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People from the transgender community hold a protest against the U.K. Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman on April 19, 2025 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place.
On April 16, the U.K. Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that the legal definition of a “woman” must refer solely to biological sex. The implications of this decision were immediate and severe—trans women may now be strip-searched by male officers and excluded from spaces where their safety and dignity depend on recognition. At first glance, the decision may seem like a dry point of legal semantics. But in reality, it reflects a far deeper and more dangerous shift: the consolidation of an authoritarian political logic that treats trans lives as expendable in the pursuit of social order and hierarchical control.
This is not a policy based on scientific evidence or democratic deliberation. It is part of a wider cultural strategy designed to fracture public solidarity, weaponize identity, and enforce a hierarchy of who deserves protection. These strategies rely on well-worn tools: the stoking of moral panic, the resurrection of essentialist binaries, and the reduction of rights to a zero-sum contest. At the centre of it all is a necropolitical logic—one that governs through the threat of exclusion and disposability, using the unequal and conditional distribution of life, rights, and freedom as a tool to maintain dominance, privilege, and control.
Yet these politics do not operate only on a material level. They work most powerfully through identity—through constructing certain groups as more or less deserving of life. This is where queer necropolitics becomes a vital framework for understanding the terrain we are on. In this logic, queerness itself becomes a site of state violence, not because it poses a real threat, but because it disrupts the neat social categories authoritarian capitalism needs in order to manage, discipline, and divide us.
The U.K. Supreme Court’s decision is only the latest episode in an escalating series of culture war skirmishes that target trans people under the banner of protecting women. These moral panics, like those which target and continue to target migrants, queers, and sex workers, rely on sensationalism and fear rather than evidence. They mobilize deep-seated anxieties about gender, identity, and social change into a reactionary demand for order and exclusion.
Proponents of these anti-trans positions often frame themselves as defenders of feminism. They argue that allowing trans women into women’s spaces compromises safety or dilutes hard-won rights. But these arguments closely mirror the language and tactics of far-right populist movements. They draw on a worldview in which society is fractured into antagonistic identity blocs, and in which any gain by one group must come at the cost of another. This zero-sum logic reinforces the idea that rights are scarce—and that groups must compete for recognition, safety, and survival.
The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded?
Critically, these arguments lack grounding in either biology or social science. Claims about fixed “biological sex” ignore the robust and growing scientific consensus that sex is not binary and that human sexual traits exist along intersecting spectrums. From chromosomal variation to endocrine diversity, biological reality defies the simplistic male-female binary that the court ruling seeks to enshrine. Social science, too, has long shown that gender is a social construct with material effects, shaped by context, power, and historical processes.
Yet despite this, trans women continue to be painted as dangerous intruders, especially in spaces like sports or prisons. In sport, arguments against inclusion often rely on misinformation and biologically essentialist (and deeply racist) assumptions. However, both scientific research and legal analysis show that trans athletes face no inherent advantages—and are often at a disadvantage due to systemic barriers and social exclusion.
Through casting trans inclusion as a threat to cis women’s rights, this rhetoric not only distorts the goals of feminism but plays directly into the authoritarian politics it claims to resist. Instead of building coalitions among those historically marginalised, it encourages rivalry and suspicion. The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded? In this framework, protection is no longer a right—it is a prize to be fought over.
These attacks reveal a profound transformation in how power is exercised. It is no longer enough to control access to resources, wealth, or institutions. Authoritarian capitalism now governs at the level of life itself—who is deemed socially legitimate, who is recognized by the law, and who is left to navigate violence and precarity without protection. This form of rule is what theorists have identified as necropolitics: the power to determine who lives and who dies, not only physically, but socially, economically, and symbolically.
A queer necropolitical perspective deepens this understanding. It shows how queerness—particularly trans identities—are positioned as excessive, abject, or threatening within systems that demand legibility and conformity. Queer bodies do not just live precariously under this regime; they are actively made precarious. Their visibility becomes grounds for surveillance; their autonomy becomes justification for abandonment. Crucially, queer life—and by extension, any life that resists being neatly classified and controlled—is often only tolerated when it serves a political purpose or stays out of sight.
This logic did not emerge in isolation. It evolved from the earlier structures of neoliberalism, which systematically turned basic goods—such as housing, education, and healthcare—into commodities to be fought over. Under neoliberalism, survival became a matter of individual competition. But as the failures of that model have become increasingly visible, its competitive logic has migrated: Now it is identity itself that is rendered scarce. Rights are no longer distributed through citizenship or universal protections, but through contest between demographic groups.
This shift has produced a kind of demographic austerity. If trans people gain access to gender-affirming care, it is framed as coming at the expense of cis women’s services. If migrants seek asylum, it is painted as a drain on national resources. If Black communities organize for safety and justice, it is seen as threatening the status of white working-class voters. These dynamics reflect a necropolitical state that no longer promises inclusion through shared humanity, but only conditional recognition based on identity, utility, and submission.
In this way, trans people—and queer people more broadly—are turned into political symbols whose lives can be bartered, debated, or denied. Recent legal commentary has detailed how trans voices were excluded from the court’s reasoning. Policy analyses show how access to gender-affirming services is increasingly restricted. Meanwhile, broader populist movements are reinforcing essentialist identities globally—such as the Trump administration’s recent effort to promote racial essentialism and reject race as a social construct.
These are not isolated developments. They are the global grammar of a resurgent necropolitical order.
Faced with these conditions, the most urgent political task is to reject the premise that life must be earned through conformity. Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place. It refuses the logic of scarcity, of competition, of “deservingness,” and insists instead on a politics rooted in abundance, solidarity, and mutual care.
This form of resistance is especially vital in confronting necrophobic politics—the cultural and institutional tendency to reject or erase those who live outside normative scripts of gender, sexuality, race, or ability. Queer resistance confronts this head-on, not by asking for tolerance, but by building new ways of relating, surviving, and resisting violent normative logics. It appears in grassroots movements for the collective ownership of our spaces, mutual aid networks, in trans-led care collectives and cooperatives, and in artistic and theoretical projects that imagine life beyond legibility.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in.
The point is not simply to expand the margins of acceptability. It is to dismantle the very system that produces social death in the first place. As recent academic research and political analysis show, authoritarian capitalism survives by creating artificial crises of identity, which can then be managed, exploited, or repressed. Queer resistance makes those crises unmanageable. It refuses to play the game of identity competition. It recognizes that our survival depends not on winning favor from the state, but on transforming the conditions that make such favor necessary.
This resistance is already under way. Across courts, classrooms, and communities, people are challenging the reduction of identity to threat and fighting to build alliances across difference. Even as the far-right attempts to recapture the public imagination with a nostalgic vision of fixed categories and rigid roles, queer communities continue to model what it means to live otherwise—to live together and otherwise—outside the confines of binary thinking and zero-sum fear.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in. Will we be divided into discrete groups, each vying for conditional safety under an authoritarian state? Or can we build a world where life is not reduced to a bargaining chip, but recognized as fundamentally shared, entangled, and worth protecting—simply because it exists?
Queer politics answers this question with a resounding refusal to accept the terms as they have been offered. It defines freedom not as something won by denying others their rights or survival, but as the shared pursuit of joy, dignity, and possibility through the creation and exploration of diverse ways of living. And in doing so it provides the radical blueprint for a different and better future.
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On April 16, the U.K. Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that the legal definition of a “woman” must refer solely to biological sex. The implications of this decision were immediate and severe—trans women may now be strip-searched by male officers and excluded from spaces where their safety and dignity depend on recognition. At first glance, the decision may seem like a dry point of legal semantics. But in reality, it reflects a far deeper and more dangerous shift: the consolidation of an authoritarian political logic that treats trans lives as expendable in the pursuit of social order and hierarchical control.
This is not a policy based on scientific evidence or democratic deliberation. It is part of a wider cultural strategy designed to fracture public solidarity, weaponize identity, and enforce a hierarchy of who deserves protection. These strategies rely on well-worn tools: the stoking of moral panic, the resurrection of essentialist binaries, and the reduction of rights to a zero-sum contest. At the centre of it all is a necropolitical logic—one that governs through the threat of exclusion and disposability, using the unequal and conditional distribution of life, rights, and freedom as a tool to maintain dominance, privilege, and control.
Yet these politics do not operate only on a material level. They work most powerfully through identity—through constructing certain groups as more or less deserving of life. This is where queer necropolitics becomes a vital framework for understanding the terrain we are on. In this logic, queerness itself becomes a site of state violence, not because it poses a real threat, but because it disrupts the neat social categories authoritarian capitalism needs in order to manage, discipline, and divide us.
The U.K. Supreme Court’s decision is only the latest episode in an escalating series of culture war skirmishes that target trans people under the banner of protecting women. These moral panics, like those which target and continue to target migrants, queers, and sex workers, rely on sensationalism and fear rather than evidence. They mobilize deep-seated anxieties about gender, identity, and social change into a reactionary demand for order and exclusion.
Proponents of these anti-trans positions often frame themselves as defenders of feminism. They argue that allowing trans women into women’s spaces compromises safety or dilutes hard-won rights. But these arguments closely mirror the language and tactics of far-right populist movements. They draw on a worldview in which society is fractured into antagonistic identity blocs, and in which any gain by one group must come at the cost of another. This zero-sum logic reinforces the idea that rights are scarce—and that groups must compete for recognition, safety, and survival.
The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded?
Critically, these arguments lack grounding in either biology or social science. Claims about fixed “biological sex” ignore the robust and growing scientific consensus that sex is not binary and that human sexual traits exist along intersecting spectrums. From chromosomal variation to endocrine diversity, biological reality defies the simplistic male-female binary that the court ruling seeks to enshrine. Social science, too, has long shown that gender is a social construct with material effects, shaped by context, power, and historical processes.
Yet despite this, trans women continue to be painted as dangerous intruders, especially in spaces like sports or prisons. In sport, arguments against inclusion often rely on misinformation and biologically essentialist (and deeply racist) assumptions. However, both scientific research and legal analysis show that trans athletes face no inherent advantages—and are often at a disadvantage due to systemic barriers and social exclusion.
Through casting trans inclusion as a threat to cis women’s rights, this rhetoric not only distorts the goals of feminism but plays directly into the authoritarian politics it claims to resist. Instead of building coalitions among those historically marginalised, it encourages rivalry and suspicion. The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded? In this framework, protection is no longer a right—it is a prize to be fought over.
These attacks reveal a profound transformation in how power is exercised. It is no longer enough to control access to resources, wealth, or institutions. Authoritarian capitalism now governs at the level of life itself—who is deemed socially legitimate, who is recognized by the law, and who is left to navigate violence and precarity without protection. This form of rule is what theorists have identified as necropolitics: the power to determine who lives and who dies, not only physically, but socially, economically, and symbolically.
A queer necropolitical perspective deepens this understanding. It shows how queerness—particularly trans identities—are positioned as excessive, abject, or threatening within systems that demand legibility and conformity. Queer bodies do not just live precariously under this regime; they are actively made precarious. Their visibility becomes grounds for surveillance; their autonomy becomes justification for abandonment. Crucially, queer life—and by extension, any life that resists being neatly classified and controlled—is often only tolerated when it serves a political purpose or stays out of sight.
This logic did not emerge in isolation. It evolved from the earlier structures of neoliberalism, which systematically turned basic goods—such as housing, education, and healthcare—into commodities to be fought over. Under neoliberalism, survival became a matter of individual competition. But as the failures of that model have become increasingly visible, its competitive logic has migrated: Now it is identity itself that is rendered scarce. Rights are no longer distributed through citizenship or universal protections, but through contest between demographic groups.
This shift has produced a kind of demographic austerity. If trans people gain access to gender-affirming care, it is framed as coming at the expense of cis women’s services. If migrants seek asylum, it is painted as a drain on national resources. If Black communities organize for safety and justice, it is seen as threatening the status of white working-class voters. These dynamics reflect a necropolitical state that no longer promises inclusion through shared humanity, but only conditional recognition based on identity, utility, and submission.
In this way, trans people—and queer people more broadly—are turned into political symbols whose lives can be bartered, debated, or denied. Recent legal commentary has detailed how trans voices were excluded from the court’s reasoning. Policy analyses show how access to gender-affirming services is increasingly restricted. Meanwhile, broader populist movements are reinforcing essentialist identities globally—such as the Trump administration’s recent effort to promote racial essentialism and reject race as a social construct.
These are not isolated developments. They are the global grammar of a resurgent necropolitical order.
Faced with these conditions, the most urgent political task is to reject the premise that life must be earned through conformity. Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place. It refuses the logic of scarcity, of competition, of “deservingness,” and insists instead on a politics rooted in abundance, solidarity, and mutual care.
This form of resistance is especially vital in confronting necrophobic politics—the cultural and institutional tendency to reject or erase those who live outside normative scripts of gender, sexuality, race, or ability. Queer resistance confronts this head-on, not by asking for tolerance, but by building new ways of relating, surviving, and resisting violent normative logics. It appears in grassroots movements for the collective ownership of our spaces, mutual aid networks, in trans-led care collectives and cooperatives, and in artistic and theoretical projects that imagine life beyond legibility.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in.
The point is not simply to expand the margins of acceptability. It is to dismantle the very system that produces social death in the first place. As recent academic research and political analysis show, authoritarian capitalism survives by creating artificial crises of identity, which can then be managed, exploited, or repressed. Queer resistance makes those crises unmanageable. It refuses to play the game of identity competition. It recognizes that our survival depends not on winning favor from the state, but on transforming the conditions that make such favor necessary.
This resistance is already under way. Across courts, classrooms, and communities, people are challenging the reduction of identity to threat and fighting to build alliances across difference. Even as the far-right attempts to recapture the public imagination with a nostalgic vision of fixed categories and rigid roles, queer communities continue to model what it means to live otherwise—to live together and otherwise—outside the confines of binary thinking and zero-sum fear.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in. Will we be divided into discrete groups, each vying for conditional safety under an authoritarian state? Or can we build a world where life is not reduced to a bargaining chip, but recognized as fundamentally shared, entangled, and worth protecting—simply because it exists?
Queer politics answers this question with a resounding refusal to accept the terms as they have been offered. It defines freedom not as something won by denying others their rights or survival, but as the shared pursuit of joy, dignity, and possibility through the creation and exploration of diverse ways of living. And in doing so it provides the radical blueprint for a different and better future.
On April 16, the U.K. Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that the legal definition of a “woman” must refer solely to biological sex. The implications of this decision were immediate and severe—trans women may now be strip-searched by male officers and excluded from spaces where their safety and dignity depend on recognition. At first glance, the decision may seem like a dry point of legal semantics. But in reality, it reflects a far deeper and more dangerous shift: the consolidation of an authoritarian political logic that treats trans lives as expendable in the pursuit of social order and hierarchical control.
This is not a policy based on scientific evidence or democratic deliberation. It is part of a wider cultural strategy designed to fracture public solidarity, weaponize identity, and enforce a hierarchy of who deserves protection. These strategies rely on well-worn tools: the stoking of moral panic, the resurrection of essentialist binaries, and the reduction of rights to a zero-sum contest. At the centre of it all is a necropolitical logic—one that governs through the threat of exclusion and disposability, using the unequal and conditional distribution of life, rights, and freedom as a tool to maintain dominance, privilege, and control.
Yet these politics do not operate only on a material level. They work most powerfully through identity—through constructing certain groups as more or less deserving of life. This is where queer necropolitics becomes a vital framework for understanding the terrain we are on. In this logic, queerness itself becomes a site of state violence, not because it poses a real threat, but because it disrupts the neat social categories authoritarian capitalism needs in order to manage, discipline, and divide us.
The U.K. Supreme Court’s decision is only the latest episode in an escalating series of culture war skirmishes that target trans people under the banner of protecting women. These moral panics, like those which target and continue to target migrants, queers, and sex workers, rely on sensationalism and fear rather than evidence. They mobilize deep-seated anxieties about gender, identity, and social change into a reactionary demand for order and exclusion.
Proponents of these anti-trans positions often frame themselves as defenders of feminism. They argue that allowing trans women into women’s spaces compromises safety or dilutes hard-won rights. But these arguments closely mirror the language and tactics of far-right populist movements. They draw on a worldview in which society is fractured into antagonistic identity blocs, and in which any gain by one group must come at the cost of another. This zero-sum logic reinforces the idea that rights are scarce—and that groups must compete for recognition, safety, and survival.
The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded?
Critically, these arguments lack grounding in either biology or social science. Claims about fixed “biological sex” ignore the robust and growing scientific consensus that sex is not binary and that human sexual traits exist along intersecting spectrums. From chromosomal variation to endocrine diversity, biological reality defies the simplistic male-female binary that the court ruling seeks to enshrine. Social science, too, has long shown that gender is a social construct with material effects, shaped by context, power, and historical processes.
Yet despite this, trans women continue to be painted as dangerous intruders, especially in spaces like sports or prisons. In sport, arguments against inclusion often rely on misinformation and biologically essentialist (and deeply racist) assumptions. However, both scientific research and legal analysis show that trans athletes face no inherent advantages—and are often at a disadvantage due to systemic barriers and social exclusion.
Through casting trans inclusion as a threat to cis women’s rights, this rhetoric not only distorts the goals of feminism but plays directly into the authoritarian politics it claims to resist. Instead of building coalitions among those historically marginalised, it encourages rivalry and suspicion. The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded? In this framework, protection is no longer a right—it is a prize to be fought over.
These attacks reveal a profound transformation in how power is exercised. It is no longer enough to control access to resources, wealth, or institutions. Authoritarian capitalism now governs at the level of life itself—who is deemed socially legitimate, who is recognized by the law, and who is left to navigate violence and precarity without protection. This form of rule is what theorists have identified as necropolitics: the power to determine who lives and who dies, not only physically, but socially, economically, and symbolically.
A queer necropolitical perspective deepens this understanding. It shows how queerness—particularly trans identities—are positioned as excessive, abject, or threatening within systems that demand legibility and conformity. Queer bodies do not just live precariously under this regime; they are actively made precarious. Their visibility becomes grounds for surveillance; their autonomy becomes justification for abandonment. Crucially, queer life—and by extension, any life that resists being neatly classified and controlled—is often only tolerated when it serves a political purpose or stays out of sight.
This logic did not emerge in isolation. It evolved from the earlier structures of neoliberalism, which systematically turned basic goods—such as housing, education, and healthcare—into commodities to be fought over. Under neoliberalism, survival became a matter of individual competition. But as the failures of that model have become increasingly visible, its competitive logic has migrated: Now it is identity itself that is rendered scarce. Rights are no longer distributed through citizenship or universal protections, but through contest between demographic groups.
This shift has produced a kind of demographic austerity. If trans people gain access to gender-affirming care, it is framed as coming at the expense of cis women’s services. If migrants seek asylum, it is painted as a drain on national resources. If Black communities organize for safety and justice, it is seen as threatening the status of white working-class voters. These dynamics reflect a necropolitical state that no longer promises inclusion through shared humanity, but only conditional recognition based on identity, utility, and submission.
In this way, trans people—and queer people more broadly—are turned into political symbols whose lives can be bartered, debated, or denied. Recent legal commentary has detailed how trans voices were excluded from the court’s reasoning. Policy analyses show how access to gender-affirming services is increasingly restricted. Meanwhile, broader populist movements are reinforcing essentialist identities globally—such as the Trump administration’s recent effort to promote racial essentialism and reject race as a social construct.
These are not isolated developments. They are the global grammar of a resurgent necropolitical order.
Faced with these conditions, the most urgent political task is to reject the premise that life must be earned through conformity. Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place. It refuses the logic of scarcity, of competition, of “deservingness,” and insists instead on a politics rooted in abundance, solidarity, and mutual care.
This form of resistance is especially vital in confronting necrophobic politics—the cultural and institutional tendency to reject or erase those who live outside normative scripts of gender, sexuality, race, or ability. Queer resistance confronts this head-on, not by asking for tolerance, but by building new ways of relating, surviving, and resisting violent normative logics. It appears in grassroots movements for the collective ownership of our spaces, mutual aid networks, in trans-led care collectives and cooperatives, and in artistic and theoretical projects that imagine life beyond legibility.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in.
The point is not simply to expand the margins of acceptability. It is to dismantle the very system that produces social death in the first place. As recent academic research and political analysis show, authoritarian capitalism survives by creating artificial crises of identity, which can then be managed, exploited, or repressed. Queer resistance makes those crises unmanageable. It refuses to play the game of identity competition. It recognizes that our survival depends not on winning favor from the state, but on transforming the conditions that make such favor necessary.
This resistance is already under way. Across courts, classrooms, and communities, people are challenging the reduction of identity to threat and fighting to build alliances across difference. Even as the far-right attempts to recapture the public imagination with a nostalgic vision of fixed categories and rigid roles, queer communities continue to model what it means to live otherwise—to live together and otherwise—outside the confines of binary thinking and zero-sum fear.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in. Will we be divided into discrete groups, each vying for conditional safety under an authoritarian state? Or can we build a world where life is not reduced to a bargaining chip, but recognized as fundamentally shared, entangled, and worth protecting—simply because it exists?
Queer politics answers this question with a resounding refusal to accept the terms as they have been offered. It defines freedom not as something won by denying others their rights or survival, but as the shared pursuit of joy, dignity, and possibility through the creation and exploration of diverse ways of living. And in doing so it provides the radical blueprint for a different and better future.
