“Cis Hell”

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of cis hell to describe the regulatory normativity over all bodies based on gender biopolitics as a global political pandemic. Centring the recent UK Supreme Court’s 2025 Equality Act ruling and connecting it to similar examples across the world, we demonstrate how biopower operates through social movements inspired by the new authoritarianisms to establish transnational regimes of bodily control. Drawing connections between trans exclusion in the UK, USA and pronatalist policies in Turkey, Hungary, and Russia, we argue these seemingly disparate developments represent coordinated manifestations of biopolitical logic reducing human worth to reproductive capacity. Authoritarian innovation threatens and destroys modest progress towards human rights for vulnerable groups. ‘Gender-critical’ activism, despite protection claims, functions within a broader masculinist restoration project threatening collective prosperity by constraining human potential and re-centring white, male, and cis supremacy. The purported ‘safety’ of cisgender categorization creates a hell of rigid taxonomies undermining human flourishing across the gender spectrum, necessitating a radical reimagining of gender justice as essential to global prosperity through participative co-design processes inherent in new social movements theory focusing on social identity, human potential, and affect.