The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

by Shon Faye

In their classic analysis of moral panics, sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda outline five key characteristics: ‘concern’, or the belief that the behaviour of the group in question are likely to have a negative effect on society; ‘hostility’ – fairly self-explanatory – to the point where the group in question are seen as ‘folk devils’, that is, a group of people who are portrayed in media as outsiders and deviant, and who are blamed for crimes or other sorts of social problems; ‘consensus’, or widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society; ‘disproportionality’ – the resulting societal action taken against the group is entirely disproportionate to the actual threat posed by it; and, finally, ‘volatility’ – moral panics typically appear and subside very quickly, often vanishing abruptly because media, and therefore public, interest wanes or a new panic supplants the previous one.16