A new analysis commissioned by Amnesty International has put hard numbers on something trans people have known for years. Between January 2020 and April 2025, four of Britain’s biggest newspapers — the Times and Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Sun and The Guardian — published a combined 16,913 articles on trans-related topics. That’s roughly nine articles every single day.
The coverage was, in Amnesty’s words, “entirely disproportionate” to the size of the trans population, which makes up around 0.5% of people in Britain according to the 2021 Census.
The findings expose what many have long argued: this isn’t a spontaneous public debate. It’s a sustained ideological campaign.
According to the research, trans people themselves were routinely excluded from coverage about their own lives. Instead, reporting was dominated by politicians, anti-trans activists and organisations opposed to trans rights. So-called “gender critical” groups were regularly quoted and their claims often reported uncritically.
As Amnesty’s gender justice programme director Chiara Capraro put it:
“There is nothing balanced about the way trans people’s lives are reported.”
“Anti-trans narratives dominate coverage and are often presented as fact, while trans people themselves are pushed to the margins or erased entirely.”
“This is not happening organically. What we are seeing is a coordinated and increasingly well-resourced effort to roll back trans people’s rights and reshape public debate. The consequences are real, affecting trans people’s equality, safety and wellbeing across the UK.”
For Marxists, none of this should come as a surprise.
The capitalist press has never existed to provide neutral information. Newspapers are businesses owned by wealthy individuals and corporations. Their role isn’t simply to report events but to shape public consciousness in ways that protect existing power structures.
When sections of the ruling class decide a political objective is useful, media institutions frequently act as transmission belts for that agenda. The endless obsession with trans people follows a familiar pattern seen throughout capitalist history. Migrants, Muslims, trade unionists, welfare claimants, single mothers and countless other groups have all served as targets for moral panics when elites needed a convenient enemy.
That even an independent liberal paper like The Guardian, which is run by The Scott Trust, has joined in the concerted hate campaign against a minority shouldn’t come as any suprise either. As a liberal, ie pro capitalist, institution, it’s devoted to protecting the current status quo of society, or making mild reforms at most. As such, when the establishment reaches a consensus on which voices should be platformed and which should be ignored, The Guardian falls in line.
The question isn’t why the media talks about trans people so much. The question is why newspapers owned and controlled by some of the most powerful people in society have devoted such extraordinary resources to a tiny minority group.
The answer lies in distraction and division.
Britain faces stagnant wages, collapsing public services, a housing crisis, rising poverty and deepening inequality. Millions of working-class people are struggling to pay rent, heat their homes or access healthcare. Yet rather than directing public anger towards the economic system responsible, much of the press encourages people to focus on a minority that represents roughly one person in every two hundred.
This is classic divide-and-rule politics.
By encouraging workers to see other workers as threats, the ruling class weakens solidarity and redirects frustration away from those who actually hold economic power. The result is a political environment where people argue about the existence of trans people while landlords, corporations and financiers continue accumulating wealth.
The media’s treatment of trans people also demonstrates how consent for reactionary policies is manufactured. Amnesty found that many articles questioning trans people’s rights failed to include even a single trans perspective. Readers are presented with a debate in which one side is allowed to speak while the other is discussed as an abstract social problem.
The consequences are far from theoretical.
Police-recorded hate crimes targeting trans people in England and Wales have roughly doubled since 2018/19, reaching record levels in recent years. While the state and media establishment often present this as a mysterious social problem, the timing tells its own story.
Unsurprisingly, TransActual also found that 99% of more than 4,000 trans respondents said media transphobia negatively affected their mental health.
A spokesperson for TransActual said:
“When human rights are under attack the role of the press should be to challenge those in power – not cheer them on.
“To wake up every morning to more smears and misinformation about yourself and your community comes with a heavy cost, and has left us facing one of the most significant government-led rollbacks of LGBTQ+ rights in history with a press that has failed in its duty to speak truth to power.
“Amnesty International’s report should be a moment for editors and journalists alike to step back and ask themselves how they ended up supporting a campaign of hate led by some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world. But, faced with the consequences of the moral panic they built, it seems they have chosen silence.”
That silence extends beyond the original coverage itself.
Despite documenting nearly 17,000 articles and exposing systematic patterns across Britain’s biggest newspapers, Amnesty’s report received virtually no mainstream media attention. The newspapers criticised in the study largely ignored it. When approached for comment, none of the four newspapers responded.
As Capraro observed:
“It is sadly not surprising. The volume of articles produced in five years and the type of language consistently used in relation to trans people show that these are deliberate editorial decisions.”
That point is crucial.
What’s being exposed here isn’t a collection of unfortunate mistakes. It isn’t accidental bias. It isn’t the result of a few poorly chosen headlines.
The scale, consistency and duration of the coverage point towards something structural. Powerful media institutions have chosen to make trans people a national obsession while systematically excluding trans voices from the conversation.
Ideas don’t float freely above society. They emerge from material interests and power relations. The campaign against trans rights has received support from wealthy donors, well-funded lobbying organisations, influential politicians and major media outlets because it serves a political purpose.
A working class divided against itself is easier to govern.
The lesson isn’t simply that media coverage of trans people is unfair, although it clearly is. It’s that the same institutions claiming to inform the public are actively participating in a broader reactionary project designed to narrow rights, manufacture consent and redirect public anger away from the capitalist system itself.
The press likes to present itself as a watchdog holding power to account. Amnesty’s findings suggest something very different: a media establishment helping powerful interests wage a culture war from above while claiming merely to report on it.
This shows that the struggle against transphobia cannot be separated from the struggle against the economic and political system that repeatedly relies on division, scapegoating and moral panic to preserve its legitimacy. Defending trans people isn’t a distraction from class politics. It’s part of the broader fight against the reactionary forces that capitalism cultivates whenever its own failures become too difficult to ignore.
