The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

by Shon Faye

Britain is in the midst of a heated national conversation about the ‘issue’ of transgender people. Perhaps no topic – other than Brexit and, latterly, the coronavirus pandemic – has received such a consistently high and recurring level of popular media coverage in the past few years. In 2020 alone The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times between them ran over 300 articles – almost one a day – on trans people. The free Metro newspaper accepted a full-page ad in 2018 from a campaign group urging the public to resist reform to the Gender Recognition Act, a piece of legislation designed to make the process of changing your legal gender less costly and invasive, in line with other European countries. The previous year, the tabloid Daily Star ran an entirely false series of stories claiming that the notorious child murderer Ian Huntley was transgender, before – two years later – finally admitting the story wasn’t true. At the same time, televised debates on the topic became a staple fixture of daytime TV shows