As the state doubles down on binary gender, trans resistance challenges the machinery of control from below

~ Blade Runner ~

On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the term “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refers exclusively to so-called “biological sex”. The case—For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers—challenged the inclusion of transgender women with Gender Recognition Certificates in the legal definition. The court deemed such inclusion “incoherent”. While trans people remain formally protected under provisions for “gender reassignment”, the ruling clarified what has long been true in practice: the law is anchored to a rigid binary, recognising only two sexes and two genders. Labour leader Keir Starmer welcomed the decision, aligning the party—and the British state—with an exclusionary transphobia.

This decision, met with UK-wide protests, reaffirmed that the gender binary isn’t just a cultural norm—it’s a foundational tool of social control. Inscribed across law, medicine, education and culture, it organises life from birth to death under systems of elite power.

From re-routing the world’s largest trans pride to accommodate far-right marches to Scottish rulings pandering to gender-critical lobbies, the British state’s culture war is advancing. This is not neutrality—it’s an authoritarian tactic: delegitimise dissent, break solidarity, enforce the status quo through law.

In the US, dozens of states are rolling back trans rights through bans on healthcare, education, and public participation, often coordinated by Christian nationalist and far-right networks. At the same time, US-based groups are exporting these policies abroad—funding anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns and legislation in Europe, Africa and beyond to entrench binary gender norms and authoritarian control.

The idea that patriarchy, inequality and authority stem from human nature has long justified domination. From religious doctrine to state bureaucracy, textbook history to anatomical pseudoscience, patriarchy seeks constant validation—from biology, from tradition, and now, from the courts. Gender is imposed before a person is even named. A foetus becomes “he” or “she”, blue or pink, boy or girl. Centuries of stereotypes land on a body still taking shape. Schools reinforce the split. History teaches a parade of “great men”. Toys and language discipline us. Even play becomes a site of control.

This isn’t just about identity. Like race and class, gender reproduces power through expectation, repetition and fear. We’re told to view the world “as it is”, but live as if we’re free. Often, conformity to a gender norm is simply the ‘least punished path’: patriarchy is not fixed, it is enforced. And like all forms of enforced domination, it can be resisted. The state’s enforcement of gender norms is deliberate. Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin writes, “The state exists to preserve and protect the rule of a minority class over the majority. Any form of liberation must challenge and ultimately dismantle this structure”. That includes the binary categories it polices so fiercely.

Dean Spade reminds us that “Trans politics needs to be about changing life chances, not just legal categories”. Recognition in law may offer relief to some, but it can’t undo the structures that criminalise, exclude, and punish gender nonconformity. The law is an instrument of order, not freedom.

Trans communities have always been central to radical movements. From Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria to figures like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy — who all fought police violence and gender conformity — this is our shared history of resistance. Today, groups like LGSMigrants, Action for Trans Health, and Bent Bars show how gender freedom connects to prison abolition, migrant justice, care and mutual aid. These aren’t side issues—they are the heart of collective liberation.

The idea that trans identity conflicts with feminism relies on a fiction—one that reduces womanhood to anatomy and erases the feminist struggle against exactly that logic. Murray Bookchin argued that hierarchy is socially produced, not natural. Patriarchy, he wrote, was the first system of domination—a blueprint for later forms of class rule, racial supremacy and state power. Binary gender fits a broader logic that splits the world into opposites—man/woman, mind/body, reason/emotion, subject/object. Abdullah Öcalan built on Bookchin’s thought to name “civilisational sexism” as a deep structure of domination, calling patriarchy the “first colony”.

From this analysis emerged Jineology—not just a science of women, but a method for rethinking life and knowledge. It begins with lived experience, with resistance, and with the refusal of domination. Gender here is not a fact or a legal status, but a terrain of struggle. Womanhood is not lack or deviation, but a site of resistance and becoming.

Under capitalism, gender’s disciplinary role deepened. As Silvia Federici showed, capitalist economies were built on the subjugation of women’s reproductive labour. The witch hunts, enclosures, and nuclear family relocated autonomy from commons to household, from collective to man. Gendered labour divisions, morality and bodily control were essential to this process.

Anarchist, decolonial and abolitionist feminists have shown that gender is not essence but relation: structured by labour, shaped by violence, open to transformation. The panic over toilets and sports isn’t about safety — it’s about control. Trans people don’t threaten public space. Surveillance, policing, and stigma do. Inequality in sport comes from class, funding, and access — not trans participation. Blanket exclusions mask these truths and weaponise fear.

Across the world, people have always lived beyond the binary—showing us a system already breaking. As Susan Stryker discusses in Transgender History, challenging the rigid alignment of sex and gender is crucial for expanding the possibilities of identity and freedom for all individuals.

We’re already building something different — in clinics without gatekeeping, in classrooms that restore stolen histories, in spaces where care replaces coercion. In our movements, we don’t ask permission to be free—we practise freedom, increasing visibility and inviting others to join us.

The Supreme Court’s ruling shows that the law will not lead us to liberation. But it also reveals the cracks. The binary may still rule in law and language, but in life, it is breaking apart. What matters now is what we create in our spaces—new ways of relating, healing, and organising. Ways that don’t demand conformity for safety. A world beyond normal and other. A world where gender is no longer a cage but a spectrum, a refusal, a possibility.

No gender or all genders. Against who the law says we are, we become who we are—together, in struggle.