‘Answering Lady Britannia's Call: The Street, Visual and Media Tactics of the British Anti-Trans/Queer Far-Right’

I examine the visual practices of the anti-gender movement in the UK, namely focusing on the use of images depicting injury by Gender Critical (GC) women. I explore the positioning of (GC) women’s identity as mostly-white, cis-heterosexualist, middle-class British mothers to build broad alliances and achieve significant legislative and institutional success. Injury images can take the form of images of trans/queer surgery which violate the integrity of a 'healthy' cisgender body or images of perceived grievances by trans/queer individuals, such as images from protests, confrontations of 'women's spaces' such as gendered bathrooms. Injury-images are capable of articulating conceptions of female vulnerability through a persistent matrix of sexual threat. These follow from the perceived threats of transition, surgical alteration and hormone therapy rendering white British children infertile, sexually undesirable/illegible, and 'corrupted' by embodiment of British anti-trans/queer sexual anxieties. GC activists deploy cameras for the purposes of capturing confrontations with trans/queer individuals, including in both public life and protest mobilisations. Activists will instigate physical conflicts with the purpose of filming them. These images dictate the flow of discourse and prompt action against trans/queer people. These images are recirculated through social networks with the purpose of galvanising more supporters to action.