In April 2025, in the aftermath of the UK Supreme Court’s devastating trans-exclusionary ruling on the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010, I met with a group of friends and colleagues who share an interest in trans history. Among them was Zoë Playdon, an emeritus professor and veteran trans activist who I’m proud to know. Her experience of fighting long legal battles towards trans equality gave us all a measure of hope, but one thing she said struck me: she was concerned that such a terrible blow, following years of relative stability in trans people’s legal rights, would leave a new generation of activists paralysed by defeat and vulnerable to despair. ‘I’m worried for them,’ she said. ‘They don’t know how to be defeated.’

Over email following our meeting, Zoë expanded on her concerns. ‘It takes a lot of time,’ she told me, ‘to learn to understand defeat as a helpful way of revealing the other side’s arguments and postures, and using the time when you’re down for the count to regroup, rethink, get up and keep on fighting.’ 

It is this political context – and this urgent need to understand the strategies of our forebears in UK trans activism – that makes Rebecca Jane Morgan’s Deviants and Trailblazers, which traces the history of UK trans activism from the mid-twentieth century onwards, such an essential book. 

Tools to fight back

Morgan reveals a wealth of compelling detail about the process by which legal gender recognition, albeit in a partial and unsatisfying form, was finally enshrined in UK law in 2004. It is fascinating to understand the aspects of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) debates that parallel debates over trans rights today (in particular, the discussions of ‘biological sex’ based more on vibes than science), as well as those that seem bizarrely antiquated 22 years later (one key ‘point of contention’ was ‘the moral and civic character of transsexuals’). 

Crucially, Morgan also unearths many aspects of the fight for legal trans equality that are liable to be forgotten by contemporary activists. One is the role of the European Court of Human Rights – underlining the importance of opposing Reform’s proposals to withdraw the UK from its jurisdiction. Another is how and why the consensus began to move away from emphasizing respectability and privacy and towards ‘a more confrontational style of activism’ originating in US trans politics. 

Another is the quickly-fading memory of how good we had it, at least for a decade or so. Many younger trans people have already forgotten the period following the GRA that Morgan describes as ‘a time of unprecedented advances in public attitudes’ – and how quickly the toxic debates about GRA reform, beginning in 2017, changed everything. Understanding the factors that led to our contemporary trans moral panic, and to a regime of state-sanctioned segregation, is essential, and Morgan provides this in meticulous detail. 

Missing voices

And yet despite this treasury of activist history, there are several ways in which Deviants and Trailblazers doesn’t quite live up to its promise. Rather than a broad history of UK trans activism, it is mostly a history of the fight for legal gender recognition; other areas of activism, focused on issues like healthcare or prisoners’ rights, are almost entirely absent. Because these campaigns have often been more grassroots, eschewing engagement with political systems in favour of community-based care and advocacy, their absence from the book often prevents Morgan from being able to represent trans people as agents of change in our own right. For long stretches of Deviants and Trailblazers, the active protagonists are cis MPs rather than trans activists.

In a contemporary context where the trans community is often siloed into sometimes opposing political positions, it is deeply valuable to discover the extent to which our predecessors worked alongside those they disagreed with

This is a particularly acute problem because – as I’ve been lucky to glean from my relationship with Zoë – many of these trans people are still alive for us to learn from. In Morgan’s postscript, written after the Supreme Court ruling, she concludes rightly that it is a ‘blessing’ that, this time, ‘we don’t have to start from zero’ in reconstructing legal equality. But doing this will urgently require building intergenerational activist relationships.

One passage especially felt like a microcosm of the problem: describing the role of trans people in the Gay Liberation Front, Morgan writes, ‘Angela Mason, a lesbian activist who was in the GLF at this time, recalled in 1996 that [trans activist] Roz Kaveney […] “felt very excluded in GLF”.’ Kaveney is very much alive – still working, still contactable – and yet her feelings here come through the retrospective gaze of a cis woman, rather than in her own voice. This is a shame, because intergenerational dialogue will be key to helping trans activists out of a bind in which we currently find ourselves.

Revolution or recognition?

Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? How do we reconcile a contemporary activist consensus, that change can’t be made without first dismantling oppressive political systems, with the historical fact that activists have made important changes by working within those systems? Morgan provides us with three important ways to square this problem. 

First, she argues that fighting for legal gender recognition (rather than, say, fighting to entirely abolish gender markers on legal documents) has always been a more revolutionary position than we might think. Far from being a middle-class preoccupation, it was envisaged by the activists who secured it as being the only way to make sure that respect and dignity were available to all trans people, rather than just to those with the cultural and financial capital to hire a lawyer. Morgan makes an impassioned case for not abandoning the cause of legal recognition as irredeemably neoliberal: ‘Recognition is meant to fulfil a human need to feel accepted by others, and, perhaps more importantly, to belong to an entity greater than oneself […] We seek recognition from those around us because closed feedback loops are spiritually deadening’. 

Second, she points out that strategically, we shouldn’t see this as an either/or problem. ‘There is a developing appreciation among gender policy theorists,’ she writes, ‘that it is possible and perhaps even desirable to incorporate elements of both gender recognition and gender abolition […] Recognition now, revolution eventually.’

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Morgan’s account of the history of UK trans activism depicts it as consistently pluralist. Throughout her narrative of how the GRA was formalised, and the work of the activist group Press for Change, she emphasizes the alternative positions that existed alongside the group’s chosen strategies. In a contemporary context where the trans community is often disparate – siloed and hardened into discrete, sometimes opposing political positions via social media – it is deeply valuable to discover the extent to which our predecessors worked with and alongside those they disagreed with, and the way different parties were able to shape each other’s views and approaches without ever fully ‘converting’ them. 

It is deeply inspiring, too, because Deviants and Trailblazers is not only vital reading for our current crisis: it is also a roll call of activists who are still with us. We may not agree on everything, but our trans activist forebears are essential real-life allies and teachers – and we must urgently build on the work of this book by not only reading about them, but engaging with them. It’s going to take all of us to get through this.