A moral panic, untethered from reality, is creeping into mainstream discourse.

Last October, Northern Territory Chief Minister Lia Finocchio pledged to bar trans women from women’s prisons, despite there being no recorded cases of such placements. Her comments followed weeks of sensational headlines and political posturing across jurisdictions constructing a threat that does not exist.  During this time, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan defended recent amendments to the state’s prisoner placement policy, insisting they were about “women’s safety”, while Sky News and other outlets framed the issue as “ideology over safety”

We know that if “gender-critical” advocates were truly concerned for the safety of women and children in custody, they probably wouldn’t inundate Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody with death threats and would probably focus on the everyday harms of imprisonment like routine invasive strip-searches of adults — as well as, shockingly, of children — removal of newborn babies from their mothers’ care,   constant suicide attempts, rolling lockdowns and lack of clean food and water. These statements form part of a broader pattern: a revival of the conservative moral language of protection that casts trans women as threats to cis women’s safety.

The contemporary anti-trans backlash in Australia follows a well-rehearsed script. In the United Kingdom and United States, transmisogynist activists, conservative think-tanks and religious lobby groups have refined a shared “anti-gender” playbook (Paternotte & Kuhar; Lamble). Its first tactic is issue-framing through moral panic. The second is to attack legislative and policy settings. The third is coalition-building. And the fourth is the invocation of “free speech” and “reasonabless”. We’ll go through each of these in a little more detail to understand the strategy and expose it as a calculated, rather than genuinely felt, concern for cis women.

A closely aligned piece was published by close friends Debbie Kilroy and Tabitha Lean in Women’s agenda while this essay was in draft, calling out the political use of cis women in prison to attack trans women. This essay builds on that shared concern but approaches the issue from a different angle, tracing the transnational anti-gender playbook and the colonial and carceral logics that shape how “women’s safety” is constructed in Australia.

Tactic 1: moral panic

Moral panic is a political technology that transforms isolated anxieties into social crises. In the current backlash against trans women, the figure of the “innocent cis woman” sits at its moral centre. As Sarah Lamble observes, Britain’s “sexual peril” debates around trans prisoners mirror the colonial trope of women’s bodies as territories that are under siege by a racialised, sexualised other. The panic is not spontaneous — it is orchestrated. The claim that cis women are at risk is used to legitimise harsh control, letting prisons masquerade as safe havens instead of places where violence is routine.

This logic is deeply colonial. As Leon Laidlaw and Lucy Nicholas show, the gender binary in Australia’s prisons descends directly from settler regimes that equated “civilisation” with a rigid gender order. Colonial governance treated white, cis, heterosexual womanhood as the symbol of moral purity and the measure of social progress. Protecting that figure has long been a rationale for racial control — from the policing of Indigenous men under the “threat to white women” narrative, to the contemporary portrayal of trans women as intruders in spaces of femininity. Nishant Upadhyay calls this the “coloniality of white feminism” — a framework that universalises one experience of womanhood while weaponising it against others. The panic over trans women in prison reproduces the oldest colonial fantasy that safety and civilisation require someone else’s exclusion — a fantasy ultimately about maintaining social hierarchy through power, control, and dominance.    

Tactic 2: legislation and policy

The legislative landscape of trans rights in the United Kingdom has shaped the global architecture of anti-trans advocacy. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) was once hailed as a progressive milestone, allowing individuals to legally change their gender, yet it has since become the centrepiece of a sustained campaign to reverse trans inclusion. As Sally Hines and Sarah Lamble note, opposition to reforming the GRA, to remove medical gatekeeping and recognise self-identification, became the galvanising issue for Britain’s “gender-critical” movement.

Politicians and campaigners reframed bureaucratic recognition as moral peril, warning that “self-ID” would endanger women’s safety.  The sanctification of gender-segregated spaces (bathrooms, sports, women’s shelters and more) as natural sites of protection has become a cornerstone of this narrative, despite abundant evidence that such segregation is often unnecessary and can intensify harm.

This logic relies on policing femininity itself, treating “womanhood” as a fixed, state-definable category whose borders must be guarded, which has historically justified surveillance, exclusion, and violence in the very spaces claimed to be protective. Craig McLean describes this as a form of “silent radicalisation,” where liberal feminist rhetoric merged with nationalist populism, producing a new alliance of moral panic and policy obstruction.

The debate over the GRA thus became a template for a transnational strategy: stall or dilute legal reforms, rebrand opposition as concern for women, and use the spectre of the “male-bodied intruder” to consolidate carceral authority.

In the United States, legislative efforts to restrict gender-affirming care, bathroom access, and sports participation echo the UK’s moral grammar of “protecting women and children”, aligning with broader anti-rights coalitions. These efforts persist despite the International Olympic Committee’s own findings that trans women athletes are not advantaged in elite sport. Nonetheless, policymakers continue to exploit the rhetoric of fairness and safety to exclude trans women from participation, mirroring the same fear-mongering narratives that underpin restrictions in healthcare and public life.    

In Australia, the same discourse now shapes prison and corrections policy, even in the absence of national gender recognition reform. State-based laws, such as Victoria’s 2019 Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Act, already allow self-identification on paper, yet correctional practices remain governed by discretionary “safety” clauses that permit misgendering and isolation (see Bartels & Lynch and Winter). Advocacy led by incarcerated trans and gender-diverse people, alongside      trans-led and human rights organisations, has focused on embedding gender affirmation standards within correctional policy, but progress can be undermined by moral panic. Brömdal et al.  show that even where policies recognise identity, implementation depends on local discretion and political will. In this sense, Australia mirrors the UK’s unresolved contradiction: a legal framework that gestures toward recognition, while maintaining the punitive infrastructures that make such recognition meaningless in practice.

Tactic 3: coalition-building

The success of the anti-trans backlash owes much to its unlikely coalitions. In Europe and the United Kingdom, conservative Christian organisations, far-right populists, and “gender-critical” feminists have converged around a shared moral project that Paternotte and Kuhar describe as the “anti-gender campaign”. What began as a Vatican-driven crusade against “gender ideology” has been rebranded through secular feminist and child-protection language, creating the appearance of plural, reasoned concern rather than ideological extremism. Sarah Lamble shows how this alliance trades in affective legitimacy: feminists offer the moral credibility of women’s advocacy, while religious groups provide the financial networks, media infrastructure, and lobbying experience that sustain transnational mobilisation. Together, they produce a seamless narrative of civilisation under threat, in which trans rights become shorthand for moral decline.

In Australia, where religious groups already dominate public debate on education and reproductive rights, this alliance found fertile ground. As both Craig McLean and Sally Hines note, transmisogynist activism functions as a bridge between liberal feminism and conservative moralism, a shared stage on which both can perform outrage while appealing to “common sense”. Local faith-based lobbyists, family-values groups, and self-styled feminist commentators now repeat British talking points about “protecting women and children”, laundering trans exclusion through the language of compassion and duty. These same groups frequently attack abortion rights under the banner of “women’s welfare”, revealing that the true target is not trans inclusion but bodily autonomy itself.

This intersectional coalition blurs political boundaries: it allows right-wing religious movements to appear progressive and gives anti-trans feminism the institutional reach it otherwise lacks. What unites these actors is not theology or gender theory but a deeper ideological investment in restoring conservative social order, one that defends whiteness, heteronormativity, and colonial patriarchy under the respectable guise of safeguarding (cis) women.

Tactic 4: free speech

One of the most enduring tactics in anti-trans politics is the appropriation of liberal speech ideals, what Lamble calls “the politics of reasonable transphobia”. Transmisogynist activists in the United Kingdom and the United States have mastered the art of appearing moderate while advancing exclusionary agendas: positioning themselves not as ideologues, but as “concerned feminists” defending common sense. McLean describes this as the “silent radicalisation” of public discourse, where transphobia is rebranded as scepticism and debate.

The invocation of “free speech” and “just asking questions” operates as a shield that transforms trans people’s rights into subjects for speculation. In these debates, trans existence itself becomes the provocation, and refusal to engage is recast as censorship.

The appeal to “reasonableness” has proven particularly potent in liberal democracies like Australia, where political discourse prizes balance, civility, and “two sides to every argument.” Hines shows how transmisogynist advocates exploit these norms to cast trans rights as excessive or ideological, inverting the power dynamic so that the oppressor appears as the endangered rational subject.

This logic now circulates seamlessly through Australian parliamentary hearings, senate estimates and question time, where debate over trans inclusion is framed as democratic health but instead functions as a demand that trans people continually justify their humanity. The violence beneath this rhetoric is stark in Australian prisons: despite reforms allowing gender recognition on paper, systems in Victoria, Queensland, and New South Wales continue to sort, discipline, and erase gender diversity by placing trans women in men’s facilities or segregated units “for protection,” exposing them to isolation, harassment, and denial of gender-affirming care (Bartels & Lynch; Brömdal et al; Winter).

The likelihood of trans women being assaulted when held in men’s prisons is extraordinarily high: Wilson et al found that participants described near-constant sexual harassment, repeated sexual coercion, and violent assaults. The study highlights how gender non-conforming bodies are read as “sexualised and available”, marking trans women as prime targets of sexual violence and coercion in men’s prisons. In Victoria, trans women describe being placed in never-ending solitary confinement, misgendered, searched by male officers, and denied access to hormones. As du Plessis et al note, trans women in custody navigate “gender minority stress, resilience, and coping” within a system designed to deny their personhood.

Reclaiming Safety

A path forward lies in joining feminist, abolitionist, and human-rights frameworks into a shared front against carceral expansion, refusing the bait of “reasonable debate” and recentring material solidarity around housing, healthcare, and decarceration rather than symbolic purity tests. Feminism’s credibility depends on its rejection of punitive protectionism and respectability politics, the demand that trans people perform palatable identities to earn basic rights, while drawing on abolitionist insights that harm is prevented not through punishment but through redistributing power and resources.

The campaign against trans women in prison exposes how moral panic can be manipulated to defend colonial authority and how fragile Australia’s commitment to equality remains when confronted with difference: it is not just about prisons, but about who is permitted to belong in narratives of “women” “safety” and “the public good”.

We cannot allow trans lives to become a political plaything while parties and pundits score culture-war points as real people bear the cost. If feminist organisations are genuinely concerned about safety, their efforts must target the everyday violences of imprisonment — routine strip-searches, newborn removals, self-harm, deprivation — not the scapegoating of trans women. Against this landscape, the task is clear: build a feminism that does not rely on prison, a left politics that rejects scapegoats, and a human-rights vision that treats liberation as indivisible.

Image: Ryan McGrady