Perpetrators of Transphobic Hate Crime

Official statistics for England and Wales (Home Office, 2019; 2020; 2021; 2022) show a year-on-year increase in hate crimes motivated by a hostility towards transgender people. This has coincided with a proliferation of transgender exclusionary activism; largely from those who once called themselves radical feminists (dubbed trans exclusionary radical feminists: TERF’s) who have since renamed and rebranded themselves as gender critical feminists (see Thurlow, 2022) and other self-declared women’s rights activists. There are a number of high-profile figures who have been accused of belonging to this active online movement and who vocally campaign against transgender inclusion within social and legal life, and the existence of transgender identity in and of itself. This chapter provides an overview of dominant schools of thought relating to understanding gender and gender identity, drawing on notions of gender essentialism and social constructivism. We then discuss the origins of transgender exclusionary feminism, and the contemporary rebranding of this movement to ‘gender critical’. We discuss the nature of this movement and how it has propagated a moral panic around the existence of trans people. This chapter examines the rise in this online movement and its impact on both offline and online hate crime perpetration. We also consider structural forms of violence through state legislation and responses to transphobic violence. We situate our discussion within a queer criminological framework and explore (a) how anti-trans rhetoric is used to demonise trans people and (sb) the impact of this rhetoric on trans people.