This, from Gogglebox, is lovely: it’s people watching an episode of First Dates featuring a trans man.
“a little bit different but it don’t matter does it”
adored this: GoggleBox at its best last night, celebrating a trans storyline on FirstDates and (obviously) ecstatic that it works out for them. not being a dick isn’t hard!!!! pic.twitter.com/MJedAmBlmw
— michael segalov (@MikeSegalov) October 3, 2020
This, by MM Carrigan in Eater, is a great bit of writing. It’s about the semi-mythical fast food buffets that are unimaginable now, “an arms race in maximizing caloric intake.”
In the age of COVID-19, the fast-food buffet feels like more of a dream than ever. How positively whimsical it would be to stand shoulder to shoulder, hovering over sneeze guards, sharing soup ladles to scoop an odd assortment of pudding, three grapes, a heap of rotini pasta, and a drumstick onto a plate. Maybe we can reach this place again. But to find it, we must follow the landmarks, searching our memory as the map.
There’s a good piece in Bookriot by Alice Nuttall about the bigoted bullshit many independent bookshops experience; it’s usually because they’re supportive of LGBT+ rights and trans people specifically.
Despite the fact that the shop promotes women’s writing and has made huge strides in ensuring that little-read women authors are given the prominence and acclaim that they deserve, The Second Shelf was deemed anti-feminist for its decision to include all women, rather than solely cis women, on its shelves. The abuse faced by The Second Shelf mostly took place online, with transphobes writing negative reviews despite having never visited the store, or bombarding the shop’s Twitter account with hundreds of hateful messages.
As ever, the people doing it are usually supporters of, and often tacitly supported by, supposed champions of free speech and critics of “cancel culture”.
I do love it when writers have some fun. This, by Drew Magary, is in defence of skimming articles on the internet.
skimming is a way to help me glean the thrust of a story without having to eat my vegetables in the process. EVERYONE WINS. If I read a movie or album review, I skim right past the intro and hunt for the graf that tells me if the thing is good or not. If I read a recipe, I skip right past the storybook intro like everyone else does. If I’m hate-reading a bad column, I’ll Ctrl-F for “cancel culture†to get right to the worst part. I have s—t to do, man. I can’t go humoring the rest of you by reading all of your tedious bulls—t.
And this, by R Eric Thomas, is about US politician Katie Porter’s whiteboard.
My friend, if you ever find yourself sitting in front of the House Oversight Committee and Rep. Katie Porter pulls out her Whiteboard of Justice, please know that it is truly and deeply over for you. My friend, the truth is it never began. The minute her staff put that portable Porter board onto the little hand truck they use to cart Instruments of Truth through the halls of justice it was a wrap on you, those you associate with, and everything you’ve ever done. As the Good Book says, “And lo, a pale board! And the name of your overpriced prescription drug was upon it. And hell followed.”
It’s a really fun piece.
This is a message of love and solidarity for the trans and non-binary community. Culture is, and should always be, at the forefront of societal change, and as writers, editors, agents, journalists, and publishing professionals, we recognise the vital role our industry has in advancing and supporting the wellbeing and rights of trans and non-binary people. We stand with you, we hear you, we see you, we accept you, we love you. The world is better for having you in it.
How’s this for a TV show? We get a racist – a proper racist, ideally a knuckle-dragger from a really racist organisation such as the EDL or Britain First, someone who’s really loudly and proudly racist and spends loads of time being really racist to people on Twitter – and we pair him up with a nice middle-class Black woman. Then we get the two of them to sit down for a nice dinner and a chat and we film the whole thing.
Good, right? It’s a social experiment!
I haven’t even got to the best bit yet. It’s not just a chat. We give the racist guy a script of really racist things to say to the Black woman over dinner and we film her response. Maybe she’ll cry! Â Maybe she’ll walk out! Maybe it’ll go viral!
No? How about we pair a neo-nazi with a nice Jewish lady?
Of course not. Trying to get a fight for ratings is disgusting, as we saw with the Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle shows. But that doesn’t mean TV production companies don’t keep trying to bring back the formula, which is essentially hating for ratings. For example, an Irish TV company is currently sending this to various trans women (and to other marginalised groups, such as members of the travelling community).
As one commenter on Twitter translated: “We’re making a show where we have members of marginalised groups sit down with people who think they shouldn’t exist, for entertainment purposes. Also we’re suggesting that marginalised people are the enemy, in the title.â€
Earlier this year Evgeny Shtorn wrote about the importance of storytelling in regards to minority and marginalised people.
Considering how powerful storytelling is, we cannot pretend that the infrastructure built around it by media and researchers is always ethical and respectful towards those who constitute those stories… journalists were rude to me, disrespectful and abusive. Using my words or ideas without quotes, giving erroneous interpretations and false promises. Trans and non-binary people, homeless people, other migrants, people of colour, people with disabilities and a lot of others who I shared my concerns with, told me that they often experienced similar treatment from journalists, but also from artists, researchers and other ‘supporters’. It is called ‘cognitive exploitation’, and this is exactly the opposite to the idea of the empowerment of the community through storytelling.
…The problem is that after such an interaction most people retreat into their closet and don’t want to tell their stories anymore, despite those stories being so important to tell.
There was an example of this in England the other day: trans person and poet Jay Hulme was invited on BBC TV to discuss the government’s response to GRA reform.
I was going to be on the BBC today having a chat about the GRA – but I pulled out yesterday, having been informed that it’s BBC policy to have a cis woman invited to speak on any segment about trans ppl – I’m not going on TV to be yelled at by a transphobe from the Daily Mail.
By “cis woman” the policy doesn’t mean a cisgender woman who’s supportive of trans people, even though such women are the majority (and were the majority in the GRA reform consultation too). It means the kind of woman trans commentator Shon Faye was expected to go on air with this week. Faye was one of several trans people invited on BBC Woman’s Hour to discuss gender recognition. At the last minute, the panel was expanded to include an anti-trans activist who has taken great delight in publicly misgendering her and who Faye says even shared a now-deleted defamatory petition implying she groomed children. Faye declined the invitation.
I have some experience of this. I’ve refused to go on multiple programmes because the approach was clearly going to be gladiatorial, not editorial; other contributors were not people with concerns about specific bits of legalese but members of groups who peddle hatred on social media. Taking part is therefore a trap for marginalised people: if you don’t robustly challenge the other contributors they get to lie, lie and lie some more; if you do, and worse still if you also dare correct the presenter, you’re dismissed as unreasonable and aggressive. And even the most innocuous appearance will have bigots descending on your social media.
It’s clear that the people commissioning and structuring these programmes are thinking about ratings, not the damage these narratives can do to marginalised groups. And they are doing damage. By presenting extreme views as mainstream, such as perpetuating the myth that the two sides of the trans debate are “trans activists vs feminists” rather than “most of the country vs a few well-connected bigots”, they’re fanning the flames of intolerance and positioning extreme views as if they’re mainstream. We’ve seen this before with the platforming of far-right views, of anti-vaxxers and of climate change denial.
The problem yet again is that the people making these programmes have no skin in the game. Their human rights are not under attack. Their safety is not threatened by the rise in hate crimes. Their ability to participate in society is not something producers think should be up for debate. To them, it’s just another item. To marginalised and demonised minorities, it’s our lives.
There’s a really good piece about QAnon in The New Republic.
The “nocturnal ritual fantasyâ€â€”a term coined by the historian Norman Cohn in his landmark study of European witch trials, Europe’s Inner Demons—is a recurring trope in Western history. And it is often a politically useful one. Deployed by the Romans against early Christians, by Christians against Jews, by Christians against witches, by Catholics against “heretics,†it is a malleable set of accusations that posit that a social out-group is engaged in perverse, ritualistic behaviors that target innocents—and that the out-group and all its enablers must be crushed.
…Q adherents are perfervid Trump supporters by necessity, as Trump’s valiant battle against ultimate evil forms the spine from which the many limbs of the conspiracy grow. But a recent wave of émigrés into the Q landscape consists of New Age moms and influencers with previously vaguer politics, whose interests, during the strained days of the Covid-19 pandemic, have migrated from crystals and wellness to taking down a world-straddling cabal of demonic pedophiles.
The section on the “satanic panic” of the 1980s is particularly apt.
It was gospel belief in the media and among ordinary citizens that rings of sex abusers were everywhere. Satan and his blood-drinking minions were peripheral players, but the panic is usually referred to now, through the mocking lens of self-assurance, as the “Satanic Panic.†We in the twenty-first century could never be so naïve.
Minor celebrities: We must write an open letter to protest against online abuse of women!
LGBT+ folks: Like the vicious abuse some of your co-signatories and many supporters of your multi-millionaire pal have spent years dishing out to trans women, to the mothers of trans children, to cisgender women who say they support trans rights and to cisgender women who work in rape crisis centres and other trans-inclusive organisations?
Minor celebs: Not like that!
More than 50 public figures and anti-trans campaigners signed the letter published in The Sunday Times, which condemns the “insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic†opposition to Rowling on social media.
…the letter claims that Rowling “has consistently shown herself to be an honourable and compassionate person†– just days after the Harry Potter author promoted a website selling “f**k your pronouns†and “sorry about your d**k bro†badges mocking the trans community.
One of the signatories has been banned from social media for a years-long campaign of hate speech against trans women and any cisgender women who dared disagree with him, a campaign that cost him his career and his marriage; others have been criticised for making transphobic statements that were at best tone-deaf and at worst actively malicious. One of the signatories previously accused a gay journalist who supports trans people of being a “sucker of Satan’s cock”.
As Judith Butler said in her New Statesman interview the other day:
if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.
The US edition of The Guardian continues to show how pathetic the UK edition’s coverage of trans people and trans-related issues has become. While the UK edition is still unsure about whether we actually deserve human rights, the US edition is running series telling stories like this one: ‘Our love is radical’: why trans activists lead the way in protest movements.
Though their legacies have often been overlooked, trans Americans have been central to the country’s battles for justice, from racial equality to anti-fascism.
The Sun, 1984. Three decades later and it’s still singing the same song.
