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Some facts about the United Kingdom:
- A huge amount of the Global South's queerphobic legislation originates in being imposed by British colonial rule
- Nobody born after the repeal of Section 28 or the legalisation of legal gender changes could vote in the Brexit referendum
- The most celebrated British wartime codebreaker committed suicide because of state queerphobic persecution.
- Marriage legislation in the UK from 2013 gives the spouse a veto over legal recognition of their partner's gender, and it was passed despite a debate in Parliament.
- A large portion of the British governing elite were educated in notoriously insular single-sex private boarding schools, including at least two recent Prime Ministers.
- The British political class and state power are still incredibly concentrated in one place, even post-empire
- Mainstream British feminism never had its “wait not everyone in the country is a white middle-class woman with white middle-class woman interests” wake-up call like America.
What we're saying is, Britain reinventing transphobia at record pace and rebranding it as feminism, and it immediately taking hold of the British political class, is tragically unsurprising. The fact the wizard boarding school book woman is involved is tragically quite fitting.
Britain is a terminally inward-looking place broadly run by people who have never known happiness in their lives, with a political geography and architecture of state that is archaic, horrifically unipolar and structurally incapable (e.g. FPTP) of tolerating nuance or diversity
Transphobia is basically the least of the UK's problems, even if it is a huge one. It brings us no joy to say all this about the UK, because we grew up there and are a British citizen, and we were lucky to live through a delusion in the early 2010's that it might one day be good.