Reality continues to make satire redundant.

In mid-April, a group of senior writers and editors at The Guardian met as part of the company’s ‘Diversity and Inclusion Week’ to discuss pushing gender-critical narratives ‘fearlessly’… The meeting of four senior members of The Guardian’s staff (leader writer Susanna Rustin, financial editor Nils Pratley, chief sports writer Sean Ingle, and chief leader writer Sonia Sodha [was] watched by approximately 120 others from the company, including Guardian US, Guardian Australia, and The Observer.

Taking place on the same day as their Pride event, I was told that ‘Untangling sex and gender’ was the most well-attended event of the week.

What’s particularly galling about this is that The Guardian is still believed by many people to be a left-wing newspaper, so when its openly transphobic staff conspire to publish terrible articles demonising trans people those articles have an air of false legitimacy: leftish people are more likely to believe a Guardian story than a Daily Mail one, even if it’s written by the same kind of bigot.

The New York Times has done what the UK press has refused to do: it’s exposed disgraced Observer and Private Eye columnist Nick Cohen as an alleged predator.

Cohen has written multiple articles and posts accusing trans women of being a danger to women while, according to the NYT, sexually harassing multiple women. When the NYT put the allegations to him, he claimed it was a stitch-up by the Russians and trans people.

Cohen’s behaviour was apparently an open secret in media circles: he had the nickname “The Octopus” and many women journalists have said other women warned them about him. The publications that knew about the allegations but chose not to expose him included those notable “we must protect women” publications The Guardian and The Observer – who let him go amid much secrecy – and Private Eye.

It’s interesting, and predictable, to see who’s rushing to defend him. In a now-deleted tweet, former Guardian/Observer anti-trans columnist (now Times anti-trans columnist) and long-time Woody Allen defender Hadley Freeman was quick to excuse his serial harassment on the grounds that he was probably drunk when he did it, which makes it all okay, and anyway he said sorry. It’s a good example of Freeman’s tendency to write what she’d like to be true rather than what’s actually true: some of the allegations refer to harassment that he did long after he stopped drinking, and he hasn’t said he’s sorry.

And also on Twitter, @euanyours is providing a list with citations of the “protect women” crowd who rushed to Cohen’s defence when Good Law Project head Jolyon Maugham attempted to get people to believe women. That list includes a who’s who of very high profile anti-trans voices of the I’m So Silenced variety. If they regularly appear in the right-wing press, they’re in the list.

Mark Berry on Twitter:

The glee with which trans people – including me – are sharing the story is for a simple reason: it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-trans journalism, which may pretend to be about protecting women but which has no interest in protecting women from actual sexual predators. People who have written multiple columns about the need to remove human rights from entire marginalised groups to “protect women and girls” are on the side of the abusers, not the abused. And that’s because the so-called gender critical movement has never been about protecting anybody from anything; it’s about eliminating trans people from society.

Also on Twitter, @scriblit puts it beautifully:

Look at the photo, then the headline, then back at the photo. What kind of person do you think the police are cuffing?

That’s right! A far-right, anti-trans, “gender critical” thug!

But of course, that’s not what you’re supposed to see here. The Telegraph, very deliberately, is encouraging you to think that this is a trans person or ally. It isn’t. He’s a former member of the neo-nazi EDL, a thug who turned up in support of Kellie-Jay Keen’s anti-trans rally. Maybe he was there to offer a nuanced critique of the works of Judith Butler, as far-right thugs so love to do. Or maybe he just wanted to crack some trans kids’ heads. It’s a mystery!

The Telegraph knows what it’s doing and what he is, but it wants some of those sweet, sweet anti-trans clicks that it seems so dependent on lately. And now the far-right media ecosystem has burst into life and will forever circulate the photo as supposed proof of how violent trans people are.

This isn’t journalism. It’s hatemongering. And if you write to the press regulator to complain, you’ll be told that it isn’t breaking any rules. And that’s true, because the rules don’t exist to protect the public; they exist to protect newspaper proprietors.

I’ve written many times about the asymmetry of trans coverage: of the hundreds of stories and items published and broadcast about trans people every week, hardly any of them feature trans people or allies and most platform anti-trans activists, often misleadingly presenting them as ordinary mums or feminists with “reasonable concerns”. So you’d think that when trans people are given a platform, we’d gladly take it.

Nope.

With very, very few exceptions I stopped accepting invitations to talk about trans issues more than a year ago after it became very apparent that I was being set up. The best I could hope for was the chance to listen to an anti-trans fanatic spouting lies that I would only be given 30 seconds to try and counter; sometimes I would be ambushed, only told when I went on air that the item I’d been asked to come on was actually an excuse for someone from Spiked to talk shite about trans people for almost all of it. I’m much more cynical now, and on a few occasions I’ve listened to items I’ve declined to appear on and had my fears confirmed: mostly they’re intended to titillate, not educate; gladiatorial battles where the trans person is the Christian.

It’s easy to fall for this stuff, though. Media people are so nice, and they’ll tell you how important it is for your voice to be heard, and how keen they are to show the real story. And then they put you in a room with a bunch of pissed bigots shouting “penis!” at you.

You’d think I made that one up, but no. In May 2018, Channel 4 aired a programme called “Genderquake: The Debate”. It wasn’t a debate; it was more like an episode of Jerry Springer or Jerry Kyle. The trans participants were shouted down by an audience that appeared to be a bunch of pissed bigots; it later transpired that the audience was a bunch of pissed bigots. Posting on Mumsnet, audience member Posie Parker – yes, the same Posie Parker of “Adult Human Female” fame, an avowed anti-feminist who runs anti-trans events popular with neo-nazis – said that “we were repeatedly encouraged to heckle” by Channel 4’s floor manager. Professor Stephen Whittle, a trans man who was also in the audience, confirmed this.

Sadly it seems that Professor Whittle has been tricked again.

In October 2022, Trans Safety Network – a group of academics and researchers who do great work reporting in depth about trans rights, healthcare and anti-trans activism – posted on Twitter:

We have become aware of a documentary being produced by Brook Lapping Productions, on behalf of Channel 4 that is currently attempting to recruit transgender people and allies to talk about “the trans debate”… [we] are very concerned at reports that the suggestion of including some transgender people on the production crew “wouldn’t be impartial”. We would strongly urge anyone contacted to think about engaging…”

They also shared a document by one person who’d been invited to contribute, a document that laid out their serious concerns about the show.

And those concerns have been proven correct.

Rather than the documentary contributors were told they’d be in, a documentary trying to give a fair account of the trans “debate”, it turns out to be a puff piece about anti-trans activist, academic and author Kathleen Stock that frames trans people as sinister figures hell-bent on silencing the brave professor.

Some of the contributors, including Professor Whittle, have put together a blog about it.

On the documentary you will see many trans & non-binary (TNB) people & their allies. Most will be shown taking part in lawful but noisy protest. Only a few TNB people and one ally will speak, and only one is given any substantial opportunity to speak.

There are some specific complaints about errors and what appears to be false framing of trans people throughout the documentary, which hasn’t been broadcast yet but the contributors have been shown. But the core issue is much more fundamental: the contributors simply weren’t told that they were being invited to contribute to a documentary about Stock, whose views are well known and endlessly publicised in print, online and on radio and TV, and had they known that was the subject they would have refused to have taken part. They may not have been put in front of bigots shouting “penis!” this time, but they were tricked just the same.

In their conclusion, the contributors say:

We took part in good faith hoping to find a way forward. We all had doubts about taking part, but in the end took the production team at their word.  

We were misled and misinformed.

This is horrifically unethical, of course, and it shouldn’t happen. But deception is something trans people and allies are sadly very used to. As Elaine Scattermoon, a trans woman who herself has been tricked by a supposedly friendly journalist, posted on Twitter:

This keeps happening to the extent that most trans people in the UK I know will just refuse to take part in any TV or radio show just because there’s an extremely high chance it’s just a trap and the framing will be used against them. We’re jaded but for good reason.