Like any minority in the UK, USA and beyond, trans people are being targeted through deliberate misinformation spread by transphobes, the media and political parties looking to drive up votes and distract from the actual harm they are causing.
This isn’t new. We’ve seen this playbook before. Gay men were painted as predators, as dangers to children, as people who needed to be kept separate for everyone else’s “safety.” That framing justified exclusion from spaces, from services, from public life. It caused devastating harm. The same thing is happening now. And it’s all built on lies and fake concern from people who have clearly never spent five minutes with a trans person who just wants to be left alone to live their life.
Myth 1: “Trans women in bathrooms are a danger to cis women”
The argument goes: trans women in women’s bathrooms are a danger to cis women. It sounds like safeguarding. It isn’t.
Meanwhile, according to the ONS, for female victims of rape, the most likely perpetrator is an intimate partner, accounting for 48% of cases. Cis men. Known to the victim. Not strangers in bathrooms.
Trans people are over four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cisgender people – 86.1 victimisations per 1,000 trans women compared to 23.7 per 1,000 cis women. The people being framed as a threat are statistically the ones most in danger.
Now consider this: under the EHRC guidance, trans men who have been on testosterone for years, who have beards and a masculine appearance, are now legally directed into women’s bathrooms. The exact scenario the moral panic claimed to be preventing — mandated by the very policy meant to stop it.
And it’s already hurting cis women. Butch cis woman Eloise Stonborough estimates she is challenged every one in three times she uses a women’s toilet, with around ten experiences being particularly frightening. LGBT+ charity Galop has confirmed a rise in cis women being refused entry to female toilets based on how they look. MP Dawn Butler raised this in the Commons, pointing to a cis woman undergoing chemotherapy who was confronted in a bathroom by someone who assumed she was trans.
“If you’re masculine presenting or butch lesbian, women’s toilets are not a safe space. I’ve been spat on, screamed at.” – anonymous UK cis woman, Liberal Currents
This doesn’t protect women. It polices femininity. The danger was never inside the bathroom.
Myth 2: “Puberty blockers are dangerous and given out like candy”
Puberty blockers are not given out freely. In the UK, access is now limited to research settings only following the Cass Review, making them one of the most tightly regulated interventions in paediatric medicine.
They are not new. They have been used for decades to treat precocious puberty in children with no controversy. The same medication, the same mechanism, zero panic.
They are considered reversible by the American Psychiatric Association. When stopped, puberty resumes. This is established medicine, not an experiment.
The “dangerous” claim is not supported by the evidence base. The NHS, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Endocrine Society all recognise their use as appropriate in carefully assessed cases.
What is dangerous is denying care entirely. The evidence on untreated gender dysphoria consistently points to significantly elevated rates of self-harm, depression, and suicide attempts in young people.
Myth 3: “The NHS just hands out gender-affirming care to anyone”
Let’s talk about what actually getting NHS gender-affirming care looks like in the UK.
Over 48,000 people are currently waiting for their first NHS gender clinic appointment. The average estimated waiting time is now 25 years. Not for treatment. For a first conversation.
Sheffield is currently booking appointments for people referred in January 2021.
Since the Cass Review, puberty blockers are only available through research settings. Most young people cannot access them at all through the NHS regardless of how long they wait.
For adults it’s stark. If you can afford private healthcare, you can access gender-affirming care relatively quickly. If you can’t, you join a waiting list that in some parts of the country stretches longer than a lifetime. Gender-affirming care in the UK has become a privilege for those who can pay.
A system that’s too generous? It’s so broken that the only people getting timely care are wealthy enough to bypass it entirely. That’s not safeguarding. That’s a two-tier healthcare system built on political hostility.
Myth 4: “Trans people are all mentally unwell or neurodivergent”
The World Health Organisation removed gender incongruence from its mental health disorders chapter entirely, stating that trans and gender diverse identities are not conditions of mental ill-health. The American Psychiatric Association followed in 2013. Being trans is not a psychiatric diagnosis.
Trans people do experience higher rates of depression and anxiety. But research links this directly to discrimination, rejection and mistreatment — not to being trans itself. The people claiming to care about trans people’s mental health are the ones actively making it worse.
On neurodivergence: yes, there is some overlap between trans and neurodivergent communities. But neurodivergence is not a mental illness, and neither is a reason to dismiss someone’s identity or deny them healthcare. We don’t tell people with EDS or POTS that their conditions are imaginary because they also have another diagnosis. Comorbidities exist across all communities. That’s medicine, not ammunition.
Being trans is not a symptom. The science settled this years ago.
Myth 5: “Lots of trans people regret their transition”
The regret narrative is one of the most repeated and least evidenced claims used to justify restricting trans healthcare.
A meta-analysis of 27 studies across nearly 8,000 trans patients found regret after gender-affirming surgery at just 1%. A more recent study of 1,989 patients found only 0.3% requested reversal. 99.7% reported satisfaction.
And detransition doesn’t equal regret. Many people detransition due to lack of family support, financial barriers, or safety concerns, and later retransition when circumstances improve.
The regret myth isn’t based on data. It’s a handful of stories that fit a narrative, amplified endlessly while thousands of trans people living full, happy lives after transition are ignored.
Using a 1% regret rate to deny healthcare to the other 99% isn’t caution. It’s cruelty dressed up as concern.
Myth 6: “Trans people have an unfair advantage in sport”
Trans people have been competing at every level of sport for years. Most of the time nobody notices, nobody complains, nobody loses a medal.
In the largest study of its kind, 94.2% of high-level competitive female athletes showed no negative opinions towards trans inclusion in sport. The athletes actually competing aren’t demanding bans. Politicians and media are.
Trans men are entirely absent from this conversation because testosterone means no supposed “advantage.” If this were really about fairness, they’d receive equal scrutiny. They don’t. That tells you everything.
And it’s already harming cis women. Caster Semenya is a cis woman and two-time Olympic gold medallist who has been banned from her own events since 2019 because her natural testosterone is higher than average. She was told to chemically alter her own biology or step aside.
The actual performance difference between high and low testosterone women is 0.3%.
Decades of mandatory sex screening of female Olympians never caught a single person misrepresenting their sex. It did destroy the careers of women with intersex conditions they didn’t even know they had.
As one Team USA athlete put it: this will impact every intersex woman and every cisgender woman who participates, because of genetic testing.
This was never about fairness. It’s about who gets to be considered a real woman.
The bottom line
Every single one of these myths has been picked apart by peer-reviewed research, government data, and the lived reality of trans people and the communities around them. They persist not because the evidence supports them, but because they are politically useful.
Trans people are not a debate. They are people. And they deserve to exist, to access healthcare, to use a bathroom, to play sport, and to live their lives without having to justify their existence to a political class looking for a distraction.
If you found this useful, share it. The algorithm will probably try to bury it. Share it anyway.
Reading isn’t enough right now. Write to your local MP via Bimini’s page and sign the official Parliament petition. Both take minutes. Time is running out.
If you or someone you know needs support, Switchboard LGBT & Mermaids are here.
