Trans violence is out of control

Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project has lodged a complaint with the Information Commissioner about the gender-critical organisation, Protect and Teach, accusing it of failing to disclose ‘who they are or how they’re handling people’s data’. ‘If a group won’t say who they are’, the Good Law Project asserts, ‘it raises a vital question: what are they trying to hide? If your views are so toxic you won’t put your name to them, then maybe you shouldn’t be saying them at all.’

True or not, these pettifogging legal gripes entirely miss the point. The fact is that campaigners are concealing their identities not because of the supposed ‘toxicity’ of their beliefs, but because they are concerned about their safety and that of their families. For gender-critical feminists, speaking in public has become a very dangerous business.

The first hints of the current wave of violence began last year. Following the landmark judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd vs The Scottish Ministers, in which the Supreme Court confirmed that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, the women behind the campaign reported being inundated with death threats and misogynistic abuse. They also described the damage their views had caused to their employment and business interests.

Trans activists soon turned their attention to officials. The then chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Baroness Falkner, told parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee that she had been forced to cancel a meeting after police warned of a ‘serious risk’ of violence. Trans activists had made it harder for her staff to come to work in safety, she told MPs, adding: ‘The level of agitation that they can cause in terms of personal attacks, libellous attacks, defamation, where our family members are affected – our intimate family members have to think about how they’re going about to their place of work – has got to stop.’

You don’t even have to be a gender-critical feminist to risk the wrath of activists. Sally Dunsmore, the director of the Oxford Literary Festival, last year dared to programme a discussion between gender-critical writers Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce. Several guests, including an Oxford lecturer in English, pulled out, while other activists threatened Dunsmore directly, telling her she would be ‘put in a box and burnt’.

Now, those threats are taking on a more explicitly criminal and violent form. A militant trans-activist group known as Bash Back has issued a ‘direct action’ guide urging members to identify ‘transphobic’ targets – including MPs – and ensure they are ‘hit repeatedly until they desist’ from their ‘transphobic’ activities. The guide admits Bash Back’s campaigning would be ‘rarely legal’, and warns participants that they could face charges including criminal damage, possession of an offensive weapon and aggravated trespass. An equipment section lists items such as a hammer and advises activists to clean tools with alcohol or dispose of them after use in ‘unsurveilled residential bins’.

They’re not mucking around. Bash Back has already claimed responsibility for attacks on the constituency office of health secretary Wes Streeting, and for hacking the website of the Free Speech Union. It also targeted the offices of the EHRC last year, smashing windows and spraying the building with pink paint.

Despite Maugham’s supposed opposition to ‘toxic’ attitudes, his own response to Bash Back’s activities was favourable. He described this campaign of violence and intimidation as ‘the inevitable, and I would say legitimate’ response to a society whose ‘politics and media systematically dehumanise trans people’.

Maugham’s hypocrisy highlights what has become a familiar defence of trans activism. Allowing a gender-critical feminist to speak is cast as an act of both real and symbolic violence, where every dissenting utterance becomes an attack on vulnerable gender-confused children. Like Maugham, they claim that the clock’s already struck midnight, and there’s no time for the weary conventions of civility, tolerance or open debate.

On campus, where the sort of people Bash Back is now urging activists to target are very often to be found, the implications of this rhetoric have already been severe. At the Committee for Academic Freedom, we regularly deal with cases involving gender-critical academics who are reluctant to take their concerns public for fear of reprisals.

This is reinforced by the government-commissioned review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender, led by Professor Alice Sullivan and published in 2024. It recorded not merely isolated complaints, but also a broader chilling effect: gender-critical academics describe moderating how they frame arguments, avoiding open discussion, narrowing what they were prepared to teach or research, and hesitating to pursue work touching on biological sex for fear of complaints, ostracism, managerial disapproval or damage to their careers.

If direct threats of violence are now being added to this already hostile climate, the reluctance to attach one’s name to advocacy concerning the importance of biological sex – or to pursue research on that topic, organise conferences, supervise PhDs or teach on it at all – begins to look less like evasion and more like self-defence.

The Good Law Project is free to campaign as it wishes, but it should at least be honest about where the ‘toxic’ climate it bemoans is actually coming from.

Freddie Attenborough is director of research for the Committee for Academic Freedom.