Whipping Up Fear
Green square with stylised grey liliac writing & graphics that say Lizzie on Whipping up fear.
By Lizzie Hughes
In 2020, J. K. Rowling posted a blog about why she, as a popular children’s author, chose to make inflammatory public comments about trans people, particularly trans women. Part of her justification was her “concern” about the safety of gender-segregated spaces, including women’s toilets:
… I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman … then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
Rowling’s comments were part of the broader backlash against proposed self-ID and misrepresent what self-ID would actually involve. Instead, they create a false scene of violent men impersonating women, which she makes interchangeable with the presence of trans women. To be clear, Rowling is denying the existence of trans women by naming them as men – even as she claims to want safety for trans women.
Her comments are typical of anti-trans narratives that position trans women’s access to the space as antagonistic to the safety of women and girls. This is a framing that is established using highly emotive and impactful rhetoric that animates very powerful fears of gender-based violence, whilst obscuring its realities. How do these fears travel? And why is it so effective? To explore this, I’m taking Rowling’s comments as characteristic of the techniques used more broadly by anti-trans groups, which weaponise fears of gender-based violence to encourage anti-trans sentiment and campaigning. I first consider how her comments are energised by an existing racialised fear of rape that has links with growing far-right campaigns in the UK, before reflecting on how they encourage an informal policing of gender that is invested in maintaining whiteness and gatekeeping resources.
So, I’m doing quite a lot with just a few sentences of hers because these sentences did a lot at the time, and they still articulate a lot about the whiteness of anti-trans feminism. These narratives are about protecting the women’s toilets and “women”, both literal women and the identity category. This is about the protection of an idealised whiteness that is bound up in the production and maintenance of everyday gender. As a result, crucial resources, public attention, and public feeling are directed away from communities made vulnerable by social inequality, classism, misogyny, and racism, putting them at further risk of patriarchal gender-based violence.
Bathroom panics
Rowling’s comments are just some in the long chain of similar narratives made since, which purport to be about preventing sexual violence and reducing the risk of sexual harm against non-trans women and girls. Their argument is that trans women will make women’s toilets unsafe because they are predatory to non-trans women and girls. Such “concerns” about safety and the risk of sexual harm to non-trans women and girls are integral to much of anti-trans campaigning. Using the frame of carceral safety politics, Lamble (2024) helpfully explains how these concerns cut across the political spectrum and appear in both right- and left-wing feminist groups because of investments in carcerality, explaining why we see anti-trans narratives in obvious places like Fair Play for Women and Sex Matters, as well as in left-wing press and feminist groups. Worth noting too is the use of survivor testimonies that, as Tanya Serisier (2020) writes, legitimise “concerns” about trans women whilst de-legitimising other stories of sexual violence, like from trans women themselves.
As a result, the women’s public toilets, and gender-segregated spaces more broadly, have come to symbolise and host the false dichotomy of “women’s rights” versus “trans rights”, a framing that is established from the standpoint of preventing sexual violence and reducing the risk of sexual harm against non-trans women and girls.
In early 2025, a Supreme Court Ruling defined “woman” through biological sex for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. Interim Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance released swiftly after instructing organisations that manage public spaces and workplaces to create segregated mixed-sex bathrooms, washing, and changing facilities for trans people to use. At the time of writing, the guidance has been withdrawn after being challenged by the Good Law Project, but was likely designed to prepare organisations and workplaces that have single-sex spaces for its upcoming statutory guidance and updated code of practice. How these rulings manifest remains to be seen, but a recent tribunal in Scotland found that the Supreme Court Ruling does not actually require trans people to use separate washing and changing facilities. Nevertheless, charities and organisations have raised grave concerns about the ongoing impact on trans people’s mental health, wellbeing, and ability to move through the world. The underlying logic of these legal changes, so neatly espoused by Rowling, is that trans women are not “real” women, and that the safety of non-trans women and girls is more important than that of trans women and girls.
Rowling’s post offers a particularly evocative and physical description that helps to understand how this threat is conveyed. She describes this throwing open of bathroom doors so that any and all men can enter – any men who are all, presumably, just waiting to violate the women inside. Implied is a hyperbolic and frightening threat of mass rape. It also expresses the gendered cultural fear of strangers in public spaces, namely strange men – but a particular stranger: a trans stranger, who is imagined as both predatory and deceitful.
The suggestion that the women’s bathroom will be made unsafe presupposes two inaccuracies that are worth correcting.
First, men can already access women’s bathrooms. There are no formal gatekeepers in the women’s toilets checking that people’s genitals match their ID documents, birth certificates, and appearances (yet, anyway). And yet, interpersonal gender-based violence happens most within the home, not in public toilets, and young girls are most at risk from family members and men in positions of power, not in public toilets.
Second, the claim that trans women will make the women’s bathroom unsafe suggests that the women’s bathroom is already safe. But it isn’t. The women’s bathroom has always been a hotly policed site for poor, Black, Muslim, fat, disabled, queer, butch, and masculine women. Of course, this depends on where the toilet is in public space (think, posh hotel vs. nightclub), but it remains true that the feminist history of toilets is not clear-cut, and not all women are safe in public toilets. The gender-segregated public bathroom itself has a long and troubled past as a colonial endeavour.
So when anti-trans narratives talk about the women’s being made unsafe, they mean it is being made unsafe for a particular set of women who are worthy of protection: those who are in close proximity with the idealised form of woman. This archetypal “woman” is called-forth to legitimise a variety of political and national agendas - the ideal white woman, who isn’t disabled, isn’t fat, isn’t Muslim, isn’t poor, isn’t queer. Who “looks like” a woman. As with any idealised gender category, I’m not entirely sure this woman exists – but her figure is powerful enough that she persists across a variety of narratives. In using this powerful figure, a very clear relation is set up: there are the women and girls who need protecting, and then there is “them” – the strangers, the invaders, who need stopping. We’ve met this narrative before.
The racialised fear of rape
The threat of rape by the troublesome stranger pedalled by anti-trans narratives carries hefty cultural and emotional power. The frequent mentioning of girls in anti-trans narratives about protecting the women’s toilet is also noteworthy in this context. Trans women are increasingly posed as a threat to children: as sexual predators in the toilets, tapping into the persistent fear of the lurking paedophile, as well as the threat of transness and “gender ideology” more broadly, evident in the anti-puberty blocker campaigning that portrays gender-transitioning as child abuse (Mermaids, 2024). Such “concerns” about women and girls have clear links with fascist and racist far-right and right-wing movements that have growing momentum in the UK.
These movements have explicitly drawn on the highly emotive notion of protecting women and girls to spread xenophobic and racist beliefs. Only this year, one leader told a tens-of-thousands-strong rally that “Our women, our daughters are scared to walk the streets”. At anti-asylum marches, signs display slogans like “Safety of women and children before foreigners” and “Save our Kids”. Protecting the girl child from sexual violence, much like the idealised white woman, is a powerful cultural image. The logic being a protection of whiteness, of protecting what is “ours” and keeping out “them”. Rhetorical “concerns” about preventing sexual violence are frequently used in arguments for tighter immigration and asylum control, as well as increasing deportations. Because when white men rape, they are positioned as the “bad apple” in an institution or as singularly evil. But when Black and Brown men rape, they are said to represent their whole community and culture.
When I first read Rowling’s comments, I was reminded of an old poster from Nigel Farage’s UKIP from 2016. The poster shows a long queue of Brown men walking towards the viewer, with the words “BREAKING POINT” written in red above to suggest that there is an endless line of miscellaneously-Brown men trying to enter the UK (which is therefore implicitly identified as white). When challenged that this was actually an image of refugees, Farage made clear his position: most refugees are in the UK under false pretences and are not who they say they are. This is a crucial strategy of current far-right and right-wing political campaigning in the UK, and central to Farage’s Reform campaign. Key here is the gendered threat that this implies - because it is not a coincidence that it was a huge group of racialised men who are depicted as being deceitful to gain access. The poster shows not just the threat of the deceitful other who wants to steal “British jobs”, but also the predatory other who wants to rape “British women”. This deceitful predator could be any of them. Any and all, some might say.
Of course, Rowling doesn’t mention race directly here (though when arguing against self-ID in 2024 she asked, “Do I get to be black if I like Motown and fancy myself in cornrows?”). My point is that Rowling’s language and anti-trans narratives like it are part of the same emotive narrative that suggests sexual violence is something done by someone that comes in and that we have to defend against – not something baked into our patriarchal culture, not something done by the white men putting up the flags, and certainly not something that trans women also experience. Anti-trans narratives like these replay alarmist stories that the British public are already familiar with. They find easy footing, an arsenal of existing emotion, and compelling slots to fit into.
Policing gender, protecting whiteness
The women’s toilets are often described as a site to “do” femininity, whereby the rituals and practices that gender people as women are performed (Cavanagh, 2010). Arguments made against gender-neutral bathrooms and the need for women’s toilets to be kept “safe” often emphasise the alleged innate differences between men’s and women’s bodies to make their points. Sometimes these are colloquial, like how men’s toilets allegedly “stink” (e.g., Greed, 2019), and sometimes these are biological, such as because women menstruate or need to feed their children (e.g. see from 'Sex Matters' website, Cunningham, 2023). These are stereotypical, relying on bio-essentialist ideas of women’s bodies and ignorant of the realities of many women’s lives, trans and non-trans, and the complexities of sexual characteristics (Fine, 2017).
At the same time, anti-trans commentary has enabled a significant increase in people challenging, abusing, and doing violence against anyone who doesn’t “look like” a woman in the women’s toilets in the name of safety and preventing sexual violence. When this happens, boundaries are being redrawn around what a “woman” is. Because in order to keep out the strange others, we need to know how to spot a “real woman”, right? But what does it mean to “look like” a woman or “look like” a man? How do we arrange ourselves to do these types of gendered acts so that we become legible within the space? What stereotypes and exaggerations do we take on? Who can access these descriptions? Who will never be able to?
Inevitably, bodies already contested as not truly belonging within the category of “woman” are being targeted the most, as the normative parameters of who gets to claim “woman” are shown to be limited around a white, feminine, heterosexual core: Butch women are verbally abused (Andersson, 2021), Black women continue to have their femininity questioned by white women (O'Sullivan, 2021); disabled women are treated with disdain (Kafer, 2016). The amplification of fear about sexual harm in the women’s bathroom, and the identification of that risk as being the product of having trans women present, works to police not just the bathroom space but also the identity category and bodily entity of “woman”.
When comments are made and reiterated over and over again that appear as the “simple truth” of needing to protect women in the women’s toilets, we should perceive them to also be about re-establishing the boundaries of “woman” in narrow ways that negatively impact most, if not all, women. Asserting “woman” on the grounds of biology should be seen as a racist endeavour, with its roots in eugenics and bioessentialist patriarchy. We should see it as part of a much broader picture whereby an idealised form of whiteness is being protected, and resources that are much needed by communities impacted by that whiteness are gatekept.
Gatekeeping resources
Rowling is now synonymous with the anti-trans movement in the UK and has pledged to use her approximate net worth of £945 million to bank-roll the new ‘J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund’. Since 2020, she has made countless more claims increasingly hostile to trans people and our existence. Her power lies in her wealth, her whiteness, and in her ability to simultaneously claim she, and women like her, are being silenced whilst taking up a huge portion of the cultural zeitgeist. Sara Ahmed (2016) describes this technique as a mechanism of power – and it is a mechanism that is most used (if not exclusively used) by white feminists.
White feminism is a colonial endeavour, and anti-transness, as one facet of that whiteness, repeats long histories of the erasure of gender diversity and transness in its varying forms and descriptors (Upadhyay, 2021). It also serves to legitimise stories of gender-based violence that come from white feminists, whilst obfuscating that experienced by trans and non-trans women of colour. In news media, on social media, and in political commentary, the exclusion of trans women from women’s toilets is presented as common-sense: of course we want women to be safe in public spaces, this is what feminism has fought for! This is partially true – the exclusion of trans women from women’s toilets is actually what some feminism has fought for (but, crucially, much feminist history is not anti-trans). This is a feminism that is invested in creating and maintaining differences between women, with these differences implicitly racial, hierarchical, and value-laden. This is a feminism that is invested in a literal policing of gendered spaces and the term “woman” itself, such that it remains something only a few can claim.
This is about power. This is a question of who can access life-saving resources and garner support, attention, and empathetic feeling. Anti-trans narratives pit women and trans people against one another within our neoliberal context that already sustains a false economy of scarcity, where state resources are said to be so limited they are only available for the “most worthy” - yet billions are poured into growing the carceral state, sustaining arms deals, and Britain’s military capacity. When white feminists claim this position, we are encouraged to forget that poor Black and Brown trans women are most at risk of violence. Patriarchy fucks everyone, but some more than others.
Keeping trans women out of women’s toilets won’t stop patriarchy, nor will it end gender-based violence. What it is doing is reconsolidating power around figures who already have too much power, too much wealth, who think posing with a cigar on a yacht is the appropriate response to a legal ruling that renders life unlivable for many trans people. What it is doing is reconsolidating power around whiteness, as it moves and shifts, picks up new meanings, and continues to accumulate significant material force. What it is doing is reconsolidating the power of the carceral state, which continues to systematically harm communities made vulnerable by racism, classism, ableism, and patriarchy, and enact its own gender-based violence against them.
Lizzie is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck, University of London. They research surveillance, anti-trans politics, mental health, and the prison, and are currently working on a book about anti-trans discourse and the informal surveillance of gender in public toilets, under contract with Bristol University Press. Prior to joining academia full-time, Lizzie ran a community-led LGBTQI+ mental health project for seven years, based in North London.
References
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