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I don't think most politicians who get bounced into taking these positions are themselves committed ideological transphobes. But they're pushed, through media and other forms of lobbying, by those who are. As Shon Faye points out in her groundbreaking book, The Transgender Issue, The Times and the Sunday Times between them ran more than 300 articles -almost all of them hostile - about transgender people in one year alone. And the impression you'd get from this media coverage was that we were subject to something like an invasion from within. Whether in hospitals, schools, refuges sports, prisons or even just the census, trans people were apparently popping up like dandelions and disrupting the day-to-day functioning of institutions through their mere existence. Even just recognising that some people might be trans was enough to invite criticism: "Census trans question under scrutiny for 'confusion'" went one headline in The Times, while another signalled "Anger at transgender handbook for children in care". These pieces are fairly typical of the news offering - I'm not even looking at the comment pages. This steady drumbeat of reporting builds up a foreboding sense that trans = bad, and there's just too damn much of it. It's crude, but it's effective at closing down space for politicians to argue for more trans-inclusive policies.
Ideological transphobes seem to live in an alternate dimension, where genitals are central to every social interaction - and trans people want nothing more than to focus your attention on which ones they might have. In February 2023, a Tory councillor named Ruby Sampson alleged that a trans woman in a pub toilet turned around to her and said: "I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis." Weird, right? (Not least because I've never heard of an absorbent penis.) "The close proximity [of the stalls] made it much scarier still," Sampson wrote in an article for the Daily Mail. "What if she turned violent?" And look, if someone said that to me in a ladies' loo, I too would be a bit perturbed. "I felt like I had been flashed," she said, "as the penis image was put in my mind by her announcement. It was said to intimidate."
But just stop and think for a minute. How likely do you think it is that a random person in a bathroom would say, "I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis," to an absolute stranger? Much like the average pub toilet, this story didn't pass the smell test for me when it was published. Then, a couple of days later, a transgender woman posted a thread on Twitter. She suspected it had been her in the loos with Ruby Sampson. She'd been attending a vigil for murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, and nipped into a nearby pub for a drink with friends afterwards. There was no toilet paper or hand towels in the toilets - and what she said to Ruby Sampson was that she was going to wipe her hands, after washing them on her jeans. Jeans, penis, potato, potahto.
I get that people make honest mistakes. But it seems this one was made precisely because someone saw a trans woman enter a public bathroom and was fixated on what their body might be like under their clothes. Indeed, Sampson wrote at length about how she perceived this stranger's appearance: "She wore a skimpy top which made her shoulders seem bigger. And she spoke with a strikingly deep voice." It sounded like she was trapped in her own personal version of Kath Day-Knight's lesbian panic - when you're thinking about something obsesively, you suddenly start seeing it everywhere. Nightmares and fantasies are but a hair's breadth apart, and you'll warp your perceptions to fit what you've primed yourself to encounter.