Something feral has entered our collective bloodstreams. In 2025, the reptilian reflex – ancient, automatic – has taken over. Only now, fight or flight offers no real choice: backing down has lost its appeal. Confrontation has become its own high. Like hounds in a pit, we lunge forward, convinced the battle will cleanse us, though we’re not sure who the enemy is. It looms in sight, they say. It’s always looming. All around, the signs of unravelling are loud: tensions arising, all-out warfare sprouting in far-flung corners of the world, their embers licking our doorsteps. Trenches being re-dug in the Baltics ‘just in case’ of Russian attacks and inflation quietly dulling our consumer appetites. On the airwaves, amid the drone of crisis, the price of eggs (yes, eggs) is a mainstay and the recurring nuclear threat, which would have sent us scrambling for fallout shelters a few decades ago, now feels unusually quaint.
All of this is to say that I shouldn’t have been surprised – though I was, in that queasy, too-familiar way – when the newly inaugurated president of the United States used his very first executive order not to de-escalate, but make a statement about sex identity. EO 14168: Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government is a title so stern and sterile it nearly conceals its highly emotional undertones; its declaration made us realise the conflict went far beyond a foreign horde storming the gates. It was rooted in the very notion of self-identity. With one pen stroke, one that is not legally binding but still wreaks havoc, the leader of the free world reminded us that the rot wasn’t just out there but at home, a canker in the marrow of the body politic. EO 14168 wasn’t just a gesture to the traditionalist fringe. It was a singling-out. A week later came two more: EO 14187, Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation and EO 14190, Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling. Both were aimed at a specific target: the transgender population.
from left: Emman and Ebun
More than policies, these manoeuvres, saturated as they are in a kind of baroque lyricism, paved the way for a Congressional address two months later where identity politics took centre stage. Instead of tackling job insecurity and inflation, there were long, sweaty digressions about mice and rats being turned trans on the taxpayer’s dime, male circumcision programmes in Mozambique and, again, eggs: all omens of decadence. A narrative straight from the fall-of-Rome trope, the kind usually repeated in half-cracked internet echo chambers and cigar lounges, has finally found its political application. The myth of decadent collapse has been resurrected, though with a 2,000-year delay, as moral prophecy. “Change provokes fear,” the Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado, a trans man and author of Dysphoria Mundi and Testo Junkie, tells me. “We don’t know enough of our own history to make sense and counter what’s happening. This isn’t about trans people provoking the far right. Gender and sexuality have been the object of political management for a long time. After the trans movement started rejecting the binary male-female construct in the 1990s, it paved the way for an epistemic transition and we’re still witnessing language, visual culture and biotechnologies – all are shifting.”
Viewed through this lens, the executive orders start to make some sense, not as erratic policy, but modern mythology. They are not just reactionary. They are symbolic, framing deviation from the standard and personal expression as weakness, an oxidation that must be scrubbed away before the West can shine again. It leads me back to one particular circular aphorism, created by G. Michael Hopf, an author of post-apocalyptic books, that is now everywhere, that floats through it all: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” It’s the punchline of a meme, a slogan on tacky gym tops and the whispered prayer in think-tank corridors.
from left: Elix and Alejandra
Still, one thing continues to perplex: how a minority within the LGBTQ+ community, itself already a minority, one that is less than one per cent of the world’s population, came to be cast as an existential threat to the supposedly crumbling empire. The rhetoric has the apocalyptic tenor of national-security briefings and, while the Romans feared the Visigoths, it was for a good reason: they came with poleaxes, not pronouns. But I don’t think this is quite the case. (And while we’re borrowing from Latin tales, it’s worth recalling that Rome’s lords and generals, for all their straight-armed salutes, had no particular allergy to the affections of male slaves.) Maybe what we’re witnessing isn’t a conservative resurgence, but something more primal. A psychic revolt against shifts that unsettle the fragile architecture of the Self. As cultural critic and trans scholar Jack Halberstam observes, “What some describe as a backlash is the after-effect of the impact of decades of activism. A new generation of adolescents now can also identify as non-binary or trans without shame. But those young people are not simply the offspring of radical activists or liberals – they’re also from traditionalist and Christian families who have raised their children to be heterosexual, to be ‘normative’, and they think someone has been brainwashing their child. The dissonance causes the perception of a cultural war.”
It is easy to forget, beneath the accumulating weight of oppression, that there have also been complicated moments that have deepened the divide. In certain schools, pupils as young as 10 have been allowed and supported by educators to socially transition, which in essence means adopting different pronouns, names and identities, without parental involvement, which has led to hectic lawsuits and media frenzy. The new wave of transgender activists, unlike many of their predecessors, have largely abandoned the quiet ethos of integration, in line with other minorities. The aim is no longer to blend in but to expand the frame by standing out. The result is more presence, but also more scrutiny. And not always the right kind. For outsiders, the semantics alone can feel like a minefield, especially if innocuous mistakes lead to criticism. “There is an alienating factor,” Halberstam tells me, “when people who don’t know much about trans embodiment are being told they’re transphobic because they got someone’s pronoun wrong. It’s those smaller things, the micro-political interactions, that put people off.” These controversies have only inflamed public discourse, becoming kindling for a prejudice that was already smouldering.
from left: Elouiza and Michele
“Beneath the current political crisis,” artist and poet Juliana Huxtable tells me, “there is a simmering envy and resentment. In the crumbling neoliberal societies of the West, at a time when many are responding to the instability of the present by retreating into nostalgic traditionalisms and conservatisms, trans people – by virtue of the choices we make – appear out of step with, and even antagonistic to, the populist imagination at the heart of this ideological shift.”
Even within liberal spaces, dissonance runs deep. Dr Erica Anderson, a trans woman and clinical psychologist with decades of experience treating transgender and gender-questioning youth, has faced intense pushback for vocalising her concerns in regards to what she believes has been an “excessive zeal in promoting transitioning to kids still struggling to figure out their sexual and gender identities… Some people expect everyone to speak with one voice. When that doesn’t happen, accusations fly. I’ve been called transphobic and even compared to J.K. Rowling.” These internal discrepancies, like everything else now, echo something deeper – ongoing, unresolvable dramas of clashing identities. And yet, what remains tangible and inescapable are the consequences now unfolding after these sweeping executive orders. The revocation of gender-affirming care doesn’t merely ‘protect children’, it aims to sever access to treatment for thousands already in transition. The result isn’t symbolic but physical. A federal judge blocked the order in February, but care has still been withdrawn across the US. It is a bureaucratic nightmare with real-life consequences. That same month, the administration petitioned the Supreme Court to bar thousands of trans people from serving in the military, many of them professionals with established careers. The prison system is bracing for one of its darkest reckonings, as trans women are being relocated to male-only facilities despite court rulings blocking the policy. Travel plans are growing uncertain; many fear being barred from international movement unless they forfeit their stated identity. All of this under the guise of cutting costs, a justification that also led to the scheduled termination of a decade-long research programme for HIV vaccines.
from left: Sakeema and Bel
Where does the ‘threat’ end and the monomania begin? Proposals are being drafted to ban pornography unless it shows clear artistic or social value and, at the time of writing, Harvard University has been prohibited from enrolling foreign students (this, like everything else, has brought about a flurry of lawsuits). Across the Atlantic, in a kind of mirror-neuron reflex, the mood is beginning to echo. Corporations are quietly dismantling once-heralded diversity policies. The same ones they championed with solemn press releases only a few years ago have now been discarded with indifference. Even here, in April, the UK’s Supreme Court weighed in on what it means to be a woman, ruling that sex must be defined strictly as biological, a decision that excludes trans women from legal protections and anti-discrimination measures afforded to biological females.
In Berlin, on May 3 – during the crowded rush of a Saturday night – a queer bar called Tipsy Bear saw its rainbow flag torn down and set ablaze in the street by a group who shouted homophobic slurs while doing it. On the phone, the manager, Francis, described it to me as the most brazen escalation yet in a pattern that has unfolded over the past couple of years: offensive stickers plastered on the doors, anonymous death threats, spit smeared across the windows. Several of the bar’s trans patrons have been attacked in broad daylight, in central areas, without provocation. These are the kinds of misadventures that queer venues have always been forced to endure, but what’s alarming now is their sudden, growing pace. Fissures are becoming fractures, even in a city like Berlin, long fictionalised as an oasis of radical acceptance.
from left: Danielle and Theo
Somewhere along the way, we forgot that identity has never been fixed, only negotiated, shaped slowly through categories that always arrived late. Even our most monolithic traditions were once considered absurd. Change doesn’t ask permission. It moves unevenly, often without clarity, and is almost always misunderstood. A threat. A looming enemy. Still, change arrives. Sometimes it comes quietly, other times it erupts, but always it comes. In this entropy, again and again, we begin the work of becoming.
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 75 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
THE WAR ON TRANS
Photographer DEREK RIDGERS
Talent DANIELLE ST JAMES, BEL PRIESTLEY, EBUN SODIPO, THEO PAPOUI, ELOUIZA FRANCE, ELIX TOCI, MICHELE FORNERA, EMMAN DEBATTISTA, SAKEEMA CROOK and ALEJANDRA MUNOZ
Text EMILY PHILLIPS
Hair TAKUMI HORIWAKI using ORIBE Hair Care
Make-up MARI KUNO at Saint Luke Artists using GLOSSIER
Photographer’s assistant VLADY VALA
Fashion assistants TALIA PANAYI and BEA ALLISON
Hair assistant LEE PATRICK
Casting JACK BATCHELOR
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU and SONYA MAZURYK
Special thanks to SARAH APPELHANS
