There was a very odd front page story in the Washington Post a few days ago: after months and months of polls showing that most people supported trans rights and were against anti-trans legislation, the WSJ ran with a story headlined “Most in US back GOP’s anti-trans policies.”
The article goes on to say “Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children”.
But they don’t, as the WSJ’s own article details. Parker Molloy explains that in the only poll question asking specifically about trans policies:
the overwhelming majority of people who responded said that they support laws protecting trans people from discrimination.
It’s quite an achievement to take your own poll and misrepresent it to your readers. But unfortunately that’s where we are now, and where we’ve been for some time: for example the recent furore over a trans woman running in the London Marathon, a race that after a certain level becomes a charity fun run for most participants, is now consistently reported as a trans woman beating 14,000 women competitors rather than a trans woman coming in 6,160th and raising £37,000 for charities. And as a result, I think polls will start to show a move towards anti-trans sentiment among the public, due largely to constant lying in newspapers, online and broadcast media.
We now have a human centipede of hate, where anti-trans politicians feed anti-trans news stories which feed anti-trans columns which feed anti-trans politicians which feed… and the result is an ever more dangerous climate for trans people of all ages. Because while everybody pretends that this is only about protecting children, it never was – and the legislation proposed on such grounds, whether it’s the Don’t Say Gay law or laws against gender-affirming healthcare, are soon expanded to include teenagers and then adults too. Because the goal of the anti-trans movement is our elimination.
As ever this isn’t scaremongering or misinterpretation; it’s what US legislators and UK anti-trans activists say openly, and in the terrorism they inspire: yesterday’s US mass shooter claimed to be inspired by hateful anti-trans account Libs of TikTok and was deeply enmeshed in anti-trans, anti-women, anti-LGBT+ forums (Libs of TikTok quietly removed the “stochastic terrorist” description from her Twitter bio last night when it proved to be too accurate).
Molloy:
The authors of that Washington Post piece — a piece that gleefully described their own poll (which, again, found that the majority of adults support legal protections for trans people in all areas of life) as “offering political jet fuel for Republicans in state legislatures and Congress” — have blood on their hands. The same is true for the many people who saw this before it went to print and decided to slap it on the front page of the paper: blood on their hands. Their goal is clear: to increase anti-trans sentiment among the public and to advance anti-trans policies.
Like Molloy, I’m sick of this; as I wrote yesterday, it’s been more than six years now of daily scaremongering and hate. But many people are still completely unaware of what’s happening on a legislative level both here and in the UK, and part of that is groupthink and slanted reporting; a new study of UK journalists reports that LGBT+ journalists are experiencing a hostile environment where online and sometimes real-world abuse affects their ability to do their jobs, and the editorial stance of almost all UK mainstream media is firmly and often viciously anti-trans. So if we don’t talk about it, who will?
Molloy:
Just leave us alone, you horrible people. We’re human beings.