You’d think that the UN publishing a damning criticism of the UK government might make the news, but as expected yesterday’s statement about LGBT+ rights in the UK and the associated fall of the UK in the Rainbow Rankings has barely been covered at all: one short piece in the Metro and one (anti-trans, of course) piece in moonhowler pamphlet The Critic.
Today’s Daily Express did, however, find plenty of space to complain that a trans woman had been allowed to row a boat.
In 2015.
The UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, has released a damning statement about the increasingly abusive treatment of LGBT+ people by the UK press and government. So you can expect him to be demonised in our fair and balanced press, assuming this is reported at all; if a trans person gets a parking ticket or accidentally treads on a ladybird that will of course be considered more newsworthy.
The key summary:
Abusive rhetoric by politicians, the media and social commentators has trickled down to produce increasingly abusive and hateful speech against LGBT persons in the United Kingdom (UK).
It’s particularly damning in its assessment of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which has been stuffed with anti-trans stooges by the Tory government.
…the objective of the EHRC was to offer the Government a formula through which it could carry out discriminatory distinctions currently unlawful under UK law, and that will remain so under international human rights law. The Independent Expert is of the opinion that this action of the EHRC is wholly unbecoming of an institution created to “stand up for those in need of protection and hold governments to account for their human rights obligations”.
I’ve said many times that I live an unusually charmed life compared to many trans people, the majority of whom are not middle-aged, middle-class media freelancers. A new workplace survey of trans people by YouGov demonstrates that for those people, things aren’t great.
The study found:
There are some small indications of positive progress, though. Of those people who are out at work:
In 2015, the UK was number one in the ILGA Europe Rainbow Europe rankings. It’s an annual study of the LGBTQ-friendliness of European countries, and for a long time the UK was proud to lead the way.
The latest rankings have just been published. The UK has fallen to 17th. And it’s doing its best to fall further.
Stonewall’s Robbie de Santos, on Twitter:
This is a story about stagnation in the UK and progress across Europe. Our score has stayed steady, while other countries modernise their legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. The UK now sits at the bottom of the middle & countries like Slovenia and Croatia will soon overtake us.
The index covers issues such as gender recognition legislation, hate crime protections and so on – things that, since 2022, have become demonstrably worse as the UK government chips away at LGBT+ people’s legal protections and the media fuels ever rising anti-LGBT+ sentiment; what started as an anti-trans moral panic, sadly and predictably, is now targeting the LGBT+ community more widely as the UK seems hell-bent on becoming a rainy version of Florida.
Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley sums it up:
Shameful.
The UK used to be, could be and should be better than this.
It’s been obvious for many years that if you vote for an anti-trans politician you get an anti-abortion politician; the whole trans panic has been manufactured by an unholy alliance of political and religious conservatives who believe that they, not you, should decide what you can do with your body. But even by their low standards they’re not usually as blatant as the Republicans in Nebraska.
As the Washington Post reports, Ben Hansen filed amendments to the anti-trans bill 574, already a dangerous and hateful piece of legislation designed to remove trans people’s healthcare, that would ban abortions after 12 weeks – effectively a ban on all abortions. Senator Merv Riepe blocked the amendments, for now at least. But the amendments, and the furious reaction to Rip’s blocking of them, should remove any doubt that the war on trans people’s bodily autonomy is part of a wider war against everybody’s bodily autonomy, or that the “gender critical” movement is at best a useful tool for the evangelical right.
Jude Doyle on typically superb form:
Headlines like the WaPo one are the natural end result of a media framing that treats trans people as a “debate” or an “ideology” rather than human beings. We’ve been abstracted into ideas, and now, people think they get to weigh in on whether or not we deserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Trans lives are not ideas, and trans questions are not abstract questions. They’re often very specific, and bodily, and (above all) personal: What shape I want my chest to be, which medications I take in the morning, which bathroom stall I use. No-one else can make those decisions for me, and no vote can determine which decisions I should make, because I am the one who will have to live with the consequences.
To make it simple: If nine out of ten Americans agreed that you should stick a pencil in your eye right now, you would still have the right to refuse, and to keep both eyeballs. No-one can force you to injure yourself based purely on their belief that you should be getting hurt.
After a bit of a delay, Carrie Kills A Man is now available as an Audible audiobook read by yours truly. I had great fun recording it and I think you can hear that in the audio.
As Duncan Hothersall writes on Twitter, “calling out The Times and The Times Scotland whenever they use a lie of omission to mislead on a trans rights issue would be an endless daily task.” But there’s a particularly egregious omission in today’s paper, which features the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics – an organisation The Times is clearly a fan of, having published what appears to be rewritten versions of their press releases since at least 2019.
What The Times consistently fails to tell its readers is that the official-sounding Council is in fact an evangelical anti-evolution, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT lobby group headed by a Free Church preacher. If The Times’ journalists don’t know that then they’re incompetent; if they do, then they’re malevolent.
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.
Thanks to my friend and colleague Craig Grannell, I’ve been reminded of a short story I wrote for tech site Wareable.com in (I think) 2016. I can’t find it online any more so I’m reposting it here. It’s called The Girl Who Lost Her Glasses.
Kara didn’t notice at first. The apartment temperature was just right. The coffee was ready at the usual time. The shower was hot, but not too hot. Siri told her it’d be a sunny day and that her first lecture was at 10am. But when she stood on the scales, half-expecting bad news after a bit too much pizza last night, nothing happened. The white wall stayed white.
Kara sighed, took off her glasses, pressed the tiny reset button and popped them back on again. “Hello” hovered briefly in front of her eyes, then disappeared. She stood on the scales again.
Nothing.
No weight, no BMI, no body fat composition. No Chart Of Shame gently chiding her about her lack of exercise recently. Nothing.
She popped open the mirrored cabinet and focused on a moisturiser, waiting for the ingredients and warnings to appear. Nothing.
“Hey Siri, can you check my glasses please?”
“Of course, Kara,” the disembodied voice replied. “Your glasses are fully functional.”
“Then why aren’t they working?”
“I’m sorry, Kara, but your eyeCloud account has been suspended.”
“Suspended? What for?”
“Non-payment.”
Kara groaned. She’d meant to pay the sub the other day. Money was always tight but she always paid eventually. She’d never been cut off before.
“Well,” she said. “That sucks.”
It’s funny what you take for granted, she thought. The apartment walls were featureless, painted in neutral colours. The bright wallpaper she’d ben so delighted with wasn’t overlaid any more; the Wall of GIFs that made her laugh most mornings was just a plain wall. The floating heads of Facebook friends and Instagram frenemies were gone too, trapped behind the glass of her phone screen. They still moved and smiled and joked when she tapped on them, of course. But tapping a phone wasn’t the same as waving to somebody in front of you or flipping the bird at an unsuspecting oversharer. It was like trying to communicate with butterflies in a box.
A reminder from Siri: time to leave for college. Kara grabbed her backpack, swiped the lock and headed outside. And after three blocks she realised that she didn’t have the faintest idea where she was.
It was as if somebody had run around the entire town, taking down every shop sign, emptying every shopfront, turning off every advertising billboard. The smells were still there, of course, the ground coffee and the stale beer and the dubious aromas of last night’s revellers. But every building looked the same as every other one. She’d normally follow the luminous Maps arrow past the tattoo parlour and the tablet repair shop, cutting left – or was it right? She couldn’t quite recall – past the impulse supermarket towards the centre of town and the college. But she couldn’t see the tattoo parlour, or the tablet repair shop, or the supermarket. Just endless blank frontages pained the same shades of off-white, street signs faded, missing and occasionally peppered with what looked like small bullet holes.
“Siri, get me an Uber.” She thanked the Lord for the three-day delay between taking the ride and Uber taking payments. She’d have cash by then.
It took Kara a minute to realise she was looking in the wrong place. The familiar Uber indicator wasn’t going to appear in the sky to show where her ride was coming from and how long it’d be. She peered at the tiny car icons on her phone, feeling like Gulliver in a world of tiny cars.
The Uber pod rolled to a halt beside her and opened a side door. She climbed in and waited for the show to start, the so-bad-it’s-good parade of adverts for local businesses, viral hits and quirky news headlines that kept boredom at bay (and at night, kept the passengers awake when they’d had a bit to drink). Nothing. Just bare white walls. Boring, boring white walls.
Great, Kara thought. Just when the day couldn’t get any more crappy I’ve got to sit with a bucket on my head. It wasn’t really a bucket, but it sure felt like one. It was the only spare headset available, it was absolutely ancient and it had clearly been through the wars: it didn’t sit quite right and it kept glitching, the image shearing as the prof talked everyone through the various bits of the human brain. Without it Kara wouldn’t have seen anything. With it, she was beginning to get what promised to be a major headache.
Kara tried to look on the bright side. With no lenses the usual riot of colour in the college hallways wasn’t there to make her headache worse. The advertising that usually inhabited every flat surface floated just out of punching distance was nowhere to be seen.
But neither were the avatars. Walking through campus was usually funny and occasionally disturbing, people presenting with dragon wings or fiery haloes or extra limbs or different genders. Some of the students turned themselves into living works of art; others just chose interesting patterns for skirts or shoes. AR fashion was so fast it could change in a single day, offered up by influencers on Instagram and instantly adopted as avatars. But not today. Without AR, everybody was wearing the same stuff in the same neutral colours, just as Kara was. It was weird seeing people strutting but not what they were strutting about: she passed a half-dozen identically dressed students congratulating one another on their apparently fierce new looks. Apparently beige was the new black: whatever looks they were rocking only existed in their contact lenses.
Kara realised that something else was missing. Information. Normally you’d look at somebody and see their Facebook or Insta, maybe a Tinder icon or a mood indicator or a do not disturb. You’d be able to get the name of their kids or see their great passion or what they’re listening to. Same with vending machines and products in supermarkets: focus, blink, and you see the calories and maybe a serving suggestion and guides to the other things you need for the recipe. But you need your lenses for that.
Kara made it home via another Uber, her phone desperately short of juice: it usually sat in her bag, silently communicating with her glasses. She hardly ever used the screen, but today she’d been reliant on it. She was irritated. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask for a phone to work all day?
She grabbed a bite to eat and sat down for some Netflix. Nope. White wall, no virtual cinema screen until she got her eyeCloud account back online.
Even the dog was missing. Normally she’d be greeted with puppy madness, the kind of joy you only get from animals who think every time you go out you’re never coming back. But Effie was a PerfectPet®, a virtual labrador who didn’t shed, didn’t need fed and wasn’t banned from apartments. No glasses, no Effie.
And that meant no Julie either, or at least not Julie as Kara normally saw her, lounging in an armchair with that husky laugh of hers. They’d set the world to rights later, but with Julie trapped behind the glass of her tablet instead of larger than life over there.
Two days, she thought. Two days before the money’s in and I can get my account back online. Two days. 48 hours. 2,880 minutes. 172,800 seconds.
Just 172,800 seconds to kill.
Kara sighed.
“Hey, Siri,” she said. “Tell me a story.”
It was going to be a long two days.