Over the last few years, British gender-critical activists have successfully positioned themselves as respectable feminists with reasonable concerns about trans people. They enjoy cross-party political support, including from MPs and members of the House of Lords, have influenced policy and political decisions, and are extensively platformed in the media. Their arguments that trans women must be removed from public space – including changing rooms and toilets – have been largely listened to by those in power, and now dominate public discourse about trans issues.

Queer and trans people have long known that gender-critical feminism is synonymous with transphobia, and that its proponents have very little to do with the kind of campaigning that actually benefits all women. Despite the cost-of-living crisis and the fallout from the pandemic – both of which negatively impact women, particularly low-income women, single mums and disabled women – gender-critical activism remains firmly centred around trans people. Core tactics deployed to apparently advance the cause of women’s rights include: suing rape crisis centres; boycotting trans-inclusive women’s services, supermarkets, brands or retailers; fundraising vast amounts to legally attack trans rights and trans-affirming healthcare, and launching anti-trans groups that lobby politicians and hold conferences promoting their views.

Trans-inclusive feminists have disavowed their bigoted sisters on numerous occasions, pointing out that they are merely a loud minority who, as it was put in an open letter signed by Olivia Colman, “absolutely do not speak for us”. But these rebuttals, and any suggestion that there is any overlap with, or alliance between, gender-critical and far-right groups, have been forcefully dismissed; trans activists are branded “misogynists” and “homophobes”, and those speaking up for them quietly silenced.

Gender-critical feminists were once more commonly referred to as TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists), an acronym first used in 2008 as neutral shorthand to distinguish between radical feminists who included trans women in their feminism, and radical feminists who didn’t. Some TERFs regard the term as a slur; “gender-critical” is their current preferred label. 

Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power and volunteer coordinator at the Feminist Library, explains that the main feature of the gender-critical argument is “seeing sex as an immutable, ‘biological’ fact”.

“I think they’re really invested in this question of what it means to be a woman and putting forward a case that ‘woman’ is a stable signifier,” Olufemi tells VICE. “That’s, as we know, not true. There’s a well-documented history of Black people being, on the basis of race, excluded from normative understandings of gender. Woman, historically and culturally, has never been a stable category.”

Gender-critical thinking is immediately recognisable to those familiar with the old arguments of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, though taken to the extreme: Sex is immutable, biological and binary, therefore it’s impossible to be transgender; trans women should be barred from women’s spaces; and trans people, especially younger trans people, should be prevented from accessing gender-affirming healthcare. The existence of younger trans people or trans people as a whole is questioned; trans women are smeared as sexual predators, and trans and non-binary people as a danger to women and children – a right-wing talking point previously used by the tabloids against gay men and lesbians in the 80s.

As trans activist Roz Kaveney notes, the natural desire and end goal of this ideology is to eventually eliminate trans people altogether. Or, as a speaker at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) put it: “Transgenderism” must be “eradicated”. The Australian branch of this right-wing nonprofit, which “espouses the best of Howard, Reagan and Thatcher”, also contributed financially to Keen-Minshull’s Let Women Speak tour. That she is still supported at all by those who believe their gender-critical views are part of a progressive mission to liberate women is, frankly, a sign of some seriously strenuous mental gymnastics.

Part of the gender-critical success at controlling the framing of their anti-trans views comes from their co-opting of traditional feminist concerns: women’s safety, women-only spaces and male violence against women. These issues gained renewed public attention in the UK after Sarah Everard’s murder by Met police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021. One Observer columnist seized this moment to write – somewhat bizarrely, given Everard was kidnapped in the street – that her death highlighted the threat of “changes to gender-recognition laws” to “single-sex spaces” that “historically protected women by excluding men”.

This was in stark contrast with the response from intersectional feminist groups, like Sisters Uncut and Abolitionist Futures, who reacted to a police officer killing a woman by demanding the dismantling of policing. Olufemi points to this “clear divide” in British feminism between “contemporary grassroots feminist coalitions on the ground, who are making demands around things like deportations, immigration raids, abolition and policing, which emerge from a strong critique of capitalism” and “the gender-critical understanding of feminism, which embodies neoliberalism in its focus on law, legislation and the rights of the individual citizen”.

This focus underpinned the successful push in February by gender-critical feminists for new rules forcing some trans women to be jailed in men’s prisons. It’s also the basis of their campaigning – in parliament, in the media and online – for trans women to be barred from single-sex spaces and events. Their latest triumph saw Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, commission the UK’s human rights watchdog for advice on how to change the law to accomplish this. The resulting proposal, which would see “sex” legally redefined as “biological sex”, would remove discrimination protections for trans people and allow service providers to ban trans women from women’s hospital wards, public bathrooms and more.  

Where would that leave trans women who need to access medical treatment, domestic violence services or even just use the toilet? Notably, gender-critical feminists struggle to come up with real answers. In situations where a third gendered space is proposed or created to accommodate trans and non-binary people – such as gender-neutral bathroom provision – they fiercely oppose this, too. In 2022, the UK government announced it was scrapping gender-neutral bathrooms in public buildings after gender-critical campaigning that they were dangerous for women and girls. The movement has also fundraised for costly legal attacks on trans rights: Between 2016 and 2020, activists crowdfunded almost £1 million to fight anti-trans court cases in the UK, ranging from challenging school guidelines on trans inclusion to trying to ban puberty blockers for those under the age of 16.

In April 2022, these legal attacks ramped up when Survivors’ Network, a rape crisis centre in Sussex, was the first to be legally threatened in the UK by gender-critical feminists. To date, over £93,000 has been raised to bring legal action against the charity – all because of a single complaint over a trans woman using its services.

Trans Safety Network (TSN), a collective documenting anti-trans harm, reports “a pattern has emerged of harassment and abuse of charities and services working in the areas of sexual violence and reproductive and gynaecological health”. In recent years, six trans-inclusive rape crisis centres and sexual violence charities have been hit with online attacks by gender-critical feminists.

The Vagina Museum, along with feminist and reproductive rights charities like Bloody Good Period and Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, has also been abused online by gender-critical activists. The harassment, its development and marketing manager Zoe Williams told TSN, “diverts resources away from actually carrying out our work”.

“It seems obvious,” Olufemi says, “but I don’t think suing rape crisis centres would have a positive, or indeed liberatory, effect for the position of women. What they're doing is re-regulating and restating gender as a disciplinary regime.”

Anyone who publicly supports a trans-inclusive organisation risks coming under fire. When feminist organisation Level Up saw Survivors’ Network’s statement about the legal threat, they put out a supportive Instagram post. “We were immediately dogpiled by people who were calling us liars, abusers, not real feminists,” remembers co-director Seyi Falodun-Liburd.

Attacks on trans-inclusive women’s services and feminist organisations lay bare how gender-critical activists misappropriate British feminism for their own goals. Another indication of how incompatible gender-critical feminism is with women’s rights, like contraceptive access, is the alliance between gender-critical activists and Christian right-wing ideologues.

In 2019, Sex Matters co-founder Maya Forstater launched (with two crowdfunders totalling over £340,000) an employment tribunal claim against her former workplace after allegedly suffering discrimination and victimisation: Her employers and colleagues objected to her repeatedly tweeting that trans women are men and misgendering a trans person.

Forstater said this was discriminatory towards her due to her beliefs and became a cause célèbre in gender-critical circles after she won part of her case in 2022. That means “gender-critical” is now a protected philosophical belief under UK equalities law, alongside beliefs in ethical veganism and the ability of spiritual mediums to contact the dead.

In February 2023, Forstater gave evidence in a teacher misconduct hearing – that of Joshua Sutcliffe, a British teacher who is alleged to have repeatedly misgendered a trans pupil and told students that same-sex marriage was wrong. Forstater argued schools should not implement trans-affirming policies, such as using the correct name and pronouns for trans students, because it might “lock children into a pathway that is going to lead to them doing harm to their bodies which can’t be undone”.

Sutcliffe, who denies all charges, is a controversial street preacher who was dismissed from another school after posting a YouTube video calling Mohammed a “false prophet”. He is represented by the Christian Legal Centre, the legal arm of Christian Concern – a religious charity that campaigns, among other things, against the right to choice. 

A self-described feminist sticking up for someone who believes a woman is “required to submit to her husband” might seem like strange bedfellows, but alliances between British feminists and those who oppose women’s rights are not new. 

Anti-porn feminists in the 80s worked with the religious right. Suffragettes joined Oswald Moseley’s fascist party in the 30s. Keen-Minshull and lesbian gender-critical activist Linda Bellos travelled to New York in 2019 to speak on a panel organised by anti-trans group Women’s Liberation Front, which works with the conservative anti-abortion organisation Family Policy Alliance. Julie Bindel, another lesbian pillar of the gender-critical community, works with Tory and LGB Alliance founding member Gary Powell to campaign against gay surrogacy, despite the latter’s appearance on a panel for the Heritage Foundation, an arch-conservative think-tank with a long history of anti-gay lobbying.

Another LGB Alliance founding member, Bev Harris, tweeted in 2019 that “working with the Heritage Foundation is sometimes the only possible course of action” due to the “leftwing silence on gender”.

How did we get to this point? Present-day gender-critical groups coalesced around opposition to Conservative proposals in 2018 to reform gender recognition laws in the UK, which would have brought the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in line with other, more progressive, countries. The proposed reforms would have dropped the requirement that trans people have to be medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria before being able to access legal gender recognition, otherwise known as self-ID. 

Given that acquiring the diagnosis on the NHS takes upwards of five years, on average, the reforms would have made legal gender recognition easier to access for trans people. In fact, the proposals were prompted by the fact that fewer than 5,000 people had used the GRA to change their legal gender since its implementation in 2004, out of what was then an estimated trans population of around 200,000 to 500,000 in the UK. (The 2021 census later revealed 262,000 trans people over the age of 16 in the UK.) 

In their campaign against self-ID, gender-critical feminists portrayed legal gender recognition – which is relevant only in extremely limited administrative situations, such as when you marry, die or receive your pension – as a route through which cis men would pretend to be trans women in order to attack victims in public bathrooms. By conflating predatory cis men with trans women, they ignored counterarguments that their desired outcome would also see trans men forced to use women’s bathrooms – and that, for a cis male rapist, pretending to be a trans man would probably be a more straightforward way of accessing a women’s bathroom.

In the years since the September 2020 government announcement that GRA reforms were being dropped, gender-critical messaging has become overtly homophobic and misogynistic. Casual misogyny, like calling Madonna a “bitch” for playing a benefit concert for trans people in Tennessee or calling comedian Janey Godley a “cancer-ravaged old cow” for outspokenly supporting trans people, is rife. So are homophobic tropes – like fabricated claims that LGBTQ+ groups are pushing paedophilia and want to “legalise child sex”. Gender critical feminists no longer make so much effort to couch their so-called concerns about trans people in vague language – and, increasingly, they appear to disregard the harmful impact their campaigning has on cis women.

Falodun-Liburd is strongly critical of the gender-critical strategy of targeting rape crisis centres, when resources available to victims of sexual violence are already scarce. “It directly harms women as a whole,” she says. In 2018, Survivors’ Network supported 1,035 survivors of sexual violence, of whom 31 – less than 3 percent – were trans or non-binary, according to the charity’s most recent annual review.

The Level Up spokesperson also explains that the most pernicious harassment the organisation receives is from gender-critical feminists who claim that they “don’t care about victims of sexual violence”.

“I feel like that is particularly dangerous,” Falodun-Liburd says. “It’s a really gross weaponisation of survivorhood, because it assumes that advocates of trans justice aren’t ourselves survivors.”

She continues: “It's a very similar narrative that was, and still is, used against Black women. Our womanhood has always been policed or outrightly erased because it does not meet the white supremacist ideal for femininity.

“That's what resonates quite deeply with me, in terms of trying to support our trans siblings. That is the connection for me – the dehumanisation of trans people in this country very closely resembles the historic dehumanisation of Black and Global Majority women."

The term “gender-critical” is closely associated with the contemporary term “anti-gender”, which refers to right-wing and religious anti-LGBTQ+ actors who oppose what they call “gender ideology”. These anti-gender groups campaign against abortion access, inclusive sex education, same-sex marriage, surrogacy and adoption rights for LGBTQ+ couples, and trans rights. In the US, states like Florida that propose anti-trans legislation do so in tandem with laws restricting abortion access.

Gender-critical feminists’ well-documented relationship with the far right works, according to research from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), in two ways. “Firstly, [gender-critical feminists] produce scholarship that lays the intellectual and cultural foundation on which fundamentalists and the far right build in order to advance anti-rights agendas,” AWID’s Rights at Risk 2022 report explains. “Secondly, they form political alliances and coalitions to undermine and block progress on trans rights.” 

Questioning the “very identity of trans people”, presenting trans rights as contradictory to the rights of cis women and lobbying against legislation that would secure human rights for trans people, the AWID report states, only make it easier for right-wing groups and religious fundamentalists to attack other human rights.

In doing this, gender-critical feminists become what Alison Phipps, professor of sociology at Newcastle University and the author of Me Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism, calls a “human shield” for “the far-right war on trans people”. This is linked to “the war on women, on reproductive rights – it’s all part of the same agenda,” she tells VICE. “Gender-critical feminism is a really useful tool for the far right, because it enables it to repackage bigotry in a cloak of respectability.”

Another indication of this came in 2019, when Keen-Minshull appeared on YouTube with prominent Canadian far-right YouTuber Jean-François Gariépy – who calls for a “white ethno-state” and has made videos with fellow white nationalist Richard Spencer. Discussing Keen-Minshull’s interview, users on Mumsnet’s Feminism board – a noted hotbed of transphobia in the UK – concluded rather tellingly: “Are alt-right white supremacists not allowed to have concerns about self-ID?” 

“We see an alignment of lots of prominent gender-critical feminists with fascists,” Olufemi notes. “This is not a coincidence. Their understanding of sex and gender as fixed, ‘biological’ facts is fascistic in that fact seeks to impose a ‘right' order on human populations. It legitimises the fascist veneration of men and women’s distinct roles, the nuclear family and the narrative that [white] men need to protect [white] women and girls from predatory queers and racialised others.”

They add: “It’s no coincidence that a lot of gender-critical feminists who have power, in terms of rhetoric, are middle-class white women who act as gatekeepers for media institutions. There isn’t really an understanding within the gender-critical ideology of gender and race as co-constitutive and as contested sites.”