Authoritarianism / Fascism

A new code of practice has said that organisations offering single-sex services and spaces must exclude Trans+ people from them, or no longer label them as ‘single-sex’.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK's equality watchdog, laid the Code of Practice before Parliament this Thursday, May 21st. It sets out that single-sex spaces, from toilets to changing rooms, must be served on the basis of what it calls 'biological sex', based on people's sex assigned at birth. It will come into practice after 40 days, if it is not opposed.

The code makes it clear that this is the case even if someone has a Gender Recognition Certificate that changes their legal sex. It sets out that this should now be considered their 'certified sex', instead of their 'biological sex', and that single-sex provisions must be delivered in accordance with 'biological sex'.

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In almost all instances, it recommends creating 'third spaces' for Trans+ people to use, setting out that though people should use single sex services based on their 'biological sex', if Trans+ people are perceived to be another gender, it may be proportionate to deny them access to these too.

For example, it sets out that if a trans man is perceived to be a man, they could be denied entry to the women's toilets, even though their sex assigned at birth is female. It describes this as "a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim" because "other service users could reasonably object to his presence".

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Although this guidance is not as bad as it could have been, this is horrific news for not only Trans+ people, but the whole LGBTQIA+ community. The Trans+ community are scared, angry and fearful about what it could mean.

Trans+ Solidarity Alliance says this code will become Labour's legacy, haunting them much like Section 28 did the Conservatives. Trans Actual have warned that this will impact everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community.

It will act as a blank cheque for anyone who wants to further narrow what men and women should look like, which will lead to increasingly polarised gender policing in bathrooms, changing rooms and spaces up and down the country.

Just popping this here, as it seems Canada is preparing to be the next lemming over the cliff.

Governments in the U.S. and around the world are increasingly adopting these restrictive measures in the name of protecting children online. But in practice, these systems create dangerous new forms of surveillance, censorship, and exclusion.

Technologically, the age verification process can take many forms: collection and analysis of government ID, biometric scans, algorithmic or AI-based behavioral or user monitoring, digital ID, the list goes on. But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. Once that valuable data is collected, it can easily be leaked, hacked, or misused. (Indeed, we’ve already seen several breaches of age verification providers.)

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Age verification technology itself is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive. These restrictive mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet. They are tools of censorship, used to block people from viewing or sharing information that the government deems “harmful” or “offensive.” And they create surveillance systems that critically undermine online privacy, chill access to vital online communities and resources, and burden the expressive rights of adults and young people alike.

I wish I could say I thought these concerns were overblown:

The law orders the Director of the Kansas Department of Revenue (which oversees the granting of driver’s licenses) to identify all people granted a driver’s license (or other ID) with a gender marker that does not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth, a stipulation that applies almost exclusively to trans people.

It then orders that these licenses be invalidated, ordering the bearers to surrender their old licenses, at which time they will be provided a new license that has the wrong gender marker.

There is no part of that which isn't concerning.

Firstly, it requires the government to make a list of all people to whom this would apply to. Since the requirements are meant to only include a hated minority group, the government is essentially making a list of those which it views as its internal enemies.

Second, it required that the affected IDs be invalidated. This leaves those trans people who previously had safe IDs with no means of accurately representing themselves.

Since the primary means of identification for most Americans is their driver’s license, this would also mean taking away their legal right to drive a car, which is required for most daily tasks. Being able to drive is also a requirement for many jobs, and having a valid driver’s license is a requirement for many types of public services.

Third, the affected trans people would be forced to surrender their now invalidated IDs as a means of obtaining new ones. This serves to remove from circulation any existing IDs that do not misgender the trans people in question.

Lastly, these trans people will be provided with new IDs whose sex markers are based on what they were assigned at birth, rather than what their body (or appearance) would suggest today.

To an outside observer viewing such an ID seeing a person that appears to be one sex/gender, but whose ID marks them as the opposite is a dead giveaway that the person is trans. From there, they are marked out as different from the general population, and can then be treated differently based on whatever prejudices the reader sees fit or whatever discriminatory laws are relevant.

On Monday, Mississippi enrolled an anti-trans bill that will ban driver's license gender marker changes for transgender people across the state. The bill, which now awaits Republican Gov. Tate Reeves' signature, requires that all Mississippi driver's licenses reflect the holder's sex assigned at birth and explicitly states that court orders recognizing a gender change "shall have no effect" on license issuance. It is the latest in a wave of extreme anti-transgender identification document bans in recent months, following Kansas's decision in February to invalidate transgender people's driver's licenses overnight with no grace period—a story we at EITM broke. Though the Mississippi bill does not retroactively invalidate existing licenses the way Kansas did, any transgender Mississippian whose license comes up for renewal will be forced to carry identification that does not match their identity, should the governor sign it.

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The bill is the latest in a growing wave of anti-transgender identification document laws. In February, Kansas went further than any state before it, invalidating transgender people's driver's licenses overnight and sending letters demanding their immediate surrender—leaving many scrambling and unable to get to work, pick up their children, and navigate daily life with suddenly invalid IDs. Though Mississippi's bill does not contain those instant revocation provisions, the effect will be the same over time: as licenses come up for renewal, transgender Mississippians will be forced to carry documents that out them. According to the Movement Advancement Project, seven states already do not allow transgender people to update the gender marker on their driver's license. If Gov. Reeves signs SB 2322, Mississippi will become the eighth.

Genocide against trans people takes on patterns that set it apart from the mass murder genocides that people commonly associate with the crime, such as the Holocaust. Currently, the genocide against trans people follows a pattern – denial of identity (pattern #9 in the Lemkin Institute’s Ten Patterns of Genocide) – that makes it more familiar to the colonial genocides against indigenous populations, including the residential/boarding school systems in North America and Australia, where indigenous children were “allowed” to go on living if they gave up their identities, including their languages. Denial of identity involves two main steps: preventing people from openly expressing an identity and destroying institutions that reproduce the identity. Given that the denial of identity is the consequence of a well-defined hostility, even hatred, for the identity, the pattern is often characterized by incitement against the group. Alongside suppression and incitement, perpetrators of this pattern of genocide will simultaneously criminalize the identity, so that expressions of it or institutions that reproduce it become characterized as threatening and corrosive to the body politic and warranting state violence and coercion. People who assert or support the denied identity then become criminal elements that must be eliminated. In the case of the boarding schools, children who used their mother tongue or otherwise showed signs of their independent identity were severely punished.

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What the anti-trans movement fails to understand is that trans people are not created through gender-affirming care. Their identities are real regardless of whether they have undergone any form of medical or even social transition. Gender-affirming care bans and policies forcing trans people to remain closeted condemn trans people to lives of suffering, but do not make them cis. 

A commentator here drew my attention last night to a new policy paper from the Restore Britain group that has been launched by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who now sits as an independent MP for Great Yarmouth in the House of Commons, and who, this weekend, launched his own political party.

That party is called Restore Britain, and sits further to the right than any other likely to attract media attention in the UK at present.

Entitled Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, this paper claims that the UK could remove every undocumented migrant now living in the country within a few years through sweeping legal change, administrative expansion, and a deliberately hostile environment designed to force voluntary departures. 

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In short, it would be one of the largest state economic programmes in modern British history, put together with the deliberate intention of pursuing hate whilst imposing threats, fear, intimidation, incarceration and violent relocation on many hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions of people.

The supposed numbers involved are staggering. The suggestion is that up to 2 million people might be forced from the UK within three years. About 75% half of those would supposedly leave voluntarily due to the hostile environment the policy would create. That environment would undoubtedly target all migrants, regardless of their legal status. It would be totally foolish to think otherwise. The remainder, the report suggests, would be forcibly removed. Official estimates do not suggest that anything like that number of people are illegally resident in the UK.

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We are often told that the state is powerless. That includes the claim that it is powerless to house people, powerless to fund social security, and powerless to invest in care.

This paper implies something quite differently. The implication is that the state is immensely powerful. The suggestion is that it is capable of tracking, detaining, transporting, and expelling millions. The contradiction is obvious, but it exposes something deeper.

The choice revealed is whether the state wants to do things that are good, to which the answer from the current political establishment is that, apparently, and for reasons that are not clear, it does not, or something straightforwardly evil, which is what this paper proposes, of which it is apparently thought to be capable.

The question is not, then, about whether the state has power. The question is about how that power is used, and to what ends.

There's video of Roberts saying all this, if anybody needs an emetic:

"But where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday," said Roberts, referencing a domestic violence shooting at a Rhode Island ice rink the day before. "There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we're running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence. We have to come to grips with that as a society, in a way that transcends left versus right, because this really is about the human condition." "How do you address this, though?" replied host Patrick Bet-David. "You outlaw it," Roberts responded.

Then, when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

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One thing is clear: gender-affirming care bans have never been about science, despite attempts by far-right organizations to launder their lobbying efforts through pseudoscientific hate groups and overseas "reviews." Rather, it’s always been about hate. That much is made clear by the openly-stated agenda of a billionaire-funded political machine that has always been working towards one goal: the elimination of transgender people from public life. The only thing that has changed is that they are now saying it out loud.

Remember when Roberts voiced support for self-avowed Nazi Nick Fuentes and the respectable mainstream media cried with one voice "He's gone too far! This is the beginning of the end of the MAGA coalition!"?

Nope. They're only getting louder and more brazen.

As Oxfam said in a previous report, every billionaire is a policy failure.

Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the average annual rate in the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024.1 Whilst US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. Actions of the of the Trump presidency, including the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation, have benefited the richest around the world.

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This phenomenon of the richest influencing and controlling politics is not new; it is familiar in countries in every part of the world. But events in the US in 2025 perhaps made this viscerally clear: in country after country, the super-rich have not only accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent, but have also used this wealth to secure the political power to shape the rules that define our economies and govern nations. At the same time, all over the world we are seeing an erosion and rolling back of the civil and political rights of the many; the suppression of protests; and the silencing of dissent. A century ago, the US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, ‘We must make our choice. Either we can have extreme wealth in the hands of the few, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.’

This report is about that choice. How governments worldwide are making the wrong choice; choosing to defend wealth not freedom. Choosing the rule of the rich. Choosing to repress their people’s anger at how life is becoming unaffordable and unbearable, rather than redistributing wealth from the richest to the rest. It shows how the economically rich are becoming politically rich the world over, able to shape and influence politics, societies and economies. In sharp contrast, those economically with the least wealth are becoming politically poor, their voices silenced in the face of growing authoritarianism and the suppression of hard-won rights and freedoms.

In my defence, everybody needs a hobby.

On December 18th, during a Health and Human Services press conference that saw RFK Jr. announce new federal rules that, if implemented, will almost entirely ban gender-affirming care for minors nationwide, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill said the following:

“Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. [pauses for applause from other Trump officials] Children are innocent and they need our protection. [pauses for more applause] It takes organized efforts to deny these fundamental truths. Sadly, we’ve seen such efforts succeed from time to time.

The denial of fundamental truths can destroy nations from within. At the root of the evils we face, such as the blurring of the lines between sexes and radical social agendas, is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived. This ideology does not just deny biology; it declares war against it.”

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And it wasn’t just O’Neill either. The next day, conservative political commentator Benny Johnson, in a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, escalated even further while speaking about Charlie Kirk’s death:

“The person who pulled the trigger is part of the demonic transgender ideology that warps the minds of our young children, that poisons them, that is antithetical to creation itself. God called on us: I maketh you, man and woman. God doesn’t make mistakes. Transgenderism is a lie from the pit of hell and I’m sick of seeing transgender violence and murderers in my country!”

An interesting take, although I don't think it's quite right. I think opportunistic plunder motivates Trump, his TV personality flunkies, and his tech oligarch courtiers. They somehow scraped together enough capital to mount a hostile takeover of the US, and are now asset-stripping with a view to cashing out before it all crashes. But I don't think they believe themselves to be unfairly privileged. They sincerely believe in their own self-worth, and that they are getting only what they are due.

The rest of the MAGA coalition have other Utopias, but they are united in a shared pseudoscientific eugenicist/social Darwinist world view, and a rough consensus on who constitutes the common enemy and the immediate steps that must be taken to defeat them. However, I don't think MAGA is just a clumsy proto-fascism. The Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, Miller/Bannon driving force is very clear the mission of (as they see it) restoring the world to the timeless and eternal natural order of things.

From the bizarre cacophony of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Opus Dei fetishists and Q-Anon hangers-on that compose MAGA red hats writ large, there emerges one unifying notion in Trump’s actions. I do not believe the power and money behind Trump’s 2nd ascendancy cares for any of these ideologies the left frets about. Nor do they want to rule through a fascistic party structure—it would be too much work. The real goal is to return to an era in the United States where property and capital were despotic kings back in the 1890s.

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The powers behind Trump’s second term worship at the altar of patriarchy, property rights, and perpetual wage-slavery. They want to remove anything promoting otherwise. Now, some may still call this fascism—the state is using its power to shape society to serve privilege instead of popular mandate. But I am beginning to believe there is no long-term goal to Trumpism except to steal as much as possible, restore Jim Crow and other oppressive controls, then tear government apart bureaucratically and legally so thoroughly that it will take a generation to recover.