What reads at first as a well-meaning plea for administrative clarity is, on inspection, a familiar act of ideological policing. The Observer editorial, thinly veiled as concern for women’s welfare and statistical rigour, is in fact a reaffirmation of the state’s interest in preserving fixed categories of social control, this time under the banner of “biological sex”. The enemy, we are told, is a “belief system”: gender identity. Yet the editorial’s assumptions, about what bodies mean, what categories are real, who gets to speak, are deeply ideological, rooted in a long tradition of bourgeois mystification.
It was never about data. Or rather, it’s always about data as power. The Observer is less interested in recording reality than in restoring a normative order. Its anxieties stem not from missing information, but from the collapse of the classificatory order on which gendered capitalism depends. Trans people disrupt this order. Their existence exposes the fiction that the world is neatly divided into men and women, producers and reproducers, breadwinners and dependants. That fiction is essential to the running of capitalist society, not because it’s true, but because it organises bodies into exploitable forms.
When the Observer invokes prisons, it does so selectively. We are to believe that the problem is not the prison-industrial complex, with its routine abuse of all incarcerated people, but the presence of a small number of trans women, whose existence apparently threatens the ontological status of “female”. Similarly, the crisis in healthcare is not underfunding, privatisation, or the collapse of GP services, but the alleged confusion of NHS databases when confronted with people whose gender doesn’t conform to expectations. The editorial never pauses to consider that perhaps the problem is not trans people, but the crumbling infrastructure of the neoliberal state.
This is the reactionary politics of nostalgia disguised as common sense. The same state that slashed women’s services, gutted rape crisis centres, and drove disabled people to food banks is suddenly cast as a helpless victim of activist overreach. But who exactly are these powerful “activists”? In reality, they are some of the most marginalised people in Britain: disproportionately unemployed, homeless, subject to hate crimes and police violence, and routinely denied medical care. To frame them as a threat to democratic institutions is a staggering reversal.
What the editorial demands is not “clarity” but submission. It wants trans people to conform, to be legible to the state, to know their place in the hierarchy of suffering. But Marxists have always understood gender as a social relation, not a biological truth. Engels made this clear when he linked the subjugation of women to the rise of private property and class society. The family, in this account, is not a natural unit but a coercive one, designed to reproduce labour power and transmit inheritance. Later feminists extended this to show how “woman” itself is a role, constructed and enforced through unpaid work, legal codes, and everyday violence. Trans people challenge these assignments, not in theory, but in practice.
That’s why they are targeted. The current moral panic has less to do with feminism than with restoring discipline. It’s not a coincidence that the backlash intensifies alongside broader attacks on protest, migration, and the right to strike. Transphobia, in this context, is a gateway reaction, a test of loyalty to the nation, the border, and the nuclear family. The Observer may not speak the language of blood and soil, but its call for a return to biological essentialism plays to the same gallery.
The answer is not better sex data. It’s the abolition of the conditions that make gender a weapon of state control. That means free healthcare, an end to prisons, the dismantling of the nuclear family, and solidarity with all those forced to the margins by capital’s unrelenting need to sort, punish and exploit. Trans liberation is not a distraction from class struggle; it’s a condition of its possibility.
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