(MENAFN - The Conversation) Three years ago, 2014 was hailed as ' – a year when trans people became more visible and better understood. Sadly, looking back on 2017, it seems it was the year of a transgender moral panic.

In the first half of the year, every few weeks seemed to bring another news story invoking public concern about trans issues. A documentary about the in Canada kicked off public debates which continued all year. Legal tussles over transgender prompted anxiety and a return to people as perpetrators of violence, rather than more commonly victims of it.

In August,the US president, Donald Trump, from serving in the US military – though the move was by a federal judge in October. In the UK, there was furore over identities, , the existence of and more. Campaign groups such as and were constantly fire-fighting the latest wave of media myths and misinformation.

It became an even tougher time to be trans in the final few months of 2017. Since October, an anti-trans article has appeared in the – two or three on some days. have .

In a recent gender training session for an LGBT charity, I asked attendees to come up with all the news stories about trans they could remember from the past month or so. They filled an entire sheet of flipchart paper in minutes, and still came up with more, virtually all of them negative.

Moral panic

A is the process of arousing social concern over an issue. Moral panics often involve a particular group as the 'evil' responsible for a range of societal ills.

The current storm around trans people bears all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Trans people are blamed for a number of – often contradictory – harms. In 2017, these included , changing the English language and , and dismantle and reinforce problematic gender norms.

Myths about trans people have persisted in debates on transgender bathrooms. via shutterstock.com

The 'news' often turns out to be several years old, or based on of what somebody said. Stories frequently include . For example, a story about the proportion of was found to be based on false statistics, as were frequent reports about the number of people who ', or return to identifying with the gender they were assigned at birth.

This current media onslaught bears a striking resemblance to notably the one against . Like , gay men then were branded as paedophiles. Any mention of homosexuality was deemed to risk ' in the same way that there's now concern that young people will be ' if they .

Norms changing

There are behind this moral panic. In the UK, much of it followed the announcement of . This will hopefully bring UK legislation in line with other countries and states which allow trans people to , potentially opening this up to include non-binary people. If the revisions go through, people will no longer need to go through a lengthy, bureaucratic, medicalised process. However, it is not clear how long the on the Gender Recognition Act will take – or what impact the ongoing moral panic will have on the process.

A more insidious reason for moral panics and scapegoating is that they enable us to attack a specific group for problems we're all implicated in – in this case blaming trans people for the rigid system of gender norms which hurts us all.

This would explain why there's so little protest about the non-consensual, often medically routinely carried out , but loud outcry against the consensual, often life-enhancing, undertaken by some . The former bring people's bodies in line with , while the latter challenge the cultural assumption that people always remain in the gender they were assigned at birth.

Hopes for 2018

I'd love to see the gender conversation change in 2018 to one acknowledging the negative impact of rigid binary gender norms on everybody.

There was much evidence in 2017 that the current gender system is bad for us all. We only need to reflect, for example, on continued or the link between how and among men. Toxic are also involved in the that the highlighted in 2017.

The BBC documentary demonstrated how far these gender norms permeate society. The main life goal of the seven-year-old girls on the show remained to 'be pretty'. Boys struggled to express – or even find words for – emotions other than anger. All the kids agreed that boys were simply 'better' than girls.

Along with legal changes in the UK that will enable people to , I hope to see an end to the trans moral panic which targets a group of people who already suffer frighteningly high levels of and . In its place I'd love to see a return to the kind of celebration of the of trans people that we had back in 2014.

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I'd also love to see the media focusing on the ways cultural norms of gender affect all of us, whether we're trans or cisgender; women, men, or non-binary. Instead of the current sensationalist focus on trans bodies, the media could document the changes – social, physical and otherwise – that we all to experience, identify and express our gender in ways which are a more comfortable fit.

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