In the midst of the pandemic, a slew of anti-trans books came out within months of each other: polemics about shadowy cabals propagating ‘transgender ideology’ or the ‘transgender craze seducing our daughters’. I remember how unnerving it felt to see such sinister and inflammatory ideas being considered worthy of respect, and how comparatively rare it was to see trans people granted a platform to write at length about trans politics for the general public. But there was at least one major exception: Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, a sharp, rigorous, historically informed dissection of contemporary anti-trans oppression and an argument for dismantling it, rooted in the need for both economic liberation and bodily autonomy.

Five years on, ideas of transness as a contagion, a conspiracy, and/or an undesirable element are still entrenched in UK media and culture. Things have gotten considerably worse, materially and rhetorically, for trans people in Britain. Alongside this, escalating far-right racism and worsening economic conditions have made The Transgender Issue’s left-wing structural argument – that we should go beyond attempting to win on the terrain of representation and focus on wider left-wing organising – even more prescient. The book, which is being reissued with a substantial new foreword ahead of its fifth anniversary, has lost none of its power and relevance, though its original hopes for what a Labour government might provide have been spectacularly disappointed. Given the ground trans people have lost since its original publication, it’s a useful text to revisit when thinking about where we go next.

Dazed talked to Faye over Zoom about the changing political landscape in the UK, the politics of visibility, and where the trans left should focus its energy now.  

What’s on your mind right now, as the reissued version of The Transgender Issue is coming out? How has your understanding of the political landscape changed since it was originally released?

Shon Faye: I’m thinking more concertedly right now about the general threat of far-right politics in the UK. I worry that what’s happening in Belfast right now [we conducted this interview during a days-long campaign of right-wing loyalist violence in Belfast, mostly directed against people of colour] is a foretaste of what could come if we continue on a far-right trajectory. When I originally wrote the book between 2018 and 2020, Reform UK didn’t exist. And now we’re staring down the barrel of the prospect of its gaining power. Hopefully that won’t come to pass, but we have to be realistic that there’s a very real chance of that. And we have to think about what that means for all minority groups, for migrants in particular, for people of colour, and for trans people as well, because trans people have been earmarked in quite a big, public way as a target group by the right. So that’s on my mind. When I wrote the book, and when it came out, I didn’t quite feel the same immediate fear about the prospect of a very, very right-wing governing power in the UK. 

The foundations we were working with then were different; the Tories weren’t as openly antagonistic as they are under Badenoch, and Labour were seen as having the potential to make things better. People seemed more willing to think in terms of a horizon, a better future that might open up, even if things get worse first. Whereas now, a lot of the trans people I know in the UK talk about the future, and they end their sentences with ‘until 2029.’ 

Shon Faye: Things have gotten much harder for trans people in this country, even before we consider the precise threat of what a Reform government would do to us, and the difficult thing is that cis people are only partially aware of why. Cis people who are loosely aware of ‘trans issues’ in this country will likely be aware of the Supreme Court ruling, for example, and the segregationist policies around that. But it’s also important to think about the ways that things have gotten so much harder for trans youth, and the attacks on trans healthcare, for trans youth and increasingly for trans adults as well. That’s also making people feel precarious and like trans life in the UK isn’t really viable.

The explosion of visibility doesn’t protect us from harassment in public spaces; it can even make it more likely

There’s this aggressive backlash happening against prior attempts to normalise us, this attempt to stymie our free movement and existence in public space, which you address in the book as working on both an interpersonal and a state level. But at the same time, there are more of us than there’s ever been. It’s strange seeing a campaign against us being allowed to participate in public life when you can’t go into a big supermarket, or a club, or walk for more than half an hour through a major city centre without a high likelihood of seeing a trans person. 

Shon Faye: Yeah, that is absolutely true. And I’ve witnessed that shift in my own lifetime, working in the 2000s, before the explosion of trans visibility in all senses of the word. I remember when trans people just weren’t really spoken about except as objects of ridicule on late-night television. And there’s a mixed blessing to that. The explosion of visibility doesn’t protect us from harassment in public spaces; it can even make it more likely. There’s a more common cis fantasy around ‘transvestigation’ now, where trans people are supposedly everywhere and are supposedly obviously trans and clockable, but are also tricksters who are trying to deceive… that being such a mainstream idea is quite new, and I think it’s directly related to the disproportionate amount of coverage that trans people get in mainstream media. 

Increased visibility has certain benefits; when sympathetic or powerful people come out, that may create a vested interest in their powerful friends. But then the growing numbers also have negative effects re: people focusing more on what to spot, developing more caricatures, developing a growing sense of threat. And for the most radicalised people, suddenly everyone is trans, and it’s infecting everything, and nothing can ever be good or normal again unless we ‘return’ through some kind of spectacular violence.

Shon Faye: This is quite a common historical trope, and the group changes and the target changes but the overall cycle doesn’t. All of this is a form of propaganda, some of which the mainstream media participates in, and some of which is done through blogs and Substack and social media. It’s fascinating to me that in the past year, the BBC’s editorial guidance has shifted in such a way that as soon as you say ‘trans woman’, there has to be a clause after that says, ‘who is a biological man, biological male.’ And same with trans men. They state that someone is trans and then they need to provide this kind of exposing alternative definition. Ideology and propaganda are being used to entrench a suspicion around the very concept of transness itself.

Trans Kids Deserve Better have had some pretty good ideas about protest compared to us adults

What can even be done about transphobia in the UK press, at this point?

Shon Faye: The anti-trans issue in the press is symptomatic of a wider issue with our press in general. One of the things I’m proudest about in The Transgender Issue is that it has a very anti-capitalist, socialist lens, and I think in the UK, media is broken because of the interests that it serves. The editorial and journalist class here almost all come from a small group in the British caste system who tend to know each other and to be very connected to those who hold power. If I’m being honest, I don’t think there’s anything you or I or any ordinary trans person can actually do about the press on a pragmatic level. I think press harassment of trans people is now deeply entrenched; I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Ten years ago, there was a lot of emphasis from trans organisations on media reform and targeting the media, and that if we could engender more sympathy and respect from the media that it would improve things, and the situation has actually deteriorated a lot in the last five years. It’s a losing battle. 

I think trans people are better off in 2026 pragmatically redirecting our energy away from the media. I think it’s good to target and put pressure on institutions to take trans-inclusive stances, and to encourage protest and direct action where appropriate. Trans Kids Deserve Better, for example, have had some pretty good ideas about protest compared to us adults, in terms of where we should be prioritising change. We can take cues from history here, from the Lesbian Avengers protesting Section 28 by interrupting the evening news. But I don’t think the press should be a primary target of activism. I think we’re better off focusing on building power where we have power, which is often within wider LGBT communities and within social justice movements.

I’m in the business of being a persuasive writer, and trying to create a greater societal understanding of trans people

I wanted to ask you specifically about the publishing industry, in terms of strategic activism around trans rights. The Transgender Issue is the most high-profile pro-trans book on trans rights for the general public, and it got published around the same time as a cluster of anti-trans books, which it was often placed in conversation with. And things have gotten a lot worse give years on, but I’d argue that there haven’t been any more anti-trans books with equivalent status published since. It feels like that movement has partially withdrawn from the realm of books, which is partly because a couple of key players left publishing, but may also speak to long-form writing suiting our purposes better than theirs. 

Shon Faye: The collective effect and intention of those books was to build a semblance of intellectual legitimacy for the ‘gender-critical’ movement, to establish it as a legitimate intellectual and political force. Now they have shifted their strategy towards lawfare and litigation, and that’s been much more effective for them than the discursive world of books, which is why I think a lot of them have stopped publishing. Their spokespeople do better on radio and television. That’s why I don’t really do radio and television appearances anymore. In a very short radio or television segment, it’s easier to deal in massive generalisations and in tropes and stereotypes. Trans lives are unfamiliar to most people in the UK. We’re a small minority. Cis people, unless they have a trans relative or trans friend, don’t have much sense of what trans life is like. It’s easier to convey things in depth in a book, and that’s why I chose to write one.

But I also think that there’s this widespread belief that we need to be understood by cis people in order to succeed against this huge movement to suppress our right to live in peace, and I’m increasingly unsure whether that’s true. I’m in the business of being a persuasive writer, and trying to create a greater societal understanding of trans people. But the book argues that what we actually need to do is to form a part of stronger political communities, and to organise in a way that means that we can build strong political bonds of solidarity. 

I think we both feel some irritation that some trans people are focusing on policing their own, on defining who the ‘bad’ trans people are, and who we need to exile in order to win public opinion back. Being under threat can lead to such paranoid, short-termist thinking, rather than the patience of maintaining solidarity. I think your book is admirably patient.

Shon Faye: The difficult thing right now, when we are under so much pressure, is that we want quick solutions. But building the kind of movement that we need is not going to be done in five years, or even ten. It’s probably going to be done on a generational timescale. And that’s really demoralising, because everyone wants to have signs of imminent hope. But I’ve lost faith in the liberal model of ten years ago, where we thought that persuading those in power would be enough on its own. We’re allowed to find each other annoying. But we need to be able to work together.