When someone tells you they are standing up for women by opposing trans rights, ask them which women they mean. Because the women most immediately harassed, policed, and excluded when anti-trans hostility gains ground are often cisgender women who happen not to fit a narrow, racialised, heteronormative idea of what a woman should look like. Trans rights and women's rights are not in conflict. They are, and always have been, the same fight.
What Nadia Whittome got exactly right
In a clip credited to Nadia Whittome and Pink News, Whittome makes an observation that I think is one of the most important in this whole debate. She points out that attacks on trans people do not stay contained to trans people. From the abuse directed at women of colour competing in sport, to cisgender lesbians being harassed in bathrooms, the harm spreads outward to anyone who does not fit within what she describes as anti-trans activists' "ever narrowing heteronormative and Eurocentric parameters" of womanhood.
That framing matters. It names the mechanism, not just the outcome. Anti-trans activism does not draw a careful line around trans people and leave everyone else untouched. It enforces a template of acceptable femininity, and that template has always been narrow, white, straight, and conventionally feminine. Everyone who falls outside it is at risk.
How the harm actually spreads
Think about what bathroom policing actually looks like in practice. Nobody stops in a public toilet to check a birth certificate. What happens is that women who are tall, short-haired, dark-skinned, butch, disabled, or simply not dressed in a way that reads as feminine enough get challenged, followed, filmed, or thrown out. Cisgender lesbians have reported this for years. Women of colour have reported it for years. The framing that says trans women are the threat to women in bathrooms has, in practice, made bathrooms more dangerous for all women who do not look the part.
The same is true in sport. The cases that made headlines as examples of supposed unfairness disproportionately involved women of colour, women whose bodies were deemed too muscular, too fast, too powerful to fit the acceptable feminine frame. Caster Semenya is not trans. Imane Khelif is not trans. But the logic that polices trans women's bodies bleeds straight into the logic that polices theirs, because the underlying project is identical: deciding which bodies count as properly female.
The shift to liberal transphobia: why it is harder to name
Here is what has changed, and what the update to this piece needs to address directly. The most overt forms of anti-trans hostility, the slurs, the explicit dehumanisation, the unambiguous bigotry, are now easier to call out precisely because they are so visible. The harder problem is the version that has moved into the mainstream wearing the language of reasonableness.
Liberal transphobia does not call trans women men. It says it wants a "nuanced conversation". It does not demand trans people be expelled from public life. It says it is just asking questions, seeking balance, trying to protect everyone. It uses the frame of compromise, of hearing both sides, of not rushing. And it is significantly harder to push back against, because any pushback can be recast as intolerance of debate, or as refusing to engage with legitimate concerns.
So how do you name it? The test is not tone, it is consequence. Ask what the practical effect of the position would be. If someone says they support trans people but opposes every legal or medical pathway that would make trans lives liveable, the position is not supportive regardless of how it is phrased. If someone says they believe trans women are women but thinks every space women use should be organised by biological sex, the first clause is doing no work. If someone says they are not anti-trans but consistently amplifies, platforms, or gives charitable readings to people who are, the disclaimer is not load-bearing.
The compromise frame is also worth examining carefully. Real compromise involves both parties giving something. When the proposed compromise is always that trans people accept less recognition, less access, and less care, while the other side concedes nothing of practical significance, that is not compromise. It is concession demanded of one party only, with polite language wrapped around it.
When anti-trans hostility is affecting cis people around you
If you are trying to push back in a conversation where someone is being affected by this dynamic, and they are cisgender, a few things are worth keeping in mind.
First, name the shared mechanism rather than asking them to prioritise someone else's rights over their own experience. The woman of colour who was challenged in a bathroom does not need to be told she should care about trans rights as an act of solidarity. She needs to hear that the logic that harmed her and the logic that harms trans women are the same logic, and that both of them are better off when that logic loses ground.
Second, point to the pattern. Individual incidents can be framed as misunderstandings or edge cases. The pattern cannot. When the same enforcement mechanism consistently lands on the same categories of people, that is not an accident. It is the system working as designed.
Third, when someone uses reasonable-sounding language to arrive at positions that would cause serious harm, you do not have to pretend the language neutralises the harm. You can say: I hear that you are framing this carefully, and I also notice that what you are describing would mean trans people cannot access healthcare, or cannot use public facilities, or cannot have their identity recognised. The framing does not change what the outcome would be for real people.
The claim that this is about protecting women
When someone says they are standing up for women by opposing trans rights, the most useful question is: which women have you stood up for lately? Have they spoken publicly about the abuse directed at women athletes who failed the femininity test? Have they campaigned against the harassment of lesbians in bathrooms? Have they defended women of colour from body policing in sport? If the answer to those questions is consistently no, then the concern for women is doing selective work. It is being deployed in one direction only, and that direction is not toward the protection of women broadly. It is toward the enforcement of a particular idea of what women are.
Whittome's point, at its heart, is that the category of acceptable womanhood being defended by anti-trans activists is not one that includes most of the world's women. It is narrower than that, and it is getting narrower. Trans women are not the only people falling outside it. They are the current focal point of an enforcement project that has always had a much wider target.
What to actually say when someone pushes back
If someone accuses you of shutting down debate by naming this dynamic, you might try: I am not saying the conversation cannot happen. I am saying that calling a position reasonable does not make its consequences less real. If the outcome of a policy is that people cannot get medical care, or cannot use public facilities safely, then the policy causes that harm whether it is proposed gently or not.
If someone says you are conflating different issues, you can point to the shared mechanism: these are not coincidentally linked. They share a common logic about which bodies are acceptable, and both sets of people are harmed by it.
If someone says they are just trying to protect women, you can ask them to be specific: which women, from what, and what would you do differently if you were wrong?
The conversation is not going away. The least useful thing is to approach it as though the only form of anti-trans hostility worth naming is the overt kind. The version wearing the language of reasonableness is, right now, causing more structural harm, because it is the version that gets taken seriously in policy rooms.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Written by Dr Helen Webberley, drawing on the words of Nadia Whittome via Pink News.
Comments