This interview is based on Fran Amery’s article ‘Gender critical’ feminism as biopolitical project published in Sexualities (2025).
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The anti-trans movement in the UK appears to have different roots compared to the more straightforwardly conservative version in the US or South America for example. Could you tell us about the differences and whether we can still see them as an organised movement?
So-called ‘gender-critical feminism’ has origins in certain pockets of radical and lesbian feminist organising in the 1970s and has considerable crossovers with anti-porn and ‘prostitution abolition’ feminisms (though it’s certainly possible to be anti-porn or anti-sex work and pro-trans). But the contemporary UK anti-trans movement is also considerably influenced by various conservative movements internationally, in particular ‘anti-gender’ movements. These have their origins in the Vatican and initially spread via Catholic intellectuals and social movements, particularly within Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America – though these now aren’t exclusively Catholic movements and are now well established around the world and notably in the United States. They oppose what they call ‘gender ideology’, which typically refers to a mash of feminist ideas, LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive rights. But transphobia has always been an important part of these movements going back to their Vatican roots.
Despite the fact that anti-gender movements are typically also anti-feminist movements, we’re now at a point where feminist and conservative anti-trans movements in the UK have considerably converged. ‘Gender-critical’ and conservative figures work side-by-side in campaigns and on the boards of organisations that oppose gender-affirming care. The UK movement has also borrowed the term ‘gender ideology’. In the UK this is used interchangeably with ‘trans ideology’ but otherwise the claims made about it are almost identical: ‘gender ideology’, like it is in wider conservative anti-gender discourse, is for the UK anti-trans movement a sinister force that has ‘captured’ institutions and turned them against the supposed will of the majority.
In line with wider anti-gender movements we’ve also seen a shift in focus in the UK towards children and an increased prominence for parents’ groups that oppose both medical and social transition for young people. Their claims are strikingly similar to those made by conservative homophobic movements: that vulnerable, innocent children are being corrupted by a dangerous adult sexuality. Anti-porn feminism has supplied these more child-focused organisations with the narrative that trans women are ‘pornsick’ and sexual threats to children. More broadly, conservative anti-trans actors have started borrowing feminist frames about women’s vulnerability to men and the impact of pornography.
There have always been ‘gender critical’ figures who have insisted on standing apart from religious right and far-right actors, but their voices seem to be growing ever quieter. Tellingly, Woman’s Place UK, a more ‘moderate’ group which had been warning other feminists in the movement about the dangers of the far right, disbanded in late 2024.
In the article, you argue ‘gender critical’ feminism is a biopolitical project. Could you explain this and how it helps us understand the movement better?
The term ‘biopolitics’ comes from the work of Michel Foucault and refers to ‘techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’. The article understands biopolitics has having two poles, one of which concerns the discipline (or ‘subjugation’) of individuals and their bodies and the other of which concerns the management of populations. I argue that ‘gender critical’ feminism is also interested in these two poles, and that, (seemingly) paradoxically, it views women’s liberation as only possible through the surveillance and control of those marked as ‘gender deviants’.
The article focuses mainly on the population management pole and situates ‘gender-critical’ feminism within a context in which feminism (or rather, certain feminisms) have become increasingly entangled with the work of neoliberal governments. One consequence of this entanglement is that gender equality work is now seen to require the collection of massive quantities of quantitative data in order to facilitate government decisions about the allocation of resources. Achieving gender equality thus becomes an administrative exercise. When combined with transphobic beliefs about the primacy of ‘biological sex’ as an organising principle of society, this helps explain why the movement became preoccupied with how trans people answer questions on the census, and more recently, its attempts to control how information on sex and gender is collected and reported in research and official records.
I didn’t really have space to address it in this article, but there is also ‘gender critical’ activity at the disciplinary pole of biopolitics, including recruitment of parents as agents of gender discipline within the home, teaching them methods to encourage their children to ‘desist’ from being trans.
Finally, could you tell us what role transphobia, and its ‘gender critical’ version in particular, plays in the wider reactionary resurgence?
Transphobia has been a prime tool in helping reactionary movements unpick the progressive alliances that oppose them. We know that this is a deliberate strategy. For example, key figures in the US Evangelical right have called very explicitly to ‘separate the T’ from LGB in order to ‘divide and conquer’ and they are well aware of the usefulness of anti-trans feminist ideas to this strategy. This isn’t the first time that the Christian Right has tried to drive feminists apart – older tactics have included using arguments about sex-selective abortion to turn feminists against one another – but feminist transphobia has been a particularly successful wedge, driving feminist alliances apart and making enemies out of friends.
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Fran Amery is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath. Her research addresses contemporary struggles around gender and LGBTQ+ equality, specifically regarding reproductive rights and justice and the rise of anti-gender movements. Her current research addresses, firstly, organised transphobia, particularly the ‘gender-critical’ movement in the UK, but also its international linkages. Secondly, her research addresses menstrual justice and injustice globally in the context of activism, politics and policy. She is the author of Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain.
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