The Hate Review

Country Group: Advanced entrenchment

Key indicators in 2025: Contamination 3.00 / 4  ·  Impact 3.00 / 4

The trajectory of anti-gender activity in the UK over the last decades has moved through three broad phases. In the early 2000s, the movement was led by religious institutions and Conservative politicians mobilising against the repeal of Section 28 and, a decade later, against equal marriage — deploying faith networks, obstruction in the House of Lords and mass petition campaigns. From 2017, a new and distinctly British phenomenon emerged: a well-resourced so-called “gender critical” movement, framing opposition to trans inclusion not as religious conservatism but as feminist defence of women’s “sex-based rights”, giving the movement a mainstream respectability and media embedding it had previously lacked. From the early 2020s these strands converged with far-right street mobilisation, US-linked litigation strategies and an increasingly sympathetic government, culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling. Throughout, the UK has functioned as an international reference point for the transnational anti-gender movement, its legal strategies and individual cases regularly amplified across European and US conservative networks.