Bigmouth Strikes Again

Something wonderful happened in the Scottish elections this week. A whole bunch of politicians who’d bet on transphobia being a vote-winner were either kicked out of office or failed to get elected in the first place.

The most obvious example of that is self-confessed sex pest Alex Salmond’s sleepy cuddles party, Alba, which failed to gain a single seat or even a convincing share of the vote, and the Scottish Family Party doing predictably badly. But there were other losers too, such as the deeply unpleasant Joan McAlpine (SNP), Catriona MacDonald (SNP) and Andy Wightman (independent). Two other vocally anti-trans politicians, Johann Lamont and Jenny Marra (both Labour) also stepped down. In a single week the Scottish parliament has lost many of its anti-trans politicians.

I’m not going to pretend that transphobia was the only reason why some of these candidates were defeated; for example McAlpine was defeated by a Tory, a party hardly famed for its pro-trans stance, and there are still fundamentalists such as John Mason in the SNP. But it’s abundantly clear that the obsessive transphobes making a lot of noise on Twitter and claiming to represent the views of Scots women are deluded: anti-trans groups urged Scots to vote with their feet and they did, by getting as far away from the bigots as they possibly could.

It’d be nice if our media started to reflect that fact.

The unprecedented legislative attacks on trans people, particularly teens, in the US are horrific. Writing in Jewish Currents, Jules Gill-Peterson explains why there are so many anti-trans bills being introduced by Republican lawmakers and what ideology is behind them.

the right-wing proponents of this legislative avalanche have greater ambitions than mere electoral dominance. As HB 1476 shows, this legislative tactic is an attempt to use trans people as a pretext for a broader reformation of civil life and citizenship to advance an authoritarian, Christian state policy on sex and gender. From this vantage point, it shares its strongest affinities with antisemitic, Islamophobic, and New Jim Crow-era anti-Black politics

…It is no coincidence, then, that Islamophobic, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, evangelical Christian, and white nationalist groups all find themselves on the same side of this issue

It’s Lesbian Visibility Week. That’s important, because research suggests that gay men are more than twice as likely to be out in the workplace than gay women; gay trans women tend to stay closeted in the workplace too.

Visibility matters. I grew up in a period of viciously anti-LGBT+ media and Section 28, and it wasn’t until very many years later that I discovered that there were other people just like me. That lack of knowledge kept me miserable and in denial for far too long.

Visibility tells you that you’re not alone, that you’re not broken, that you should not be ashamed of or battle who you are. Visibility tells you that you deserve and should demand respect, love and joy.

The actor Alan Cumming wrote this for the Royal Society of Edinburgh and shared it on his Instagram.

I think he’s right. The vast majority of people who fear LGBT+ folks aren’t hateful. The problem is that they are lied to by a small but vocal group of people who are hateful and whose goal is to make others hateful too.

There was a good example of this at the Women and Equalities Committee hearing on gender recognition reform yesterday. After hearing from trans-inclusive groups previously, yesterday was the anti-trans groups’ turn. A representative of one of the most prominent anti-trans groups made several lurid claims about trans women and gender recognition; when asked what evidence she had to back those claims up, she had to admit on multiple occasions that she didn’t have any. And yet these are the people whose claims go unchallenged in print and broadcast media, spreading fear about us.

I was listening to the You’re Wrong About podcast, whose latest episode is about the “political correctness” moral panic of the late 80s and early 90s. In it, co-host Sarah Marshall made the point that the moral panic thrived in part because a credulous media treated people who should be subjects as sources: you could say any old shite about political correctness gone mad and the press would lap it up.

That’s directly relevant to the anti-trans panic today. A man who tells a journalist that the world is flat is a subject, not a source: he is making a claim, not stating a fact. All too often, though, the print and broadcast media present him as an expert in a subject he knows nothing about, spreading misinformation and sometimes bare-faced lies to readers and viewers without being challenged.

Another Angry Woman has an excellent post about the comedian Robert Webb, who’d previously been vocally transphobic. This week he was gently questioned about it in an interview by a presenter who is the parent of a trans child. Faced with someone who actually had some insight into the subject of trans kids, Webb’s response wasn’t great: like most people who claim to want a respectful, fact-based debate, Webb didn’t. His people attempted to get that part of the interview pulled.

It’s ironic that some of the people who rail against so-called identity politics are the first to declare war on entire groups of people when their identity as The Smartest Person Ever is questioned; in what seems to be a trend among the UK establishment, Webb became outspoken about the supposed dangers of trans people after being mildly criticised for a trans-hostile joke. Most of the columnists who write anti-trans pieces, the kind of pieces that lead to the introduction of genital examinations for schoolchildren (which is becoming law in the US this week), the removal of healthcare for thousands of teenagers and a massive increase in hate crimes, appear to be acting not out of a desire to protect anybody but from a desire for revenge against people who dared question their authority.

AAW:

This is the crux of The British Strain Of Transphobe mindset. It’s a core part of their identity that they’re smarter than everyone else. The vast majority of them start life on the private/grammar school-Oxbridge pipeline, where in place of education they’re just told this. The possibility of being incorrect is something The British Strain Of Transphobe is incapable of processing, because they’ve spent their lives believing they’re cleverer than everyone else, and this belief is integral to their belief of who and what they are. The British Strain Of Transphobe lives within an echo chamber of similar people. This is why, for example, transphobia spread like wildfire among the sceptic community, where many organisers are posh white folk, and it hinges on the belief of being smarter than everyone else.

And so, how does the British Strain Of Transphobe react to someone raising the mere possibility that they might be incorrect about something? Badly, because they take it as a fundamental attack on their identity as a person who is smarter than everyone else.

Like AAW, I have no idea how to solve this either. But we could start by not giving these goons a bully pulpit to spread misinformation about things they know absolutely nothing about.

Slate explains the role of the Alliance Defending Freedom in US (and UK) anti-trans bills and legal cases.

Over the last 28 years, the ADF has defended laws prohibiting same-sex intimacy; opposed marriage, adoption, and surrogacy for same-sex couples; attacked LGBTQ non-discrimination laws, as well as bans on conversion therapy for minors; argued in favor of laws that require transgender people to undergo sterilization before legally changing their gender; challenged access to contraception; and supported the criminalization of abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Its work stretches beyond the United States; ADF has, for instance, championed Belize’s archaic anti-sodomy law, which allows for the persecution and imprisonment of gay people. The ADF’s overarching position on gay people is that they should either be converted to heterosexuality or fired from their jobs and imprisoned because of their sexual orientation.

The ADF’s first strategy was the “bathroom bill”, legislation designed to prevent trans people from using the correct toilets.

They were rooted in fear of the “bathroom predator,” a mythical figure who pretends to be female so he can gain access to women’s bathrooms and rape them.

But the bathroom predator does not exist. So ADF developed a second generation of anti-transgender legislation, this time identifying an ostensible problem and a victim. The problem: transgender girls and women participating in sports, particularly school athletics. The victim: every cisgender girl and woman forced to compete against trans athletes. The solution: new model legislation drafted and pushed by ADF banning transgender students from participating in women’s sports, from elementary school through college.

In reality, this putative problem does not exist.

The endgame has been obvious for several years now.

these anti-LGBTQ bills build on each other. Soon, another state will consider outlawing gender-affirming care not just for youth or young adults, but for everyone. Schools will introduce harsher and harsher policies designed to identify and discriminate against students who do not perfectly match a cramped conception of gender roles. The government will insinuate itself into parents’ relationship with their children, children’s relationships with their bodies, and LGBTQ adults’ attempts to live authentic and fulfilling lives. ADF’s ascendant ideology demands nothing less. Did anyone really think this was going to stop with bathrooms?