MANY American trans people and their families are devastated and fearful of what is to come following the re-election of Donald Trump.

A campaign video in which Trump outlined his plans to tackle “gender insanity” as president has been re-circulating, reminding people of just how bad things could get.

Trump pledged to sign an executive order on “day one” of his second term, “instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age”.

He promised to block all federal funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for under-18s – including puberty blockers – and create a private right of action to allow “victims” to sue doctors who have provided this care.

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And he committed to inform all schools that they could be sued for “civil rights violations” and lose federal funding if any teacher or school official suggests to a child that they could be trans.

For trans people who have already seen numerous Republican-run states introduce similar laws, the prospect of the White House mandating this hostile environment at the national level is understandably frightening. Some have even expressed plans to prepare to leave the country to protect themselves and their children.

Looking on in horror at what’s happening in the US, it would be a small comfort to imagine that trans Americans faced with oppression at home might be welcomed into a safer environment here in the UK.

More comforting still would be to think ourselves superior to the Americans who voted Trump in for a second time, in the knowledge that LGBT+ people in Britain are accepted and supported. Sadly, the reality is not so simple, and trans people in the UK have much reason to fear that Trump’s dystopia could be coming for them at any moment.

You need only look at much of the UK media commentary on Trump’s campaign and election to understand this. While the appropriate degree of alarm and outright disgust has been conveyed about Trump and his ultra right-wing politics, the not-so-small matter of his stance on trans issues has been a glaring omission.

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Perhaps it would be too difficult to square up how someone as demonstrably terrible as Trump could hold such similar positions to those which large parts of the British media have been agitating for at home.

Maybe it would be too awkward to acknowledge that some of the UK’s great defenders of women’s rights – the ones who only ever talk about trans people and who the media have been promoting like they’re about to go out of stock – are now celebrating Trump’s victory.

It would be too much cognitive dissonance, I suppose, for the mainstream of Britain’s political and media class to applaud Trump for his decisive action to “protect women” by punishing trans people, when we all know exactly what the president-elect thinks about women, his right to our bodies, and our right to choose.

But Trump’s promise to effectively ban federal recognition or support for trans people is inextricably linked to his wider ideology – or, at least, the ideology of the people who helped him win and who are telling him what to think, say and do.

In the same breath as his plans for trans people, Trump announced that the federal government would “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different.”

That’s what makes it so scary that the new Labour Government – the more progressive of our two realistic options – is pushing ahead with policies and rhetoric which are simply the “lite” version of Trump’s plans to roll back trans inclusion and healthcare.

This tells us that Labour either know exactly what they’re doing, or they haven’t a clue but they’re doing it anyway – neither of which is reassuring in the least.

One of Labour’s first actions on taking office was to back the Tories’ “emergency ban” on puberty blockers for children experiencing gender dysphoria and defend it in response to a legal challenge.

This move came in response to an independent review by Dr Hilary Cass which concluded that there was insufficient evidence about the impacts of puberty blockers, but did not go so far as to call for an outright ban.

Never mind that the review, which was commissioned by an explicitly anti-trans Conservative government, has been criticised by numerous medical experts within the UK and internationally, or that the British Medical Association has raised “concerns about the rapid, but selective, implementation of [its] recommendations”.

Never mind that an “emergency” ban would imply that children are being prescribed these medications in their droves, as opposed to sitting on waiting lists for years and only receiving a prescription in exception circumstances. It is estimated that 100 children or young people in England had a prescription for puberty blockers at the time of the ban, while in Scotland there have been an average of just seven new prescriptions annually over the last 12 years.

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Despite all of this, Labour have driven full steam ahead with actions which seem to replace individualised healthcare with political generalisations, and which substitute the opinions of pitchfork wielders for medical evidence.

The reverberations of all of this have been felt here in Scotland too, with very real impacts for trans people. Scottish health boards have taken the decision to stop prescribing not only puberty blockers but also testosterone and oestrogen for 16- and 17-year-olds, while NHS Lothian’s only gender identity clinic has paused gender-affirming surgeries for 18- to 24-year-olds.

This starts to look a lot less like “protecting children” and a lot more like withholding medical care from trans people for as long as possible – which means likely far too long for those who have already waited years.

Ultimately, though, this is the natural conclusion of the views which Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed during the General Election when he was asked if he would scrap the Tories’ plans to ban teachers in England from teaching about gender identity.

“No,” Starmer said, “I’m not in favour of ideology being taught in our schools on gender.”

Once you accept the notion that the existence of trans people must be erased from the education system, it’s pretty clear that you would prefer that trans people didn’t exist at all – and that’s exactly what this withdrawal of gender-affirming healthcare seeks to achieve.

Labour might be using softer language than Trump, but the direction of travel is the same. They might not (yet) be making pronouncements about how rule-flouters will be punished but really, isn’t Trump just being more transparent – because how else is any of this to be enforced?

Still, with Kemi Badenoch at the helm of the Conservative Party, things could get a lot worse. As with other issues like immigration, it seems Labour thinks their best chance of success is to act as much like the Tories as possible.

Perhaps they imagine this will head off the worst of what the Tories would unleash, but that would be fanciful thinking.

You will never out-right the right. You will never satisfy the truly trans-hostile mob that Trump and Badenoch appeal to. Without presenting a meaningful and convincing opposition to their ideology, all you will achieve is paving the road they wanted to take us down all along. This is a lesson the Democrats ought to have learnt. Maybe it’s one Labour might have the sense to learn before it’s too late.