The New Yorker has published a lovely essay by Emma Rathbone, Before The Internet.
Before the Internet, you could move to a new state and no one at school would know anything about you. You’d have no online history. You could be anyone. You would lean against the lockers with a faraway expression on your face and let people assume whatever they wanted. Like that you were a girly girl but could also be a tomboy. Or that back in your home town you’d been friends with a bunch of crows.
This case could be very significant. Former Times night editor Katherine O’Donnell’s employment tribunal raises an interesting question: does the content that newspapers publish fall under their duty of care to their employees?
O’Donnell alleges multiple counts of illegal behaviour towards her after she transitioned to female, and her claims lift the rock to show a “boy’s club” of entrenched sexism, bordering on misogyny. But the case also introduces something that hasn’t previously been tested. Buzzfeed:
O’Donnell and her lawyer… allege that it wasn’t just what happened in the newsroom but also what those inside it published in the newspaper about trans people that constituted a hostile, transphobic place to work.
If O’Donnell wins, newspapers and other media outlets would have to reconsider their reporting of all minorities – not just gender and sexual minorities such as LGBT people, but anybody with a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. Content that bullies and demonises groups would be considered workplace bullying.
Should O’Donnell be successful, therefore, it would mean a newsroom’s output could be deemed an internal, employment issue too. News outlets may in future have to consider how their coverage of trans people and other minority groups could be in breach of employment laws that protect members of these communities on their own staff from discrimination and bullying.
That doesn’t mean the titles couldn’t report accurately on minority groups or feature a range of opinion. But it could mean that the more vicious stuff would have to stop. It would be a welcome development in a climate where the press regulator IPSO won’t even rule that an invented quote was never said by anybody.
I’ve been following O’Donnell on Twitter for a long time and she strikes me as a newspaperwoman of the old school, someone who really cares about her profession but who’s been treated despicably by her employer. The Times may come to regret that.
[Content note: vicious transphobia, racial epithets and trauma]
This is a photo of Tyra Hunter. She died in 1995.
Hunter, who was 25, was injured in a car crash. When first responders arrived on the scene, they cut off her clothes and discovered that she was transgender. Instead of treating her they verbally abused her and mocked her, and at DC General Hospital she received shockingly inadequate care. She died of internal bleeding in the ER.
The District of Columbia was subsequently and successfully sued, with damages of $2.8 million awarded to Tyra’s mother. Dana Priesing, who observed the trial, wrote that the evidence clearly showed that “ER staff, as evidenced by their actions, did not consider her life worth saving.â€
Tyra was knocked out by the crash, but by the time the firemen arrived, she was conscious but dazed, and developing airway trouble from teeth knocked into her mouth. Tyra looked female at first glance, but in their initial injury assessment, a fireman discovered Ty’s male genitals, uttered the epithets (“This ain’t no bitch. It’s a nigger. He’s got a dick and balls.”), and ceased treating her.
They failed to clear her airway for some period of time while they laughed at her as the crowd yelled at them to get to work. Other emergency personnel on scene approached some time later, after treating the other injured passenger. They found Tyra still lying on the grass, gagging and combative, apparently trying to escape the taunting firemen.
…she suffocated from lack of oxygen in her blood. Dr. Baker testified that the sensation would have been “sheer terror.”
None of the first responders or the medical staff involved in her death were ever disciplined.
Imagine reading that and being on the side of the bigots.
That’s where the Trump administration is.
The US Department of Health and Human Services has announced a long-expected rule that would enable healthcare workers to deny people treatment based on “moral or religious objections”.
According to acting Department of Health and Human Services secretary Eric Hargan a few months ago, this is necessary because “For too long too many of these health care practitioners have been bullied and discriminated against because of their religious beliefs and moral conviction.”
The rule would allow workers to refuse to provide basic health care like birth control, refuse to treat women who have had abortions, and discriminate against gay or lesbian individuals and their families, including their children.
It’s important to note that the healthcare being talked about here is not limited to healthcare that the religious people object to such as hormones for transgender people. It’s any healthcare for people they have a problem with. Fixing broken arms. Chemotherapy for cancer. Pediatric care for your children. Life-saving help after a car accident.
What this rule says is chilling: if you’re gay or lesbian, trans or a sexually active woman, the Trump administration considers you less than human. Bigots’ hatred is more important than your right to life.
When Michael Phelps, who is a straight white man, became the most decorated Olympian of all time he was hailed as a “legend” and greeted with glowing newspaper profiles on how “a biomechanical freak of nature” had a competitive advantage over other athletes because he had a “body made to swim”.
When Caster Semenya, who is a gay black woman, became an Olympic champion she was greeted with racist, misogynist, homophobic hatred and a vicious campaign that now means she  will be forced to alter her natural body chemistry in order to remove her competitive advantage over other athletes.
I wonder if there’s some kind of explanation for the way in which Michael Phelps, who is a straight white man, was treated differently from Caster Semenya, who is a gay black woman. It’s a mystery!
A picture tells a thousand words, especially this one.
For me at least, most of the thousand words are swears.
Many newspapers have based their digital strategy on lazy clickbait: contrarianism, hyperbole and trivia. There’s just one problem with that. It’s a road to nowhere.
Writing in The Irish Times, former Sunday Independent editor Anne Harris describes the new media operations of Ireland’s beleaguered Independent News & Media group.
A decision was made to prioritise digital, and the strategy was called digital first. This could have worked out fine were the right decisions made. But digital first was profoundly flawed.
INM opted for click-based journalism, thereby bringing it downmarket. The idea of click-based journalism is already redundant. And you don’t need to be a marketing genius to know that when you bring a product downmarket it is almost impossible to bring it back up. Added to that, the market is always reluctant to pay for what was once given free.
As Harris rightly points out, if your plan is to get people to pay for your journalism via a paywall you need to give them content worth paying for.
…journalistic quality is the sine qua non of a paywall, and that will prove extremely difficult to achieve in an organisation that has not prioritised talent for some years.
(The title of this post comes from a Twitter user describing Scots newspapers’ social media feeds.)
The writer Aidan Comerford, who’s ended up getting a lot of online abuse for being supportive of trans people, asked women who support trans rights to share their photos so he could put them in a collage. The collage was to show that the anti-trans crowd are not acting in their name.
In just a few days, he’s received nearly 2,000 photos.
Some days are hard. Things like this make them easier.
Today’s stupid ideas: rape victims should hand over their phones to police or have the investigations dropped.
There are two big problems with this. One, it’s victim-blaming: the number of false allegations is incredibly low and massively overshadowed by the solid, evidence-backed allegations that don’t lead to prosecution. The idea that a victim’s communications history and social media should be demanded before investigating rape is despicable. It’s also a gift for defence lawyers who could ask for such history so they can try to paint the victim as somehow responsible for her own assault if she didn’t live the life of a Carmelite nun.
Two, you can’t trust the police to get it back to you. I’m seeing lots of women on social media with tales of phones held by the police for as long as three years, three years in which the bills still had to be paid; one woman was hounded by a debt recovery agency over her Vodafone bill for a device the police kept for months. By the time it was finally returned, the hugely expensive phone had been in police hands for so long that it was effectively obsolete and completely worthless. As the woman put it on Twitter: “I had to make do with an old handset (not a smartphone, an ancient handset by today’s standards) on a pay-as-you-go basis until I could afford otherwise. Having been the victim of a crime, I now felt I was being punished for reporting it.”
Although I’m a musician, I haven’t performed in public for 15 years.
It’s not about lack of opportunity; even if you aren’t in a band there are plenty of open mic nights around if you want to grab an instrument and play. It’s mainly because of crippling stage fright, something I used to address with that musician’s crutch, alcohol. The longer I went without performing the more frightening the prospect became.
Last night, I played a short gig.
It wasn’t just my first time performing in 15 years. It was my first since coming out, my first as a visibly trans woman, my first time standing in front of strangers under lights in a dress.
I had an icy blast of fear during the day, but it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. Back then I’d be unable to concentrate all day, often nauseous and unable to eat because of the ice cold in the pit of my stomach. It would fade a bit once I was actually on stage, but the fight or flight response means that the most memorable gigs I ever played, I barely remember at all.
But last night I wasn’t scared, just full of nervous excitement. I wasn’t full of booze, either. Just two medicinal whiskys for a cold that was threatening to take my voice away. I’d intended to take beta blockers, but I decided not to. I simply wasn’t as scared as I used to be.
While the gig itself was in sad circumstances and one of the songs bassist Kenny and I played is terribly sad, I loved every second of it. It helped that the room was a positive one, there like us to remember a friend. But even in less friendly environments there is a buzz you get from playing live, from connecting with strangers through songs you wrote in isolation, from opening your heart in a strange room at high volume. That all came rushing back last night.
Sometimes you don’t realise you’re missing something until you experience it again. Sometimes fear keeps you from the things you love, the things that give you life. For me, music is one of those things.
There’s a narrative you hear a lot about people who come out: they always knew. And that’s true for many, but not all. Some of us take a terribly long time to realise who we are, partly because it’s not always so obvious and mainly because we actively fight against it. And that means when we do finally put it all together and finally become ourselves, we do so late in life.
That’s hard. It’s hard practically – coming out often means throwing a hand grenade into a life you’ve spent many years constructing, causing all kinds of devastation, and of course there are physical aspects too: it’s a lot harder to transition if you’re old, overweight and baggy than when you’re young and slim with great skin.
But it’s harder emotionally. You find yourself looking backwards with a mix of sadness and sometimes anger, mourning the you you never were. It’s hard not to focus on what Wilgus describes as “the opportunities I’m never going to get back. The doors that feel like they’re closed to me.” There will always be huge gaps in your experience because you wasted so many years trying to live the wrong life.