of the same biological Sex as the detained person”. Trans officers are likewise barred from searching detainees whose ‘Sex assigned at birth’ differs from their own. Assumed biology is set as the organising rule; everything else becomes an exception that must be justified.

Inside the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a similar message took shape. At a London School of Economics debate, EHRC commissioner Akua Reindorf KC said Trans people had been “lied to” about their protections and must now pass through a “period of correction” so that “other people have rights.” Another panellist, barrister Naomi Cunningham, added that Trans people “will have to give way.” Amnesty UK and Liberty replied that the regulator is pitting rights holders against one another instead of safeguarding them all. Here, the language of balancing rights becomes a polite cover for withdrawing protection from the group singled out by the court.

These institutional shifts land in a media ecosystem already saturated with Trans “debate.” Constant alarm primes the public to accept each new restriction, whether it is police search rules or “corrective” guidance as ordinary safeguarding, rather than a deliberate contraction of rights.

Together, the court’s redefinition, the swift operational policy shifts, and relentless media amplification create the terrain on which today’s anti-Trans politics advance, which is the reason for this piece. Though it is incomplete, we do our best to explain what is happening so that you have a tool in your toolkit to resist and disrupt. We hope this is useful.

Understanding Gender: The Technology Behind the Panic

It’s impossible to understand transphobia without first understanding Gender.

Gender is lived, breathed, enacted, and engaged with by us all, yet its workings often remain invisible, and it can be hard to pin down.

What many people first picture, when they think of ‘Gender’, might include:

  • Man or Woman
  • Pronouns
  • Clothes and presentation
  • “Appropriate” subjects of love or desire
  • The look or function of a body
  • Personal feelings about identity

But Gender also organises:

  • Who does which labour and why
  • Who makes key decisions and why
  • Who controls resources and why
  • Who receives power and why
  • Who is positioned as superior and why

We therefore might want to think of Gender as a technology, as Judith Butler and others have also articulated: a tool that arranges and organises social, political, and economic relations.

The Gender Binary: Two Boxes, One Hierarchy

At the heart of this technology sits the Gender binary, intent on sorting every person into exactly two categories based on genitals observed at birth.

Claim of the binaryWhat it assertsHow it governs behaviour
Biological/scientificOnly two innate, immutable categories, Male or Female, exist.“Real Men” are presumed to be inherently dominant, aggressive, and in control. “Real Women” are presumed to be inherently passive, nurturing, and subordinate.
NaturalThe binary reflects the natural order; deviation is dangerous.Anybody or identity that exists beyond the binary is framed as abnormal or threatening.

Binary thinking imports a value scale: Man over Woman, Masculinity over Femininity, Cis over Trans or Non-Binary.

Patriarchy: The Operating System

Patriarchy is a social system that uses Gender as its organising regime. It links interpersonal behaviour, cultural expectations, and structures to channel power, wealth, and resources toward Cisgender people, Heterosexual people, and/or Men.

Transphobia is a feature of patriarchy.Transphobia is far more than personal dislike or bigotry. It is a sub-system of oppression within Patriarchy that is specifically concerned with negatively targeting Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming people, while positively targeting Cis people.

Transphobia relies on the ideology of the Gender binary, and the strict relationship between what it is to be a ‘real Man’ or a ‘real Woman’ and the body mapped to these poles.

Understanding Gender as a technology and the binary as its sorting algorithm reveals why current attacks on Trans and Non-Binary people are not isolated outrages but deliberate design choices.

Patriarchy, Transphobia, and System Design

So, if transphobia is a system of oppression, how does that work?

Fearless Futures maps oppression through four interlocking parts. Each is fully visible in today’s anti-Trans landscape.

StageHow does it show up against Trans and Non-Binary people
Negative Root Ideas (which are false!)Trans people are positioned as pretending • are not normal • are deviant • are spreading a dangerous ideology.
Conditional ResponsesIf those ideas are “true,” institutions must do the following things (not exclusively): Segregate (toilets, prisons, sports) • Pathologise (psychiatric gatekeeping, forced surgery) • Infantilise (deny legal agency, impose parental vetoes) • Erase (ban books, block documentation), etc
Structures (Institutions, laws, policies)Courts • Regulatory authorities • Criminal justice system • Medical institutions • Media ecosystem • Sporting bodies • Schools & Libraries • Labour market etc
Negative OutcomesEmployment levels • Health outcomes • Safety • Housing access, etc

It’s worth zooming in on Structures as they have a particular role in systemic oppression – they scale up the negative targeting to create en masse negative outcomes. To deepen our understanding of structures, we might turn to examples such as the recent Supreme Court decision that removed Trans Women, even those holding Gender Recognition Certificates, from eligibility for Women-only shortlists and public boards. Or, citing the interim Cass findings, NHS England instructs general practitioners to refuse even routine blood tests for Trans minors who receive private puberty blockers until psychiatry grants approval. This is a twenty-first-century echo of Sweden’s twentieth-century policy that required sterilisation for legal Gender change and of Singapore’s current rule that demands surgery, the public system will not fund it before it updates an identity card. Meanwhile, if we look at the media as an institution, we see that over the past seven years, the British press has averaged more than one hundred and fifty Trans-centred stories every month, a volume forty times higher than the attention any relatively small community receives.

Once these structures align, they produce adverse outcomes as steady as a metronome at scale. Legal erasure reduces the routes to updated identification, voting registers, grants and funding reserved for Women, parliamentary candidacy, and public appointments. Economic insecurity follows. Surveys show that hiring managers are one-third less likely to employ a Trans applicant, and the poverty rate among Trans adults is nearly triple that of the Cis population. Healthcare barriers mean a twelve-year-old waits into late adolescence for puberty blockers, emerging with a voice or bone structure that no surgeon can reverse, and mental health studies record corresponding spikes in suicidal ideation. Violence grows, too, as the community is conclusively dehumanised. Police (also involved in the making of transphobia) logged almost five thousand anti-Trans offences, a twenty-fold increase over a decade, and that figure captures only the incidents declared to officers.

None of this is accidental. It is the predictable yield of a design that starts with a story about who is actually real, converts that story into policy language, applies structural weight to enforce and scale it up, and then calls the resulting harm a natural consequence of biology. Each layer justifies the next until exclusion feels like an ordinary procedure. Whenever someone transgresses the binary, the system is designed to move to discipline the deviation and re-secure the binary and its hierarchy. Recognising the pattern allows us to trace exactly where resistance can break it.

Safeguarding as Moral Engine

Every backlash needs a moral centre, and in the current anti-Trans campaign, that centre is the child. “Safeguarding” has become the all-purpose keyword that converts suspicion into law, surveillance, and medical denial, just as “family values” once justified Section 28’s gag on Queer teachers and at different times, moral panic (coined by Stanley Cohen) around ‘hoodies’ and ‘chavs’. The script is almost identical, only the targets have changed. Today, surveys show the public wildly overestimates how many Trans children exist. NHS England guidance now instructs doctors to withhold even routine blood work from Trans under 18s and instead for GPs to flag supportive parents for safeguarding referrals. These mechanisms enact institutional suspicion while presenting themselves as neutral – even ‘caring’ – oversight.

A recent dispatch from journalist Erin Reed captures the feedback loop in real time. She reviewed “The Protocol,” a six-part New York Times podcast that repackages earlier disinformation about gender medicine and crowns the now discredited Cass Review as its measured authority. Reed notes that the show’s most compelling evidence undermines its own thesis: the first European patient to receive puberty blockers in the 1990s is now a content, middle-aged doctor who simply “lives life as a normal, happy dude.” Yet the producers frame him, and a similarly thriving Trans woman featured in episode two, as exceptional cases who differ from today’s youth because their treatment followed a tighter “protocol.” The manoeuvre mirrors Cass precisely. Both claim scientific caution while leaning on sources tied to organisations that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as anti-LGBTQ hate groups. Both recycle the old eugenic logic that some deviations from the Sex binary can be tolerated as medical rarities, but wider access signals social decay. Reed’s critique reminds us that the real dispute is not pharmacology; Cis children experiencing ‘precocious puberty,’ for example, still receive the same puberty blockers without controversy. In one study, of the 151 breast reductions among cisgender male minors and trans and gender diverse minors in the US, 146 (97%) were performed on cisgender male minors. We see here that a quarrel arises only when healthcare frees Trans adolescents from a puberty that state gatekeepers insist they must endure, with devastating consequences for these young people.

Austerity’s cultural decoy

It is imperative that we question why we have this moral panic and why now, because it hasn’t always been this way. Deborah Frances White in research for her latest book, she examined reviews of Orange is the New Black in mainstream media and specifically how Laverne Cox’s character, Sophia – a Trans Woman in the Women’s Prison – was perceived. At the time, in 2018, Sophia’s identity as a Trans Woman was not cast with suspicion at all. It’s presented as utterly unremarkable that she is in a Women’s prison, even in the Daily Mail. At around the same time, in 2017, ex-Prime Minister Theresa May spoke at Pink News, asserting the need to ease the barriers to Gender Recognition Certificates.

And of course, Trans people have not since this time become more dangerous as a collective. So something else is going on.

To have an answer to this, it’s worth turning our thoughts to the ways many systemic oppressions work, and that is through the creation of ‘scapegoats’. Certain communities become scapegoats for – often – economic crises, turning people’s attention away from those responsible for devastating economic conditions. When the mainstream media plays a key role in maintaining oppression, and with ownership concentrated in the hands of a few, there are good grounds to consider transphobia as a tool of elite interests.

In this frame,  transphobia serves the maintenance of class inequality by turning economic frustration into cultural hostility. Sarah Anderson and Reyanna James trace how tabloids, talk-radio hosts, and cabinet ministers redirect Working Class anger about their economic conditions toward the figure of the “bathroom intruder” or the “unfair athlete” precisely when wage stagnation, benefit cuts, and public service contractions bite hardest. The spectacle invites those who have lost secure housing or reliable hours to blame a small, visible marginalised group rather than the austerity budgets that produced the scarcity in the first place. While debates circle toilets and pronouns, tax cuts for high earners and large corporations pass with scant resistance, and service closures are explained away as necessary belt-tightening.

Niamh Timmons shows the material cost of this diversion. Trans people, and most starkly Trans Women of Colour, are pushed to the front of every queue for deprivation: first to lose jobs in a downturn, first to face eviction when rents spike, first to be triaged off waiting lists when clinics run short of staff. Public commentary frames Trans rights as a luxury that drains common resources, yet audit after audit reveals that welfare freezes and clinic closures strike Trans communities earliest and hardest. The same economic policies that shrink social safety nets amplify anti-Trans sentiment, then point to that sentiment as proof that cuts reflect popular will, completing the circle of economic harm disguised as common sense. It’s up to us to be alert and vigilant to these dynamics and refuse to acquiesce.

Policing the Body: From Toilets to Stadiums

Bodies, identities, and histories do not fit neatly into two boxes. It is worth being clear that:

And given that the Gender binary is an inadequate framework to reflect how humans exist, when the false binary is inevitably challenged, it requires formal and informal policing in order to generate consequences. As such, we find a choreography of inspections, tests, and other humiliations from Olympic stadiums to the most ordinary public loo – that are best understood as an infrastructure of policing and punishment.

Public loos as border posts

Let us imagine a person in the UK today steps into a café toilet marked with the dress-wearing icon. She is a patron with cropped hair, a flat chest, and a slight build. She is stopped by someone: “You shouldn’t be in here.”

In such a context, the demand for the person to stop is not just to appear recognisably feminine. It’s now a requirement that we all have to perform hyper-femininity to be legitimate in ‘dress-wearing icon’ spaces, to avoid assault. Anyone who does not conform to a stranger’s guess is implicitly asked to prove themselves, an absurdity in any public space and a cruelty for people whose safety depends on privacy. Many Trans Women who have undergone genital surgery “look” exactly like Cis Women (which of course has infinite form in any case!); many Cis Women, through scarring, menopause, or Intersex variation, do not match textbook norms. The policy implies that every loo doorway should become a border post where bodies are verified, some are let in, and others aren’t. The spectacle is as unworkable as it is invasive.

More contradictions follow. A fully bearded Trans Man, for example, legally Female under the UK Supreme Court’s new definition, is now meant to queue for the “Women’s loos”. Gender-critical campaigners seem fixated on a “Man in the Women’s loo,” yet it is also the direct consequence of the birth-certificate rule they champion.

We all suffer under this regime, though in relationally different ways – when we are coerced into particular modes of expression or risk violence. The control we see here in these examples for how our bodies should be, what they should do, and how they present themselves, of course, tracks through to any further specific inquiry into sexism and heterosexism as interconnected oppressions under Patriarchy. That alone is a clue that the struggle against sexism is utterly aligned with the struggle against transphobia as much as it is with homophobia and vice versa. As a result, any attempt to separate them and place them in a hierarchy of importance will ultimately fail. This must give us hope.

Elite sport as a public lesson in “real” womanhood

The campaign against Trans existence is often marketed as a narrowly “Sex-based” quarrel, as though chromosomes alone were on trial. In practice, every flash-point – bathrooms, sports, medicine, prisons – rests also on older hierarchies of Race, Disability, and Class. Whenever we see the language of biology, it inevitably includes the contours of White Supremacy and capitalism. Under the logic of oppression biology is a categorising device that is about resources: who gets what, who does what and who is valued.

As such, Gender in the Global North, where this piece is situated, is not racially neutral. The body imagined when journalists say “ordinary Woman” is unmistakably White, slim-hipped, modest in muscle. Anybody who deviates from this, as we have already seen, risks investigation.

Few spaces are more useful to the binary than international sport, where bodies are already weighed, measured, and televised. Governing federations claim they merely chase fairness, but their rules reveal a singular obsession: defining Womanhood by numbers that conveniently sort out those whose femininity is not racialised as White European.

Caster Semenya’s ordeal is now familiar – years of intrusive hormone scrutiny, a ban, an appeal, another ban – but she is only the most famous. Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi of Namibia were barred from their signature events after suddenly falling afoul of a newly lowered testosterone ceiling. Zambian striker Barbra Banda missed the 2022 Africa Cup because FIFA medical panels declared her “ineligible” mere days before kick-off. In boxing, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting have been pulled from championship bouts for breaching limits they did not know existed a month earlier. From the long list of examples from the Global South, some of which have not made the mainstream news, we can conclude that the Gender binary also requires White European femininity in order to qualify as a Cis Woman.

The institutional violence enacted upon Women of the Global South by sporting authorities is unimaginable, were it not very real. Cases that did not make headlines include that of Annet Negesa, who did not know that doctors would perform a surgical procedure on her, but woke up to post-surgery scarring and pain. Her process also involved the absence of aftercare, which has had devastating impacts on both her mind and body.

The Sex-testing of Women in elite sports began as early as the 1930s. At the 1936 Games, 100m gold medallist Helen Stephens was accused of being a Man and underwent the first ‘Sex-test’ at an event. By the 1960s, there were effectively ‘nude parades’.  Maren Sidler, an American shotputter at the 1967 Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, recounts: “You had to go in and pull up your shirt and push down your pants…I remember one of the sprinters – a tiny, skinny girl – came out shaking her head, saying, ‘Well, I failed. I didn’t have enough up top.”

Under World Athletics’ rules, an athlete with polycystic ovary syndrome, for example, can compete despite having high testosterone because they have XX chromosomes and no testes. Athletes with high testosterone levels whose bodies do not respond to the hormone can also compete in the restricted categories. What must be clear here is that no equivalent ceiling or surgery exists for men’s testosterone or physiological advantage. No one proposes capping Michael Phelps’s lung capacity or Ian Thorpe’s arm span and huge feet – both naturally occurring physiological variations that lead to their sporting success.

The binary policing is not symmetrical; it sets limits only for those already deemed relationally suspect.

Statistician Jayna Sheats recently ran the numbers on the most-cited U.S. high-school sprint case, where two Trans girls competed against a Cis runner who later sued. She plotted every race time from 2017 to 2020. She found no consistent trend: sometimes the Trans athletes placed first, sometimes the Cis athletes did, and their season-average times overlapped within the ordinary error margin of a stopwatch. Applying the same method to NCAA swimming, Sheats showed that Lia Thomas, painted in headlines as unbeatable, finished sixth in total points while three Cis swimmers set seventeen records at the same meet. The dataset undercuts the claim that Trans Women retain a permanent biological edge; performance distributions overlap so widely that any one of the athletes might win or lose on a given day. The controversy, Sheats concludes, is less about mathematics and more about a cultural refusal to accept outcomes that contradict a fixed idea of who should stand on the podium at all.

Some of the persistent logics are older than track and field. Nineteenth-century colonial officials who catalogued “Hottentot Venus” and classified hijras in India as “eunuchs” wrote the first textbooks on “abnormal femininity”. Contemporary lawmakers inherit that record. When the UK Supreme Court and the Equality and Human Rights Commission insist that female means “biological and immutable,” they repeat an archive compiled to cast Whiteness as the default human template and all other bodies as deviations to be managed.

Ultimately, we see there are arbitrary, cruel thresholds that lead to the violent scrutiny of all Women under the framework of the Gender binary. And the implications extend beyond sport. Patriarchy and its sibling, White Supremacy, are about declaring who gets to do what roles in society overall, who gets to do what work, and, fundamentally, therefore, who gets access to what resources, wealth, and power. Shifting goal posts about ‘who is a Woman’ is necessary also to ensure that all Women remain subordinate to and dominated by Men, that Trans people are subordinate to and dominated by Cis folks, and that LGB+ folks are subordinate to and dominated by Heterosexual people, all within a racial hierarchy.

When we consider the material issues impacting Women in sport: chronic underfunding, especially for athletes in the Global South; doping; lack of opportunity; sexual harassment and assault from coaches, the deflection to arbitrary ratios like naturally occurring hormones seems a convenient focus to maintain the status quo.

The upshot of the policing and punishment we detail – from toilets to stadiums – is that everyone loses. Trans people face harassment and forced disclosure; Cis people who deviate from either hyper-femininity or hyper-masculinity, which are also racialised categories, risk harassment and surveillance too; Cis patrons confront the bizarre prospect of policing toilets by genital inspection. The Gender binary relies on constant policing and punishment because it is, at its root, unstable, and we do not actually need it.

This is where the possibilities of a different future are also found.

Despite this bleak reality, the script is not unchallenged – of course not. Every sporting federation decision spawns athlete solidarity statements; internal emails revealing that “fairness” caps are set first, rationalised later. Campaigns like Not In Our Name, signed by thousands of Cis Women in the UK, reject the notion that their security depends on Trans exclusion; legal teams take on the State;  grass-roots networks share “safe restroom” maps and crowdfund legal appeals. Each act of refusal exposes the arbitrary line between acceptable and deviant bodies, inviting others to question why the line exists at all.

Solidarity Beyond the Binary

After this incomplete telling of the challenges, fears, and injustices, we arrive at a fundamental question: Well, what can I do about it? For organisations and leaders, this translates into two concrete commitments:

  • Practice “structural solidarity.”

This fulfils what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls an intersectional approach and what other and Black feminist scholars have theorised – acknowledging how oppressions intersect, and designing solutions accordingly. By adopting our ‘Issue-Led Approach’ and targeting business issue areas such as promotions, progression, pay, etc, you can bring an intersectional lens and ensure that Trans people are within focus across the employee life cycle as you solve for scaled inequities. This goes beyond non-discrimination clauses (though those are basic and must be there, explicitly naming Gender identity and expression as protected). It means auditing all policies – from health insurance to parental leave to dress codes – for their impact on Trans and Non-Binary folks, as you identify the inequities for other marginalised communities. Does your health plan cover transition-related care (hormones, surgeries, voice therapy)? If not, advocate to change that, as a matter of parity and health equity. Does your parental leave policy only talk about mothers and fathers? Update it to include all parents and birthing people (some employees may have a Gender-neutral parent title, or a Trans Man could be a birthing parent). Do your DEI programs include specific training on Trans inclusion and also integrate Trans experiences when talking about, say, sexism or racism? They should – because, for example, discussing “Women in leadership” should include Trans Women, and discussing police brutality should consist of how Trans People of Colour are targeted. Ensure recruitment and HR processes are equitable for Trans folks: allow use of preferred names on resumes and emails; train interviewers on not asking inappropriate questions; have an easily navigable process for employees to update their Gender marker in records without undue hurdles. These tangible steps create environments where Trans and Non-Binary communities can thrive.

  • Stand in public solidarity:

This is crucial. In an atmosphere of moral panic, silence from leaders equals agreement. We need bold voices. That means issuing statements supporting Trans equality even when it’s controversial. It means not abandoning initiatives at the first sign of backlash, but explaining why they matter and holding firm. It means using one’s platform to counter misinformation. E.g., if you’re a CEO and you see your industry magazine spouting nonsense about Trans policies, write an op-ed to correct it or lobby the Business Secretary. Use corporate power for good, on this occasion, especially when it is a well-lubricated machine for matters in its own interest. Public solidarity also means supporting and funding Trans-led organisations and including them in coalitions. Angela Davis, ever the internationalist, emphasises that solidarity is not a one-issue game – so show up for Trans issues just as strongly as for anything else.

A world beyond the binary is not a static end state but a process – a collective journey of learning, unlearning, and growing stronger together. It involves discomfort – those in power may have to yield privileges, and all of us have to confront our participation in its maintenance. But it also promises profound gain: the freedom to thrive authentically.

Solidarity beyond the binary insists that we see each other’s struggles as our own. It calls on us to be, in the words of Jules Gill-Peterson, “students of each other’s histories” – to know that the fight we wage now has been fought before, side by side with others, and will be won by forging a common cause. It invites us to replace fear with hope and division with unity. In place of the moral panic’s question – What will we lose if we include Trans people?  We ask – What might we gain – what new forms of kinship, understanding, and liberation might flourish – when we embrace all Genders, all of us, as worthy?

In closing, solidarity beyond the binary is not a utopian dream; it is an attainable reality, built step by step. The required tools are already within our grasp: knowledge, empathy, courage, and solidarity. As we wield them, we move from a society of exclusion and fear to inclusion and freedom. In the spirit of Fearless Futures, let us design that inclusive future now, with fearlessness, foresight, and an unwavering commitment that liberation for Trans people is liberation for us all.

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