Astro-TERFs

This research is intended to complement my study on the impact of the anti-trans moral panic on trans-advocacy organizations, The Stoning of Stonewall During the New Trans Panic (Gwenffrewi 2021). The findings in that report revealed UK legacy media outlets running intensified negative coverage against Stonewall over the latter’s advocacy of trans people’s rights, in reflection of the broader anti-trans coverage of UK legacy media over the same period (Faye 2021; Folan 2023). My follow-up research here examines a “gender critical” organization that came into existence in 2019, the LGB Alliance, and their interaction with the same UK legacy media, to compare and contrast how the media coverage differs with that targeted at Stonewall.

An Overview of the LGB Alliance

I have selected the LGB Alliance (henceforth “the LGBA”) from among the “gender critical” organizations because it has been presented by the legacy media as Stonewall’s ideological antithesis (Hurst 2019; Jackson 2021). Notably, some of Stonewall’s founding members and associates, such as Simon Fanshawe (Hurst 2019), contributed to the LGBA’s creation, in response to Stonewall’s decision to extend its pro-LGB remit and advocate for trans rights circa 2015 (Jackson 2021). Yet those who associate with the LGBA include individuals with a record of anti-LGB campaigning, including Baroness Emma Nicholson and Graham Linehan (O’Connor 2022). Nicholson’s record includes supporting anti-LGB legislation Section 28 in the 1980s (Stone 2022), being publicly shamed by a lesbian rights group in 1995 over her opposition to a United Nations Year of Tolerance declaration that included sexual orientation (Lesbian Avengers 2021), and later being boycotted from chairing a prestigious book prize in 2020 over her cumulative anti-gay rights record, which by 2020 included opposing same-sex marriage legislation passed in 2013 (Flood 2020). Linehan, meanwhile, is recognized for his online “groomer” slurs against trans people, as well as against cisgender gay men, typified by his “Fuck off, you sweaty groomer” tweet against a high-profile cis gay film director (Linehan 2024).

Thematically and in terms of its composition and alliances, the LGBA appears to be less representative of LGB people than of those committed to what Leah Owen (2022, 487) describes as “attacking the social, legal, and institutional infrastructure that trans people depend on to exist as trans people.” This hostile, trans-focused mode of campaigning is indicated in the LGBA’s ultimately successful bid for charity status, with the Charity Commission (2021, section 37) observing, “some evidence of social media activity (information that was posted or re-posted on social media) by LGB Alliance and [we] considered that some of the language used may be regarded as inflammatory and offensive … the activity appeared to involve, at times, demeaning or denigrating the rights (recognised by law) of others” (my italics). Underlining the connection between the LGBA’s media output and its policy campaigns, Helen Clarke (2024, 7) highlights the LGBA’s condemnation of LGBTQI+-awareness-raising “Relationship and Sexuality Education” and its compulsory status in UK schools, with the LGBA “advocat[ing] for parents to remove their children from these lessons, citing concerns about how gender identity is taught and the inclusion of non-normative models of sex/gender.” As my analysis of the LGBA website reveals later in this article, the example of the LGBA’s campaign to undermine LGBTQI+-inclusive education for the sake of denying the validation of trans identity in schools is typical of its overall actions. Pro-LGB rights and initiatives are de facto subordinated for the perceived “greater good” of undermining trans people’s rights and validity.

The LGBA’s actions of “demeaning or denigrating the rights … of others,” namely those of trans people, has concerned LGBTQI+ groups not only for the multi-faceted harm it causes trans people, but also because of its scorched-earth implications in undermining LGBTQI+ rights more generally. This is exemplified by the legal appeal brought by trans youth charity Mermaids, supported by several LGBTQI+ groups including LGBT Foundation and the Consortium for Stronger LGBT+ Communities (LGBT Consortium), against the LGBA’s charity status. LGBT Consortium stated:

the LGB Alliance’s real purpose is the denigration of trans people and the destruction of organizations that support them, in particular through political lobbying and campaigning for changes to the law … Ever since it was established in 2019, LGB Alliance has repeatedly targeted registered LGBT rights charities including Mermaids, Stonewall, LGBT Foundation, GIRES and others… Further, the LGB Alliance has … Called for a Parliamentary investigation into Mermaids … Lobbied the Equality and Human Rights Commission to open a statutory investigation into Stonewall … Campaigned to stop LGBT charities from advising schools and government bodies on transgender rights … Campaigned to deprive LGBT charities of funding and/or to divert their donations and grants. (Consortium for Stronger LGBT+ Communities 2021). 

The seemingly paradoxical function of the LGBA campaigning to damage other LGB-focused charities, as noted by LGBT Consortium, can partly be understood by seeing the LGBA as a trans-exclusionary astroturf group. According to the Good Law Project (2023), “astro-turfed” groups are “fake grassroots organization[s] whose function is to mask the real actors who have a vested and often financial interest in the message they sell.” In terms of evidence of an agenda behind the claims to advocate for LGB rights, the LGBA’s address at 55 Tufton Street (Colbert 2023; Stone and Hurley 2022) suggests that the LGBA’s alliances are not with other LGBTQI+ groups but with conservative organizations with a record of anti-LGBTQI+ activities. Various investigations (Barwise and York 2020; Geoghegan 2020) have highlighted 55 Tufton Street as the property of the Conservative businessman Richard Smith, which Patrick Barwise and Peter York (2020, 103) describe as the home of a “network of right-wing ‘research’ groups, lobbyists and ‘astroturf’ organizations.” A characteristic of the right-wing astroturf and lobby groups, according to Barwise and York, is their “strong links to their American right-wing counterparts.” These include the Heritage Foundation and the Witherspoon Institute, which campaign against LGBTQI+ rights as well as women’s reproductive rights, as typified by the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a second Trump administration, titled Project 2025, in which, “whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them” (Leingang 2024). The LGBA’s co-founder Bev Jackson has publicly acknowledged the necessity of collaborating with the anti-LGB rights’ Heritage Foundation to oppose trans rights, such as her 2019 tweet with its euphemism of “gender” for trans identity: “The leftwing silence on gender in the US is even worse than in the UK. This story explains why working with the Heritage Foundation is sometimes the only possible course of action” (Jackson 2019). Beyond the strategic alliances with anti-LGB groups, Jackson has publicly declared opposition to the legitimacy of trans identity as the LGBA’s raison d’être, when stating, “We’re applying for charitable status and building an organization to challenge the dominance of those who promote the damaging theory of gender identity” (Jackson 2020). Similarly, the LGBA co-founder Kate Harris claimed that the LGBA was formed “to prevent the dissemination of the lie of gender identity” (Gentleman 2022).

The LGBA’s Positionality as an Astroturf Group

My interest in studying the interaction between the LGBA and the legacy media has implications beyond the transphobia of UK media coverage, to a broader understanding of how structures of power in the UK police minoritized people’s lives. In his analysis of systems of discipline, Michel Foucault (1991, 209) identifies two historical “extremes,” one recognizable as the authoritarian police state, based on “a schema of exceptional discipline,” the other representing “a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.” Foucault writes about surveillance as the new mode of enforcement, but I am interested in the “subtle coercion” by institutions, refined for that society to come, which in fact is happening now. To see how the blueprint of the authoritarian regime resides in liberal democracy, a glance at the military states of Latin America between the 1960s and 1980s reveals both differences and similarities with the contemporary UK. Within such regimes of prohibition in Latin America, there was no need to hide the mission of repression behind “astroturf” structures when policing sexual and gendered minorities. Yet in terms of ideological guidance, integrated within the regime’s structures were “non-state organizations” that promoted “moralistic ideas” (Cowan 2019, 12), what Benjamin Cowan (2019, 13) calls a “moral technocracy” involving “the coalescence of a self-appointed cadre of scientific and cultural authorities … who successfully brought their concerns about sex and subversion into national conversations.” In those national conversations, Othered minorities or political enemies are variously portrayed as “bestialized” (Cowan 2019, 203) or disparagingly “gender-troubled” (Cowan 2019, 153). They are framed as “threats to tradition, family, gender, and moral standards, and conventional sexuality” (Cowan 2019, 8). The political response by the Brazilian regime in Cowan’s (2019, 26) study was an “emphasis on eugenics and hygienism, combining anticommunism, pathologization, and moral panic.”

In more liberal-democratic-structured states, the narratives of pathologization, eugenics and moral panic against othered minorities have required more careful negotiation and application, including via a predecessor of the “astroturf” organization, namely “false front” organizations. Writing on the moral panic orchestrated by the German government against the presence of Black soldiers in the French army positioned in post-WWI Germany, Melvyn Stokes (2023, 228) references the role of “false-front organizations claiming to be the result of local civic initiatives,” including “the Rhenish Women’s League … founded in May 1920 within the German Ministry of the Interior.” Its disseminated literature included a pamphlet “Coloured Frenchmen on the Rhine: German Women’s Cry for Help,” which contributed to how “Black French soldiers were represented as beasts, incapable of controlling their strong sexual desires; as rapists and assaulters of the virtues of white German women; as major threats to the purity of the white race” (Stokes 2023, 226). Such fear-inciting predator/bestial tropes evoke not only the “moral technocracy” of more authoritarian regimes, but the LGBA’s campaign language to obstruct or repeal trans rights, for example its media campaign against GRA reform in which it declared “Self-ID gives predators the green light” (TSN 2020), or its broader tweeted warning, “Adding the + to LGB gives the green light to paraphilias like bestiality” (Maurice 2021).

The idea of an anti-LGBTQI+ “moral technocracy” constructed by the UK Conservative Government in recent years has resonance. In the LGBA’s contemporary setting in the UK, Hil Aked (2023, 16) contrasts grassroots social movements “from below,” “organized by subaltern social groups … to disrupt power structures,” against a “social movement from above … seeking to defend or enhance dominant power structures.” These “social movements from above” benefit from “superior access to economic, political and cultural resources” and “privileged access to state power” (Aked 2023, 16). In development of Aked’s analysis, I am interested in the interplay between the LGBA and the establishmentarian gatekeeping function of the legacy media (Malik 2020), and how this contributes to our understanding of the UK legacy media’s interaction with, or delegitimization of, disempowered groups and their advocates.

The Post-2019 Political Context in the UK And Its Impact on Equalities Policy

For contextual evidence of the LGBA’s relevance within an emerging anti-equalities “moral technocracy” constructed by the Government, the timeline of 2019–2024 is revealing. Between 2016 and 2018, the Conservative Government under Prime Minister Theresa May and its then-Women and Equalities minister Penny Mordaunt declared its intention to improve the lives of trans people by introducing GRA reform (Government Equalities Office 2018). May’s subsequent resignation in the aftermath of unsuccessful Brexit negotiations and diminished General Election results produced a Conservative Government in 2019 led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, special advisor Dominic Cummings, and Equalities ministers Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch. Conservative policy and rhetoric were reoriented against trans people (Maddox 2024; Tapsfield 2024; Wilcock 2024), in alignment with that of the right-wing press’s intensifying anti-trans moral-panic coverage (Pearce, Erikainen, and Vincent 2020), itself drawing on an emerging, reactionary “gender-critical” movement against trans rights. The Government suspended its proposed legislation of GRA reform in 2020. A parliamentary inquiry by the cross-party Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) into the failure of GRA reform between October 2020 and December 2021 produced a report highly critical of both Conservative Equalities ministers and the Government’s recalibrated equalities watchdog the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The inquiry concluded:

We are deeply disappointed by the approach taken by both the Government Equalities Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission to this inquiry … We condemn the negligible engagement with our inquiry by both the Government Equalities Office Ministers and the EHRC, and the delay in response to the consultation which further polarised and toxified the debate. (Women and Equalities Committee 2021, 73–75)

The inquiry’s criticism of both Equalities ministers, the “gender-critical” aligned Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch, as well as the EHRC, underscores how the LGBA are part of a larger picture of institutional recalibration under the Conservative Government since 2019. This translates as an already authoritarian Government (Fowles 2023) adopting a more hostile, “culture wars” approach to its equalities commitments (Forrest 2023). Typifying this broader development is the Government’s response to the surge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 following the murder in the USA of George Floyd by a police officer. The Johnson Government’s Head of No. 10 policy unit, Munira Mirza, established the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (a.k.a. the Sewell Report), chaired by Dr Tony Sewell, despite both Mirza and Sewell having a background of denying the existence of institutional racism (Easton 2021; Sewell 2010; Walker, Siddique, Grierson 2020). The findings of the Sewell Report were published in 2021 and claimed there was no evidence of institutional racism in the UK. These findings were rejected by the UK’s leading race equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust, as well as by numerous politicians and high-profile activists (Matiluko 2023), with criticisms of the Report including its “spurious claims to objectivity, the erasure of racism and the inadequacy of its recommendations” (Tikly 2022, 857).

Similarly reflecting the shift in policy against social-justice issues is the EHRC’s altered role, from equalities watchdog to attack-dog against equalities, as a pattern of controversies at the time indicate. The EHRC is ideally independent of Government but also funded by it, and its Commissioners are appointed by the Minister for Women and Equalities. Its current head is Kishwer Falkner, appointed by Truss and Badenoch’s office in December 2020. Falkner has since been accused in whistleblower claims and investigative journalism stories of presiding over a hostile workplace climate for trans people and people of color (Hunte 2023; Siddique 2023). Internal EHRC investigations into Falkner’s behavior, which included eye-witness accounts of her ridiculing trans women with transphobic statements, were suspended in 2023 by Badenoch’s office (Walker 2023).

The recalibration of the EHRC as effectively an “anti-equalities” equalities organization is a useful parallel for understanding the LGBA’s capacity to develop networking connections with the UK’s Conservative Government during the same period. Between 2019 and 2020, the British Government withdrew from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme (Milton 2021). In March 2021, three members of the Government’s “LGBT Advisory Group” resigned in protest at the resistance of Equalities Ministers (i.e. Truss and Badenoch) to work constructively for LGBT+ rights (Allegretti 2021). Consultation on broader LGBTQI+ issues with Stonewall and other pro-trans LGBTQI+ organizations effectively ended in 2021 (Hatton 2024). During this period, Badenoch instead met representatives of anti-trans groups including the LGBA (Hatton 2024; Provost et al. 2021). This is in spite of the LGBA’s lack of record of any pro-LGB initiatives (Consortium for Stronger LGBT+ Communities 2021; O’Thomson 2023) and their unpopularity with the broader LGBTQI+ community (Ramsay and Bychawski 2022). In April 2022, the Conservative Government cancelled its “Safe To Be Me” conference celebrating LGBTQI+ people in the UK, after the conference was boycotted by over 100 LGBTQI+ organizations, over the Government’s policy shift to exclude trans people from a conversation therapy ban (Consortium for Stronger LGBT+ Communities 2022; Wait 2022), a policy advocated for by the LGBA. The Conservative Government’s record since 2019 has been one of intensifying hostility towards the LGBTQI+ community, and this is reflected in changes to its institutional networks. It is with this context that we see the LGBA’s emergence as a lobby group enjoying access to the Conservative Government and favorable coverage from an anti-trans press. Other anti-trans-rights lobby groups to have filled the void in Government consultations on trans rights include charity and right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, whose “Judicial Power Project” is described by Sam Fowles (2023, 47) as being “particularly effective at dressing up increasingly authoritarian ideas in the guise of democracy … [with] Judges who force the executive to obey the law or rules that empower parliament or citizens at the expense of the executive … portrayed as frustrating the ‘will of the people’.” Policy Exchange’s (Moore 2023) policy document “Asleep at the Wheel,” with its foreword by “gender critical” politician Rosie Duffield—herself a speaker at an LGBA conference (Young 2021)—accuses UK schools of “increasingly becoming influenced by gender ideology.” In its executive summary, a recommendation for teaching guidance is that “[d]iscussion about gender-critical beliefs should be included” (Moore 2023, 13), and that “[n]o school should facilitate a child’s social transition,” in spite of social transitioning being recommended as beneficial for trans people generally by the global medical authority on trans health, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (2024, 52).

One may argue that the UK Government’s new orientation towards anti-LGBTQI+ policy since 2019 ought to have become the focus of legacy media investigations. While liberal/left-of-center press like The Guardian and The Independent have produced some critical coverage, legacy media investigations have tended to contribute to the anti-trans reorientation of the Government and its “moral technocracy” of think tanks and lobby groups. A new BBC Director General, former Conservative councilor Tim Davie, was appointed by the Conservative Government in 2020—the same year as Falkner’s appointment to the EHRC—and has presided over a similar re-orientation towards a more critical mode of coverage about trans people, leading to accusations of “institutional transphobia” in an open letter from public figures from the LGBTQI+ community (Parsons 2020). The BBC’s programming during this time has focused on producing exposés of pro-trans charities such as the anti-Stonewall series Nolan Investigates (2021), and the challenging of the legitimacy of trans healthcare (Barnes and Cohen 2020).

To further deconstruct the UK legacy media’s role in relation to a conservative “moral technocracy,” it is worth noting the Sutton Trust’s Social Mobility report in 2019 highlights the elite composition of the UK media’s commentariat. Of columnists, 44% attended just one of two universities—Oxford or Cambridge (Sutton Trust 2019, 40)—while only 19% attended a comprehensive school—the latter attended by approximately 90% of people educated in the UK. Nesrine Malik (2020, 210–11) observes that the result of the elitist composition of the London-centered legacy media is a uniform “world view that is ideologically establishmentarian, unlikely to question the status quo and overly respectful of the offices of power.” Wealth and power, and the interests of those that have much of both, consolidates itself in the media; in other words, particularly at the level of commentariat and the editorial line. In thinking about Aked’s analysis of “social movements from above,” and its recent intensifying nature under the Conservative Government into a form of “moral technocracy,” there is value in confirming the “strong hegemony” model of the legacy media. Given the ideological alignment of the Conservative Government, its “moral technocracy” of right-wing, policymaking think tanks and lobby groups, and the legacy media’s composition, there are implications for those disempowered groups targeted by the monolith of these powerful, ideologically aligned institutions in terms of the current state of British democracy and its accessibility for all. The legacy media’s coverage of the LGBA provides one source of data on these potentially harmful relationships for minorities, in this case the trans community.

Method

In studying the interplay between the LGBA and major outlets of the UK press, this research addresses two contesting frameworks that appear to reflect current differences between UK and US legacy media engagement with social justice organizations. The first of these is the “strong hegemony” model conceptualized by Todd Gitlin (1980), in which legacy media institutions assert establishmentarian or outright hostile gatekeeping when framing stories about the social-justice agendas of minoritized groups. Or, as TJ Billard (2024, 55) writes, “[m]ass news media would never carry social movements’ critical messages about the dominant order, but rather would always marginalize them and portray them as dangerous.” This framework has been challenged by those observing a “dialogic model” involving “sustained patterns of collaborative interaction among social movement actors and mass media actors that form movement-media relationships” (Billard 2024, 55). Billard (2016; 2024), for example, states that the “dialogic model” is more reflective of their study of the interplay between the trans advocacy organization the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the US legacy media. Given the findings of my research on the UK legacy media’s systematically hostile coverage of trans advocacy organization Stonewall during the anti-trans moral panic, my analysis of legacy media coverage assumes a continuation of Gitlin’s “strong hegemony” model. From this deductive position, my research questions are:

RQ1: Is there sufficient, publicly accessible evidence to indicate that the LGBA is primarily an anti-trans-rights campaign group?

RQ2: In reflection of the “strong hegemony” model, do UK legacy media outlets boost the LGBA while undermining trans-advocacy groups such as Stonewall?

To answer these questions, I have conducted a mixed-methods content analysis of articles featuring the LGBA by four major UK press outlets. This is to ensure both the identification of broader patterns through statistical data, as well as case studies in the form of in-depth close reading. These outlets are among the top 10 best-selling UK newspapers and represent broadsheet or middle-market outlets with significant presence in UK political and cultural discourse. They are the Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday (conservative, middle-market), The Times/The Sunday Times (conservative, broadsheet), The Telegraph/The Sunday Telegraph (conservative, broadsheet), and The Guardian/Observer (liberal/left-of-center, broadsheet-style content within a middle-market format). A fifth news outlet, based solely in Scotland, namely The Scotsman (broadly liberal, middle market), is included for comparison and context in the statistical analysis, given the recurring anecdotal evidence by some high-profile journalists critical of the “groupthink” character of the London-based UK national press (Edwards and Cromwell 2018; Malik 2020; Novara Media 2023), typified in the latter case by journalist Glenn Greenwald’s (2015) observation, “I’ve never encountered any group more driven by group-think and rank-closing cohesion than British journalists.” To research the archives of these outlets, I used the specialist media search engine Nexis Advance UK. To align the study with my research paper on Stonewall (2022), I used the same timeline of 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2022. Articles were identified through the keyword “LGB Alliance.”

Definition of Transphobia: “Organized Transphobia”

In referencing anti-trans media coverage and campaigning, this article dispenses with the kind of attitudinal-focused definition of transphobia such as that used by the UN: “Any form of prejudice or hostile attitude towards transgender people, including denying their gender identity or refusing to acknowledge it” (UN Free & Equal 2024). As noted by Fran Amery and Aurelian Mondon (2024, 5), this individualized approach to analyzing transphobia in relation to “prejudice” “would allow said actors to claim plausible deniability… More importantly, it would remove the focus on wider trends, power relationships and the impact of such politics, which is where … structural oppression lies.” With the focus of this research on the LGBA’s value to structures of oppression, this article instead uses the UK-centered definition of “organized transphobia” used by Amery and Mondon. This definition involves:

the elite production of essentialising discourse and politics regarding trans people to construct them into an homogenous group incompatible with “our” “normal” and “good” society… [T]his discourse does not occur at random or in isolated events, but rather is being generated and promoted by a highly organized social movement in a top-down manner. (Amery and Mondon 2024, 5)

There is a significant overlap between this definition used by Amery and Mondon, concerning “a highly organized social movement in a top-down manner,” and the function of anti-trans astroturf groups that reflect, in Aked’s (2023, 16) words, a “social movement from above … seeking to defend or enhance dominant power structures [that enjoy] superior access to economic, political and cultural resources” and “privileged access to state power.” Organized transphobia, in this sense, can also be measurable by the legacy media’s contrasting coverage of anti- and pro-trans organizations.

Publicly Available Evidence of the LGBA’s Systematic Transphobia: The LGBA’s Website

The LGBA is regarded among national and international LGBTQ+ organizations, such as LGBT Consortium and ILGA Europe (2022), as being an anti-trans campaign group. In order to highlight the publicly accessible record of such campaigning, this article presents an analysis of arguably the most publicly accessible point of information about the LGBA’s anti-trans actions, namely the LGBA’s website, from 2022. This analysis serves to underscore that the legacy media’s positive engagement with the LGBA, to the degree of boosting the LGBA’s public visibility and status as a legitimate organization, occurs within full view of the LGBA’s record of anti-trans campaigning.

The LGBA Website (December 2022)

In an analysis of the LGBA’s website, a key finding is the gradation of anti-trans hostility that occurs. The rhetoric-based sections addressing Vision, Values, and Mission statement make minor references to trans people’s legitimacy. However, regarding the LGBA’s actual campaigning, “Resource” and “Campaign” sections devote 100% of their content to challenging the legitimacy of trans people. This gradation indicates that separate to its liberal-aligned corporate messaging, at the level of its actual campaigns, the LGBA is primarily an anti-trans campaign group.

Vision (anti-trans = 0%), Mission (anti-trans = 11%), Values (anti-trans = 14%)

The LGBA’s Vision statement declares, “Lesbians, gay men and bisexuals living free from discrimination or disadvantage based on their sexual orientation.” The Mission section displays nine objectives. With similar liberal-orientation, it declares, “We do not condone, endorse, or encourage any abusive or discriminatory behaviour towards any group or individual.” By contrast, another objective implicitly associates trans identity with brain-washing and false-consciousness: “We work to protect children from harmful, unscientific ideologies that may lead them to believe either their personality or their body is in need of changing.”

In the Values section, one of the seven “values,” titled “individual freedom,” misgenders and caricatures trans people as pressurizing cis lesbians and cis gay men into having sexual relations: “We stand with lesbians in rejecting pressure to accept as sexual partners, or admit into lesbian spaces, males who define themselves as women. We stand with gay men in rejecting pressure to accept as sexual partners, or admit into gay men’s spaces, females who define themselves as men.”

Campaigns (anti-trans = 100%)

This section displays seven campaigns, all recognizable as anti-trans. I categorize these under four headings: campaign against trans-affirming care for trans youth; campaigns against trans-advocacy charity Stonewall UK; campaigns against laws that legitimize trans identity in Scotland; and campaigns that delegitimize trans identity in Wales.

Campaigns against trans-affirming care for trans youth

The LGBA’s “Gay Teens Aren’t Sick” campaign describes the “scandal” that “young people referred to gender clinics and subsequently prescribed puberty blockers are same-sex attracted.” No reference to the agency of these trans youth is made. No supporting data is provided for the LGBA’s claim inferring LGB youth being passively led into transitioning. Available data omitted by this section reveals an increase in the number of LGB youth (ONS 2021). The LGBA references trans identity as a process of eradication in its hashtag associating transitioning with lesbian/gay erasure: “Children are the main victims of the controversy surrounding gender identity. The evidence shows, and this is coming out in the Sonia Appleby case, that homophobia often plays a role in the unnecessary & harmful medicalisation of lesbian & gay teens. #StopTransingTheGayAway” (LGBA 2021).

The “End Conversion Therapy” campaign supports ending conversion therapy for LGB youth but continuing it for trans youth. The “Schools Campaign” displays the names of twelve trans-supportive or trans-advocacy organizations that provide trans-affirming information to trans youth and families, including the organizations Stonewall UK, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence and LGBT Youth Scotland. They are introduced: “We attach links to the websites of the various groups along with a few quotations from them. We see their ‘teachings’ as potentially harmful propaganda.” These references appear to confirm the Charity Commission’s own concerns, as well as those of charities such as LGBT Consortium, of the LGBA’s direct attempts to undermine LGBTQI+ charities.

Campaign against trans-advocacy charity Stonewall UK

One LGBA campaign centers a lawsuit by one of the LGBA’s associates, Allison Bailey, against the UK’s largest LGBTQI+ charity over the latter’s advocacy of trans rights. Titled “Justice for Alison [sic],” it is promoted by Bailey in her crowdfunding with the title “I’m suing Stonewall.” Via the LGBA’s re-tweet, trans women are presented in Bailey’s campaign without supporting evidence as predators and exponents of male violence, as part of what Bailey describes as “the new trans activism”:

I was horrified (and terrified). I wanted to look away, to pretend that I had not seen it; that it did not reveal the worst woman-hating, lesbian hating, misogyny that I have ever come across in my lifetime … Thanks to brave women who have come before me, such as the late, great, Magdalen Berns, whose courage and no-nonsense approach to calling out the new trans activism as the men’s rights movement it so clearly is, gave me courage. (Bailey 2020)

Bailey’s framing shares the LGBA’s veneration of anti-trans campaigner Magdalen Berns. Berns’s pattern of crude, delegitimizing abuse of trans women on social media is typified by her tweet in 2016: “You are fucking blackface actors. You aren’t women. You’re men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women. fuck [sic] you and your dirty fucking perversions. our [sic] oppression isn’t a fetish you pathetic, sick, fuck” (Montgomerie 2020). In 2022, the LGBA commemorated Berns’s death with a tweet that references her activism in relation to the caricature of trans women as predators using sexual coercion against cis lesbians: “Today marks three years since Magdalen Berns died, far too young, at the age of 36. She stood up bravely against the erasure and coercion of lesbians, and was a fiercely inspirational voice to so many. She is sadly missed” (LGBA 2022). The LGBA’s veneration of Berns contradicts its liberal-oriented Mission claim: “We do not condone, endorse, or encourage any abusive or discriminatory behaviour towards any group or individual.”

Campaigns against laws that legitimize trans identity in Scotland

The LGBA’s fifth and sixth campaigns oppose Scotland’s “Gender Recognition Act Reform” and “Hate Crime Bill (Scotland).” The LGBA’s fear-invoking against GRA reform (passed as law by the Scottish Parliament in 2022, then blocked by the UK Conservative Government in 2023) can be illustrated by its “Self ID gives predators the green light” campaign in the press and on social media. The Hate Crime Bill (passed as law in 2024) is designed to protect a range of minorities with protected characteristics against hate speech, including sexual minorities—the very LGB people meant to be championed by the LGBA. This subsection claims the Hate Crime bill fails to “protect free speech and will not prevent a chilling effect on women’s ability to discuss their rights or partake in debates on reform of the Gender Recognition Act.” The LGBA’s opposition to hate crime legislation designated to protect LGB—as well as trans—people indicate their prioritization of obstructing legislation that benefits trans people, regardless of the cost to the LGB people who would also benefit from that legislation.

Campaigns against laws that legitimize trans identity in Wales

In this sub-section, the LGBA provides a link to the website of the ideologically aligned anti-trans campaign group Merched Cymru (translated: Girls/Women of Wales), which includes blogs focused on challenging trans rights in Wales. The LGBA’s website in 2022 also provided links to seventeen of these blog posts on the Merched Cymru website. All seventeen of the blog posts are trans-centred and are hostile to the Welsh government for LGBTQ+ advocacy that includes advocating for trans rights. Among these, thirteen are critical of the Welsh Government’s (2023) “LGBTQ+ Action Plan” which commits Wales to supporting LGBTQI+ rights and making Wales “the most LGBTQ+ friendly nation in Europe.” One of these posts is written by the LGBA co-founder Bev Jackson, accusing the LGBTQ+ Action Plan of being “a blueprint for imposing gender identity dogma.” Another post by activist Helen Staniland reflects on what Staniland sees as the meaninglessness of the phrase “trans rights are human rights.” Two other posts criticize the Welsh government for supporting the annual Pride festival because of its inclusion of trans rights, and for promoting sports which are inclusive of trans people. Overall, these posts reveal how the LGBA’s anti-trans campaigns are amorphous but dedicated consistently to obstructing trans rights. As in Scotland with the LGBA’s opposition to the pro-LGB Hate Crime legislation, the LGBA reveals how obstructing pro-trans initiatives, such as their campaign against the Welsh LGBTQ+ Action Plan—despite its overwhelming benefit for LGB people—is the LGBA’s priority.

Legacy Media: LGBA and the Mainstreaming of Anti-Trans Campaigning

The previous section’s analysis of the LGBA’s website reveals that there exists substantial evidence of the LGBA’s campaigning involving its opposition to pro-trans legislation and initiatives rather than promoting LGB rights—the latter frequently being sacrificed for the former. The following data reveals how the legacy media largely omits this anti-trans campaigning and frames the LGBA as a force for good, in contrast to its negative coverage of LGBTQI+ charities.

Table 1. Legacy Media’s Legitimizing Descriptions of the LGB Alliance via Linguistic Markers

The media’s legitimizing of the LGBA is evident in the discourse of the press coverage in Table 1. The LGBA is primarily referred to as an “LGB rights group” rather than an anti-trans-rights group, despite its campaigning record. As Table 1 also shows, the LGBA is frequently presented as a safe and sensible alternative to Stonewall, indicating its function as a best-practice model contrasted against trans-inclusive LGBTQI+ charities and groups, in spite of the LGBA’s sole record of outputs being anti-trans campaigning. While some coverage does refer to the criticism of the LGBA, this is included in articles that portray both pro- and anti-LGBA perspectives.

Table 2 reveals the scale of support of the right-wing press for the LGBA in terms of frequency of affirming representations, compared to representations of pro-trans organizations. Over 90% of articles by right-wing papers legitimize the LGBA as either an LGB-rights group and source of expertise on LGBTQI+ rights, or as a model of good LGBTQI+ activism when compared with the “bad” model of Stonewall and other trans-inclusive organizations. The left-of-center The Guardian replicates anti-trans hostility but at a reduced rate. The majority (60%) of The Guardian articles use a legitimizing frame for the LGBA, and a majority (54%) of their articles delegitimize pro-trans LGBTQI+ organizations when referencing the LGBA. Taken together with the news coverage of the other outlets, the result is that the LGBA is legitimized and mainstreamed for liberal and conservative audiences alike. The frequency of The Scotsman’s coverage of trans-related stories that reference the LGBA is more consistent with pre-2014 levels of the UK media coverage of trans issues, namely the era prior to the moral panic. This reflects observations of a London-centered “groupthink.”

Table 2. Frequency of UK Legacy Media’s Coverage of the LGB Alliance, 2020–2022

In stories that reference the LGBA, the top three most frequently recurring source of stories focus sympathetically on anti-trans campaigner and barrister Allison Bailey’s attempt to sue Stonewall over the latter’s advocacy of trans rights in the workplace; articles that denigrate Stonewall generally; and articles that portray anti-trans campaigner and academic Kathleen Stock as a victim of trans activism and on-campus anti-free speech campaigns. With the top two most frequently recurring type of articles attacking Stonewall, it is notable that the fourth, fifth and sixth most commonly recurring articles focus on delegitimizing the UK’s second most high-profile trans-advocacy charity, Mermaids. The LGBA is referenced in all of these articles as an expert community voice and best-practice model that views trans people and their rights as a social problem. Overall, the thematic pattern of frequency reflects Owen’s (2022, 487) analysis of how institutions of power in the UK are “attacking the social, legal, and institutional infrastructure that trans people depend on to exist as trans people,” in this case the organizations that defend, protect and advocate for trans people and their rights. The rest of the high-frequency stories report on the absurdity and/or threat of initiatives that attempt to publicly legitimize trans people, including the language that can be introduced to accommodate them.

Table 3. Common Themes in UK Legacy Media’s Coverage of the LGB Alliance

In summary, the high-frequency stories that reference the LGBA almost completely depict trans people’s existence and their rights as a form of public threat or harm. This is in spite of the LGBA being—by their own definition as well as the Charity Commission’s requirements—unqualified to speak on trans issues. A notable tendency in the most frequently produced stories referencing the LGBA is the stories’ delegitimization of trans-advocacy groups. The LGBA appears to function in these stories as a best-practice model, by its opposition to trans people’s rights and legitimacy. Given the LGBA’s record of campaigning against initiatives that benefit LGB people, such as Scotland’s Hate Crime Bill and Wales’ “LGBTQ+ Action Plan,” it could be argued that the LGBA are the establishment’s best-practice model because they oppose any further progress on LGBTQI+ people’s rights generally—a majoritarian check on minority empowerment, in other words. This indication is further apparent regarding the LGBA’s aforementioned record of associations with anti-LGBTQI+ organizations in the U.S.A. and its association with the conservative, right-wing networks of 55 Tufton Street.

Case Studies: Four Articles from the Data

These case studies show the legacy media reference the LGBA in order to delegitimize trans people and their advocates. The four examples reflect the high-frequency stories captured in Table 3. Three explicitly address trans identity, while the other implicitly undermines an established LGBTQI+ charity over its support for trans rights. The articles include legitimizing references to the LGBA while (1) condemning trans-affirming initiatives, (2) condemning trans-rights activists, (3) condemning trans-advocacy organizations, and (4) omitting coverage critical of the LGBA’s anti-trans campaigning.

Article 1: “Prove World Cup Will Be Safe, England LGBTQ+ Supporters’ Group Tells Qatar” (Ingle 2022)

This The Guardian article by sportswriter Sean Ingle—one of The Guardian’s four “gender-critical”-aligned journalists who spoke against trans rights at a The Guardian/The Observer Sex Equality Group meeting (Hurley 2023)—omits any reference to the LGBA’s reputation and record of anti-trans campaigning. It quotes the LGBA’s managing director Kate Barker as a primary source of authority on sports-related LGBTQI+ issues, in implicit recognition of the LGBA’s authority. It omits to mention Barker’s public record of anti-trans output. Between December 2021 and February 2022, for example, Barker tweeted a series of statements that pathologize trans identity or associate it with the oppression of others (LGB Alliance Watch 2022):

1. “How is it right that companies like @Zara leave [young shop assistants] to manage adult AGP men performing their fetish without support? What is the position of @UsdawUnion?”

2. “So many lesbians my age (50s) say that if they were 12 today, they’d be lobbying their parents for drugs and surgery in a bid to ‘become’ a boy. All of them, without exception, say it would’ve been a horrific mistake. My heart breaks for girls caught up in this homophobic cult.”

3. “A Cambridge college has refused to fly the Pride flag because it’s a symbol of everything ugly about the pernicious, creeping ‘queer’ movement. LGB people have been too willing to tolerate the poisoning of our community. Time to reassert our pride in being same-sex attracted.”

4. “The baby fetishists, sports cheats, furries and blue-haired Tik Tok straights crying about rising violence to ‘queers’ will opt out of their ‘identity’ when things get tough. LGB people, who’ve been force-teamed with them as they trash our community, don’t have that luxury.”

5. “LGB people are being force teamed with people who believe they are cats, babies and eunuchs. Ridiculous as it sounds, that’s where we are now. My campaign is to show that LGB people don’t share these crackpot, bonkers ideas in a bid to stop us being dragged into the delusional swamp.”

In this The Guardian article, Barker is quoted in relation to an area that the LGBA appears, according to its own website, to have no previous campaign involvement, namely sports: “Football has also been urged to do more by the LGB Alliance’s Kate Barker, who said that some of its campaigns to support gay rights at the World Cup, such as captains of national teams wearing a OneLove armband, risked appearing ‘performative’ when there was still so much uncertainty over safety.” Further down in the article and signifying its lesser importance, Stonewall is referenced and quoted as an additional, secondary source of expertise on LGBTQI+ issues, in spite of Stonewall’s history of campaigning on LGBTQI+ inclusivity in sports, including in relation to football and its ‘rainbow laces’ campaign, in which, “Since Rainbow Laces kicked off in 2013, over a million [people] have laced up in support of LGBTQ+ inclusion in sport, fitness and physical activity” (Stonewall 2023). By this inclusion and prioritizing of the LGBA, the article can be said to be contributing to the more general, incremental media campaign of relegating and delegitimizing the pro-trans LGBTQI+ charity as punishment for its advocacy of trans rights, while boosting at its expense a minor, newly-created organization with no campaigning connection to sports and which is primarily involved in anti-trans campaigning.

Article 2: “Sainsbury’s Trans T-shirt for Children Aged Three” (Ryan and Aitchison 2022)

This The Daily Mail article excludes Stonewall as a source of expertise and replaces it with the LGBA. The latter’s reputation and record of anti-trans campaigning is omitted. The LGBA is instead described according to its self-definition of defending “the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals.” The article implicitly constructs a “groomer” narrative in its coverage of a supermarket chain’s sale of an LGBTQI+ inclusive t-shirt to children suitable from three years and above. The article evokes the public shaming and boycotting of supermarkets selling pro-LGBTQI+ products that have recently characterized anti-LGBTQI+, “anti-groomer” campaigns in the USA (Bernstein 2024).

The t-shirt, which displays the LGBTQI+ symbol of a rainbow and a chicane/heart in the colors of the trans flag, features the LGBTQI-affirming words “You Are You.” The t-shirt’s message of LGBTQI+ inclusion and affirmation is framed as representing “a damaging and misogynistic ideology” unsuitable for children. The article says, “Kate Barker, managing director of the LGB Alliance which defends the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, said the range ‘promotes a damaging and misogynistic political ideology that neither the supermarket nor the children understand.’” The LGBA’s position as experts in a trans-related intervention is notable given its disconnection from trans issues and its charity status being partly conditional on not being involved in delegitimizing trans identity. Given the image of the universally known LGBTQI+ rainbow symbol, the LGBA’s contribution here also consolidates an anti-LGB groomer narrative.

Article 3: “Campus Activists Defend Anonymous Crusade to Oust Trans-Row Professor” (Ball 2021)

This The Times article exemplifies one of the three most popular recurring news stories across the UK legacy media in 2020–2022 that references the LGBA; namely, the on-campus campaigning by students at the University of Sussex calling for the dismissal of anti-trans academic, Kathleen Stock. The LGBA is briefly referenced in association with Stock, who is described as an LGBA trustee. The article represents a trans-inclusive activist who is campaigning against Stock’s anti-trans campaigning, in a way that both undermines the activist’s argument and reiterates the LGBA’s claim to being an LGB-rights organization: “[Trans-rights activist] Jacques said that Stock’s trusteeship of the LGB Alliance, a charity that advocates the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, aligned her with the ‘far-right.’” Via this false framing of the LGBA, defined by its sanitizing corporate rhetoric rather than its 100% anti-trans campaigning record, a form of reputation-laundering occurs for the LGBA, while the reputation of the trans-inclusion activist is reiterated as irrational, intolerant and anti-LGB.

The article’s omission of key details about Stock’s record of anti-trans campaigning is notable. To highlight some examples of what is not said, in one magazine interview, Stock describes trans women as fetishists who masturbate in women’s spaces (Bindel 2021); in her book Material Girls (Stock 2021) she calls for the rescinding of trans women’s rights by having women-only spaces exclude trans women; and she has signed the gender-critical Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights (Women’s Declaration International 2019) which repeats many of the aforementioned narratives and denies the legitimacy of trans identity. Deborah Shaw (2023, 771) has noted Stock’s invalidating analysis in which trans identity is portrayed as existing within an “immersive fiction” similar to “playing video games and acting.” These kinds of outputs, which provoked the on-campus campaign calling for Stock to be dismissed during a period of rising anti-trans hate crime (Home Office 2022), are omitted in the coverage, contributing to the narrative of Stock as the innocent victim of an irrational and aggressive trans activism (Shaw 2023). Typifying the scale of this type of coverage in a different outlet is The Guardian’s framing of the situation with the headline “Kathleen Stock says she quit university post over ‘medieval’ ostracism” (Adams 2021) and a sympathetic accompanying profile article “Kathleen Stock’s departure shows universities can’t cope with argument” (Cooke 2021).

Article 4: “Allison Bailey Was Unlawfully Victimised for Opposing Stonewall’s ‘Trans Extremism’, Tribunal Rules” (Bodkin 2022)

This The Daily Telegraph article, about anti-trans-rights lawyer and the LGBA co-founder Allison Bailey and her claim of victimization against the UK’s largest LGBTQI+ charity Stonewall, reports on two of the three most frequent trans-related stories across the UK media between 2020–2022 that reference the LGBA. The Bailey article covers the barrister’s unsuccessful attempt to sue Stonewall, a campaign promoted by Bailey on social media titled “I’m suing Stonewall” with the accompanying hashtag #StonewallOut.

The first striking aspect of the headline is that it gives the false impression that Bailey has won her case against Stonewall. Its sub-heading consolidates this framing, “Barrister hails decision as victory against attempts to replace biological sex with notions of self-identified gender identity.” The article accomplishes this frame by referencing Stonewall in the headline and accompanying first, second, fifth and sixth paragraphs in accompaniment to references to a Bailey victory. Contributing to the narrative of Stonewall’s defeat, the article omits naming Garden Court Chambers in these opening sections, Bailey’s then-employer against whom Bailey was awarded damages of £22,000 for injury to Bailey’s feelings—i.e. the source of Bailey’s actual victory. The overall effect is aided by how only in the sixteenth paragraph does the article report that Bailey’s case against Stonewall has failed: “Alongside her action against Garden Court, Ms Bailey also sued Stonewall, alleging that the charity had induced the chambers to discriminate against her. However, this was rejected by the tribunal.”

The article legitimizes the LGBA in two ways. Firstly, it frames Stonewall in such denigrating terms to effectively imply that Stonewall is unfit for purpose in representing LGB people. Secondly, the article replicates the trend evident in the coverage of The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and The Times of approaching the LGBA for comment as experts on LGBTQI+ issues. The quoted comment by Kate Barker combines a fulsome tribute to Bailey with a dehumanizing condemnation of trans-rights advocacy: “Allison’s bravery and steadfast focus on truth and justice has profound implications for women and LGB people who will not be cowed by the pernicious poison of extreme gender ideology.” The “extreme gender ideology” that Barker describes as “pernicious poison” is evidently Stonewall’s acceptance of the legitimacy of trans people. The article’s first and second paragraphs also reference “Stonewall’s ‘trans extremism’” and how “Allison Bailey was victimised for expressing ‘gender critical’ beliefs and for her contention that Stonewall’s advocacy of gender self-identity made it complicit in threats against women.” With the addition of comments by Barker and Bailey, the latter quoted as describing the exonerated Stonewall as operating like a “criminal protection racket,” the article’s overall message appears to be that anyone who publicly supports trans people and their rights is guilty of spreading poison and harm against women into UK society. Given the scale of The Daily Telegraph’s hostile coverage of trans issues in its the LGBA-referenced stories—it produces double the amount of trans-centered stories by The Times and nearly triple the amount published by The Daily Mail–the relentlessly delegitimizing coverage appears to confirm a commitment to invalidating trans people in public life.

Conclusion

This article began with the context of an already authoritarian Conservative Government’s reorientation since 2019 towards anti-trans policymaking and rhetoric. Its staffing of the senior management of the EHRC and BBC has resulted in a similar anti-trans shift in those organizations’ outputs, while policy-making over trans rights has shifted from consulting with trans-advocacy organizations such as Stonewall to anti-trans think tanks and lobby groups such as Policy Exchange and the LGBA, as well as the now-anti-trans EHRC. Consolidating this anti-trans hegemony is the legacy media coverage, which boosts anti-trans groups such as the LGBA while relegating or omitting trans-advocacy groups. Owen (2022, 487) has noted the apparent goals of anti-trans campaigns that are responsible for “attacking the social, legal, and institutional infrastructure that trans people depend on to exist as trans people.” The media coverage contributes to these campaigns by using the LGBA as a primary quoted source of expertise on trans- and broader LGBTQI-related issues. This is in spite of—or perhaps because of—the LGBA’s well-documented campaigning record since 2019 as an anti-trans and broader anti-LGBTQI+ group.

The LGBA may be said to influence UK Government policymaking and legacy media coverage. Since the LGBA’s meetings with Government officials circa 2021—during the same period when the Government no longer met with pro-trans organizations—the Government has changed its policy on conversion therapy in order to continue the practice against trans people. Yet the rapid development of the LGBA’s access and influence has been enabled by its ideological alignment with an anti-trans-oriented government. As Amery and Mondon (2024) say of organized transphobia, it involves “the elite production of essentialising discourse and politics regarding trans people to construct them into a homogenous group incompatible with ‘our’ ‘normal’ and ‘good’ society.” Since 2019, the ideological confluence of Government, moral technocracy, and legacy media transphobia underscores how the new anti-trans discourse “does not occur at random or in isolated events but rather is being generated and promoted by a highly organized social movement in a top-down manner” (Amery and Mondon 2024, 5). One solution would appear to be a change of approach in the Government and legacy media, away from the politics of majoritarian domination—shaped by elites—which replicates totalitarian characteristics of authoritarian regimes, including the production of a “moral technocracy.” There needs instead to be the recognition of the expertise and knowledge of grassroots networks that represent vulnerable minorities as an integral part of policy-making and democratic politics, not least as a vital form of checks and balances performed by the disempowered. As Lewis Raven Wallace (2019, 175) says of the illusion of media objectivity, including on trans issues, “How we understand power structures—as either inevitable or constructed, natural or learned, consensual or forced—matters a great deal to the questions we ask about race, class, gender, and identity in this era.” Wallace calls for a more collaborative, dialogic, less “extractive” relationship between those that control mainstream media narratives and write about minorities, and the minority communities themselves. Given the current nature of the “strong hegemony” of the UK legacy media, and how it relates to the media’s elitist composition, this may be either a good-faith appeal or wishful thinking. Regardless, the current monolith of anti-trans decision-making and representation congealed at the level of legacy media, government and policy-advice, is not only life-destroying for one of the UK’s most vulnerable minorities, but also a failure by those with power to appreciate the functioning of democracy and the role of civil society and minority networks in democratic empowerment and enfranchisement.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers of this article. Their encouraging words were a welcome fillip during the writing of what can be a distressing field of study for a trans researcher, and their generous feedback led to the addition of important details.