In the aftermath of the decision in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers [2025] USCK 16, many disabled people sought to give practical solidarity to trans people. Disabled activists offered to share their RADAR keys with trans friends. Articles were published exploring the links between disabled and trans experience. “Being Trans is Disabling,” on the Disability Rights UK website described some of the commonalities, “One thing Disabled and Trans communities have in common is our creative solutions to medical survival outside the confines of a state that seems hell-bent on our suffering.”
Also in spring 2024, the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly ran a special issue on trans-crip theory, an approach characterised by J. Logan Smilges and Slava Greenberg as “a dynamic framework designed to illuminate the fundamental entanglement of transness and disability across ontological and phenomenological registers”. The metaphor of entanglement makes me think of two separate groups of explorers hacking their way through a single jungle, branches hanging down from above and blocking our war forward. To keep on with our lives, we must hack at the jungle: rationing of medicine, hostile politicians, judges who help them.
The state, too, has been exploring its own notion of trans/disability overlap. In April 2025, the government leaked proposals to restrict children’s treatment for gender dysphoria. They proposed to excluding children from trans healthcare who also present with neurodevelopmental conditions. If someone with autism suffers gender dysphoria, in other words, the NHS should ignore their dysphoria and medicate their autism. Such an approach entangles disability and trans politics but in a reactionary way. It seemingly prioritises the former, but only as another obstacles to trans people living the lives they want.
Another instances of malign entanglement was the decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Forstater, the case which established the principle that “gender critical feminism” is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.
Forstater was a step towards the bad judicial habits which were on spectacular display in For Women Scotland – the president of the EAT speculated on issues which had not been raised in court, in relation to which they had heard no witness evidence, and in relation to the social sequences of which they were blithe.
Mr Justice Choudhury canvassed the repeal of the main legal protection of trans people, section 4 of the Equality Act 2010 which prohibits discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment. Trans people could not complain, he said, if that protection was removed since, if that happened, certain rights would still accrue to them. In a case where a trans woman was mistaken for a cis woman and suffered harassment as a woman, she might still bring a claim for sex discrimination. Or, Choudhury speculated, “A trans person could potentially bring a claim for disability based on the conditions of Gender Dysphoria or Gender Identity Disorder”.
The President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal, the most senior Equality lawyer in Britain, was calling for the recategorization of trans people as a small subset of the larger group of disabled people. On his reasoning, Gender Dysphoria is simply a mental impairment, the state should recognise it as such and allow its sufferers the most limited of protection. That argument felt patronising in 2021, today, it reads as positively malign.
Everyone, it seems, recognises a certain commonality of experience between trans and disabled people. But the conclusions drawn from that insight vary enormously. You could use it to generate common struggle involving two groups of embattled people, or you could use it to limit resources. How you construct an argument for mutual recognition, is likely to have consequences; either it will shield people from repression, or bring that repression on.
State definitions, movement definitions
To evaluate Mr Justice Choudhury’s argument that trans experience belong within the category of disability, social movements needs our own definition of disability, separate from the state’s. But to apply that distance does not come easily to us. Many activist accounts simply repeat the definition of disability set out at section 6 of the Equality Act 2010 without ever asking how useful it actually is. And while judges have treated it often as an “everyone in” definition, hence the general support for it, that’s not how all of them apply it.
Following section 6, a disabled person is someone who “has a physical or mental impairment, and the impairment has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on [their] ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.” Two groups of people fall foul of this definition. The first is people who have mental impairments, which are assumed by others to be trivial unless accompanied by other conditions (e.g. depression, autism, ADHD). Such people are not necessarily excluded from the definition, activists have to wage a constant, ongoing, unresolved battle to get employers, landlords, and even judges at first instance to include them. The second is anyone suffering from addiction. These people are excluded from the act. Senior judges have tried to moderate this exclusion but it is a major obstacle for the large group of disabled people whose mental illness is aggravated by historic or ongoing substance use.
Choudhury was right that under section 6, Gender Dysphoria could be considered an impairment, in that, people who experience it are more likely to suffer other psychological issues, including depression and anxiety. And he was correct that those symptoms are often substantial. What he never asked was whether redefining trans as a category of disability was the appropriate way for the state to offer redress against discrimination.
What is grating about his argument is not what he says, so much as the unspoken but real assumption that dysphoria is the consequence of trans’ people’s error. A person having been codified by the state as one gender at birth, he assumed, that person’s later desire to live according to a different gender must come about from a mistake. That error, he labels dysphoria. The part he cannot grasp is that the state might have done fewer tests than it should at birth, or might be doing harm later in insisting on a category that the person involved rejects for them. He does not comprehend that a trans person might face discrimination in life from people who accurately identify them as trans, object precisely to their gender non-conformity and use this as an excuse to harass them. Such bullying is intended – just like Choudhury’s reasoning – to push trans people back to the gender they were assigned at birth. He could not see it, because he could not escape the discriminator’s mindset.
Trans people are not discriminated against because they have an irrational desire to live according to the wrong gender, an illness which causes them pain against which they need to be protected. They are discriminated against rather because of their rational desire to live according to truth of their experience.
An alternative way to see the same question is through Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra’s definition of disability – which was generated in the service not of the state but of social movements. In a piece for Socialist Register, they defined disabled people as those who do not offer a body which will enhance profit-making: “Industrial capitalism thus created not only a class of proletarians but also a new class of ‘disabled’ who did not conform to the standard worker’s body and whose labour-power was effectively erased.”
From this perspective, whatever commonalities we might identify between trans and disabled, in terms of access to medication, vulnerability to moral panics, or hostility from the state we are talking ultimately about two different experiences of oppression. Capitalism rejects disabled people because they do not serve the interest of the capitalist employer in the workplace. The disabled human being is not a stable proletarian, rather an obstacle to capital’s need for labour. Where capitalism can fit disabled people into a money-making (for example, as the needy people whose existence justifies parts of the pharmaceutical industry), this is despite and in contradiction to disabled people’s essential failure to be steady workers.
Capitalism rejects trans people for specific and different reasons: because the social reproduction of a new generation of workers is made easier by stable heterosexual families in which one person is gendered male and another female; and trans existence throws this unit into disequilibrium. How can the birth-parent be satisfactory if he is a man?
Thinking of trans people in all their variety – this same essential calculation does not change if we substitute intersex in favour of trans in what I have just written, or non-binary or gender non-conforming. The role as disruptors is a constant.
To return to the metaphor of entanglement with which this paper opened; what different fractions of oppressed people have as a constant is an antagonist, capitalism. But the routes which bring us to the jungle and how we are entangled are different.
Sometimes it is argued that trans and disabled people are unified by the embodied experience of oppression. But we cannot use the body as a means of identifying trans and disabled as single experience since many forms of social oppression are marked there. Examples include the anti-black racism of the US in the 1920s, and how it depended on the notion of the potentially insurgent black man, physically robust and so incapable of being fitted into the appropriate racial hierarchy that prison became the suitable place for him. Or think of the ethnic stereotyping which faced Jews, a decade later, in Nazi Germany – assumed to be physically unfit for work, short-sighted, stooped, the carriers of infectious disease. Or, in the 1980s, the heterosexual fear of gay sex. Or, we might think of capitalist’s society constant inability to acknowledge women physical pain, its obsession with women’s looks, it’s requirement that women should be pretty, and diet- Unwanted bodies are not a commonality unique to disabled and trans experience, they are the setting on which capitalism constantly imposes hierarchy, and makes impossible demands on almost everyone.
A solidarity deeper than the casual
Resisting the urge to treat trans and disabled experiences as essentially the same; does not mean rejecting the arguments for commonality. I began this piece by citing an article published by Disability Rights UK. In the same source, a compelling series of arguments are made for treating these two causes as similar and potentially linked.
Both groups of people suffer the pressure of a social expectation of “normality” from which they are excluded, “If you have a hysterectomy as a result of having endometriosis, does that make you ‘less of a woman’? If you have hypogonadism, meaning you produce less testosterone than ‘normal levels’, does that make you less of a man?”
A significant group of people are both trans and disabled. The author estimated that rates of disability among trans people ran at around twice the levels do in cis society, and blamed state strategies of rationing healthcare. “The resources needed to live healthily and to take care of pre-existing impairments are made even more scarce for us.”
Inside both communities, the author continued, there is a memory of suffering medical hostility and responding with creative strategies of resistance intended to frustrate medical gate-keepers. “Did I learn how to safely inject myself intra-muscularly because of naloxone or because of transition hormones? That’s for you to guess. What I can tell you is that I was forced, like many of us, to figure it out without the help of any medical professional, relying only on the care and knowledge of Disabled, Trans people around me.”
The broad politics of trans struggle which has most excited me has not been the campaign for rights, fixed as that has been in the UK on the goal of winning state-approved gender self-ID, an end-point which strikes me as both limited, and unachievable in the present context. “There’s so much energy,” Connor Liao has written, being poured into struggles, which even if won by the pro-trans sides would have a negligible effect on trans people’s lives.” The vision which I’ve found most inspiring has rather been that of trans liberation; the idea that successful struggle would culminate in what Sophie L and Lisa Leak describe as, “the abolition of the prisons and policing systems of the state; the abolition of the medicalising and pathologising structures of state gender regulation, and perhaps of gender itself.”
This Communist, abolitionist, politics offers a very great deal to disabled people and to the exploited and the oppressed in all our variety. As I write, the Welfare Bill is about to pass; and the government is also on the verge of announcing measures intended to reduce spending, low as is already, on children with special education needs. In a world where so much left organising proceeds by appeals to consensus it can feel easier to limit your hopes to the defending of the few reforms that remain. Yet, faced as we all are with the open and growing hostility of the state, the only thing which can change the argument in our favour is a strategy of radical demands. Stressing optimism and utopian vision – urging solidarity and mutual struggle – becomes in an epoch of state antagonism the best route to victory.
DK Renton
