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When I arrived in the UK six years ago as an asylum seeker, I was stunned by how LGBTQI+ friendly the country seemed. Compared to Ukraine and Russia – where I had previously lived – it felt almost like time travel.

I’ve known I was trans since I was four years old. But it was only here, in the UK, at the age of 24, that I finally felt safe enough to come out.

Since then, much has changed. The political climate has shifted. Laws have shifted.

In 2015, the annual Rainbow Map and Index by ILGA-Europe ranked the UK as the most LGBTQI+ friendly country in Europe. But in the latest rankings released on 14 May, the UK has fallen to 22nd place, with an overall score of just 46 per cent. That makes it the second-worst performer on LGBTQI+ rights in Western Europe and Scandinavia.

This drop isn’t abstract – it reflects growing hostility, dangerous rhetoric, and policies that especially target trans people.

The recent Supreme Court ruling that defines “woman” as “biological woman” under equality law is a particularly cruel institutional decision. Its consequences for trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people may not even be fully visible yet – but they will be far-reaching.

Transmasculine people like me may soon be under direct attack as well. And then, as history shows, the broader LGBTQI+ community often follows. For people already facing multiple forms of oppression – like refugees and people seeking asylum – the danger is even greater.

So as Pride Month begins, we must ask ourselves: What does Pride mean right now? How did we get here—and where do we go from here? What does this mean for LGBTQI+ refugees in particular, and why is it important for the community in general?

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The Cass Review: a turning point

I knew something was deeply wrong when the Cass Review was published in April 2024, and the NHS began blocking transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care.

Outside the LGBTQI+ community, few people seemed to care. Even many liberals and left-leaning voices accepted it as “reasonable”.

But this decision has already caused immense harm. The review was widely criticised by both UK and international experts, but the damage was swift – especially for transgender kids. As a former trans child myself, I know the mental health cost of being denied gender-affirming care. I still live with that impact today.

And it always starts the same way: The first attacks come for LGBTQI+ youth, because they are not taken seriously because they are considered to be “too immature” to think for themselves. Just like refugees, who are seen as “barbarians” from less developed societies.

Those at the intersection suffer the most.

A dangerous shift in politics

Despite its history as a progressive party, many trans activists now say Labour is doing more harm to LGBTQI+ people than recent Tory governments.

Labour is even continuing the particularly dangerous for LGBTQI+ people anti-immigration policies introduced under Rishi Sunak. Prime minister Keir Starmer recently said the UK is considering sending rejected people seeking safety to third countries.

As someone who has worked with LGBTQI+ refugees globally, I can say: This is extremely risky for trans people.

Trans people seeking asylum already face daily harassment, even within refugee communities. Most third countries lack the legal protections they need. Deportation could cut them off from hormone therapy or vital healthcare.

And all this is happening as far-right movements gain more support. The rise of the transphobic, anti-migrant Reform Party, the far-right riots last summer, and increasing global conservatism are life-threatening for LGBTQI+ refugees.

Sometimes the threat is physical – being attacked for looking non-White and gender non-conforming. Sometimes it’s quieter but just as harmful – denial of healthcare, legal protections, or safety.

As an expert by experience for the mental health charity Rethink, I know how hard it is to access therapy even for cisgender, straight British people.

Now imagine being a trans person seeking asylum. You’re under constant pressure, facing daily dehumanization – and if you finally reach out for help?

The therapist might be transphobic. Or xenophobic. Or both.

Maybe you can’t fully express yourself in English.

Maybe the waiting list is too long.

In the end, the suicide risk for trans and LGBTQI+ refugees is terrifyingly high. And still, much of the broader LGBTQI+ movement stays silent.

Pride as Protest: What Must Be Done

So what does it mean to celebrate Pride in this context?

In recent years, Pride has become a celebration – of victories, of corporate support, of police apologies. But we must remember: Pride was born as a protest. Today, it must return to its roots. It must be about resistance.

It should be not about past victories, but present dangers.

Not “love is love,” but “the lives of our queer and trans siblings are at risk.”

I know that for many people — even some within the LGBTQI+ community — lives like mine don’t matter.

But history shows us: The erosion of human rights always begins with minorities.

Just as the attacks on trans kids marked the start of broader attacks on LGBTQI+ people in the UK, the targeting of trans refugees and LGBTQI+ people seeking sanctuary is not the end of the story of oppression —it’s only the beginning. But we may change this story, and this is what Pride Month should be about.

When the Supreme Court issued its 88-page long judgement that the legal definition of ‘sex’ is based on ‘biology’, gender critical lobbying group and controversially registered charity LGB Alliance declared it was a “landmark for lesbian rights in the UK”. 

“This matters greatly to LGB people,” CEO Kate Barker said of the ruling. “It is especially important to lesbians, because the definition of lesbian is directly linked to the definition of woman.” 

Barker – who once claimed a singular drag queen carrying the Olympic torch demonstrated the “erasure of woman in all spheres of public life” – went on to say the ruling “marks a watershed for women and, in particular, lesbians who have seen their rights and identities undermined over the last decade”. 

Despite Supreme Court judge Lord Hodge specifically counseling against certain factions “reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another,” gender critical activists view the outcome of the Supreme Court case as a decisive victory for all women over so-called ‘gender ideology’. 

However, in the days and weeks that have followed the Supreme Court ruling, it has quickly become clear that many women who are not trans – who are in the court’s definition born as ‘biological women’, identify as women and women and live their lives as women – will likely be disadvantaged by the court’s decision because they do not fit into narrow, often white and western, definitions of what constitutes as ‘woman’. 

Sparked by a trans-inclusive definition of womanhood in Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018 – which sought to diversity the number of women on public boards in the devolved nation – the Supreme Court decisionwas the culmination of a years-long legal battle between gender critical Scottish group For Women Scotland (FWS) and the Scottish government about how the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ is defined and applied in the 2010 Equality Act. 

After traversing many different appeal processes, the case finally ended at the UK’s highest court and concluded the definition does not include trans people. 

“The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex,” Lord Hodge said in his oral reading of the ruling. 

The decision is expected to have wide-ranging implications for the trans community, as well as organisations, public bodies and services who may be forced to update their policies on single-sex spaces, inclusion and discrimination. Some, including the Football Association and the England and Wales Cricket Board, have already taken steps to bar trans women from taking part in female matches. 

In the wake of the ruling, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – the UK’s equalities watchdog – issued interim guidance which said single-sex spaces must be based on biology whereby a trans woman must not be allowed to use a female toilet and a trans man not allowed to use a male one. However, the guidance also adds that, in “some circumstances,” trans women should also be banned from the men’s facilities and trans men from women’s facilities.

When asked to clarify this point by the BBC, the EHRC directed the broadcaster to a section of the Supreme Court ruling which states trans men could be excluded from women’s facilities “where reasonable objection is taken to their presence, for example because the gender reassignment process has given them a masculine appearance or attributes to which reasonable objection might be taken” in the context of a female-only space, such as a toilet. 

In essence, when a trans man looks, well, too much like a man (because he is one) or when a trans woman looks, well, too much like a woman (because she is one), they can be totally excluded from gendered spaces and be forced to only use a unisex facility – assuming one is available.  

If the circumstances which would see trans men – who are defined by the court ruling as ‘biologically female’ – banned from female toilets is all about ‘masculine appearance’, then where does this leave masculine, cis women? 

Whilst the Supreme Court case is supposedly about ‘protecting’ the interests of all women, this exception – in itself – shows there is only interest in protecting certain kinds of women. Namely, women who ‘look’ like women: traditionally feminine women with long hair, hips and visible breasts, who dress and talk and walk in a way that is ‘expected’ of women and who have no trouble moving through the world as one. 

By contrast, there are plenty of other women out there who constantly have their gender and presentation policed by strangers for not fitting into the narrow and misogynistic definitions of what a woman should be. Women who are tall, have short hair, broad shoulders and square jawlines. Women who wear clothes from the men’s section and have deep voices and body hair. Women who are “incorrectly female,” Hannah Gadsby famously said. 

Writing for Refinery29 in 2022, Yassine Senghor exemplifies this as “a dark-skinned Black, fat, masculine-presenting dyke with a shaved head who tends to lean towards clothing gendered as men’s” and said she has always been told she is “doing ‘woman’ wrong”. Similarly, in a different article for the publication, architect Martha said she has been made to feel that she is “failing at womanhood” and even when she presented more femininely was questioned about her gender. 

Such slim definitions of what is correct or incorrect womanhood rooted in patriarchal beauty standards are – ironically enough – what feminists have actually spent decades fighting against, so that women have the choice about whether or not they want to shave their legs, wear make-up or put on dresses or *gasp* trousers. 

The Supreme Court ruling will, very likely, cause butch and masculine lesbians to face increased harassment in single-sex female spaces simply because of how they present themselves. This is not a fictitious, dystopian musing by one dyke about the rights of others in her community, this is something we have already seen – and are continuing to see – when it comes to women do not fit into the confindes of traditional femininity and gender. 

For Lesbian Visibility Week, which came a week after the Supreme Court’s decision, Labour MP Kate Osborne said she is “frequently misgendered”because of how she looks and expressed concern it will only get worse going forward. 

“I note that Ministers said yesterday that there will be guidance regarding the Supreme Court verdict. That decision will have a huge impact on my life, on many other cis lesbians and, indeed, on heterosexual women,” Osborne told fellow MPs. “I suspect that I will get challenged even more now when accessing facilities. The impact on my life will be problematic, but the impact on my trans siblings’ lives will be significantly worse.”

Just this week, across the pond, in the United States, a number of headlines were dedicated to an incident involving lesbian woman Ansley Baker who was removed from a female toilet in a Boston hotel by a male security guard after being accused of being ‘a man’ by other women in the facility. The irony that it was a male security guard who banged on the cubical door and removed her when her shorts were not fully done up has not been lost on most in the LGBTQ+ community, it must be noted. 

Baker is certainly not the first, nor will she likely be the last, lesbian to face such treatment, with other incidents from recent years including the partner of children’s author Jessica Walton and poet Eloise Stonborough, whilst Martha told R29 she has “some kind of confrontation or experience in a public bathroom every few months” after starting to present in a more butch way.

But, tight confines and strict parameters of what constitutes correct womanliness and the social punishments inflicted when broken are not solely restricted to masculine lesbians, straight women too have subject to such policing. 

In 2023, the pregnant girlfriend of Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel actor Erin Darke, was transvestigated by anti-trans pundits on social media because she happens to be taller than Radcliffe and have certain facial features. Transvesigation refers to conspiracy theories that falsely claim individuals, typically women, are transgender and are hiding their “true” gender identity, with Drake accused of ‘secretly being trans’. Transvesitigations are entirely rooted in warped, deeply misogynistic and racist, views of femininity and gender.

Similarly, Olympic boxer Imane Khelif – who was thrust into the centre of a gender storm during the Paris Games – was accused of ‘being a man’ despite the fact she, and Olympic bosses, clarified she is not nor has ever identified as trans. In fact in Algeria, where Khelif hails from, gender-affirming care is banned and public gender non-conformity has the potential to be prosecuted as “indecent” under the 1966 penal code. However, people failed to engage the grey matter in their brains and the conspiracy persisted because, according to the wisdom of users on X/Twitter, Khelif has a strong nose, muscles, is tall and has hairs on her knuckles, so must be male. 

Other cis women who are seemingly not woman enough according to transphobes include rugby icon Ilona Maher, tennis legend Serena Williams and former first lady Michelle Obama. Why? Again, because their bodies have dared to exist outside of patriarchal beauty standards, defined and controlled by the the male gaze. 

As organisations, public bodies and services across the UK look set to draw up fresh guidelines in response to the Supreme Court ruling we will all do well to remember that gender policing does far, far more harm than ever does any good. At best it can be an irritant for women who move through the world everyday in a more masculine presentation, at its worst it poses an inherent threat to the people such an ill-thought out ruling is supposed to protect; putting woman who do not conform at risk of harassment, abuse and vigliante justice. 

As Hannah Gadsby explained when she described herself as being ‘incorrectly female’, she was beaten up for being visibly lesbian and accepted that was what she was worth, because that is what the world told her. 

“He beat the shit out of me and nobody stopped him. And I didn’t report that to the police and I did not take myself to the hospital and I should have. And you know why I didn’t? Because I thought that is all I was worth,” she explained during her stand up show Nanette. “And that was not homophobia pure and simple, people, that was gendered. If I’d have been feminine, that would not have happened. I am incorrectly female, I am incorrect, and that is a punishable offence.”

At its heart gender policing just proves – just like their views on the beautiful diversity of gender are narrow – the views of bigots on womanhood are equally as restrictive.