The trans-led non-violent direct action project BASH BACK emerged almost exactly a year ago when they took action against the then Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s constituency office, in response to “huge backpedals in the healthcare rights afforded to trans people — and young people especially — in an NHS system that was never kind to us in the first place.” There is, as BASH BACK have said, little hope that the Andy Burnham administration will choose to change direction without considerable pressure. This Monday, John Woodcock, the former independent government adviser on political violence, called on the British state to learn “the lesson from Palestine Action” and proscribe BASH BACK. In a statement, BASH BACK said that “Terrorism is an insidious descriptor… denoted by the use of extreme police powers, long prison sentences, isolation, medical neglect, and of course overseas bombing campaigns and gun-running” and which has “always been used by the ruling classes to designate threats to the status quo, and in doing so intimidate them into silence.”
BASH BACK have been extensively demonised by the state and by a press that seeks to portray them as a violent mob, or as thugs. Yet they have a serious strategy based on a rigorous analysis of the situation which trans people face in Britain today. This is what they set out here.
Who are BASH BACK and why is BASH BACK necessary?
BASH BACK is a direct action group that is responding to the explosion of transphobic rhetoric, violence, and policy in Britain through concerted covert action targeted directly at the people responsible and the structures enabling them. We exist to challenge the preconceived notions that the situation we are in is inescapable and that we as trans people are powerless to stop it. We are the sharp end of the stick, a means to challenge transphobia directly, to show that we cannot be intimidated, and that we are able to fight back.
BASH BACK is everyone that chooses to fight, to sabotage, to threaten instead of engaging with the status quo of liberal trans activism, which has gotten us nowhere. We created BASH BACK not just as a group but as a symbol: a symbol that says, “no more fear, only rage.” A symbol that says that trans people can and will win this fight when we take it into our own hands. We encourage activists who want to take up our name and symbol to do so. BASH BACK operates anywhere and everywhere. As we wrote in our action guide: a BASH BACK action is simply one that uses our symbol to take action in the fight for trans liberation.
In your manifesto you write, “what do we do when reason fails and the queerbashing continues unending? We bash back.” What does it mean to say that reason has failed, and how has that shaped BASH BACK’s approach to resistance?
Governments in the Global North have continued their escalation of fascism and authoritarianism. The Labour Party and its allies have made unprecedented attacks on trans people’s basic rights and liberties. Trans murders and suicides are on the rise. And yet, the broader leftist response has been to write petitions, publish press releases, or organise peaceful marches with police permission. They continue to attempt to debate or reason with the fascists that are making our lives hell when they’re not busy outright assassinating us.
As with all respectability politics, IT IS NOT WORKING. We have seen how the media establishment will move mountains to ignore trans voices while worshipping cisgender ‘experts’, how they will tout blatant misinformation like the Cass Review as infallible fact. They cannot be reasoned with, because their violent campaign against trans people does not stem from honest misunderstanding. It is a coordinated moral panic in order to distract from our government’s blatant corruption and the economic, social, and political crises they are responsible for. No matter how many marches we go on, no matter how many debates we engage in, no matter how politely we ask, they simply continue to ignore us, because these things do not pose a threat to them.
BASH BACK is something that they cannot ignore. When 100,000+ people marched through London at last year’s Trans Pride — one of the biggest in history — barely any news outlets, or politicians, batted an eyelid. Just days later, we took action against Wes Streeting’s London office, and it was all over the mainstream press, forcing Streeting himself to come out of hiding to make a statement on it. Years of petitions, letters, protests and speeches have done nothing to sway the EHRC’s heinous guidance, to even register on their radar, but we took action, and now we’ve forced them to acknowledge us and to run into hiding. Reason has failed, and so will they.
In the last few days, disgraced former Labour MP and former “political violence tsar” John Woodcock, has called for BASH BACK to be proscribed. What does this tell us about the situation in Britain, and, perhaps, about BASH BACK’s effectiveness?
We know John Woodcock is a bully, and we know he’s been accused of sexual harassment; it’s common knowledge that the standard, which he asserts in his piece, that “political violence […] begins with intimidation [being] normalised” is never really applied to him or the political establishment he is a part of. Terrorism as a political concept is in fact a method for normalising the intimidation of a group of people, and what is the police if not a force of political violence? Any accusation by Woodcock is an admission of his frustration that our protest isn’t peaceful enough to ignore. He hates us because what we do works.
For all his attempts at promoting law and order, he also treads dreadfully close to perverting the course of justice by making false accusations against our group for the murder of Ann Widdicombe — he knows this because he even lampshades it in order to get away from any personal accusation of wrongdoing.
That formulation of BASH BACK as a symbol is really interesting for thinking about the discursive or communicative aspects of direct action. Some of the action you’ve taken has delivered material consequences – you got the EHRC evicted, for example, but there are also those crucial communicative aspects, direct action as a practical demonstration that liberal-democratic paths are blocked (or “reason” is blocked) and that the oppression of trans people is serious – in both senses of the word. If these two things weren’t true, then direct action wouldn’t be necessary. The action proves the situation in a way.
Direct action is hard. We don’t want to make other trans people uncomfortable, we don’t want to make them scared, and we don’t want to do that to our community. We still get people saying “this is hurting our community, it’s making us more of a target”. We want to say: we don’t want to have to do this BUT there’s a reason why we must do the work we do. Unfortunately, all the other roads are blocked. It’s hard to get through, but we can get through. Direct action can be a way of getting through.
The disappointing thing is we have, time and time again, people — whether they be activists, or journalists, or propagandists, or media personalitie — who are so determined to repeat this “love is love” line. So, if we think about marriage — that was successful right? But, more generally, the reason we’ve had so many pushbacks on queer and gay rights, and trans rights in particular, is because “love is ;ove” is not actually that useful. You can only appeal to people’s better nature if they have a better nature in the first place, and we recognise that people in government or in business, people with huge power within capital or the state, nationally and internationally, have zero interest in discussion. Why would we appeal to their conscience? It’s not enough. We’re at risk of a Reform government: there is no appealing to their conscience.
As Kwame Ture said, there can a kind of political tactic that assumes that, “if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart”. But in order for that work, he says, “your opponent has to have a conscience.” If there’s no conscience to appeal to, we have to fight.
Then the political question becomes one of what consequences a concept or a slogan or a set of tactics can deliver. As Huey Newton said, political capacity is the capacity to deliver consequences; if you can’t deliver consequences, you’re politically useless. And it feels like what you’re saying is “love is love” can’t deliver meaningful consequences, especially against that backsliding on rights.
We cannot afford it. We cannot afford not to be able to deliver consequences. In terms of how we see capacity, there’s no better way to strike back than to just have an anonymous group that’s a symbol. We’re very happy with the symbol that we’ve got. We think it’s very bold and it says everything it needs to say. It’s the pink triangle, originally a Nazi label, which ACT UP inverted and we’ve reinverted it. For ACT UP, the inversion meant a pushing upwards and a rising up; we’ve reinverted it to point down. We recognise that the state is trying to erase and kill us, so we use the triangle in its original form as a recognition that we have become victims of the state once again. We invite people to take action and to use that symbol, and people do. We are organised and focused, and we have many plans, but we want to encourage people to do things themselves and we don’t have a membership list.
So, the strategy is that dispersed capacity can deliver consequences better?
Yes, and the fact we do have that capacity has been realised by a lot of transphobes, and don’t worry, we’re keeping an eye on them, they shouldn’t think for a moment that we’re not, and there’s more to come. So, in terms of who is BASH BACK? The answer is: anyone who stands up.
If the failure of reasoned discussion justifies non-violent direct action morally, what’s the pragmatic basis? Why do you think this can be successful? What are the weak links in the transphobic apparatus that can be targeted?
Unlike say, weapons and oil, the transphobic infrastructure doesn’t have a material supply chain to target. That’s what separates us from some other direct action groups. What transphobia does have is a status to uphold. So long as transphobia is seen as an acceptable, safe and — counter-intuitively — inoffensive, groups that promote it can continue to sustain their rhetoric through deals with venues, partners, and — as we’ve seen with FORA and the EHRC — private landlords. Transphobes feed on the good PR they are given by the press. They thrive on the idea that they are rational and unimpeachable. Breaking through that barrier by targeting their premises, their allies, and their funders hits them where they can’t recover: their wallets. If a transphobic entity can’t exist publicly because its landlords fear bad publicity or targeted action, then we’re starting to win. That’s part of the whole deplatforming operation: make them realise that their actions have consequences.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has, as you just alluded to, been a particular target of yours and its recently announced guidance on how equality law should be implemented is extremely repressive for trans people. How do you understand the role of the EHRC, and how can this guidance be challenged or resisted?
The EHRC is an advisory body that issues recommendations. It does not make law. None of its “guidance” has any force unless Parliament, the courts, and the police decide to give it force. So we do not make the mistake of assuming that we can win trans liberation by bending the EHRC to our will. In reality, the EHRC is a smokescreen for transphobic politicians to hide behind. They imbue it with a semi-divine status, depicting it as a neutral legislative body that can never be questioned, and wring their hands, saying, “Oh, there is nothing we can do, we have to follow the Law.” In reality, MPs could undo the guidance, undo the Supreme Court ruling, undo the puberty blocker ban, and so much more. Make no mistake: they are actively choosing not to. The EHRC simply provides them with an excuse, and acts as a shield. It enables them to hide their transphobia behind a cloak of objectivity.
We target the EHRC for three reasons. First, the EHRC is the public face of the state’s attack on transgender people. Any action directed against the EHRC provokes an immediate response and causes howls of outrage from TERFs and the press. Second, we seek to demonstrate just how pathetic and small the EHRC actually is. It’s treated as a dominant all-powerful machine that no politician can possibly hope to rebuke, yet a handful of trans people forced them to move their offices after a single action. Finally, we target the EHRC because it explicitly claims to protect our human rights, yet is instrumental in destroying those rights. That betrayal can’t come without a cost.
We are fully aware that the EHRC is not the driving force behind the attacks on trans people in Britain, but rather a tool of the state and the billionaire class. If the EHRC did not exist, they would use something else to advance their agenda. But it does exist. And while it remains the figurehead of the campaign to exterminate trans people, we will bash back.
You’ve had a particular focus on prisons following the death of Toni Asik in HMP Bronzefield, which is a privatised prison run by Sodexo. Why are prisons such a crucial site of state transphobia, and how dos the struggle for trans liberation relate to prison abolitionism more broadly?
Prison abolition and trans struggle are necessarily intertwined; it is all part of the same fight to reassert sovereignty over ourselves, our movements, our bodies. When we heard of the devastating case of Toni Asik, we were maddened that nobody did anything to prevent his death, and by the moral vacuum that seemed to mark people’s responses. Where there should have been outrage and action, there was silence. Prison deaths and abuses are, of course, often kept under lock and key, rarely shared with the public. However, when something like this happens, no matter who it affects, you have to hold the perpetrators to account. We thought: how did the children who murdered Brianna Ghey get sentenced to prison, while the prison officers who tortured and killed a vulnerable trans man through negligence and malice didn’t even receive a slap on the wrist? It was, and is, infuriating. Prisoners are rarely thought about in our society, and the propaganda from our carceral state means that their suffering is treated as either their own fault, or as necessary for the “safety” of the rest of society.
Our proximity to prisoners as activists and actionists, taking risks that could land us in a similar position, grants us a certain level of insight and concern. But this concern must be integral for everyone, not just activists. In addition, direct action spaces owe it to themselves to fight for the most vulnerable, to highlight abuses in the most controlled and violent spaces. For us as trans people, it’s pretty clear: we are fighting for bodily autonomy above all else, and prisons are the spaces in the world where this is most denied and controlled. We know that those who went on hunger strike last winter (as part of Prisoners For Palestine) were either Muslim or trans. This makes sense: having to fight for bodily autonomy in the face of the state is something both groups have faced for a long time. Prisons are treated as a battlefield for “the trans debate”. Trans women are monstered for attempting to access women’s prisons and be in a space where they won’t be harassed by guards or their fellow prisoners. We also know that trans people are routinely denied their basic gender-affirming care, segregated and isolated, and forcibly medically detransitioned in prisons — that is, when they’re not being actively abused or murdered by staff.
We recommend Bent Bars’ “Trans In Prison” reports for further details on this. We’d also like to raise awareness about Jon Cink and Amu Gib of the Brize Norton 5, who are currently being denied hormone treatment and gender affirming care. Trans people will not be free without the abolition of prisons and the wider carceral infrastructure. The way trans prisoners are treated is hideous, and rarely reported on. Meanwhile, trans prisoners are used as a theoretical football, in order to manufacture consent for further policing and targeting of our community. We treat it as part of our duty to fight for them.
You’ve said “every trans death is political”, about the murder of Juniper Blessing. What’s the relationship between state transphobia and transphobic street violence?
To put it simply: our government encourages and engages in transphobic violence at every level. As mentioned, they have intentionally ignited a moral panic surrounding trans people — just as everyone was told the gays were indoctrinating your children thirty years ago, they are now told we’re grooming the whole world into a vague, and of course evil, “transsexual agenda”. The national ‘conversation’ surrounding trans rights is profoundly one-sided and dominated by TERFs who bombard ordinary people with misleading headlines, transphobic caricatures, and outright lies about even the most simple aspects of trans existence. The most obvious example is the toilet debate and subsequent EHRC guidance about single-sex spaces. This hinges on the myth that trans people, particularly trans women, are dangerous predators who can’t be trusted to take a piss without assaulting someone. Naturally, this mindset invites assault towards us and in the devastating case of Juniper Blessing, it invited much worse. Every trans death is political, and the state has blood on their hands.
If BASH BACK is anyone who stands up, anyone who uses the symbol, that’s one sort of political agency. On the other hand, you’ve criticised “trans liberalism”, a politics that claims to speak for all trans people, often in a very conformist way. What would you say is the basis of trans liberalism?
I think some of this can be understood by thinking about how there’s been a move maybe from one kind of materialism to another. Previously the political understanding of transness was vague because the understanding of transness was vague – and understandings of homosexuality were also vague for a long time. And in some ways this vagueness isn’t bad. I would never say there’s a hard definition of what it is to be trans: you’re trans if you feel trans, you’re trans if your gender is different to the mainstream, you’re trans if you’re affected by what affects trans people.
I’m a Foucauldian, and I think these forms of knowledge are linked to power and discoursively produced. When you look at Foucault’s argument around the repressive hypothesis1, that can offer a challenge to a certain influential, dominant view which holds that we (gay people) didn’t have rights because we didn’t have the names for things — we didn’t have the term “homosexual”, for instance. Whereas what’s exciting in Foucault’s argument is he’s saying almost the reverse: the naming of homosexuality enabled new restrictions because it categorised a group of people who could then be identified, outcast, and discriminated against. By contrast, I would identify with a notion of queerness, which is to say, we think we should be evading or exceeding these discourses, or at the very least not being completely reduced to them.
To put it a bit more concretely: there’s a strange materialism associated with emphasising certain very specific, very commodified, parts of trans identity. There’s a whole thing with an IKEA shark even. This is about a social expectation around looking for ideal trans people who offer a cute and easy version of transness that can be picked up on, or people who the state can work with. This isn’t what we want, we want to be seen for the needs we have, not the marketable demographics we fulfil.
Even just existing as a trans person is so hard, the material foundations of our existence are being denied us: the denial of HRT is a trans issue, the recent denial of surgery is a trans issue, and there’s so much more making our very existence hard. I think we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t acknowledge that. Cute, inoffensive or even celebratory modes of transness can’t reckon with that.
A lot of liberals want things to be easier, but they don’t necessarily want to really change things, because they still have the notion that, on some level, this is the best possible system. And that means that when we exist we have to adapt to this system, and it ends up with a claim that it’s actually on trans people to accept less for the sake of maintaining this system. The other thing with trans liberalism is we now see so many groups for trans people that promote the police, or Zionists; I’ve seen so many trans capitalists, and we’re meant to celebrate that? I don’t want the next bomb to be sent by a trans woman. I want people free. I want people free here, and in the Middle East, and anywhere in the Global South, and I want trans people free everywhere, and that means being free of imperialism. And I want the prison system gone. I want total trans liberation.
So much queer theory or gender studies, or any of the other knowledge that is shared among queers is being toned down by the liberal gay rights movement and the liberal LGBTQ+ movement. But we need to say, we need it to be known, that this community is built on bodies, and it’s built on the need to change, and it’s built on the need to communicate that very bodily materialism and need to change.
We see so much content that says it’s naive to try to do anything, and actually we have some specific goals, but, ultimately, we’re a group for total transgender liberation, and we call ourselves that because the trans community is not feeling big enough or powerful enough. There’s a lot of caution too, fear leading people to play it safe or rein in ambition, not take the risks of acting – and we can make mistakes, nobody is perfect, and the demand to be perfect or not make mistakes is limiting.
It’s a dangerous world for trans people, and the hostility that exists is material, yet still, so many people want to just change the conversation and not change the world. We deserve much more than that. There’s a tendency for trans people to focus on language and also to emphasise maximum vulnerability and personal pain, you know, and it’s like the Ture quote, “if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and be moved…”. But, with BASH BACK, we give trans people the opportunity to make a change with their friends and comrades, to do something to protect themselves, and, importantly, to channel their rage. Obviously, we say, “be careful”, but we encourage trans people to use their rage, to make something of it. Things are hard, and we have so few freedoms, and it feels as if there’s no chance to change the things that are hard, so it’s very common for trans people to turn that rage on themselves.
And, it’s interesting then when there is press coverage of BASH BACK, how much it runs on an attempted delegitimisation of that anger. That brings us back, I think, to the question of what’s blocked. So, implicitly, the criticism goes: if there are usable democratic channels then calm debate and lobbying is what’s required; it’s irrational to be angry or to take direct action, one uses the proper channels, because however much one might disagree with a specific law, the mechanism for making laws (or interpreting them, in the case of the role of the EHRC) is legitimate. To act outside that is to make oneself a “thug”, or part of a “mob”. This has been an attempted pacifying discourse since at least the 19th century. You have it in criticisms of Chartism and then the 1860s fight for expanding the franchise: people who act based on the awareness that the so-called proper channels are blocked are “a mob”.2
Another thing we’ve seen, which they’ve used a lot, is this notion that this is “male anger”. Have these people trying to claim the mantle of feminism forgotten that their whole movement is built on the righteous and necessary rage of women? If anything, we exist within a paradigm of direct action, and practices of direct action, that has more women and queers than men among its ancestors. Men are often angry, but treating rage as this purely masculine thing is a great injustice, and not only to our queer antecedents.
So, you get this pretty inane tactical move against trans struggle which ends up repressing or disavowing women’s own militant practice. And, there’s something else too: their implicit assumption is that it’s only trans women in our movement, they see our anger, and they want to claim these women are men. They ignore any other trans people, and it ends up being strangely misogynistic, as well as viciously transphobic. To add to the irony, it’s misogynistically historically inaccurate in ignoring the tradition of righteously aggressive women whose colours contemporary transphobes are appropriating.
You call for “total transgender liberation”. What does that look like and how might we get there?
Total transgender liberation means liberation for all of us. We have four primary goals: free and accessible gender-affirming care for all; the desegregation of trans people from all spaces; the end to so-called “conversion therapy”; and the deplatforming of transphobia. But it doesn’t stop there. We say “total transgender liberation” because we don’t want to be limited by our specific goals, but rather motivated to fight for them while keeping our eyes fixed on the broader liberation, for all, that we know is possible. That’s why we take action for trans prisoners who are being abused and killed by the carceral state. That’s why we’ve been open about the fight for a free Palestine. That’s why we will always resist racial hatred and encroaching fascism. We know, consciously, that transphobia is a product of colonialism exacerbated and enabled by wealth and state influence, and that the harms done by state and capital to racial minorities, women, migrants, disabled people etc., also harm trans people within those groups. Total transgender liberation means fighting not just for our goals, but for a better world. We will not be free — in our totality — until we are all free.
Can trans liberation be won on its own? How do your actions and analyses relate to other struggles for liberation?
No one is free until we are all free. Transphobic rhetoric stems directly from racism and misogyny, from eurocentric and white supremacist beauty standards, to defining womanhood by genitalia and reproductive capability. Cultures and communities across the Global South, and even Europe once upon a time, have historically held broad and liberatory understandings of gender, which have been suppressed by colonial violence that deemed this freedom and expression a threat to their ability to control and subjugate. We take our actions knowing our history has always been part of a unified struggle against these forces. While BASH BACK is a trans-specific direct action group, we understand that oppression is intersectional and we will always fight for the liberation of all oppressed people. We have previously collaborated with LGSMigrants, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, and Prisoners for Palestine. Trans liberation cannot be won on its own. We must unite with our comrades in humanity across the globe, and take it from our oppressors by force. In the words of Lilla Watson: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
One thing that seems very valuable about both your answers and the questions posed practically by the actions of BASH BACK is around the non-naturalness or non-necessity of social practices or institutions. So, there’s the point about the EHRC posed by the action: this isn’t merely an administrative body (why would anyone take direct action against that?), with a technical function around interpreting equalities laws, that is external to and even above political controversy (the action demonstrates that it’s controversial). Or there’s the point you make about prisons: if they are even thought about, they’re presented as a regrettable necessity, a natural and inevitable response to crime — but this can be challenged. Finally, and perhaps at the core, there’s the point about gender: at the very least, and at the most basic level, it’s not natural in the way transphobes present it. I was wondering if you think a trans perspective opens up these questions and almost necessarily estranges — in the very literal sense — institutions and practices?
It’s very notable how many trans people, in Britain but also globally, are involved in direct action and resistance struggles, and this is something that’s we’ve been asking ourselves. Something we mentioned in our interview with ish99ni, the musician, is that the Prisoners for Palestine hunger strikers were all either Muslim or trans, so it’s an important conversation to have. As you said, trans people exist in a way where things can be changed, almost on the cellular level, everything from personality, to what is enabled by technology, especially medical technology, to social existence. We adapt our voices, we adapt our bodies, we adapt according to whether we need to navigate social situations in ways that seem more feminine or masculine. All that intersects with experiencing systems or people who don’t like us, who want to try to push us into living in certain ways. So, I don’t want to be the way I am, so I want to pursue different options, and it’s hard knowing different options are there while at the same time they’re being structurally constrained.
All of these questions — and wider ones besides — get posed: when encountering the NHS, how does patriarchy affect the way in which we present and hold ourselves? And this then opens up a set of wider questions - about notions of gender, including is it even a necessary thing at all, and gender abolitionism is a whole other kettle of fish — but also about state structures, not only the NHS but prisons. So, it all has a reach and a set of connections, and this all comes from a very simple place of something necessary being absent, and a change that is, or ought to be, possible being denied.
But on the other hand, whilst there is this sense of possibility and denial, often from the state, of that possibility, a lot of the conversation at trans prides, in the LGBT movement, even in some semi-radical trans spaces, is about how do we get more rights rather than about winning public liberty ourselves. There are so many appeals to authority or calls for moral representation. We want access to hormones! We want to be able to go outside without having to look over our shoulders! We want fewer trans people being abused in the street, and fewer trans people being jailed. But instead of trying to do anything about all this, these people just want representation. It’s so grim. I keep coming back to trans liberalism; it’s something that sort of sits within the movement. But we want better than that, we deserve better than what we’ve got.
What can be done to support BASH BACK in the struggle for total trans liberation?
Two words: TAKE ACTION. We have an action guide available online, and a recruitment form on our linktree, but we encourage independent, sporadic action. So gather some mates, start a cell, take action, and don’t get caught. Remember that you do not need to be helpless victims anymore. We don’t just need actionists, we also welcome artists, researchers, and developers. We recognise that direct action is not accessible to everyone and in that case the next best thing is to attend whatever protests you can and be an active participant in queer community.
Cis people: we neither need nor want you to swoop in with a misguided attempt to save us. Stay in your lane. If you want to help you can express public support for our actions and get involved with grassroots activist groups in your area. Uplift trans voices and learn queer history. Go to your local protest and talk about us, help support us through promoting direct action as a means to liberation. Chant “WHEN TRANS RIGHTS ARE UNDER ATTACK, WHAT DO WE DO? STAND UP BASH BACK”
It’s often said that we need all the help we can get, but BASH BACK exists so we can liberate OURSELVES.