Transphobic feminist Julia Beck on the far-right Tucker Carlson's show
To confront the current resurgence of transphobia requires that we acknowledge and understand the phenomenon of collaboration between many prominent transphobic feminists (who now often describe themselves euphemistically, and inaccurately, as 'gender critical' ['GC'] feminists) and the hard right. When Judith Butler wrote in The Guardian that 'GC' feminists were allying with the worst sorts of reactionaries (1, 2), some left-wing activists were genuinely surprised or sceptical to hear such an accusation. This article is intended to demonstrate the unfortunate and shameful existence of these alliances.
I hope it will be useful to comrades who may not have encountered the problem before, or who may have assumed it marginal. Being a sampling of examples, it is not an exhaustive, systematic mapping, and does not attempt to cover the longer historical roots of this cross-political convergence and coordination. Most of this is not original research but draws heavily on work by other activists, linked in the text for readers wishing to follow up.
The war on Gillick competence
Gillick competence is the legal principle that children under 16 can consent to medical treatment if the medical professional assesses that the child has “sufficient understanding and intelligence to understand fully what is proposed”.
Gillick is a precedent set in a case where a right-wing religious activist tried, and failed, to block teenagers’ access to contraception without parental agreement. Since then, it has been the legal basis on which under-16s have been able to access contraceptive prescriptions, as well as other treatments including abortion and vaccination.
Undermining or overturning Gillick is therefore a goal for reactionaries, from anti-abortionists to anti- vaxxers, who want to extend the ability of conservative parents to deny their children (particularly girls) the right to make informed choices about healthcare.
Angela Driver explained in Solidarity (1, 2, 3) how the Bell v Tavistock case revolved around Gillick competence and the ability of trans teenagers to access puberty blockers. Bell’s solicitor, Paul Conrathe, is an Evangelical Christian leader with a record as a conservative legal campaigner. His previous efforts include multiple cases attempting to restrict abortion access or undermine the validity of consent to abortion (1, 2, 3, 4, 5); a challenge against equalising the age of same-gender sexual consent; opposition to the ‘No Outsiders’ LGBT+ equality education programme at Parkfield Community School in Birmingham; and a challenge to the BBC’s broadcast of the ‘blasphemous’ Jerry Springer – The Opera .
After their defeat on appeal, Conrathe said that they would seek to take the case to the Supreme Court on the basis that “the Gillick competency test is no longer fit for purpose”.
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (AKA Posie Parker) – one of the UK's most well-known transphobic feminists and a protest leader – agreed, saying: “My idea, from now on, is that maybe we need to repeal Gillick, or we need to re-examine it.… We have decided that children really can consent, and I don’t think they can. … We need to find other ways to stop teenage pregnancy.”
That is, ways to stop pregnancy other than respecting girls’ rights to make their own informed choices about abortion and contraception. Keen-Minshull is no fringe outcast but a regular protest organiser, associated with other prominent British ‘GC’ feminists such as Maya Forstater, Venice Allan and Helen Staniland.
So – in the most high-profile recent ‘GC’ legal initiative in the UK, transphobic feminists collaborated with a long-standing Christian conservative activist, in an attempt to destroy the law that informed, competent teenagers need for access both to trans healthcare, and to contraception and abortion. Thankfully, the Supreme Court shot them down – this time.
Alliances with the US Christian Right
Transphobic feminist leaders and groups have particularly built alliances with prominent organisations from the US Christian Right.
Though there had previously been some looser, one-off links, US liberal writer Brynn Tannehill traces the key tipping point to 2014. Legal advances for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights had thrown the Christian Right onto the back foot, and in response they made a calculated decision to pivot into fostering a moral panic over trans rights. (N.B. much of this section draws from Tannehill’s essay.)
The Southern Policy Law Center reported on how right-wing leaders later openly discussed this strategic shift at the Christian Right’s 2017 Values Voter Summit, attended by then-president Trump. Leaders talked about driving a wedge – “divide and conquer” – between trans rights advocates and the rest of the progressive, liberal, feminist and LGBT movements. They advised their conservative supporters to lift talking points from, sow fear among, and seek alliances with, feminists, LGB activists, etc.
They were successful - the Christian Right found its partners in the transphobic feminist movement.
Early efforts included a substantial grant from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to the radical feminist Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). The ADF is a Christian organisation that runs legal, legislative and ‘cultural’ campaigning in the US and around the world, against the separation of church and state, abortion rights, LGBT rights and the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing & Combating Violence Against Women. The Southern Poverty Law Center (which has a lengthy report on its activities) designates it as a hate group and highlights its influence on leading US Republicans and the Trump administration.
In 2017, our own newspaper highlighted WoLF’s collaboration with another evangelical Christian group, Focus On The Family, in opposition to including trans women in Title IX (legislation against sexist discrimination).
That same year, WoLF contracted Zachary Freeman and his Imperial Independent Media to do their fundraising. Freeman is a director in the anti-abortion Family Policy Institute of Washington. He is known for his efforts to get the names of workers in a foetal tissue research lab released, so that anti-abortionists could target them for harassment.
Keen-Minshull is a special advisor to WoLF’s board. In 2021, Keen-Minshull talked about travelling to the US before the 2020 election and advising Republican strategists to focus on anti-trans agitation as a campaign issue. She argued that Trump was a lesser evil compared to Biden, because of the latter’s support for including trans women in anti-discrimination law. She called on (cis) women to put aside the left-right divide and abortion rights, in favour of an alliance against trans rights – which she believes “destroy” women’s rights. Keen-Minshull justified this alliance on the basis that if forced to choose, she would rather see women subjected to a “conservative family unit”, forced to wear “uniforms” and do housework.
The ADF is also pumping more and more US hard-right money into the UK where it campaigns against abortion rights and assisted dying. And in 2019, it worked with anti-trans feminist Linda Bellos. ADF flew Bellos to DC to join a protest at the Supreme Court during the Zarda, Bostock and Harris hearings. The protest was co-sponsored by WoLF and the evangelical Concerned Women for America. The hearings were for cases in which the ADF and the Trump administration – with anti- trans interventions from WoLF – sought to defend employers’ rights to discriminate against workers who are LGB, trans, or do not conform to gender stereotypes in their appearance. The protest also received a solidarity message from another prominent British ‘GC’ feminist, Julia Long.
In fact, Ruth Serwotka, co-founder of another ‘GC’ organisation Woman’s Place UK, wrote condemning WoLF’s participation in this coalition (though she omits mention of Bellos or Long), and praising women who intervened to counter-protest. Serwotka says the counter-protesters were also radical feminists.
Long has form. On another trip to the US, Long and Keen-Minshull filmed themselves walking into a private meeting to harass and insult Sarah McBride – a trans woman and press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT rights NGO.
In 2019, WoLF board members were part of the top-table at a public meeting hosted and funded by the Heritage Foundation. Heritage is a homophobic, neoconservative, pro-Christian-Right think-tank, which was extremely influential in both the Reagan and Trump administrations. Dansky and Chavez were not there to debate Heritage – rather, the panel were all self-proclaimed liberals and feminists, brought in by the right-wing hosts to talk about their shared anti-trans stances.
One of those panellists was Julia Beck, who then went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to chat to him about opposing trans rights. Beck explicitly told press she understood herself to be allying, reluctantly, with the right: “I do feel kind of nervous about working with the right wing because they have opposed women’s bodily autonomy and lesbians’ sovereignty”. Again, she did not make the appearance in order to challenge or debate the right, but to collaborate – during the interview she made no attempt to discuss their differences or raise any criticism or disagreement. (Carlson has also become a favourite for other former leftists and second-campists who have joined him in attacking liberalism from the right, rather than from the left.)
Beck’s professed nervousness about the alliance did not stop her going further. She went on to accept invitations from congressional Republicans to testify that the Violence Against Women Act should not protect trans people, and against the Equality Act, which would add protections for sexual orientation and gender identity to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
And Carlson’s spot with Beck wasn’t his first cross-partisan transphobic collaboration either. His Daily Caller outlet is part of the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition. In HATAC’s own words: “We are radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives that are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation.”
HATAC brings together Carlson and other high-profile hard-right US outlets like The Federalist; Christian organisations such as the National Catholic Bioethics Center and the evangelical Family Research Council; and prominent ‘GC’ feminists, including the British initiatives Fair Play for Women and Transgender Trend.
In 2017, the Family Policy Alliance and WoLF filed a joint submission in a Supreme Court case in defence of a school that forced a trans boy to use segregated facilities away from all other children, even after he legally transitioned to male. The Family Policy Alliance boasted of their cooperation with “unlikely allies”. The ACLU represented the trans boy and, years later, he has won the discrimination suit.
Another explicit joint initiative in 2021 was a submission to the UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity. WoLF led the submission, advised by the Christian Right anti- LGBT rights organisation "United Families International". It was co-signed by radical feminist platforms such as OBJECT and Feminist Current; well-known ‘GC’ feminists including Keen-Minshull, Linda Blade, Janice Raymond and Heather Brunskell-Evans (co-founder of Women’s Declaration International – see below); and hard-right religious groups such as Heritage Foundation, the mis-named American College of Pediatricians (a Christian, SPLC-designated hate group that peddles pseudoscientific justifications for homophobia), and Partners for Ethical Care (an international group that promotes a project mapping trans healthcare clinics for harassment, on the model of the campaigns against abortion clinics).
Yet another co-production was the “Gender Resource Guide”, an anti-trans handbook for parents, on which WoLF, the Heritage Foundation, the Family Policy Alliance, the aforementioned American College of Pediatricians and others worked together.
British and European organisations
As these initiatives and the attack on Gillick show, this collaboration extends to this side of the Atlantic. Not only do British and European ‘GCs’ collaborate with US right-wingers, British conservatives also understand the utility of cynical cooperation with transphobic feminists in the “war on woke”. In a Conservative Party 2021 conference fringe event, senior editor of UnHerd Ed West stated that anti-trans pushback was made possible “by using gender critical feminists as human shields, because there’s no Conservative who will go out there and use the Conservative argument against this. We have to use other progressives to fight it.” Fair Play for Women and the LGB Alliance (see below) were also hosted by the conference.
1. Transgender Trend
Transgender Trend, mentioned above in relation to HATAC, was among those who wrote in solidarity with the Morning Star after protests against its transphobic content, praising the Stalinist rag’s “courageous stand against the erasure of women as a class”.
From the opposite side, Christian Concern gave a glowing review of TT founder Stephanie Davies- Arai’s speech on the panel of a 2020 parliamentary meeting of the religious reactionary “Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group”. They were pleased that someone from “a more socially liberal background” could be such an asset in the fight against trans inclusive sex and relationships education. It does not appear that Davies-Arai was interested in challenging these bigots.
2. LGB Alliance
Another high-profile transphobic feminist organisation in the UK is the LGB Alliance. Purporting to stand for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights, the bulk of its work is anti-trans agitation.
Its code of conduct states that it will not work with organisations hostile to LGB rights or women’s reproductive rights. But Pink News has documented Gary Powell’s role in helping to launch it. Powell is a special consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture. The CBC agitates against stem cell research, surrogacy, and sperm and egg donation, and its founder and leader Jennifer Lahl is a religious conservative who speaks at anti-abortion conferences and criticises same-gender couples raising children. Lahl and Powell have connections to the Heritage Foundation and ADF. Powell is also a research fellow at the conservative Bow Group, described by its Chair as standing “against the tide of globalism, liberalism and Marxism”.
In 2019, LGB Alliance co-founder Bev Jackson – a self-described socialist feminist – explicitly argued in defence of collaboration with “anti-women” forces on the hard right. She admitted that it was the help of the Heritage Foundation “that made it possible to launch a gender-critical movement in the US”.
These alliances may relate to a vein of broader social reaction in LGB Alliance activists’ politics. Another co-founder, Malcolm Clark, even argued that school students should not be permitted to form LGBT clubs at school or explore their own sexual orientation, because this would “encourage” predatory teachers.
3. Red-brown connections
In 2019, Keen-Minshull and Marit Rønstad (transphobic feminist co-founder of Gender Identity Challenge Scandinavia) came together for comradely discussions with Assadists like Vanessa Beeley, pseudo-anti-imperialist conspiracy theorists, and the Norwegian anti-immigration, Holocaust-denying, far-right Alliansen Party at the red-brown Mot Dag conference run by former Maoist leader Pål Steigan.
Among the Putinist propaganda and antisemitism that fills Steigan’s website are numerous contributions from Kajsa “Ekis” Ekman, a prominent transphobic feminist and associate of the Communist Party (Sweden), who co-founded the Swedish branch of Women’s Declaration International. WDI is an ostensibly feminist campaign for ‘sex-based rights’ (an anti-trans dog-whistle) whose co-founders include Sheila Jeffreys and Heather Brunskell-Evans.
Dissent
These alliances have not gone uncriticised among ‘GC’ feminists. One, Jean Hatchet, intended to join Keen-Minshull and the notorious Venice Allan on one of the delegations to the USA, until she discovered the nature of their alliances with misogynistic, anti-LGBT right-wing Christian organisations. When she raised objections with her comrades, she was various ignored, dismissed, and accused of “divisive” “purity politics”. Ultimately, she says, she had no choice but to pull out. Hatchet remained dedicated to anti-trans activism but has been accused of sabotage for making these criticisms.
As mentioned above, Ruth Serwotka of WPUK has polemicised against WoLF’s lash-ups.
Julie Bindel, too, has denounced Keen-Minshull/Parker. But this seems empty given Bindel’s own similar lash-up in anti-surrogacy campaigning. She and Jennifer Lahl (see above) appeared as friends and colleagues in a promotional video for the latter’s Center for Bioethics and Culture. In this video the pair boasted about doing a “drive-by” of a fertility clinic, which appears to mean they marched in and harassed a (woman) worker who they mocked as “creepy”.
Clearly, it is not the case that the entire ‘GC’ movement participates in, agrees with, or is even fully aware of, these alliances. But a non-negligible, prominent section of the movement does, in ways that right-wing leaders explicitly regard as useful to the right’s causes. Even some ‘GC’ feminists identify it as a problem! Though many in the rest of the movement seems to have little to say about their comrades’ joint work with misogynists, homophobes and theocrats.
Transphobia and antisemitic conspiracy theory
Solidarity has published articles previously discussing the parallels between antisemitism and transphobia, and between the “left” manifestations of both. I will not repeat those here, but I will flag a particularly disturbing strain of conspiracy theory that combines the two.
For an introduction to the issue, see this investigation in The Progressive and this explanation by Christa Peterson. I will summarise. A gender version of the anti-migrant “Great Replacement” theory is popular among far-right white supremacists. They allege that a Jewish plot promotes “transgenderism” as a form of “ethnic warfare”, as well as a profiteering racket for their Big Pharma investments. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan similarly alleges that “the Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behaviour that Hollywood is putting out, turning men into women and women into men.”
The conspiracy cherry-picks and exaggerates the role some wealthy liberal Jews – some cis, some trans – such as George Soros (a regular bogeyman for modern antisemites), Jennifer Pritzker, Martine Rothblatt, and Jon Stryker, who have made donations to liberal NGOs and charities promoting LGBT rights. (Though N.B. it seems the far-right might have mis-identified Stryker as Jewish.)
In its most extreme form, the theory cites a supposed Jewish adherence to transhumanism and alleges that “transgenderism” is merely the first step in a project to dissociate humans from biological nature and normalise altering our bodies. This will, so the ‘theory’ goes, allow the cabal to usher in a dystopia where they can get microchips into everyone’s brains and forcibly integrate humanity with computers(!).
Over the past few years, transphobic feminist writer Jennifer Bilek – previously an activist with Deep Green Resistance, which hopes to save nature by destroying industrial civilisation – has written up similar allegations. She focusses on Jewish liberals who support trans rights, and even promotes the most extreme allegations about transhumanism.
It would be one thing if Bilek was a fringe outcast from the GC movement and her theories derided by other transphobic feminists. But as Christa Peterson writes, within GC circles Bilek is “extreme but not fringe”.
Most significantly, Peterson shows how more mainstream transphobic feminists peddle watered down versions of Bilek’s theories – claiming that Rothblatt et al engineered the trans movement, merely omitting the Jewish identity of the accused cabal (whatever these writers intend, as with most conspiracy theories a substantial number of readers will complete the “cabal = Jews” equation for themselves).
In her popular 2021 book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” Helen Joyce also picks out Pritzker, Stryker and Soros and claims “[t]hey have shaped the global agenda”. In fact, Bilek has accused Joyce of plagiarism! Though Joyce had previously promoted Bilek’s investigative work, she says the Jewish identities of the supposed orchestrators she flagged is entirely coincidental.
Peterson also highlights how other high-profile transphobic feminists promote and recommend Bilek’s “investigations”, including Sheila Jeffreys, Allison Bailey, Kara Dansky, Bev Jackson , Debbie Hayton and organisations like Transgender Trend, WDI, Women’s Space Ireland, and OBJECT UK.
What's wrong with single-issue collaboration?
By highlighting prominent transphobic feminists’ intentional collaborations with the hard-right, I am not arguing that this collaboration, in and of itself, proves wrong their underlying arguments and perspectives. To rebut ‘gender critical’ feminism, its political content must still be tackled directly. That task is undertaken by plenty of other work, including in Solidarity and on the Workers’ Liberty website.
The collaborations are, of course, based on the points of political agreement between transphobic feminists and the hard-right. But it would also be wrong to argue that the transphobic feminists’ stances are discredited merely because they coincide with stances held by right-wing reactionaries. After all, progressives and reactionaries can arrive at the same position on a given issue for all sorts of reasons – for example, whether you were for or against Brexit, you would have found both left and right-wingers, both workers’ organisations and ruling class forces, advocating the same answer to that question as you.
So if sharing a stance with reactionary right-wingers, or even collaborating with them, doesn’t prove the content of the stance wrong, why bring this up at all? Because aside from our criticisms of the transphobic feminists' ideology, there are also important principles and consequences about what methods and alliances a self-proclaimedly left, progressive or liberatory movement uses to pursue its goals.
First, clearly, the arguments for ‘gender critical’ feminism are wrong, as my comrades have convincingly argued elsewhere. Hostility to trans rights and trans liberation is reactionary, and runs contrary to the pursuit of women’s liberation, working-class emancipation and socialism.
But for a moment let’s pretend otherwise, for the sake of argument. Active collaboration with the reactionary right – forming joint organisations, undertaking joint initiatives, promoting hard-right commentators and organisations – would nevertheless remain unacceptable.
Even when socialists’ goals incidentally align with some reactionaries or some ruling class forces on a given question, it is necessary to maintain clear political and organisational independence, and to put forward our position based clearly on our own reasons and reasoning. For a forceful argument in favour of these distinctions, see for example Trotsky’s polemic "Learn to think".
When the “gender critical” feminists breach that divide and coordinate with deeply reactionary forces, not only do they attack trans rights, but they help to empower and promote these forces as a whole, undermining broader socialist feminist and liberatory causes such as reproductive freedom.
Indeed, some of them explicitly calculate that this is a sacrifice worth making to defeat the supposedly existential ‘threat’ posed by trans liberation. Keen-Minshull, for instance, is quoted above saying as much. And when they sided with the Trumpists and theocrats during the Zarda/Bostock/Harris hearings, Linda Bellos and Julia Long made the choice that it was more important to uphold employers’ freedom to discriminate against trans workers, than to oppose employers’ freedom to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and gender non-conforming workers.
As one activist said on social media: “I still can’t get my head around Bellos – a gender non-conforming gay woman with short hair who wears a suit – supporting the Trump administration’s efforts to make it legal to discriminate against gay and/or gender non-conforming women.”
Moreover, over time this collaboration must surely exert its own corrosive influence on the transphobic feminists’ own politics and organisations. Perhaps this contributes, for example, to their political tendency’s increasing susceptibility to the conspiracy theories discussed above.
Toxic obsession
The toxic obsession of many transphobic feminists has led them to a place where they seem to view the existence, inclusion and rights of trans people as a singularly existential threat. They therefore render themselves willing to throw almost any other principle – any other right! – under the bus in their lash-ups against it.
The obsessive nature of their hostility has also helped fuel conspiratorial thinking. This is shown by the widespread embrace of claims that, rather than arising from an oppressed group fighting for self- emancipation, the trans rights movement is instead driven by nefarious billionaires.
We cannot effectively face the anti-trans feminist movement, and the struggle for trans liberation, without acknowledging and understanding this reality.
