Tag: Workplace

Transphobic Networks in The Workplace

In mid 2025 it came to the attention of Solidarity Federation (SolFed) in London that transphobes were organising in the workplace under the banner of the Sex, Equality, and Equity Network (SEEN). A brief look at SEEN made it clear that this network was “gender critical”, or transphobic, but attempting to hide it behind a mask of fake feminism and liberal civility. London SolFed did some additional research into SEEN and produced a report for the wider federation in November 2025. This is a lightly edited version of that report for wider consumption.

We had initially intended to do a far more detailed report than this one, but it quickly became clear that this topic was beyond our capacity to cover in depth. We found 21 different transphobic professional associations operating in various industries, all networked together and into the wider transphobic milieu but without any formal central organisation. This represents a serious attempt to spread and defend transphobia in the workplace on a scale which we can not do a detailed analysis of in timely manner. Instead, we hope this broad overview still proves useful and that other can use this as a basis for their own work.

This report is based off of what can be found out about these associations from browsing their websites and social media accounts. This puts serious limits on what we can say about the on-the-ground composition and activity of each of these networks. Are these astroturfed organisations with no real presence in any workplace? Do they represent a membership scattered across each industry? Do they represent a membership concentrated in specific workplaces within each industry? These are important questions that can not be answered without a more specific, in-depth, and hands-on investigation into each of the individual networks.

Likewise, we can not make a firm judgement to the degree to which these associations meaningfully cooperate. While they lack a formal overarching organisation, the extent to which they are tightly organised along informal lines is something that is hard to say from the kind of broad but shallow investigation we have presented here, beyond the limited information that can be gained by looking at who is sharing who on social media, and announcements of open joint events.

A Brief History of SEEN

Most of these associations uses a similar SEEN branding, however there are a few associations that pre-date SEEN. The first of these professional associations, at least the first we could find that is still active, was the Evidence-Based Social Work Alliance (EBSWA) which now also goes by SEEN in Social Work, set up in 2020.

The next wave of associations came out of the healthcare sector. Thoughtful Therapists was founded in early 2021 and in 2024 launched a spin-off project, Just Therapy, which is a network of therapists which believe “much of the world of psychotherapy and counselling has been taken over by activists and ideologies”. With Woman, an association of maternity and women’s healthcare workers, was also founded in early 2021. The Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender (CAN-SG), a doctors’ association, seems to have been founded in early 2022 and Transgender Map has done their own research into them, describing them as “an anti-transgender front group” who are “heavily involved in trying to stop NHS from conducting clinical trials on puberty blockers.”

These pre-SEEN associations have remained fairly active in terms of their online presence with well maintained websites, active social media accounts, and offer an unfortunate wealth of propaganda and other resources. From what can be seen on their social media accounts they are also networked with each other, the later SEEN associations, and the general transphobic milieu, with at least members of With Woman attending a 2024 meeting of transphobic professional associations.

In late 2022 the original SEEN network was founded as a professional association for civil servants. This seems to be an important moment in the birth of this broader network as all of the associations following this one share a general SEEN branding. Early 2023 then saw the launch of SEEN in the city, a network for people working in finance. After a gap of a year there was then an explosion in organising under the SEEN banner. In the first half of 2024 networks were launched for police, HR, parliamentary workers, science and technology, journalism, sport, schools, health, local authority workers, publishing, trade unions, and the Church of England. Third Sector SEEN then launched in late 2024 and SEEN on Campus launched in mid 2025.

All of these SEEN networks maintain a similar style and look and many of them have links on their sites to other SEEN networks. While there is no obvious coordinating organisation between these networks, the common branding and the fact that their seemed to be a concerted campaign to launch these networks in 2024 implies a significant level of informal coordination. From looking at the social media of these networks, they share content from the usual transphobic personalities and organisations and seem to be well embedded in that wider network. Of special note in this broader network is the charity Sex Matters which regularly puts up information about how to push transphobia in the workplace, hosted the previously mentioned meeting of transphobic professional associations, and also maintains a list of these associations that cover not just the SEEN networks but also the earlier associations that were launched before the SEEN branding became the dominant style among them.

Activity

Not all of these associations have been equally successful. Some already seem to be inactive with seven showing low levels of activity online, including the original civil service SEEN. Five more are moderately active online but do not seem to have developed much reach. The journalists network seems to be the most successful single network, with a publishing network also active that likely has some overlap. The healthcare sector is also a place of strength for these networks with not only an active SEEN network but also three active pre-SEEN associations. Combined, these associations probably rival the journalism network, although they have also had far longer to build up. The next most active seem to be the police, social work, and sport. Based on where it is most active, the SEEN network probably draws its support from the class of technocratic professionals with little clear reach into the rank and file working class.

In terms of the style of propaganda put out by these networks, they take great pains to avoid being open transphobes, emphasise that their views are legally protected, and attempt to pass themselves off as just concerned about “sex based rights”. This kind of tone likely sounds quite reasonable to people who do not know what they are looking at. The below quote from the original civil service SEEN’s about page represents this general tone well:

“The focus of our network is on challenging sex discrimination and upholding rights and protections that relate to sex (including the protections provided to those with the protected characteristics of sex, pregnancy and maternity and sexual orientation, as set out in the Equality Act 2010). We recognise that to achieve this and ensure sex equality and equity sometimes requires treating women and men differently, according to our different rights and needs.”

In terms of activities, these associations seem to mainly devote themselves to various forms of lobbying, professional networking, propaganda, and developing resources such as form letters and legal advice. Campaigning over controlling access to toilets seems to be a common activity among many of these associations, along with defending people who have come under pressure for transphobic attitudes and actions.

Causes for Concern

Even the most successful of these transphobic professional associations are probably still quite small but we think they pose a real threat in a variety of ways. Firstly, they are trying to build networks in sectors in which professionals have a lot of day to day power over trans people: healthcare, policing, social work, education, and government. In these sectors individual professionals or managers often have the capacity to ruin the lives of trans people just by the nature of their position, and a network of transphobic professionals has the capacity to help empower and defend its members even if they lack any kind of mass movement in the general workforce.

Secondly, transphobic opinions are already massively over-represented in the media compared to the size of the transphobic milieu and SEEN networks have a well developed shared propaganda approach that makes them look as reasonable as they can given the implications of their actual ideas. I can see this approach leading to quit a few people who are not tuned in to what exactly they are looking at treating these SEEN networks as genuinely concerned with feminism and any attacks on them as attacks on feminism. The strength of SEEN in Journalism gives the network further propaganda advantages over any union or political group that may end up confronting them. Any counter-propaganda will have to be very careful and take pains to point out the actual implications behind all their polite wording and the links that they have to other transphobic organisations that are not as consistently slick in their messaging.

Lastly, given that transphobia is rapidly becoming a point of shared agreement among the ruling class of this country, with both Labour and the Conservatives being various forms of terrible on the issue and Reform being on the rise, it is possible that these networks will be able to punch well above their weight in terms of influence. While they may not represent a mass movement of workers, if they represent views that high level managers, capitalists, and politicians already agree with then they will be able to call on the power of state and capital without the need to develop a true broad based mass movement.

Given that much of the SEEN network was only set up in 2024, possibly by a coordinated campaign, it is also worth considering that we have not seen the end of attempts to set up new associations or that currently low activity associations may be able to build into more active organisations. Even the oldest of these associations is only five years old, so it is hard to judge from what we have already seen just how far these networks could expand. We also do not know what has driven the creation of these networks and what resources were required to build them up to their current level. If they are a grass roots development from transphobic professionals that has so far been built on limited resources, they could become far more dangerous if they find a rich and powerful benefactor that can give them serious funding and connections.

In any case, these networks provide yet another reason to be organised in our workplaces and to organise not just on the basis of pay and conditions but around broader social and political concerns. Transphobes need to get in the bin and given how transphobia is increasingly becoming political common sense among our rulers, it will come down to everyday people organising and fighting in our workplaces and our neighbourhoods to get it done.

Appendix

Below is a list of details on the transphobic professional associations we could find, with notes on their social media presence and activity online. Accurate as of November 2025.

EBSWA/SEEN in Social Work
Sector: Social Work
Founded: November 2020
Activity: High
Presence: Website – Fleshed out, Twitter – 4,400 followers, Facebook – 100 followers, YouTube – Inactive

With Women
Sector: Healthcare
Founder: February 2021
Activity: Medium
Presence: Website – Fleshed out, Twitter – 6,800 followers

Thoughtful Therapists
Sector: Healthcare
Founded: March 2021
Activity: High
Presence: Website – Fleshed out, Twitter – 6,500 followers

CAN-SG
Sector: Healthcare
Founded: February 2022
Activity: High
Presence: Website – Fleshed out, Twitter – 5,100 followers, YouTube – 290 followers

SEEN
Sector: Civil Service
Founded: October 2022
Activity: Low
Presence: Website – Fleshed out, Twitter – 2,500 followers

SEEN in the City
Sector: Finance
Founded: February 2023
Activity: Medium
Presence: Website – Bare bones, Twitter – 1,900 followers, LinkedIn – Company page

Police SEEN
Sector: Police
Founded: January 2024
Activity: Medium
Presence: Website – Bare bones, Twitter – 7,000 followers

SEEN in HR
Sector: Police
Founded: January 2024
Activity: Medium
Presence: Twitter – 2,800 followers, LinkedIn – 1,400 followers

SEEN in Parliament
Sector: Government
Founded: February 2024
Activity: Low
Presence: Twitter – 1,400 followers, Linktree – Bare bones

SEEN in STEM
Sector: Science and Technology
Founded: March 2024
Activity: Low
Presence: Twitter – 1,400 followers

SEEN in Journalism
Sector: Media
Founded: March 2024
Activity: High
Presence: Website – Unremarkable, Twitter – 21,400 followers, Substack – 2,500 followers, Has a podcast

SEEN in Schools
Sector: Education
Founded: March 2024
Activity: Low
Presence: Twitter – 1,600 followers

SEEN in Retail
Sector: Retail
Founded: March 2024
Activity: Low
Presence: Website – Unremarkable, Twitter – 1,100 followers

SEEN for CoE
Sector: Church
Founded: March 2024
Activity: Low
Presence: Twitter – 350 follower

SEEN in Sport
Sector: Sport
Founded: April 2024
Activity: Medium
Presence: Website – Unremarkable, Twitter – 4,900 followers

SEEN in Health
Sector: Healthcare
Founded: April 2024
Activity: Medium
Presence: Website – Fleshed out, Twitter – 3,600 followers

Local Authority SEEN
Sector: Government
Founded: April 2024
Activity: Medium
Presence: Website – Unremarkable, Twitter – 1,900 followers

SEEN in Publishing
Sector: Media
Founded: May 2024
Activity: High
Presence: Twitter – 4,600 followers, Substack – 620 followers

TU SEEN
Sector: Trade Union
Founded: July 2024
Activity: Medium
Presence: Twitter – 1,600 followers, Substack – 100 followers

Third Sector SEEN
Sector: NGO
Founded: September 2024
Activity: Low
Presence: Twitter – 1,600 followers, Substack – 100 followers

SEEN on Campus
Sector: Education
Founded: August 2025
Activity Low, but in formation
Presence: Website – Bare bones

Stand up To All3

Yesterday we delivered a letter to the company ALL3 in London on behalf of our comrades in the Serbian Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative (ASI). ALL3 in Serbia have taken advantage of a worker’s precarious immigration status, ultimately leading to their wrongful dismissal, and we stand in solidarity with our comrades against this unfair treatment. Full letter below:

” To whom it may concern,

Our union has been informed by the Trade Union Confederation “Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative” – Section of the International Workers’ Association from Serbia– about a case involving abuse and violations of human and labor rights of Vladislav Surin by the management of your company – All3 in Serbia.

V.S. is a refugee coming from a war-affected region, and was initially promised certain employment conditions by All3 company, to which he agreed. Believing he had found stable employment and a solution to his existential situation, he relocated to Serbia. However, once he arrived and began working, it quickly became clear that the conditions promised to him are not actually provided.

V.S. repeatedly attempted to address these discrepancies in a calm and constructive manner. Each time he raised concerns about his working conditions, however, he experienced forms of intimidation and sabotage of his work: unrealistic tasks with impossible deadlines, intimidation, and eventually threats of dismissal. At one point, his access to the company’s offices was revoked, preventing him from working—after which the company attempted to present the situation as if he had refused to come to work. The company offered him a compensation package in exchange for signing a mutual-agreement resignation—an offer that was unacceptably low. When he refused, the company initiated disciplinary measures, replacing the attempted dismissal with a two-month suspension. Ultimately, his employment was terminated, citing untrue information as the excuse for it.

Throughout this process, your company not only failed to honor the conditions originally offered to him but also exploited his vulnerable position as a foreign citizen coming to Serbia from a conflict zone.

His demands are: adequate financial compensation for everything he suffered and for one-sided dismissal, or return to work, on which he will be allowed appropriate working conditions.

As a result of the issues outlined above, we hereby inform you that our union has joined international campaign directed against your company here in Britain. This campaign will continue until Vladislav Surin is provided with appropriate financial compensation for the harm he suffered, or until he is reinstated to his working position under fair and adequate working conditions.

Sincerely,

Solidarity Federation”

New Flyer – Towards a Better Union

We have a new flyer ready to share with the world! Towards a Better Union lays out a critique of mainstream trade unionism and argues for a specifically anarchist and syndicalist approach to workplace organizing. It is designed to be easy to print on a work or home printer, being a single sheet of folded A4, so feel free to print your own. It is available along with all our flyers in more formats, like block black and white and booklet, in our Materials and Flyers page. Full plain text available below the pdf on this post.

Towards a Better Union London Colour A5Download

A BLEAK FUTURE

The trade union movement has been extremely important in furthering the desires of workers and improving our living conditions. This movement was vital in raising many workers out of the gruelling fourteen hour days, unsafe working conditions, poverty pay, and general degradation of the industrial revolution.

However, the modern trade union movement seems unable to extend or defend those gains. For many workers, the next decade looks like it will be bleaker than the last, and in the long term we may be slowly sliding back to the soul crushing working conditions of the 19th century. In the face of this, modern unions often seem to lack the ability to effectively stand up for their members. They are also often wracked with problems of internal abuse and a lack of accountability to their membership.

This pamphlet will argue that this failure is inherent to the way that modern unions are structured, and that in order to defend the interests of the working class we need to build a better kind of union with a radically different structure. However, before that, we will explore why the trade union movement developed in the first place and what the purpose of those early unions was.

CAPITALISM

Trade unions developed as a reaction to the growth of capitalism. Before capitalism, most families were broadly self-sufficient, either working the land as peasant farmers or creating things for sale with their own tools as craftspeople. These farmers and craftspeople were not free from exploitation, often owing a portion of their produce to an aristocrat, the church, or a craft guild, but they were often capable of providing for themselves as individuals, families, or communities without the aid of their exploiters.

Capitalism changed this. As technology developed and production became more and more dependent on expensive machinery, it became harder and harder to produce anything efficiently without access to that machinery. In this situation the vast majority of people could no longer be self-sufficient and provide for themselves with the tools they owned, and they had to sell their labour to those rich enough to own the buildings, machines, and other means necessary to produce.

Society became divided between workers in need of employment, and capitalists in need of employees. A worker who could not find an employer faced poverty and starvation, but a capitalist who could not find workers could sell their capital and live off the proceeds, giving capitalists the advantage. The capitalist also had an incentive to use this advantage to exploit workers, as capitalists are only in business to make a profit, and paying lower wages and demanding more work increases profits. This is the basis for the name capitalism; a society in which those who own capital hold power and run the economy in the pursuit of profit.

This was not just a quirk of technological development. The developing nation state also often forced poverty and dependence on many of its subjects; stripping peasants of land and giving it to the developing capitalist class, suppressing small craft production by law, and policing the developing working class. A population dependent on their masters to survive did not just enable exploitation by capitalists, but also enabled tighter control by governments.

UNIONS

With a capitalist class driven to exploit the workers, and the state siding with capitalists over the working class, workers needed their own organisations to fight for their interests. And while an individual worker might be replaceable, any workplace could be ground to a halt if workers resisted collectively. This gave rise to the first unions and the use of strikes as methods to fight for workers’ interests against a ruling class that saw them only as tools.

As unions grew, they also realised that what was true of the workplace was also true of the economy more broadly; one worker or workplace may be expendable within the economy, but a united working class could bring the entire economy to a halt, and not only put pressure on individual capitalists, but on the capitalist class as a whole and even the nation state.

This was the basis of trade union movement; the use of the collective economic power of the working class to fight for better lives for workers regardless of what capitalists or politicians wanted. However, the modern trade union movement has drifted far from this idea.

INDEPENDENCE

The original unions were not legally recognised. While this caused many problems for them, it also meant that they were independent from both the state and capitalism, relying on their working class membership for their power. They had to serve working class interests or they would lose their only base of support.

This is not the case for the modern trade union movement. Unions have become legal entities, and with this legal recognition the union movement has integrated itself into the state and social democratic political parties like Labour. However, that state has never reliably been on the side of the working class and even left wing governments often suppress strikes, as working class radicalism is as much a threat to state power as it is to capitalist profits.

This has put unions in an awkward position where they must serve two masters. Some of their power comes from the support of the workers, but some of it comes from recognition by the state. Many of the most disruptive tactics that a union might use to win disputes are currently illegal, and unions will be held liable if their members use those tactics. A legally recognised union must then police the militancy of its own members in order to maintain itself, even if this is against the interests of its membership. Unions have become an enforcer of government policy instead of an instrument of working class interests.

HIERARCHY

Trade unions could make such compromises with the state because their internal structure never really represented all of their membership. While most unions make a show of being democratic, that democracy means that, at best, a union can only ever represent a majority of its membership and can ignore the desires of minorities within the union.

Modern trade unions are also universally run from the top down, even if those at the top are elected. This means that the membership only has limited control over the leadership. Workers may elect them, but outside of elections the union leadership can do whatever it wants, and the membership has a little to no ability to veto the decisions of their leaders.

This leads to a situation in which trade unions do not represent their membership, but instead recreate the relationship between workers and bosses in a workplace hierarchy where the boss has the last say. The workers within a trade union do not collectively decide how to use their collective power in pursuit of their shared interests, but give up that power to union leaders who often use it to serve their own interests.

VISION

The development of a reliance on state recognition and an internal hierarchy means that the modern trade union movement does not reliably serve working class interests. Often unions suppress militancy and initiative amongst their own membership, allow people higher up in the union hierarchy to abuse their position, negotiate compromises with employers without a mandate from the workers they claim to represent, and act to preserve their relationship with the state and the stability of their internal hierarchy over taking action to improve the lives of workers.

But this failure has far wider consequences beyond practical day to day struggle. It also makes the trade union movement incapable of developing a consistent and useful vision of what a better society for workers might look like, as it cannot fully embrace the interests of the working class. When the state cares about its own power and the profits of capitalists over the needs of workers, which is the normal state of affairs even under left wing governments, the trade union movement suffers from conflicting loyalties, both between its members and the state, and between its rank and file membership and its internal hierarchy.

Mainstream unions may have been able to balance these competing interests when the system of state and capital was stable and growing and could afford to pay off the unions and the working class while maintaining profits. But, as that system starts to fail and become unstable, those old compromises fail with it, and unions are so firmly integrated into that system that they cannot advocate for anything that might destabilise it, no matter how much harm this failure causes the working class. Conflicting loyalties have left unions paralysed.

Compared to the early unions, which were often hotbeds of working class intellectual development and critique of state and capital, and helped develop radical ideas like socialism and communism, the modern union movement is in a sorry state. Modern trade unions are often deeply conservative organisations, incapable to radical change even when a radically changing world demands it.

BEYOND THE WORKPLACE

This lack of a broader vision has also isolated most unions from other social movements. Early unions were not only integrated into a broader working class movement of mutual aid, education, self-help, and struggles by renters and the unemployed, but also attempted to coordinate internationally in response to the increasingly global nature of capitalism.

The core insight that led workers to form unions, that workers had strength together and that solidarity was our best weapon against capitalism, has been lost. Most unions do not attempt to build networks or alliances with other workers’ movements or even other unions. Partly this is because the legal framework they have accepted often prevents things like solidarity strikes in support of other organisations, and partly this is because the union hierarchy is more interested in its own power within the union than building the collective power of the working class in the global economy.

The result of all this is that most modern trade unions are more like insurance companies than grass roots workers’ organisations. They often have very little rank and file involvement and treat rank and file initiative as a threat to the internal hierarchy. They have no coherent strategy to advance working class interests and they have no theory that might provide a basis for such a strategy. They are often more interested in controlling and suppressing any militant impulses among workers than helping us to fight for what we want. The trade union movement has failed as an engine of working class interests, and that failure is based in their adoption of internal hierarchy and their abandonment of independence.

ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

None of this criticism is a rejection of the idea that workers should organise amongst ourselves in order to further our own interests. However, such organisation needs to be completely independent of the state or any other institution which might have conflicting interests with the working class. Our unions must serve our collective interests as workers first and foremost, otherwise they become a mechanism for controlling us.

We also need to avoid creating a hierarchy in which some people sit at the top the organisation and dictate to everyone else what to do. We need to build new unions on mutual agreement and mutual consensus so that no one can be ignored. We need to build them from the bottom up, with each local branch running its own affairs on the basis of the ideas and desires of its rank and file, instead of just empowering a new class of bosses over the rank and file.

However, we also need to look beyond the local branch and the individual workplace. We need to develop solidarity not just in the workplace, but between workplaces, and between workplace struggles and broader social struggles. The working class is strongest when we act together, and that principal applies from the individual workplace all the way up to the global economy.

We must also not be scared of the implications of our own power as the working class. The capitalist class and the state do whatever they can get away with, while we often tie one hand behind our backs and seek some kind of mythical “fair compromise”. The working class, if united and organised, could run the entire economy in our own interests without capitalists or politicians. This would be a genuine worker revolution instead of simply changing one set of bosses for another. Any organisation that genuinely represents working class interests should constantly push towards a worker controlled society, and develop the collective power of the working class until such a society can be achieved.

This approach to unions has a name. Because it is critical of hierarchies and all other forms of rulership and seeks to organise without resorting to that rulership, it is anarchist, which literally means without (an) rulers (archy). Because it seeks to build working class power though organisations in the workplace and the community, it is syndicalist, which comes from the French word for a workers’ union. Together, these two ideas form Anarcho-Syndicalism.