Today’s anti-trans rhetoric looks a lot like old-school homophobia

“Now gay life has become an aggressive freemasonry, for which recruits are required to stand up and be counted. The price [homosexuality] exacts in the form of childlessness, instability and now mortal danger from Aids is not something that most 16-year-olds have the capacity to evaluate.”

In December 1991 the Times ran a column by Janet Daley with the headline “The sad fraud of gay equality”. After declaring herself the least homophobic person alive, she argued against equalising the age of consent by raising various phantom “concerns”: straight 16-year-old males, too shy to talk to their female counterparts, are particularly vulnerable to gay seduction – and once they have strayed from their natural sexuality, these young people will find themselves in “a club from which there may be no return”.

Since 1991, none of the concerns Daley raised have materialised. Right-thinking people now recognise that a 16-year-old who is gay and comes out is unlikely to have been recruited by a lobby or cult, but is simply naming a fundamental part of themselves. Daley’s antiquated piece seems particularly relevant, however, at a time when people are using the history of gay emancipation to make a rhetorical point against trans people. Writing in the Times recently, the columnist Janice Turner argued that “gay people sought only the right to love who they wished and for that love to receive equal recognition: gay rights had no impact on the rights of anyone else”.

That was clearly not Daley’s view. In fact, gay rights were won in the teeth of opposition that argued exactly the contrary: gay people’s happiness was a threat to wider society.

The 30th anniversary of the anti-gay legislation known as section 28 is a useful moment to pause and examine the parallels between the trans and gay movements: not only are the struggles analogous in that they were both designed to improve the legal rights of a minority group; the responses they provoked have been at times eerily similar.

At each stage of the fight for gay rights, the British political and media establishment became saturated with arguments that used the notion of a “conflict of rights” in which gay people were always expected to give way to the majority. These often included the rights of children: in a startling interview for ITN News in 1998, the Conservative peer Baroness Young referred to gay rights as “a paedophiles’ charter”; and in 1994 the Tory MP Tony Marlow said gay campaigners were seeking to “legalise the buggery of adolescent males”, and that he wanted to “protect young boys”.

Under the Human Rights Act of 1998, people have a legal right to freedom of religious belief. Since then there have been a number of attempts to argue that the right to this freedom is being breached by the requirement not to discriminate against gay people in providing services.

But we tend to forget all this. Instead it has become common for (heterosexual) commentators to see the development of gay rights in hindsight as an evolutionary process towards an enlightened state. The misrepresentations and calumnies that arose in response fade into the background.

This whitewashing means we don’t always recognise how similar rhetoric is being deployed now against trans rights.

Like our gay and bisexual siblings in the past, trans people are now being told that simple rights – such as changing our birth certificate by making a statutory declaration – are part of an agenda to dismantle the rights of cisgender women or children. But there is no evidence for this: the gender recognition laws sought here in the UK are already present in Argentina, Belgium, Malta, Denmark, Colombia, Norway, Ireland and, most recently, Portugal. Sweden is soon expected to follow suit. That’s a combined population of 64 million women and girls whose rights and safety do not appear to have been compromised. Neither has the feminist struggle been erased or diluted in these countries: in Argentina cis and trans women work together in the Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) collective against male violence, and trans women are visible every year at Argentina’s National Women’s Conference .

The same is true closer to Britain. Ellen Coyne, a feminist and senior reporter for the Irish edition of the Times, told me that Ireland’s gender-recognition legislation “has been completely inconsequential to my day-to-day life. There’s no difference.” In Ireland, trans people and cis women are fighting together to repeal the eighth amendment (which in effect enshrines a ban on abortion) next month – because their desire for self-determination and bodily autonomy is shared. The ongoing display of solidarity in Irish feminism was typified by an open letter against transphobia signed by more than 1,200 women, which unequivocally stated that Irish feminism had only gained from its embrace of trans rights.

In the absence of evidence that trans rights encroach on anyone else to their detriment, a stark parallel emerges with the rhetoric that was used to stymie the gay movement. The campaign to pressure Girlguiding to rescind its trans inclusive policy, with whispered mention of “risk” to cisgender girls from their trans friends on “overnight trips”, is reminiscent of the old “slippery slope” dog whistle about seduction of the young. All LGBT people, feminists and allies must reject this damaging narrative at every turn.

Gay people and trans people have had to battle similar arguments about being “unnatural” – homophobia still often rests on the prejudice that the worthiest form of sexuality is that which is capable of reproduction. Transphobia, too, emanates from a prejudice that a person’s stated identity is more trustworthy if it reflects their “natural” role in human reproduction. This rigid, unyielding hierarchy of natural over unnatural, of biology over feeling, should terrify anyone progressive: it is, after all, the same argument that has been used to deny women’s access to abortion and contraception for decades. Misogyny, homophobia and transphobia share much of the same DNA.

• Shon Faye is a writer, artist and standup comedian