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Abstract

This article analyses the security politics of opposition to trans rights in the United States and United Kingdom. It argues that opponents of ‘gender ideology’ view transness as a threat to reproductive ability and therefore as a threat to national, societal and/or racial reproduction. Anti-trans movements articulate reproductive dis/ability along lines of gender, age and race, with an overwhelming focus on (what they imagine as) white girls’ developmental capacity for biologized motherhood, and white men’s developed genital size and sexual appetite. The article first develops an analytic framework combining Alison Howell’s account of global health security with queer, feminist and Trans Studies scholarship on reproductive nationalism. It then outlines a history of transatlantic security politics surrounding reproduction, showing that today’s moral panic extends a long lineage. Turning to contemporary anti-trans movements, the article argues that these approach children’s and/or feminized bodies as sites of national, racial and/or societal security, in need of defence against invasive, reproductively disabling, or racially degenerate trans threats. Overall, the article argues, opposition to transness exposes the broader security politics of reproduction, not least how these configure race, gender and age with dis/ability and health.

Keywords

Bodies disability race reproduction queer transgender

Introduction

Contestation surrounding trans rights has pervaded most areas of transatlantic public and political life in the last decade. Opponents of trans rights view transness as a powerful and far-reaching site of insecurity and threat. Former United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister Liz Truss, for example, blames Western weakness in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on ‘ludicrous debates’ about ‘pronouns’ (Daly, 2022), while former United States (US) President Donald Trump argues trans soldiers weaken the US military (Pepin-Neff and Cohen, 2021). Gender Critical movements accuse trans women of dangerously invading women’s and girl’s spaces, from school sports and public bathrooms to prisons (e.g. by the group Keep Prisons Single Sex), imagining a ‘trans lobby’ is taking over state and societal institutions (e.g. Brunskell-Evans, 2020: 58). In these ways, despite trans populations’ small size and marginalization,¹ anti-trans movements view transness as a new and increasingly urgent security problem.

This article examines the security politics surrounding transness in the context of what is most often opponents of trans rights’ central concern: sexual and reproductive health. It shows that anti-trans movements consistently depict the threat posed by transness as one of improper sexual and reproductive development, and improperly sexed or gendered bodies. For these movements, transness is a sterilizing medical intervention, sexual perversion, contagious disease, psychiatric disorder and/or conspiracy, resulting in wrongly developed genitals, sexual appetite, or experiences of sexual pleasure (e.g. in Shrier, 2021; Brunskell-Evans, 2020; Stock, 2021). These threats are gendered, with ‘normally’ reproductively developed womanhood (or, more often, girlhood with ‘normal’ developmental capacity) defined as biologized white motherhood, and manhood defined by virility and penis size. The threat to reproductive bodies represents, for opponents of ‘gender ideology’, a threat to national, societal and/or racial reproduction. Anti-trans policies are then required to protect girls’ reproductive futures, and men’s virility and penis size, for the purpose of national fortification and racial defence. That is, the article argues, anti-trans movements approach transness as reproductive disability and through the security politics of reproduction.

This explains the disproportionate power attributed to transness: for opponents of trans rights, the stakes are not solely the existence of trans individuals, but rather the reproduction of national, societal and/or racial futures. Thus, despite trans communities’ location at the violent edge of these politics, anti-trans movements articulate a much wider defence of national or racial health security. The insistence on the security of biologized white motherhood, and male virility or penis size, affects transatlantic societies well beyond trans populations, albeit in different ways. It also extends a long lineage of reproductive security politics dating from the Victorian era which, as described below, have targeted masturbation, migrant gender norms, sex work, queerness, poverty, madness and illness as reproductive threats to whiteness and nationhood. In this light, despite the sense of newness, urgency and exceptionalism often attached to transness, this article argues that the reproductive security politics surrounding transness are long-running and routine.

The article proceeds in five sections. The first section discusses how the rich field of queer security studies has largely failed to address the security politics surrounding transness (e.g. Amar, 2013; Bosia, 2014; Baker, 2017; Hagen, 2017; Weber, 2016; Leigh et al., 2021; Leigh, 2017; Wilkinson, 2017; Leigh and Weber, 2018; Charrett, 2019; Cooper-Cunningham, 2022). The second section introduces the field of opposition to ‘gender ideology’ as a moral panic comprising two interconnected strands: one centres narratives of feminism or the insecurity of girlhood and women’s rights (e.g. Brunskell-Evans, 2020; Shrier, 2021; Stock, 2021); the other focuses on the threat of emasculation to boys and men (as described by Gambert and Linné, 2018; Taylor and Jackson, 2018; Burnett, 2022). The third section outlines an analytic framework for understanding the security politics of reproduction, joining Howell’s (2014) critical analysis of the security politics of global health with scholarship on reproductive nationalism. The fourth section explores the history of transatlantic contestation surrounding reproductive and sexual health, situating opposition to ‘gender ideology’ within a long lineage of security politics. Finally, the fifth and sixth sections address contemporary contestation surrounding trans rights.

Transness in security studies

Despite debates about transness pervading international political and public spheres, there is still relatively little security studies scholarship addressing transness (as observed by Hagen, 2016, and Châteauvert-Gagnon, 2023). We might expect to find analyses of transness in the rich queer security studies scholarship, which often claims to address transness under the umbrellas of ‘queerness’, ‘gender deviance’, or the ‘T’ in ‘LGBT’ (e.g. Altman and Symons, 2016; Amar, 2013; Baker, 2017; Bosia, 2014; Charrett, 2019; Cooper-Cunningham, 2022; Hagen, 2016; Jjuuko, 2021; Kramer, 2017; Leigh, 2017; Leigh and Weber, 2018; Leigh et al., 2021; Weber, 2016; Wilkinson, 2017). Yet in most queer security studies scholarship, the security politics surrounding transness specifically are decentred or overlooked. For example, transness appears as a passing example (e.g. Bosia, 2014), illustrative case study (e.g. Leigh and Weber, 2018), or short if important section (e.g. Hagen, 2016: 325–327), rather than as central to analyses. Alternatively, work is required on the part of the reader to ‘read’ transness into an analysis where it is not named as such, as in Sjoberg’s (2016) reading of Weber’s Faking It, or as may be possible in scholarship on drag (e.g. Cooper-Cunningham, 2022; Weber, 2016). It may be that, given queer security studies’ roots in queer theory, and queer theory’s post-structuralism-informed concern with discourse and language (illustrated by Weber, 2016), queer security studies has found it difficult to integrate trans studies, which is more often informed by Marxist feminism (e.g. Gleeson and O’Rourke, 2021) or concerns with the materiality of the body (e.g. Gill-Peterson, 2018).²

A small body of work by Beauchamp (2019), Shepherd and Sjoberg and (2012; see also Sjoberg, 2012, 2016), Wilcox (2015: 9–14, 116–138), and Châteauvert-Gagnon (2023), constitutes the main exception in making the security politics surrounding transness the central object of study. Beauchamp, Shepherd and Sjoberg, and Wilcox all focus primarily on surveillance technologies and borders. Beauchamp (2009) traces transness across a range of security and surveillance sites, including passports, biometrics, intelligence and counter-terror practices, arguing that transness and surveillance are co-constituted in the United States. Drawing on Beauchamp, Shepherd and Sjoberg (2012) suggest that paying attention to the hyper- or in-visibility of trans bodies in security practices can, along with the concept of ‘cis privilege’, make visible previously obscured gendered dimensions of security practices. Relatedly, Wilcox (2015: 9–14, 116–138) proposes that the surveillance of trans bodies at borders reveals not only harms to trans air passengers, but the inherent difficulties in fixing and therefore securing gendered materiality. Taking a different approach, and emphasizing the need to centre trans narratives of transness, Châteauvert-Gagnon (2023) deploys whistle-blower and trans woman Chelsea Manning’s articulation of her dissent vis-à-vis both the military and gender to analyse ‘queer’ logics of state protection (on trans subjectivity, see also Wilkinson, 2017).

While this work points to transness as a fruitful and increasingly important site of investigation for security studies, such a small body of scholarship inevitably constructs a narrow view of the significance of transness for security studies. The overwhelming focus on surveillance, often located in the airport, offers a distorted view of the significance of transness to security studies (and indeed of security itself). In contrast, trans studies scholars show that transness is entangled with a broader range of core security studies concerns, including the carceral state, colonial state-formation, violence, race and populism (e.g. Bassi and LaFleur, 2022; Bey, 2022; Gill-Peterson, 2018; Snorton, 2017; Spade, 2015). This broader view is needed to understand transatlantic opposition to ‘gender ideology’, which views transness as insecurity in a vast array of realms outside the airport, not least health and reproduction. Although outside the geographic scope of this article, by exploring demands that transness be recognised as a ‘backwards’ class in India, Rahul Rao’s (2020) Out of Time points to another realm a broader lens might reveal.

Stoffel and Birkvad (2023) further criticize scholarship on transness in international relations for abstracting transness from trans people and communities. Drawing on work in trans studies (Chu and Drager, 2019; Heaney, 2017; Namaste, 2000), Stoffel and Birkvad argue that transness, viewed as gender transgression, has come to stand in for transgressions of any and all borders and boundaries. Transness is then deployed as a metaphor or ‘analytic’ abstracted from concrete conditions. Stoffel and Birkvad draw on Heaney’s (2017: 5) analysis of the ‘trans feminine allegory’ to argue that this process of abstraction and mystification risks essentializing, fetishizing, objectifying and otherwise fixing the meaning of transness away from the historic specificity of trans (and for Heaney especially trans women’s) lives. Such mystifying abstractions, Stoffel and Birkvad (2023: 856) show, ‘obscure the historical specificity of the structures, relations, and organizational mechanisms through which they are constituted’. Instead, they argue, we must follow Karl Marx and Stuart Hall and undertake ‘concretization’ – not empiricism, but the analytic embedding of ‘abstractions within the concrete social relations through which they are constituted’ (Stoffel and Birkvad, 2023). This argument should be especially compelling for queer security studies scholars seeking to engage with trans studies, because it offers a way to take seriously queer theory’s engagement with the discursive and linguistic realms, while avoiding reproducing abstractions, instead connecting these realms to trans studies’ concern with materiality and the body.

The abstraction of transness is a central characteristic not only of some scholarship but, crucially, of contemporary opposition to trans rights. As I show below, transness must be abstracted in order to posit trans medicine as violating not only the individual body but, through the individual body, also the borders of the sovereign nation-state. Transness must be abstracted in order to be viewed contradictorily as simultaneously predator and victim, degenerate/abject and hyper-powerful, and comprised almost entirely of white trans boyhood and womanhood (trans girlhood and manhood, as well as non-binary and non-Christian genders, are often absent from the anti-trans imagination). Through the abstraction of transness, sinister threats can be implied, while not specified, in rhetorical moves, such as discussing the sexualities of adults and children in close proximity on the page. In all these ways the abstraction of transness from trans lives enables the vast range of ways it is deployed by opponents of ‘trans activism’.

Outlines of a moral panic

The field of transatlantic opposition to trans rights spans far-right, Christian fundamentalist, Gender Critical and party-political spheres (Mackay, 2021; Pearce et al., 2020). It expresses concern with – and opposition to – a perceived growing and negative influence of transgender citizens, rights and activism. The UK has been a site of influential politics opposing trans rights, with US politics following the UK in this regard (Lewis, 2019). Opponents of trans rights are not homogenous. As Mackay (2021) describes, they variously overlap, collaborate, share arguments or tactics, and/or disagree with and denounce each other. In fact, one of the most striking features of opposition to ‘trans activism’ is its heterogeneity, including unlikely alliances between, for example, feminists and openly misogynist far-right activists (Evang, 2022: 366) or evangelical Christianity (Libby, 2022).³

This article addresses two clusters of opposition to trans rights. First, Gender Critical opponents of trans rights claim concern with women’s rights and safety. For this strand I focus on published books and journal articles rather than social media (e.g. Brunskell-Evans, 2020; Shrier, 2021; Stock, 2021). This avoids creating ‘straw man’ by addressing more developed arguments, as well as recognizing the significance of the legitimising function of publishing.⁴ Second, far-right opponents of trans rights express concern primarily with the threat of emasculation. The article relies primarily on secondary studies of this strand, which is more often expressed online and in community groups (e.g. Burnett, 2022; Gambert and Linné, 2018; Taylor and Jackson, 2018).⁵ Although this separation is useful analytically to identify the range of actors and arguments at play in the field, given the entanglement of both strands observed by Mackay (2021), it is ultimately false. They are especially entangled in party-political spheres, where the two combine to inform the same policies from different angles. Further, as this article shows, some Gender Critical opposition to trans rights shares a legacy of reproductive security politics with its far-right counterpart. Such connections are made possible in part by the amorphous abstraction of transness by opponents of ‘gender ideology’.

Trans studies scholars often describe contemporary contestation surrounding transness as a ‘moral panic’ (Elster, 2022; Miles, 2022; Pepin-Neff and Cohen, 2021). Stuart Hall et al.’s (2013) account of the 1970s UK moral panic surrounding ‘mugging’ is a foundational text in scholarship on moral panics. Hall et al. argue that ‘mugging’ was articulated as a new and increasingly urgent problem, despite the fact that the type of street robbery named ‘mugging’ had not measurably increased (see also Danewid, 2022 on Stuart Hall in security studies). The very word ‘mugging’ was new, used to invent – and abstract – a specifically Black, urban and working-class crime. This, in turn, legitimized increased urgent security measures targeting Black neighbourhoods, and especially Black youth, which strengthened an emergent right-wing neoliberal and law-and-order nation-state.

While neither is analogous to the other, a comparison of these two very different moral panics – one surrounding trans ‘gender ideology’ in the early 21st century and another about Black ‘mugging’ in the 1970s – confirms that opposition to trans rights is expressed in the registers of a moral panic. As was the case for ‘mugging’, opponents of trans rights create their own terminology for the threat they articulate, including ‘transgenderism’ (e.g. Brunskell-Evans, 2020: 1), ‘trans activism’ (e.g. Stock, 2021: 25), and ‘gender ideology’ (or, in Williams’s [2020] case, also ‘transgender ideology’), as well as diagnostic terms such as ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’ (Littman, 2017). These terms are not generally used by trans communities or advocates (and are, as in the case of ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’, sometimes denounced by the scientific communities they appeal to) (Giles, 2020). Such terminology does not simply contest the nature of gender or transness, but is necessary to the security politics of reproduction. For example, labelling trans women as sexually disordered men, or naming trans boys as weak-minded young girls, makes possible the appeal to nationalist tropes of vulnerable girls and perverse threatening men. Quasi-scientific language further functions to de-politicize trans rights and move transness into the realm of medical governance (‘mugging’, in contrast, enabled governance in criminal terms).

In these ways, naming is part of the process of mystifying abstraction and, as such, has become a site of struggle. This article uses the terms of opponents of ‘trans activism’, with reference to their articulation in the security politics of reproduction. It does not address trans life, trans reproduction and/or forms of reproduction exceeding the heterosexual, white and/or biologized version valorized by opponents of ‘gender ideology’ – a task undertaken elsewhere (e.g. by contributors to Gleeson and O’Rourke’s [2021] Transgender Marxism; see also Giles, 2019; Raha, 2021).

Also consistent with the nature of moral panics described by Hall et al., ‘gender ideology’ and ‘trans activism’ are imagined as new and newly urgent problems, and as generational, a trend and/or the domain of youth (e.g. by Shrier, 2021). This imagined ‘crisis’ of transness is then mobilized to promote urgent and exceptional measures to ‘defend’ (usually feminized) youth and ‘vulnerable’ women (e.g. the 2023 blocking of Scottish gender recognition legislation by the UK government) (Morton and Seddon, 2023). Yet, as I describe in the following section, the reproductive security politics surrounding transness are not new or exceptional but long-running and routine.

Analysing the security politics of reproduction

Global health security scholars have begun to consider the security politics surrounding reproductive health. Davies and Harman (2020: 283) define reproductive security access to ‘reproductive services’ for ‘women’, especially to safe abortion and contraception (‘Lack of access to comprehensive and safe reproductive services is a source of insecurity for women around the world’). While the (certainly gendered) issue of individuals’ access to care of all kinds is vital, this approach to reproductive security takes the meaning of ‘health’ as a fixed good to be ‘protected’. This obscures, as Howell (2014) argues of global health security scholarship more broadly, the social and political relations expressed through particular understandings of ‘health’ and ‘protection’ (in Stoffel and Birkvad’s terms, we might say the abstraction of health obscures the concrete relations through which its meaning is produced). Instead, this section develops a framework for understanding the reproductive politics of anti-trans movements focused precisely on these social and political relations. It combines Howell’s approach to the security politics of health with feminist and queer analyses of reproductive nationalism.

Building on scholarship in disability studies, Howell argues that modern medical, psychiatric and psychological discourses surrounding health have ‘been a science of social security and public safety at the level of the population’ (Howell, 2014: 971).⁶ In this analysis, following Michel Foucault, the nation is understood as population, and security is the management of that population, including their health, sanity, and vulnerability to the threats posed by (sick, mad or contagious) enemy populations. Howell describes how, since the late 1800s, a range of medical ideologies and practices targeting or constructing ‘health’ – including psychiatry, public hygiene, public health and eugenics campaigns – have had the aim of ‘improving the population, of defending society from enemies without and degenerates within’ (Howell, 2014: 971). ‘Health’ has been articulated variously as, for example, the capacity to work or to fight in war, in order to produce workers and soldiers. Health has also been articulated along lines of race and sexuality: ‘enemies without and degenerates within’ were viewed not only as sick and mad, but as racially other and/or queer, and as threats to the white race (Howell, 2014). Contemporary contestation surrounding transness belongs among such public health discourses.

A wide range of literature connects reproduction to the nation-state, identifying gender, sexuality, age, and race, as central to reproductive nationalism. In security studies, feminist and queer work makes this connection in terms of gender and sexuality. They show, for example, that women’s bodies and girls’ future bodies are viewed as vehicles for the reproduction of the nation: the violation of vulnerable (white) women and girls (e.g. through rape by an ‘enemy’) constitutes the (foreign) invasion of the nation, making the protection of vulnerable women and girls from perverse others a matter of national security (Peterson, 1999, 2000, 2013; Tickner, 2004; Weber, 2016; Weissman, 2018). While this literature also observes how ‘deviant’ femininities are viewed as threats to the nation (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007), and this certainly applies to transmisogynist depictions of trans women (as described by Serano, 2016), the current article focuses on the trope, central to reproductive nationalism, of an imagined perverse male threat to vulnerable young girls.

Outside of security studies, both post-structuralism-informed queer studies (e.g. Edelman, 2004) and materialist trans studies (e.g. Gill-Peterson, 2018) makes clear that age is part of this picture (see also Elster, 2022). Viewed as, uniquely innocent, vulnerable, easily influenced, and in need of special protection (especially against queer or trans perversion), children become stand-ins for the national future both discursively and in practice. Scholarship in Black and Indigenous studies points to the central racial and colonial dynamics of reproductive nationalism, in which racial difference is often coded as gender deviance, queerness or transness, and is associated with non- or wrongly or dangerously reproductive sex (Bey, 2022; Puar, 2002; Simpson, 2021; Snorton, 2017). All these fields engage the temporality of reproductive nationalism – whether backwards-looking nostalgia for imagined ‘traditional’ gender roles, untainted children, and imperial glory days, or future-oriented civilizational development – as a repeated theme.

Reading these accounts of reproductive nationalism together with Howell’s, we come to an analysis of the security politics of reproductive health, ability and disability. Bodies understood as sexually and reproductively healthy or non-disabled are just as key to reproductive nationalism as sexuality, gender, age and race. For campaigns against trans rights, reproductively healthy bodies are ‘normally’ sexually ‘developed’ bodies, with ‘normally’ sized genitalia, that are fertile with appropriate desire for reproductive sex. Yet these narratives of health must be understood through the varied scholarship on reproductive nationalism described above. Not only are young girls imagined as more vulnerable to contagious and deforming reproductive threats, but girls’ sexual health and boys’ sexual health are constructed differently: opponents of trans rights are concerned with white girls’ fertility and capacity to orgasm, but with boys’ penis length and virility.

At this intersection of transness and reproduction, we also find a particular iteration of nationalist nostalgia. Gill-Peterson (2018: 3) argues that, in the 20th-century United States, children’s ‘unfinishedness and plastic potential to be changed as they grow’ made children’s bodies sites for medical development and nationalist orientation towards future expressions of race, gender and sexuality. As I describe below, contemporary transatlantic opposition to ‘gender ideology’ similarly places – and attempts to govern – children within a developmental framework. However, unlike those doctors described by Gill-Peterson who advocated ‘correcting’ developmental trajectories through medical intervention, contemporary opponents of trans rights claim that such intervention (as they perceive it) is developmentally disruptive. They conjure a previous era of undisrupted and ‘naturally’ normative reproductive bodies (which Gill-Peterson suggests may not have existed). Through this perceived disruption or distortion of normative reproductive bodies and futures – articulated in terms of gender and sexual practices as well as health and ability – trans children are understood not as individuals but as a degenerate generation, disrupting national development, civilization, and progress.

The transatlantic security politics of reproductive health: A very brief history

In the late Victorian era, a series of transatlantic moral panics emerged surrounding children’s bodies as sites of insecurity for the (white, Protestant) national ‘stock’ and/or reproductive of ‘the’ (white, Protestant) race. The care of children, and children’s health, became ‘an imperial and class duty’ (Stoler, 1995: 34). Middle-class girls, for example, were imagined as dangerously excitable, mobile and/or physically strengthened by cycling (Kiersnowska, 2019), and at high risk of rape, especially by foreigners, in emergent public spaces such as rail transport (Barrow, 2015). This marked the emergence of transatlantic security politics surrounding reproductive health, which this section traces from the Victorian era to late 20th-century US sterilization policies. This is a history of the transatlantic security politics, not of transness, although the governance of sexuality and gender, sometimes expressed in ways we might now call ‘trans’, is part of that history. UK and US histories of transness – as well as challenges to the projection of the modern category of ‘trans’ onto history – have been undertaken elsewhere (e.g. Feinberg, 1996; Heaney, 2017; Heyam, 2022; LaFleur et al., 2021; Manion, 2021; Stryker, 2017).

Victorian society viewed masturbation as an especially pressing threat to children, with doctors claiming to have identifed a causal link between masturbation, ‘feeblemindedness’ and infertility, and establishing the diagnosis ‘Masturbational Insanity’ (Hare, 1962). For men and boys, emasculation or effeminacy were widely viewed as stemming from (or causing) masturbation, and ‘seminal loss’ was connected to ‘ill health’ and a ‘lack of manly bearing’ (Carlson, 2001: 29). ‘Masturbational Insanity’ not only threatened vulnerable children but the future of UK and UK societies, either by repressing reproduction or by degrading white Protestant societies via weakness, effeminacy, illness and/or madness. Public, political and scientific debates contested the precise nature of this insecurity, including whether perversion and masturbation caused insanity, or vice versa, as well as how best (medically, socially, spiritually, or punitively) transatlantic Victorian society could be defended against the masturbatory threat. Yet this contestation solidified the assumption of a connection between children’s sexuality and national insecurity.

In the UK and US, the late 19th century witnessed a mass migration from Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as increased urbanisation and industrialisation. White Protestant anxieties about reproductive security attached to migrants who joined the formerly enslaved as targets of reproductive defence. White populations and authorities accused migrants of perverse crimes towards white Victorian children (McClintock, 1995). Fears spread that ‘deviant’ migrant familial norms – of distinct origin yet inseparable from the concentration of migrants in poor, slum and sex working populations – might be socially contagious. Escapees from enslavement were accused of perversely cross-dressing to avoid capture (Snorton, 2017: 57). Genitalia was once again the focus of a moral panic about reproductive security. Circumcision became the vehicle through which Jews were depicted, as genitally damaged, damaging of genitals, and/or perversely interested in the genitals of children, or as (Gilman, 2013). Circumcision was also linked in public and medical imaginations with carriers of sexual disease, specifically syphilis (Gilman, 2013). Scientists claimed that, due to higher recorded rates of vaginal fissure, formerly enslaved women had inherently weaker genitals (doctors used enslaved women experimentally to develop genital surgery techniques) (Snorton, 2017: 23, 19). In the cases of both Jews and formerly enslaved Black women, then, societal narratives surrounding genital health were integral to and mobilized in service of broader racial power relations. This foreshadowed the concern of contemporary opposition to trans rights with children’s genitals.

The ascendance of race science in the late 19th century included the rearticulation of reproductive security politics in biologized racial terms, focussing on threats to white virility and/or white ‘stock’ through sex, intermarriage, or socialization with racially othered, weak, mad, sick, or perverse populations. Eugenicists argued that the white race must be secured against pollution, degeneracy, perversion and feeblemindedness (Carlson, 2001). The UK and US governments introduced reproductive security regimes, ranging from ‘encouraging’ ‘good’ matches through tax breaks (aka ‘positive eugenics’), to forced sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws (aka ‘negative eugenics’) (Carlson, 2001: 231–246).

At the same time, eugenics and anti-immigration movements abstracted advances in understanding biological contagion into narratives about the contagion of perverse sexual and gender practices. Emerging understanding of the significance of the penetration of bodily borders by germs was also abstracted to narratives of penetration of the nation’s borders. Combined with eugenicist arguments about reproductive security, these anxieties informed UK and US border policies ‘defending’ race, nation and/or society against the threat posed by immigration to reproductive security. These ranged from screening on Ellis Island for ‘healthy’ migrant bodies to increasingly restrictive US and UK border regimes in the early 20th century (Okrent, 2019). In these ways, eugenics and anti-immigration movements, as well as policymakers, identified multiple threats to reproductive health: the spread of racially degenerate (perhaps non-reproductive) sexual or gender practices via ‘contagion’; reduced fertility or, for boys, virility; madness; and/or perverse violation (especially of innocent girls). Both extant children and future generations of children were imagined as at risk. Notably, at this point, defence against such threats included – especially for white children – ‘corrective’ interventions by a growing field of trans and intersex medicine (Gill-Peterson, 2018).

These UK- and US-led security politics of reproduction informed early 20th-century fascist movements in the United States and across Western Europe. Fascist movements equated strong nationhood with the mentally and physically strong body of Aryan citizens, as well as queerness and transness with weakness and disability (Mayer, 2020). As Cohen (2018) describes, the expression of these security politics in the Nazi extermination project, although geographically outside the scope of this article, illustrates how, within fascist ideology, transfemininity has been viewed as a fantastical departure from biological rootedness, while Jewishness is seen as a decadent rootlessness in relation to land or place. Nazi rationalities were not, however, exceptional and nor did their end mark the end of eugenics: the forced sterilization of or removal of children from poor, Black and Indigenous Americans, often perceived as hyper-sexual, productive of degenerate offspring or incapable of proper childrearing, continued into the late 20th century (Stern, 2016). In parts of Europe, health policy subjected trans people to forced sterilization in this period, with sterilization a condition of access to medical transition, genital surgery a condition of legal gender recognition and/or fertility treatments denied to trans patients (Dunne, 2017; Lowik, 2018). As I now show, contemporary opposition to transness extends this long and varied tradition of security politics surrounding reproductive health.

Transness as weakness

Gender Critical opponents of ‘gender ideology’, and those expressing concern with women’s health more broadly, are preoccupied with the threat of transness to the reproductive capacity of trans-boys-figured-as-girls. For example, the parenting advice website Transgender Trend (2017) is concerned with ‘normal sexual or reproductive development’, while Heather Brunskell-Evans argues that ‘transgendering children’ (Brunskell-Evans 2020: 52) will ‘rob [the girl] of her future ability to become a mother’ (Brunskell-Evans 2020: 86) and constitutes ‘the neutering of women’ (Brunskell-Evans 2020: 87) (see also Marchiano, 2017). They are also concerned with sexual and reproductive health more broadly, including a range of sexual experiences and body parts. For example, Brunskell-Evans argues that ‘transgendering children’ (Brunskell-Evans 2020: 52) damages ‘the capacity for orgasm’ (Brunskell-Evans 2020: 86), while Transgender Trend claims ‘children who undergo transition before puberty will never have adult sexual function or experience orgasm’ (Biggs, n.d.).

Putting aside the question of whether these claims accurately capture trans reproductive capacities or sexual practices, as well as the many forms of familial reproduction, sexual pleasure and trans masculine agency they overlook, important for this article is how these statements take the definitions of both ‘reproduction’ and ‘health’ for granted. They articulate a singular desirable vision of girlhood and womanhood defined by biologized motherhood. They assume a singular desirable version of orgasm and sexual development. Picturing trans boys in this way does not solely contest the realities of their genders or lives, but makes possible the deployment of the reproductive nationalist trope of the vulnerable young girl, and her reproductive future, as under threat. In the anti-trans movements considered here, the moral weight of this feminized vulnerability, and the insecurity of biologized motherhood,legitimizes urgent and often exceptional demands for defence.

For Gender Critical opponents of ‘gender ideology’, the threat is not solely to individuals, but a generational threat at the level of nation and society. In Gender Critical narratives, girls are facing greater threats than previous generations and/or have less resilience to the normal discomforts of womanhood, and thus as more likely to ‘escape’ through transition. For Kathleen Stock, for example, it is puberty ‘for young women today’ that is particularly challenging (Stock, 2021: 162, emphasis added). This sensitivity is linked to an increasingly weak and overly sensitive younger generation, unable to withstand robust debate (Leigh, 2023). UK Peer Claire Fox (2016: 7–37), for example, describes ‘generation snowflake’ as ‘thin-skinned’, ‘febrile’, ‘fragile’ and ‘too mollycoddled and infantilized for the rough and tumble of real life’. Similarly, in the subtitle of Irreversible Damage: The transgender craze seducing our daughters (Shrier, 2021), it is ‘our’ (collective) ‘daughters’ (collective) experiencing a (collective) ‘craze’. In these ways, children’s reproductive futures are brought into the realm of public health, state governance and defence of the population.

Shrier’s (2021) book cover captures the temporality of this sense of a weakening society, including the nostalgia and whiteness attached to the figuration of the young girl. The cover features a drawing of a very young white girl – perhaps a toddler – with an old-fashioned aesthetic: a bob haircut, frilly vest, short-shorts, socks and brown shoes, with her eyes looking upwards as if towards an adult, perhaps flirtatiously or innocently. The drawing style and colouring are washed-out, as if vintage. There is a large hole cut out of the child’s abdomen where a womb (and all other internal organs) might be, through which it is possible to see through the wall behind the figure. The implication is that not only is transness a brutal and irreparable violence to very young girls, but that the object of that violence is also from another generation, normatively feminine, white, and perhaps sexually desirous or desirable or innocent (or all three). The old-fashioned image suggests a past version of white girlhood which is under attack. In a series of photos, trans author Schrieve (2021) critiques this image by dressing up as this cover figure for Halloween. Zir hairy legs, moustache, shaved head, big grin, and apparently joyful sexual agency (ze is making sexual gestures and kissing another person) undermines Shrier’s book cover, pointing to the vulnerable sexually damaged young girl as an abstraction.

In contrast to Gender Critical movements, far-right opposition to transness is more concerned with the weakening of the reproductive health of boys and men. Right-wing opponents of trans rights view transness as part of a broader trend, movement and/or conspiracy to disempower men and/or prevent the proper development of boys into men, which is, in turn, destabilizing natural, Western, white and/or civilizational orders (Maroney, 2022). Participants in the ‘manosphere’ – an online movement devoted to remasculinizing men – ‘believe that masculinity is in decline, civilization is crumbling, and men are becoming feminized’ (Williams, 2023). Sperm count is of particular concern to far-right movements, which view it as a measure of both fertility and virility (Williams, 2023). Diverse right-wing and/or men’s rights movements locate trans femininity, alongside masturbation (Burnett, 2022; Taylor and Jackson, 2018), plant-based diets, and soy products (Gambert and Linne, 2018: 131), among the many causes of the weakening and feminizing of men. Thus the US white nationalist group the Proud Boys, for example, argue that men must respond to the threat of transness by reasserting ‘natural’ biological binary gender through hyper-masculinization and the heterosexual biological reproduction of the white race (Stern, 2019: 201).

Here we see how fears about the weakening of men’s reproductive capacities and desires – and especially fertility and sperm count – are understood as threats to UK and US societies and/or whiteness. This echoes tropes from Victorian-era moral panics about masturbation and male feminization, with masturbation abstinence or ‘semen retention’ proposed, as in Victorian-era moral panics, as a solution in the manosphere (Burnett, 2022; Taylor and Jackson, 2018). The demonization of soy products makes clear the racial component by repeating another 18th-century trope: through an association of Asian food, a perception of Asian men as effeminate, soy, and vegetarianism with low semen counts and loss of male power, manosphere discourse mobilizes an ‘“effeminate rice eater” stereotype used to justify 19th-century colonialism in Asia’ (Gambert and Linne, 2018: 131). Overall, then, right-wing opposition to transness reflects broader anxieties about the degeneration of men’s reproductive bodies and male weakness en masse.

Recently, Gender Critical opponents of ‘gender ideology’ have begun to discuss trans-girls-figured-as-boys. As for the far-right and men’s rights activists, penis size is of particular concern. For example, in a court case brought against UK trans charity Mermaids, LGB Alliance expresses concern that the prescription of exogenous hormones or hormone blockers to trans girls will prevent (what they perceive as) adequate penile growth (Crown, 2023). Similarly, Transgender Trend argues: ‘Boys [sic] testes will not grow and develop and will impact on fertility. A boy’s penis will remain immature and remain the size of a child’s into adulthood’ (Biggs, n.d.). One panellist at a high-profile Gender Critical conference describes how, due to trans women but also oral contraceptives and menopausal hormone replacement therapy, the ‘peeing of synthetic oestrogen into the water’ is ‘forcibly “trans-ing” the fish’ (Braidwood, 2018). This ‘means we’re destroying the world partially because of the trans ideology’ (Braidwood, 2018). In this way, Gender Critical opposition to trans rights increasingly extends the reproductive security politics of the far right, especially regarding the feminization and emasculation of men’s reproductive organs and bodies, as well as by linking transness with national degeneracy or the destruction of ‘the world’.

In all these ways, for both Gender Critical and far-right opponents of trans rights, while girls are understood as more vulnerable and in need of extra protection, there is a strong emphasis for all children on the ‘proper’ gendered development of sexuality, genitalia, reproductive sex and reproductive futurity. For girls, this is primarily understood in terms of the capacity for biological reproduction, as well as orgasm. For boys, this is most often attached to penis size and racial anxieties surrounding emasculation or feminization.

Transness as threat

If the reproductive future and ‘normal’ sexuality of children is imagined as the key site of vulnerability to transness, the threat of transness to reproduction is attributed to the perverse trans woman, an international trans conspiracy, and psychiatric illness or contagion. Depicting trans women as perverse men who threaten women and children once again replays the classic nationalist trope of the ‘perverse other’ as well as the denigration and racial othering of ‘deviant’ femininity. In contrast to the last section, which showed divergent if overlapping concerns between Gender Critical and far-right opposition to trans rights (one more often with girls and women, the other with boys and men), the Gender Critical and far-right strands of opposition to trans rights often share the same focus and narratives when it comes to transness as threat.

Both attach anxieties surrounding transness to improper sexuality and illness. Gender Critical opponents of ‘trans activism’ are concerned with what they perceive as the distorted sexual development and genital fixation of adult trans women. They tend to articulate this in clinical or psychiatric terms. For example, in place of transness, they suggest a diagnosis of ‘autogynephilia’, a disordered fetishization of vulvas and vaginas (e.g. Stock, 2021: 229) (for a critique see Serano, 2020). In an influential analysis, Littman (2017) argues that transgender teenagers are experiencing a condition called ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’, contagious amongst peers, which is in fact a coping mechanism for other psychological disorders (for critiques see Ashley, 2020; Giles, 2020). Similarly, Shrier (2021) describes ‘the current trans epidemic plaguing teenage girls’.

Right-wing opponents of trans rights also deploy psychiatric narratives. For example, Douglas Murray (2019), a UK-based conservative journalist, argues that ‘gender ideology’ is a form of socially contagious crowd-based madness. Yet right-wing opponents of trans rights also sometimes skip the medicalizing language and straightforwardly name transfemininity as a criminal perversion. For example, in a book published by a US white nationalist publisher, Scott Howard imagines that ‘trans activists’ advocate ‘a human right for sex predators to declare themselves another gender in order to use the little girls' room?’ (Howard, 2020: 8). Thus the trans women’s mal-developed sexuality is imagined as fuelling an invasion of women’s spaces and category of ‘woman’ itself.

Here, as in 20th-century and eugenicist reproductive politics surrounding queer and migrant practices of sex and gender, opponents of trans rights medicalize transness as a quasi-biological and psychiatric threat. Gender Critical and far-right movements both connect the threat of reproductive disability with broader narratives of bodily or mental weakness. The idea that transness is contagious (and therefore a disease) elevates a biological metaphor for the social to the level of medical diagnosis.

One function of articulating transness in a medical or psychiatric frame is to depoliticize the question of trans rights. Perhaps this is why trans politics or trans rights advocacy are also sometimes seen as a result of mental weakness or psychiatric disorder. For example, borrowing from Littman, Stock describes trans politics as the ‘rapid intellectual onset of gender identity theory’ (Stock, 2021: 14). Saad describes ‘transgender activism’ as ‘idea pathogens . . . which are rooted in a deeply hysterical form of biophobia (fear of biology)’ (Saad, 2020: 7). Thus both transness and advocacy for trans rights are relocated to the domain of public health, psychiatry and other forms of governance in the name of the security of the population.

Finally, in another conflation of individual and national bodies, both strands of opposition to trans rights attach to transness the threat of invasion not only of women’s and children’s bodies but of UK and US national or sovereign borders themselves. Both view ‘trans activists’ as taking over societal institutions, conspiring internationally to control those institutions from behind the scenes, and/or funded by a network of global wealth.

From the far-right perspective, Howard (2020) calls the ‘Trojan Horse’ (2020: 19) of ‘gender ideology’ a ‘full-on indoctrination campaign operating at all levels’ (2020: 9), aiming ‘to demoralize, weaken, and dumb down the population to make them more compliant’ (2020: 18). Howard (2020: 12) further describes ‘lucrative industries profiting from transgenderism and a gaslighting operation driving the population mad’. Howard argues that this ‘transgender industrial complex’ is led by Jewish homosexuals or trans Jews, and is an attack on the white race (Howard, 2020: 11–25). Here, transness is woven into far-right conspiracy theories about a shadowy behind-the-scenes Jewish cabal (described by Berlatsky, 2019). In this way, transness is externalized to the US, from where it can be deployed as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for a broader Jewish takeover. Howard further links this conspiracy to decolonial and Indigenous politics. The BBC, he argues, is an agent of mass indoctrination, dangerously pro-trans, and also ‘claims in what is a frankly genocidal assertion that “the Sami are the only indigenous people in the EU”, which frames Europeans as colonists in their own homelands. Thus, “de-colonization” can only mean white eradication’ (Howard, 2020: 11). Here, the perceived transgender ‘denial’ of the ‘truth’ of biological sex is connected to the denial of the ‘truth’ of white indigeneity in Europe and North America. The far-right literature makes a series of associations – often facilitated by abstraction – between transness, Jewishness and Indigeneity.

While the Gender Critical side is less explicit in its evocation of a racial threat, it nonetheless reproduces conspiratorial narratives, especially regarding healthcare and expert knowledge surrounding transness. Brunskell-Evans (2020) imagines that an organized network of health professionals are imposing hormonal transitions and sterilization onto children, directed by ‘The Trans Lobby’ and ‘a cadre of elite billionaire philanthropists’ (Brunskell-Evans 2020: 58). Similarly, Stock suggests trans advocacy ‘float[s] down from on high, via academic managers, journal editors and referees, to make sure that, on the ground, no dissenting voice gets into “the literature”’ (Stock 2021: 12). Similarly to Howard’s ‘Trojan Horse’ argument, Murray and Hunter Blackburn (2019: 1) argue that ‘the introduction of gender self-identification’ legislation in Scotland is a way to ‘capture’ policy in Scotland. Thus transness is not only imagined as a biological or psychiatric threat to the reproductive and sexual health of individuals, whiteness and the nation, but also as an external invasive threat to the integrity of national borders, institutions and sovereignty over its population. In this way, Gender Critical sources extend far-right conspiracy theories of a perverse trans takeover, including narratives about outsiders taking over the medical and scientific institutions governing reproductive health. Yet by removing explicit references to race, Gender Critical sources make the nonetheless racialised image of a shadowy and perverse outsider-enemy-invader available for legitimate use in institutional and policymaking contexts.

Conclusion

Diverse opponents of trans rights converge in their view of transness as both a societal weakness and a threat. For both Gender Critical and far-right movements, the overwhelming focus is on adult-trans-women-figured-as-men and trans-boys-figured-as-girls, as well as on reproductive capacity (or disability) and practices. Opponents of trans rights are differently concerned with the bodies of girls and women than they are for men and boys: for girls, fertility is of central concern; for boys, penis size and sex drive. The trans threat is racialized through narratives of illness and contagion as well as invasion, externality and conspiracy. Viewed through Howell’s framework combined with feminist, queer and trans accounts of reproductive nationalism, we can see how this mobilizes the gendered nationalist trope of vulnerability and perversion, in the defence of the security of (white and heteropatriarchal) national reproduction.

This concretization of the mystifying abstraction of transness by anti-trans movements shows that security politics surrounding transness must be understood as produced through, and constitutive of, the broader security politics of reproduction. These included a lineage of security politics surrounding reproduction, emerging in the Victorian era, in which children’s and/or feminized reproductive bodies are sites of national, racial and/or societal security, in need of defence against invasive, reproductively disabling or degenerate trans threats. Such reproductive security politics have, as in the eugenics movements of the first half of the 20th century, often been common ground for ‘progressive’ and fascist movements. Through this lens, despite the sense of newness attached to transness, today’s opposition to trans rights can be seen as continuing a long-running lineage of reproductive security politics. The Gender Critical/far-right alliance appears less surprising and more routine.

More work is needed addressing the security politics of transness, for which the analysis here presents a starting point. In undertaking this work, security studies must take seriously both transness and trans studies (e.g. Bassi and LaFleur, 2022; Bey, 2022; Gill-Peterson, 2018; Snorton, 2017; Spade, 2015). For queer security studies, assuming that transness is addressed simply by the inclusion of ‘T’ in ‘LGBT’, or is articulated monolithically, not only misses the centrality of its contestation to contemporary security politics, but also the ways transness is differentiated, for example along lines of gender, race or age. Without such differentiation, it is impossible to recognize, for example, the role of the imagined young white girl in the security politics surrounding transness. Or, for that matter, to understand the how the transatlantic security politics surrounding transness differ from or relate to those unfolding elsewhere (such as surrounding trans demands for recognition as a ‘backwards’ class in India, as explored by Rao [2020]). Without such differentiation, that is, we risk buying into the mystifying abstraction of transness by opponents of trans rights.

Finally, this article contributes to our understanding of the security politics of reproduction beyond transness. While feminist- and queer-informed analyses of white reproductive nationalism are vital, the article shows that narratives of ability and health are equally significant to understanding the security politics of reproduction. It shows that the definition of reproductive health cannot be taken for granted, but is, along with demands for its defence, determined and deployed in the context of broader power relations. Failure to engage with transness misses a central site of struggle over reproductive security – one that implicates not only trans lives, but all those affected by enforced biologized white heterosexuality.

Footnotes

This article has been improved by comments and support from Maddie Breeze,Dan Bulley,Matthew Evans,Harry Josephine Giles,Laura Jung,Bal Sokhi-Bulley,Tarik Kochi,members of the Law & Resistance Research Group at the University of Sussex,students on the Law & Resistance module at Sussex,three generous anonymous reviewers,and Mark Salter as Editor-in-Chief of Security Dialogue . Trans,queer and feminist knowledge almost never originates in academic scholarship,and only ever makes its way into the academy belatedly,partially,and perhaps ill-advisedly. The analysis of reproductive security politics offered here has been developed and already surpassed in trans,queer and feminist communities. It is to these that the article owes its greatest debt.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Darcy Leigh

Dr Darcy Leigh ( d.leigh@sussex.ac.uk ) is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex,whose research explores the eugenic,fascist and liberal legacies of European colonialisms,often in the contexts of gender,sexuality,human rights or social movements,and always from trans,queer,antifascist and/or diasporist Jewish perspectives.

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