2024
Echoes of the Eighties: The Demonisation of Trans People and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic in the United Kingdom

You Will Be Free, 2017 (screenshot). Single-channel video, coloured, with sound, 10’13”. Courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire, London.
In 2017, I made a short film called You Will Be Free. Its starting point was the sad, tender words writer/actress Cookie Mueller wrote to her husband, cartoonist Vito Scarpati, as they were both dying of AIDS-related illnesses. Those words, delivered by Anna-Louise Plowman over a blank screen that references Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), insisted that “you will never die” but “simply lose your body”, freeing you from anxieties about rent, mortgage, fashionable clothes, cellulite, cancer, addiction to sex, drugs, or alcohol, and AIDS. Although Mueller kept her focus purely on the body, I combined a monologue that reflected on her words with archive images from two moral panics, both of which were orchestrated by print and broadcast media, paved the way for legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ communities, and made lives like hers and mine far less enjoyable than they might otherwise have been: the anti-gay campaign amidst the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, which features heavily in my film; and the anti-trans campaign of the 2010s, which did not, as I left the parallels for the audience to discern.
The stock footage, photographs, and newspaper headlines were primarily drawn from the United Kingdom, as I wanted to remind viewers that this moral panic was not only a US phenomenon and that American culture war politics are often imported to its former colonial metropole. As the narrator dismisses conventional ideas of the afterlife, saying, “If I had to share it with those police chiefs and preachers who said that AIDS was a gift from God, then I’d rather keep out of it”, we see Ronald Reagan and Christian Right politician Pat Buchanan, and ACT UP protesting with a funeral cortege. We also see Conservative councillor Bob Meacham, who said AIDS was “evidence of a divine intervention on a par with the fire that hit York Minster” in 1984 (days after the consecration of heterodox Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, a critic of Thatcher who went on to bless same-sex civil partnerships publicly), and notorious Greater Manchester chief constable James Anderton, who declared in December 1986 that gay people, drug addicts, and sex workers were “swirling in a human cesspit of their own making”. The sequence ends with the infamous “Don’t Die of Ignorance” public information advert, directed by Nicolas Roeg, which featured a collapsing tombstone marked “AIDS”, and struck fear in a generation of viewers.
Later, we see a headline from The Sun – formerly the left-wing Daily Herald, which Rupert Murdoch turned into a cheerleader for the Thatcher government and a major player in the anti-gay hysteria – saying, “Labour picks a rent boy as school boss”, with a sidebar announcing that “Even The Archers get AIDS”.1 Amidst endless headlines about how gay men were preying on young people, Thatcher complained that “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay”, as a precursor to the passing of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which banned the “promotion of homosexuality” by schools, libraries, and other public bodies. All this sprang from and fed back into a wider reluctance to address the impact of the virus for several years after the first cases were identified in the United Kingdom in December 1981, which likely cost thousands of lives.

Vittorio Scarpati, Untitled, 1989. 21 x 13 cm. Courtesy of Bill Stelling. Photograph by Andy Keate.
It’s hard to say when or even if this moral panic ended. Labour made the repeal of Section 28 a manifesto pledge for the 1997 General Election, which they won by a landslide, and it still took six years to scrap, given parliamentary criticism, fierce media opposition, and well-funded campaigns to keep it in place. They also equalised the age of consent for gay and heterosexual people, passed the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which provided transsexual people with legal recognition in their acquired gender, and drafted the Equality Act 2010, which said that people should not be discriminated against due to gender reassignment. The incoming Conservative-led coalition, led by David Cameron, passed the Equality Act along with the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, and with far more openly gay and lesbian people in British public life, including several Conservative MPs, the explicit media homophobia of the 1980s became rarer – although not extinct.
Explicit transphobia in British politics and media is, however, rampant: a tripartite onslaught of lurid and demonising tabloid headlines that out individual trans people, often characterising them as criminals or child abusers; broadsheet columns that also argue for the restriction of our rights and diminishing of our existences but in more polite language; and the constant threat of legal changes to bar trans people from single-sex spaces, to make it harder for trans people to take part in public life and to access trans healthcare, for which there are already long waiting lists due to swingeing cuts to the National Health Service, especially if they are under 18. The methodology is the same as in the 1980s: use the media to whip up transphobic sentiment (often gauged by polling companies using leading questions, with actual public opinion practically irrelevant) and to bully anyone who stands against it into silence. The intended outcome is the same, too: to stem the tide of people coming out as trans and to make the lives of those who have, or do, come out as difficult as possible.
None of this is new: media transphobia goes back as far as the public existence of gender non-conforming people. “Female personators” Boulton and Park, arrested in London in May 1870, generated plenty of negative headlines;2 Murray Sayle’s novel about his experience of working in the British media, A Crooked Sixpence (1960), ends with the protagonist quitting journalism after being asked to interview a transsexual woman and write a story monstering her. The Guardian – nominally the UK’s main liberal-left newspaper – often ran ostensibly feminist, anti-trans op-eds in the 2000s, notably Julie Bindel’s “Gender benders, beware” (2004), which concluded: “I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s does not make you a man”.3 Formed in 2009, Trans Media Watch submitted to the “Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the [British] press” in 2011 about the “horrific and humiliating treatment of transgender and intersex people”, with constant stories about how much individual transitions cost the NHS (often with wildly inaccurate figures) or other public services.4

You Will Be Free, 2017 (screenshot). Single-channel video, coloured, with sound, 10’13”. Courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire, London.
Pressuring from outside, Trans Media Watch were trying to do what I and a handful of other freelance journalists were trying to do by working within it in the early 2010s: change the culture of the British media. For a while, it looked like it was working. I wrote a regular blog for The Guardian about my transition; other trans and non-binary authors often contributed to a broadening mainstream discourse about trans rights, representation, politics, and culture; and a range of trans and non-binary writers, actors, musicians, and others became prominent. In May 2014, Time magazine famously announced “The Transgender Tipping Point”, from which our rights and representation could apparently not be rolled back. Our enemies took this as a challenge, with transphobia becoming integral to the coalitions assembled by far-right politics that emerged in response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the brutal austerity that often followed. The Polish government lobbied to remove the word “gender” from public policies at home and within the European Union; Jair Bolsonaro’s followers attacked LGBTQ+ people, with Gender Trouble author Judith Butler made a hate figure; Donald Trump’s administration looked at fixing a legal definition of sex as the one assigned at birth, and allowed health insurance providers to deny coverage for gender-affirming treatment to trans people; several US states have recently introduced “drag bans” in public spaces; Viktor Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian government in Hungary first banned Gender Studies from universities and then stripped trans people of their gender recognition in 2020, a move currently being debated in nearby Slovakia.
In the UK, there was a strange tension. Almost every newspaper, from The Sun and Daily Mail to The Guardian and the Murdoch-owned The Times (the UK’s “paper of record”), as well as political weeklies from the centrist New Statesman to the hard-right The Spectator, published endless articles by “gender-critical” women and conservative men. They drowned out the dialogue about the material realities of trans lives and amplified attacks on the validity of our identities, making the discourse solely about whether our existences were a threat to women and children. Anti-trans pressure groups were founded in response to the UK’s largest gay, lesbian, and bisexual organisation Stonewall changing their policy and including trans people in their campaigning in 2015. Their sources of funding were opaque: for one example, the trans-exclusionary LGB Alliance, which was formed in 2019 to advance “lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights” but admitted in a tribunal that it had done little on that front but will “get around” to it, turned out in 2022 to be renting an office on Tufton Street, home to a number of libertarian right-wing think tanks.5
At the same time, Theresa May – who replaced Cameron as Prime Minister in 2016 and had a history of voting against LGBTQ+ legislation, including the repeal of Section 28 in 2000 – announced a consultation on proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act, which would allow people to self-identify as their chosen gender without evidence of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. This served as a lightning rod for anti-trans politicians, commentators, and groups, who campaigned vigorously against the reforms alongside Christian right groups.6 The reforms were eventually shelved in 2020 by Liz Truss, the Minister for Women and Equalities after Boris Johnson succeeded May as Prime Minister. Truss – heavily backed by the Adam Smith Institute and other Tufton Street think tanks – briefly took over from Johnson in 2022 after a leadership campaign in which discussion of “trans issues” featured heavily, with Truss and rival Rishi Sunak both accusing trans people of “erasing women”, claiming to be aware of an inherent conflict between women’s rights and trans rights, and promising repressive legal changes for trans people.
Truss lasted just six weeks as Prime Minister after her catastrophic “mini-budget” provoked an economic crisis. Her replacement, the apparently more “moderate” Rishi Sunak, appointed Kemi Badenoch, a woman of colour, to the Women and Equalities role previously held by Truss. Badenoch has proposed revising the Equality Act to remove protections for trans people, the blanket exclusion of trans people from single-sex spaces, and legislation to force schools to out trans children to their parents. Under its centre-right (at best) leader Keir Starmer, the Labour Party has failed to meaningfully oppose any of this, backing potential reforms to their own Equality Act – as with Section 28 in the 1980s, when Neil Kinnock’s opposition declined to attack the law for fear of alienating voters, despite it being tied to funding cuts for local government. With the effects of austerity, rising rents, and spiralling inflation making it untenable for the Conservatives to fight the next election on their economic record, it was certain that it would be contested on “culture war” issues – that is, who can promise the most cruelty towards minorities, especially Roma people and travellers, migrants, and trans people.

Vittorio Scarpati, Untitled, 1989. 21 x 16 cm. Courtesy of Bill Stelling. Photograph by Andy Keate.
It’s worth noting, briefly, the parallels between the panic about migration, which has led to the UK introducing some of the most restrictive and punitive immigration and asylum policies in Europe, as well as Brexit, and the panic about trans people. In both cases, a highly motivated group of opponents, claiming their prejudices to represent those of the “public”, endlessly complained about a “liberal elite” that was not allowing their voices to be heard despite the newspapers being full of anti-immigration and anti-trans articles, continuing to recruit converts and heightening the pressure until mainstream politicians (of both major parties) bent to their demands – which, of course, could never be satisfied. The establishment of this “hostile environment” (as Theresa May, when Home Secretary, said she wanted the UK to become for immigrants) has largely driven trans people out of mainstream media and out of politics. As well as the disappearance from British newspapers of the wave of trans and non-binary writers who emerged in early 2010, it’s worth noting the sheer volume of anti-trans articles that have been published in the last few years. Recent research suggests the UK media has published an average of 154 articles about trans people – who make up 0.1% of the population – since 2016, with the Daily Mail running a staggering 115 hit pieces in January 2023 alone. Reported anti-trans hate crimes have gone from 1,700 in 2018 to 4,300 in 2022 – a rise of 156%.7
It seemed that amidst a widespread cost of living crisis, with rents and mortgages, energy bills, and food prices shooting up, the culture war tactics deployed by the right on both sides of the Atlantic were reaching their limit: the approach did not produce gains for the Republicans in the 2022 US mid-term elections nor for the Conservatives in 2023’s local council votes. In 2024, however, the situation changed again. In the UK, the Labour Party, led by its most right-wing faction, promised to “end” the “culture wars” – by capitulating to them, vowing to maintain a Conservative ban on young people accessing puberty blockers as soon as they took office. In the US, the Democrats lost eight million votes and the election to Donald Trump’s Republicans. Inflation, the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, unwavering support for Israel, and support for a socio-economic status quo that collapsed in 2008 cost the Democrats dear, but many party grandees and commentators were quick to blame ‘wokeness’ for the defeat, and it now looks likely that sweeping attacks on trans people, as well as migrants and abortion rights, will follow Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025.
To an extent, British transphobia crosses the ideological spectrum: it can be found on the left, although it is increasingly marginal there in comparison to its prevalence amongst centrists, conservatives, and the far-right. The media backlash against trans rights and visibility over the last ten years is best explained by the fact that transphobia is generational, hence the intensity of middle-aged transphobes’ efforts to win younger people over to their position. Again, there is no cause for complacency, but a counterpoint to this onslaught in legacy print and broadcast media is the rise of trans visibility not just on social media but in popular television shows such as Pose, Euphoria, and Ru Paul’s Drag Race, which will not just improve understanding and increase empathy for what trans lives involve but also produce more trans public figures who can take part in media discussions about trans issues or simply show that it’s possible to carve out a successful career whilst ignoring them, making transphobic talking points less relevant.

Vittorio Scarpati, Untitled, 1989. 20.3 x 12.8 cm. Courtesy of Bill Stelling. Photograph Andy Keate.
Transphobic editors will doubtless attempt to ensure their successors share their opinions, but I think that over time, in liberal and left-wing publications at least, a younger generation will replace them and will be embarrassed by their outlets’ positions on trans people. We’re unlikely to get a proper apology or any meaningful reconciliation, but I can imagine them quietly changing their output and so doing us less damage, at least. (Maybe some of the older, apparently liberal journalists will realise, belatedly, how much transphobia has operated as a recruiting tool and binding agent for the far-right and recant, realising that standing against this prejudice will be central to any fight against a worsening slide towards fascism, but I’m not holding my breath.)
Improving media representation may lead Labour, eventually, to stand up for trans rights, in much the same way that the emergence of more openly gay and lesbian people in media and politics in the 1990s led the party to make the abolition of Section 28 a priority in the 2000s. All this could foster an environment where more people want to fight our causes and more of us feel able to come out, further improving wider public understanding and strengthening the struggle for trans liberation: we will be free.
The Archers is a long-running, genteel BBC Radio soap opera largely aimed at older listeners.
Julie Bindel, “Gender benders, beware”, The Guardian, 31 January 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/31/gender.weekend7, accessed November 2024.
Trans Media Watch, “The British Press and the Transgender Community”, December 2011, https://transmediawatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Publishable-Trans-Media-Watch-Submission.pdf, accessed November 2024.
Lee Hurley & Gemma Stone, “Revealed: LGB Alliance has secret office at UK’s libertarian think tank hub”, openDemocracy, 19 December 2022, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/lgb-alliance-55-tufton-street-think-tanks/, accessed November 2024.
Nandini Naira Archer & Claire Provost, “Christian Right and some UK feminists ‘unlikely allies’ against trans rights”, openDemocracy, 18 October 2018, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/christian-right-feminists-uk-trans-rights/, accessed November 2024.
Ell Folan, “Welcome to Terf Island: How Anti-Trans Hate Skyrocketed 156% in Four Years”, Novara Media, 20 February 2023, https://novaramedia.com/2023/02/20/welcome-to-terf-island-how-anti-trans-hate-skyrocketed-156-in-four-years/, accessed November 2024.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published six books, most recently the essay collection Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021 (Cipher Press, 2022), the novella Monaco (Toothgrinder Press, 2023), and the short story collection The Woman in the Portrait (Cipher Press, 2024). She has contributed to volumes published by Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Other Stories, etc. Among others, she has directed two 16mm films – Approach/Withdraw (2016), co-directed with artist Ker Wallwork, and You Will Be Free (2017). She has also directed the documentary Revivification: Art, Activism and Politics in Ukraine (2018). She teaches on the Contemporary Art Practice MA at the Royal College of Art. She has been included in The Independent on Sunday Pink List of influential LGBTQ people in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, and in the Attitude 101 2024 list of ‘LGBTQ+ trailblazers’.