Event overview
07950612042
Dr Natacha Kennedy, Department of Education, Goldsmiths University of London 'Transphobia and Fascism Why Trans People are the Canaries in the Coalmine'
Hosted by the Centre of Identities and Social Justice
Wednesday 12 November,5.30-7.00pm Deptford Town Hall, Room 102, Goldsmiths, University of London
The UK in particular has become a centre for transphobic activism because of a number of features of the political environment that make it attractive for international fascist groups to invest their considerable funding. Despite having a government that many still believe to be ‘progressive’ the situation in the UK for trans people is much worse than in most other countries in Europe, even Italy, where recent polling shows that public support for trans people’s human rights is very high.
As Amery & Mondon (2024) have argued, transphobia is very much a top-down practice. This has made the UK particularly susceptible; it has a ruling establishment that is largely drawn from a very small subsection of the population - private school and Oxbridge educated, it is outside the EU which makes it easier to ignore human rights legislation, and it’s mainstream media, while appearing diverse and independent, mostly deploys identically editorial policies which exclude trans people and promote the opinions of transphobes (Davies 2024). As such a significant growth in opaquely-funded transphobic hate groups has been encouraged to develop.
The result has been an increasing flow of disinformation about trans people, with the sources of that disinformation changing and being accorded the appearance of greater authority. In what I will be characterising as the deployment of what I call contrived authority strategies (Kennedy & Anon 2025), the flow of disinformation designed to turn opinion and supposition into official “fact” has focussed on adding an undeserved credible veneer to this disinformation. As a consequence the fascist funders of organised transphobia are refocussing their campaigning power on rights-stripping of other groups in the UK, most notably removing the right to safe and legal abortions for people who can become pregnant.
This talk will focus on the development of transphobia in the UK and elsewhere and the strategies it deploys, and call into question many myths propagated by it, situating it in relation to the current global political landscape and the past fights for human rights of other groups.
Biography
Natacha Kennedy is a lecturer in Education and member of the Centre for Identities and Social Justice at Goldsmiths. A former primary school teacher, she is co-founder and director of the Feminist Gender Equality Network (FGEN), a large international network of feminist and gender-studies scholars. Her most recent publication on the effects of the UK puberty-blocker ban has revealed the serious harm caused to children by the Starmer government’s puberty-blocker ban and is one of many peer reviewed publications that have contributed to discrediting the, now very widely discredited Cass Review."
https://www.gold.ac.uk/identity-social-justice/
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Nov 2025 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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