The United Kingdom is in the grip of a transgender moral panic (Duffy, 2025). From the political sphere to the media – traditional and social – the airing of transantagonistic views has become commonplace. Trans people, particularly trans women, are imagined as dangerous, predatory individuals who invade the spaces which rightly belong to cisgender women, and bring with them fear and peril of unwanted sexuality or sexual advances. The contemporary aesthetic of transness is one of threat, transgression, and anxiety. This is no accident: this is a created aesthetic, groomed and maintained for the purposes of trans repression.

In this lecture, I will explore the background and current manifestations of this moral panic, which I argue has come to feed into a ‘lawmaking of the spectacle’ in recent judicial decisions and quasi-legislative promulgations. The spectacle, or the mediation of social relationships through the image, gains power as a governance mechanism through these legal reinforcements. The United Kingdom is becoming an ever-more risky place to be trans, with many avenues of public participation being closed to the community through law and policy. This lecture seeks to understand the whys and hows of this enclosure, and what we can do about it.