Between January 2020 and April 2025, four major British newspapers published 17,000 articles about trans people. That’s an average of nine a day, every day, for five years. A rate, Amnesty International UK notes in its new report, entirely disproportionate to the size of the trans population, which represents around 0.5% of people in England and Wales.

To understand who was shaping the coverage, Amnesty’s researchers tracked which names appeared with enough consistency and regularity to be considered significant presences in the reporting. Not every passing mention, but sustained, repeated prominence across the five years. Of all the individuals who met that threshold, only two were British trans people. One was Brianna Ghey, a sixteen-year-old murdered in a park by two teenagers. The other was Isla Bryson, a trans woman convicted of sexual violence. JK Rowling, by contrast, appears more than four times as often as both of them combined.

That asymmetry tells you almost everything you need to know about how this debate has been constructed, and why it is a democracy problem as much as a trans rights problem.

The findings come from a systematic statistical analysis of how four major outlets, The Guardian, The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times and Sunday Times, reported on trans people between 2020 and 2025, which identified patterns across thousands of articles.

Coverage was disproportionate to public interest: ahead of the 2024 general election, trans rights didn’t feature in voters’ top 16 concerns, yet gender and sexuality were the most-covered culture war topics in the four weeks before polling day. Coverage was disproportionately negative in sentiment. Successive prime ministers, opposition leaders, and the longest-serving Scottish first minister appear consistently as the named subjects of reporting, confirming that “trans issues” have been elevated to a political priority by the press even where no equivalent public demand exists.

The analysis of which named individuals appear frequently enough in the coverage to be statistically significant is where the picture becomes sharpest. Trans people appear in reporting about their own lives almost exclusively as victim or perpetrator. The frame is set by politicians, campaigners, and a novelist. The people most affected by decisions on legal gender recognition, healthcare access, and single-sex spaces are, as Amnesty puts it, virtually invisible. That absence is not just a media ethics problem, though it is that. It is a structural condition that makes it easier to do things to people than it would be if those people were present in the conversation.

Amnesty’s report documents the growth of the gender critical movement from its origins in the 2017 to 2018 consultations on GRA reform. At that point, only three of the 51 organisations now mapped existed. Today the ecosystem includes professional networks, legal campaign groups and political party factions, among them Liberal Voice for Women within the Liberal Democrats, and organisations providing services. Three are registered charities. Between them, FiLiA, LGB Alliance, and Sex Matters spent £3.6 million between 2019 and 2024. CrowdJustice pages for gender critical legal challenges have raised over £3.2 million more. The report also documents the convergence between gender critical actors and ultra-conservative Christian groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, which increased its UK spending by 258% between 2019 and 2024, and which played a central role in overturning Roe v Wade in the United States.

What Amnesty’s mapping shows is a movement that has been remarkably successful at shifting the frame of a public debate, largely in the absence of the people most affected by the outcome.

Between 2019 and 2023, the proportion of people who thought trans people should be able to change the sex marker on their birth certificate fell from 53% to 30%. A 23 percentage point shift in four years, tracking almost exactly with the period covered by Amnesty’s research: the growth of the gender critical movement, the surge in press coverage, the systematic absence of trans voices from that coverage. A TransActual survey of over 4,000 people, conducted before the Supreme Court judgment, found that 99% of respondents said transphobia in the media had affected their mental health. More than 90% believed it had worsened their treatment by strangers, family members, friends, and colleagues.

Almost 60% felt less hopeful about the future than they had two years earlier. Those surveys were conducted before the Supreme Court judgment. They describe what it feels like to be subject to nine articles a day, and written out of every one of them.

* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.