F*** the Supreme Court: In Defiance of Trans Erasure by Zoe Daniels

Zoe Daniels, they/them, is a wearer of many hats. A Brand and Marcomms consultant, Racial Justice consultant, baddy writer, hopelessly romantic poet, community organiser and stand-up comedian when they feel like it. They’re the communications and brand lead for JMB Consulting and Spark. This piece is part of an ongoing series for Uncharitable Papers called The Absolute State of It, covering the state of the Third Sector, the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

A note about the UK Supreme Court Ruling

A while back, we shared with you that we were taking a moment to decide how best to respond to our out-of-touch and out-of-bounds government, as well as the UK’s Supreme Court decision to base the definition of woman on ‘biological sex’. We wrote to you grieving, but fueled with a righteous fury to share some words in support of our trans and non-binary siblings. Now we’re back for Pride armed with more words, after more reflection, and with more justified anger. 

Pride this year feels more important than in recent years, particularly because we’ve seen our trans and gender expansive communities violently scapegoated by political parties. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Labour, the Conservatives or Reform, these parties are united by their disdain for communities that refuse to comply with their hegemony. All parties find comfort in white supremacy culture, as all parties believe that there is only one right way to exist.

We want to make it absolutely clear that the campaign behind this ruling, spearheaded by cisgender women like the despicable JK Rowling, wasn't about keeping women safe, it was about upholding white supremacist, cisgender and heteronormative systems of oppression. It was fuelled by propaganda, using trans women and non-binary folks as a scapegoat for political failings. A trend that expands beyond these shores.

When we walk home in the dark of night, we clutch our keys not because of transgender women but because of cisgender men. The idea that men transition to abuse women is so absurd and has no factual basis whatsoever. A cisgender man does not need to transition to assault women. In fact, he can freely talk about how he would like to brutalise women on a global stage. He can hide behind the power of the monarchy if accused of sexual assault. He can even become President of the United States.  It’s not transgender women who dominate and subjugate, it’s white, cisgender heteronormative men who hoard wealth and power. They are the perpetrators of the violence we see enacted in wars, our criminal justice system, in healthcare and beyond.

These past few years have made it abundantly clear that those in power, who use said power to dominate, are those who are most likely to cause harm to women. They are the ones who set the laws that restrict women's rights; they are the ones who direct funding and support away from vital services. They are the ones who vilify single-parent households, especially mothers. They are the ones who don’t convict 99% of rapists but love to pretend that they care for our safety.

Decision-makers refuse to listen to women and gender expansive folks when they tell them the carceral system does not prevent gendered violence nor deliver justice for its survivors. Instead, they allow more than 1000 police officers accused of sexual assault and domestic violence to continue working our streets. By ‘they’, I mean the cisgender men who govern. Ensuring that women are kept in their current position in the social hierarchy. They are the same men who, I am sure, are finding it very convenient and helpful that there are cisgender women who willingly campaign for their own oppression and demise. 

The cisgender women who campaigned for this ruling did so based on hate masquerading as fear, not on reality, not on facts, and definitely not on emotional intelligence; even their own lived experiences did not warrant this action. A lived experience of no contact with trans people, or more aptly put, a lived experience that is made miserable by the absence of any experience which isn’t exactly the same as their own. 

The decision-makers who have backed the ruling haven’t done so as a question of morality, but as a question of control. Reminding us that the state “rules everything around us.” This has been evidenced by “independent bodies” like EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) backing the UK Supreme Court Ruling and promptly providing guidance excluding trans people from using public toilets. It seems that the EHRC is confused about human rights, and perhaps isn’t the body we should look to for moral guidance?

Black women are excluded from Womanhood, too.

Since the mass enslavement of our people, Black women’s bodies have been deemed overly masculine. During the Transatlantic Slave trade, many white kidnappers, would systematically rape the Black women they had ripped from their lands. Their wives, in response, would assume the role of the oppressor by punishing the victim whom their husbands had abused. This form of punishment was always designed to be dehumanising. White mistresses often shaved off Black enslaved women’s hair. 

Angel Davis described how colonialism stripped Black women of innocence and vulnerability, traits that are often associated with womanhood:

“Contrasting the white woman as damsel in distress, the woman of colour innocence stripped by colonialism, often through rape - colonial ideas about Black sexual ‘savagery’ created both the notions of the Black man as rapist and the Black woman as un-rapeable, encased in the notion of Black people’s bodies as objects to which anything could be done.”

It doesn’t stop there, Hollywood and the wider film and music industries have been major culprits in the dehumanisation of Black women and Black bodies. Nothing has shown this more clearly than the idea of the damsel in distress, where innocence can only be afforded to white women. This is how Karen, the emboldened, has come to be, for she is the damsel in distress, the one who must be rescued from Black savagery! The contrast is stark.

White women are afforded vulnerability, while Black women are positioned as “angry Black women.” White women’s skin is soft and supple; Black women’s skin, however, is hard and coarse. What this means in terms of expectations is that white women are expected to be demure and helpless, while Black women should be strong and resilient and resilience and strength through a patriarchal lens is seen as masculine. Never mind childbirth or surviving under a patriarchal system.

Although white women's tears may mean that they are afforded endless possibilities in expressing their emotions, they are still beholden to the patriarchy. They will still suffer from it, and pathologising women’s emotions still exists because of it. When it comes to women, in medical terms, to be angry is to be hysterical, to be sad is to be sensitive, and to be upset is always an overreaction. And this is why this bulls**** decision by the UK Supreme Court, largely made up of white cisgender men, does nothing to address gender injustice and will absolutely do more harm for women, whether you identify with the gender you were assigned with at birth or not.

Because why? Because our struggles are connected. 

The damsel in distress rhetoric acts as a silencer. Through the victimisation of white women, Black women are demonised and are denounced by womanhood. This dehumanisation is nothing short of violent and is one of the reasons why Black women are subjected to medical racism and inadequate healthcare. It is the reason why, when we speak of our pain, we are met with dismissal. It is the reason why, as of 2025, we are 2.9 times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy and childbirth.

This ruling's impact will be felt by every single person who does not comply with white supremacist standards, and white supremacist standards, as we know, are inherently racist, patriarchal, ableist, classist, and sadly, the list goes on.

Since the invention of race, Black women have developed frameworks to recognise our womanhood, only for our methods to be watered down into oblivion through white feminists co-opting language like ‘intersectionality’. We’ve screamed at white audiences posing the everlasting question: “ain’t I a woman?”, we’ve crafted hashtags like “say her name” because when our bodies are brutalised by the state, we are forgotten. A reminder that while Black and brown bodies are over policed and under constant surveillance, when we call on the state for support, we are often met with violence or silence. 

Black women have been historically excluded from womanhood in more ways than one and prevented from taking part in all aspects of life on an equal playing field. This is exemplified in sports when white cisgender women can’t fathom that Williams is a better tennis player than they are; it had to be that Williams was either doping or not the gender she purported to be. 

Black women like Caster Semenya have been blocked from competing professionally unless they subject themselves to medically unnecessary interventions to reduce their testosterone levels to conform to a subjective colonial standard of femininity, all because their bodies have naturally occurring higher testosterone levels associated with Differences of Sex Development (DSD). In defiance of World Athletics, Semenya said: 

“I don’t care about the medical terms or what they tell me. Being born without a uterus or with internal testicles. Those don’t make me less of a woman.”

The case of Caster demonstrates how Black women are othered when it comes to white supremacist standards of womanhood. The fragility of whiteness is loud, and it is clear within the sport industry. The argument that trans women shouldn’t compete in sports isn’t about making it fair; it’s about ensuring that we all stay in our lanes. If it were a question of equality, the conversation would be focused on muscle weight and shape, rather than anything else. Instead, it’s the fragility of whiteness that can’t handle when Black people win.

Transgender people have and will always exist.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: transgender people aren’t new. Transgender folks existed long before colonialism and imperialism. Transness is expansive and exists beyond borders, beyond time, in the water we swim in and the air we breathe. Trans identities break boundaries in nature; they undermine and deconstruct rigid hierarchies of power. They provide us with hope; they are the light at the end of the tunnel beyond this current society. 

We, and many others who are a lot more qualified than we are, see that the UK Supreme Court’s ruling is medically illiterate.  Gender is a social construct, and sex does not determine your gender; sex does not determine how you express yourself in this world. If we can accept that race is a social construct, that our skin colour does not control how we express ourselves, then we can surely grasp the similarities for gender.

Race has become entrenched as a political identity; we can’t separate ourselves from its history, nor would we want to; in this way, we have mistakenly come to our racial identities as somewhat fixed. This is because race has always been a political method used to cause division and racism, a tool to justify inequity. Our racial identities are tied to our ancestors, as well as the political landscapes we’ve travelled through. Due to the politicisation of our bodies, race is something that now helps us communicate how power is constructed. Rejecting the very premise of race itself, while still fighting the very real impacts of racism, is key to dismantling it.

Similarly, with gender, we have an opportunity to think beyond our bodies, to break the binary that has been forced upon us.

Trans and gender expansive folks offer us a path towards liberation. By showing us what is possible, they break the boundaries created by the architects of white supremacy. Because, to put it simply, the UK Supreme Court Ruling is everything that white supremacy aims to be. It is about control, it’s about people only being able to exist in one way, it’s about their way being the right way, and that way is devoid of choice and liberty. It is also about hoarding power by stripping people's human rights away from them, and about objectivity being the end-all and be-all, with all decisions made in the absence of the very people impacted by them.

Before our lands were divided, stolen and poisoned, racialised communities did not exist in the binary. We did not rely on hierarchical structures like the ones we see in white supremacy culture today, and trans folks have been here since day dot. 

In the Talmud, a central text of Rabbinic Judaism, there are seven gender categories. Suppose we were to go even further back. In that case, you’ll find that the Arabic term Mukhannathun refers to effeminate men or people of ambiguous sex characteristics who often took on roles typically associated with women. It doesn’t stop there. Archaeologists and historians have uncovered the secrets of sex and gender in ancient graves and burial sites. In 2021, archaeologists unearthed the 1000-year-old remains of a potentially non-binary Iron Age leader. 

Hatsepshut, in ancient Egypt, was depicted in different ways, from a woman wearing men’s clothing to a feminine face upon a man’s body. The Dagaaba tribe of Ghana, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast based their understanding of gender on energy, a stark difference to the obsession with genitals that drives the coloniser.

The Hijras in South Asia have a recorded history of over 4,000 years and were revered as holy people with the ability to perform blessings and curses. The gender expansive Māhū found in Hawaii and Tahiti are highly respected in indigenous culture as keepers of oral traditions and historical knowledge. The Indigenous communities of North America have defined a third gender or other gender-fluid expressions as “two-spirit,” such as the Nadleeh, spiritual leaders of the Navajo people.

Trans people have always existed.

This Pride, refuse to comply.

This recent moral panic around labelling transgender people as dangerous is a mechanism of fascism. Fascism needs a false enemy to thrive. It needs distraction. It needs us to be pitted against one another. It needs the feminist movement to splinter; it needs trans-exclusionary feminism to propagandise the idea of the nuclear family as the norm, and to impede the reimaging of a world where freedom is a reality, freedom in our choice to exist as we are and love as we are. Stuart Hall would have described this panic and recent rollback on trans rights as populist authoritarianism, and it’s important to name the beast for what it is before it is too late.

We recognise that people are already being harmed by this new ruling. Butch lesbians and non-binary people with a more masculine gender expression are being violently apprehended in bathrooms for not looking the part. When the policing of gender becomes the norm, women who identify with their assigned sex at birth are not made safer. The reality is, this ruling is allowing the root issues of misogyny to go unchecked. It will only further violate women's rights, with the state acting as the torchbearer for patriarchal systemic violence, and the police given new powers to strip-search women as they please.

To the non-profit sector, we see you. We’re watching you, and we hope you do the right thing in resisting the rapid rise of fascism. Our sector has the tools to resist, has the know-how to understand that what we are witnessing is an attack on all marginalised genders. To be on the right side of history, we must be brave, we must be curious, we must be creative. This means going beyond empty statements by funding trans-led initiatives, whether in healthcare or grassroots organising, platforming and amplifying trans stories, or showing up on the streets in physical solidarity with our trans and non-binary siblings.

The non-profit sector must remain steadfast in its values of social justice, community engagement and the wellbeing of individuals. This means not pandering to the whims of politicians like Keir Starmer. Who has not only proved himself to be medically and legally incompetent but also completely devoid of integrity. Over the years, we’ve witnessed political parties use LGBTQIA+ communities as a political tool to garner support, with police cars adorned with pride colours and other governmental bodies raising the flag during Pride month and wearing their little lanyards throughout the year to signal their faux support. This Pride should be a protest against performative allyship. 

This Pride is a call to get back to the roots that brought us together on the streets in the seventies. It’s a call to action that demands that we engage in direct action and grassroots organising. This Pride, hold your workplaces to account and refuse to engage if pinkwashing is on the menu. 

For far too long, our community has been used as a marketing tool to showcase how progressive the country is, without actually taking any concrete steps to deserve the title. The non-profit sector has benefited from this by engaging in pink-washing strategies. Using the proximity to our community to wash away their sins. It’s time every single organisation reviews their relationships with sponsors by cutting ties with organisations that do not actively support the LGBTQIA+ community. 

At Uncharitable, we recognise that legality is not a sign of morality. The criminal justice system does not protect or support historically oppressed communities and has always been used as a tool to uphold systems of oppression. We understand that the current system will not liberate us; therefore, we must resist, disrupt, and be wholly disobedient to systems that were built to destroy and quell our power.

Trans existence is hopeful. The world routinely tries to extinguish them in an attempt to erase them. Yet they meet this disdain with resilience, fearlessness and love. They show us what compassionate resistance truly looks and feels like. As Major Griffin-Gracey so eloquently said:

“I don’t need their permission to exist; I exist in spite of them. I want you to train and teach and love on and create families within my community and gender non-conforming people, so that we can understand that we have a culture, we have a history, we have a reason to be here. We have a purpose.”

To our trans and non-binary siblings, we stand with you because we are you. We stand with you, every single day, through rain and shine, we will continue resisting with you side by side, because we know there is no past, no present or future without trans people.