Since 2018, we have been taking the streets of London…
Trans Feminism Now at The World Transformed, Manchester 2025
In October 2025, Feminist Fightback were invited to speak on a panel at The World Transformed in Manchester, entitled ‘Trans Feminism Now’ with speakers from Queers for Palestine, Manchester Trans Liberation Assembly and RS21. We have shared the text of the talk below.
‘I will talk about Trans Feminism in the context of politics and organising around bodily autonomy and against the far right and fascism. I have found it helpful to date some of what has happened in the past few years to put it into context and so to some extent I am going to follow a chronological order tracing the thinking and activities of Feminist Fightback, an anti-capitalist feminist collective.
In 2018 Theresa May announced plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow self-identification in line with practice in other countries. This marked the beginning of increasing transphobia and weaponizing of gender as part of what may or may not be the long march to the 2029 general election of a reform government and the rise of global fascism. Within this period of time we can trace the resurgence of the religious right and its promotion of both anti- trans and anti- feminist politics.
In the post Covid, post Brexit, right wing populist political landscape, transphobia now appears everywhere in public life. In January 2023 Feminist Fightback held a panel event on feminism and the far right with panellists including trans groups, anti-fascists and feminists from Latin America and Poland. This happened in the context of the increasingly clear, increasingly violent alliance emerging between anti-trans actors and the organised far right, as shown by the weekly far right protests organised by turning point UK against drag queen story hour in Honor Oak South London and resisted by feminists and anti-fascists.
A wide range of issues were covered in the event by speakers who analysed and described how the hard right is using gender politics to build support through the control of women and attacks on gender non-conformity in the UK and internationally. These talks were followed by interactive sessions where we collectively mapped attacks on gender rights and reproductive justice and how they are being resisted. This resulted in the formation of the Freedom to Live coalition and further work on thinking through narratives and tactics to resist this new political formation.
Bodily autonomy can be an incredibly radical demand. This is particularly true when it is placed alongside traditional religious expectations to contribute to the capitalist (or feudal) machine with your body. We can trace an opposing traditional religious demand to be physically part of a collective imagined as one body that reproduces and cares for itself and others in the permitted way according to the law for the benefit of capitalist patriarchy. Refusal of this demand can be construed as a betrayal of the collective and deserving of punishment.
Through the links created at the 2023 panel event it was possible to see very clearly how these patriarchal structures were being reawakened by a resurgent far right. The modern project of the far right has been described as right-wing Gramscian, with an ecology of well-funded institutions waging a war of position through making intellectual arguments and seizing institutions in preparation for seizing state power. In an effort aimed at building hegemony across the whole of society the right were linking winning elections and online sloganeering with making a bid to offer people ways to understand the textured minutiae of their everyday life. The right have intervened, including via social media in people’s ways of understanding themselves and those closest to them. Projects have included interventions in relationship and sex education, bathrooms and of course, men’s mental health. This can be understood as the feminist assertion that the personal is political being turned back by the forces of reaction.
At its best, feminism can support our understanding of ourselves and our personal experiences in a political context. This is also a role that can be fulfilled by narratives within right wing Christianity.
Control of sexuality and policing of traditional patriarchal gender roles in a European Christian context has traditionally been the domain of the church. During the Spanish Civil War, Franco allied with the Catholic Church to massacre republicans and enforce catholic patriarchal ways of life on the population. This was continued in the 1970s death squad era in Latin America and has been repeatedly revived on that continent. When a huge campaign for abortion to be legalised in Argentina, Ni Una Menos, was successful around ten years ago, this was viewed as an assault on tradition and the family. We could understand this moment of progress followed by right-wing backlash as similar to the reform of the Gender Recognition Act in the UK. These were both used by the right to stoke culture war and we saw a global backlash against feminism and trans rights. Both illustrate modern instances of the long-term specific preoccupation of the religious right with preventing bodily autonomy.
We worked together to block March for Life in September 2023. March for Life are a prominent, well-funded and growing far right Christian anti-abortion group who have an annual event every September to demand an end to abortion. In 2023 despite the presence of fascist streamers standing alongside the Christians, we were able to block them with a joyful noisy protest uniting feminist, trans, anti-fascist and migrant groups. In 2024 there was a smaller protest. On 6thSeptember 2025 with other feminist, trans and migrant groups including RS21 trans comrades, FALA and Young Struggle we somewhat less successfully blocked far right Christians including prominent alt-right streamers, traditional fascists, and Progressive Anti- Abortion Uprising (clue- they’re not really that progressive). We noticed a year-on-year increase in the amount of organised fascists and young people as compared to elderly Christians, as well as increasingly repressive policing, mirroring the overall policing situation.
Charlie Kirk’s funeral was recently analysed in depth on the American podcast Know Your Enemy (deep dives on right wing people and thought) in partnership with Ordinary Unhappiness (psychoanalysis. It pulled apart the way the right now (once again) uses religion, spectacle, public affect and religious symbols to provide collective emotional processes to people in times of peril or grief. It used the Charlie Kirk funeral example to show the ability of these narratives and practices to symbolize and bind feelings in ways that people experience as meaningful but that also have a political character.
Enabling trans people and non-men to live freely- freedom to live- is the political project that the original coalition coalesced around. Trans feminist ideas- the social construction of gender, gender abolition and the notion that biology is not destiny are liberatory ideas that can contribute to our capacity to connect emotionally with what we believe and want and what is worth fighting for. Transfeminism can act as a resource that also enables these clear links between anti-fascist feelings, practices, narratives and communities that can include everyone and have the potential to become hegemonic.’