The Times would never write something like this about a murderer if they were Black. “Found purpose as a vigilante” makes him sound like Batman, not a white supremacist with an illegally acquired weapon who murdered two peaceful protestors in cold blood and injured a third.
Nora Mulready writes in The Independent about her journey from “gender critical” fighter against “a new ‘woke’ orthodoxy” to trans ally.
I read everything I could find that validated my instinct that the increase in transgender identity was a millennial fad, mental health issues, trauma, social contagion, fashion, patriarchy, you name it, I clutched at it.
But unlike many – most? – anti-trans people, Mulready knew and loved a trans person. In this case, her nephew.
I saw my nephew thrive, I met many wonderful trans people who simply wanted to live their lives, I listened, and I learned, a lot. Over time my views changed.
…The final end to my sympathy for gender-critical campaigners was the collective punishment approach to trans women. All trans women are held accountable for any misdemeanour by any trans woman. This is the very epitome of prejudice. “You cannot share our toilets, you cannot share our spaces, because you might be all the same.†It is a heart-breaking act of cruelty towards trans women and is reminiscent of the very worst of the American deep south attitudes towards racial integration.
…Seeing this issue unfold within my own family taught me a profound lesson: the importance of humility in the face of something you do not understand.
I’ll be joining the line-up of this excellent online music, spoken word and visual arts event on Sunday. I don’t know all the other performers but the ones I do know are brilliant.
This Sunday… @LGBTHealthy and @SomewhereEDI present Queer Fringe – Supporting and celebrating LGBTQ+ artists in Scotland in 2020 and beyond. 15 featured artists! #SomewhereAtTheFringe #SomewhereForUs
This, by Zoe Williams interviewing author Laura Bates, is terrifying: the toxic world of online misogyny. I think many people appreciate that the internet is a toxic swamp, but I don’t think many people appreciate the scale or the danger of it.
“I started hearing boys at school who already felt that they’d been poisoned against the idea of even having a conversation about feminism. And they were coming out with some quite extreme things: feminism is a cancer, all women lie about rape, white men are the real victims of society … But the moment it really clicked for me was when they started repeating, at schools from rural Scotland to inner-city London, the same wrong statistics.
Women and minority groups have been trying to raise the alarm about this online radicalisation for at least six years, and they have been ignored.
The point Bates makes is both stark and subtle: there is a live community of violent extremists, operating online without censure, generating concrete terrorist attacks in which the perpetrators are very open about their guiding ideology of misogyny, and radicalising young boys
…this world of extreme misogyny is chillingly intertwined with the neo-Nazi one. “The journey of many men who are groomed and radicalised online towards white supremacy starts in anti-feminist forums,†Bates says. “You can see it in the overlap of the lexicon – the entire dense, complex language they’ve created for themselves [red pills, blue pills as in The Matrix, black pills to denote suicidal certainty] – is very similar across both groups.
A lot of white supremacy is predicated on this obsession with birth rates and replacement theory, the idea that white women need to be forced into sexual servitude and raped, in order to bear white, pure babies. The incel movement is obsessed with sterilising or forcing abortions on black women. And some groups explicitly say – they call it ‘adding cherry flavour to children’s medicine’ – that you target kids of 11-up with anti-feminist memes and jokes, and that’s the gateway to white nationalism.â€
Many of these tropes – replacement theory, “tradwives” and so on – have infiltrated the mainstream media and politics both here and in the US.
There’s been a lot of discussion about conversion therapy, the often-illegal and usually deeply damaging attempts to force people to change their sexual orientation or gender identity.
That’s horrific, of course. But you don’t have to give people electro-shock therapy or send them off to prayer camp to try and talk them out of being who they are. From parents to healthcare providers, many trans and non-binary people encounter a great deal of resistance. In the case of GPs, that resistance can mean denying them access to the gender clinic system: as far as I’m aware Scotland is the only bit of the UK where you don’t need to persuade your GP to refer you to the gender clinic; I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about Northern Irish GPs in particular refusing to refer patients.
The trans-friendly practice GenderGP asked some of its blog readers what experiences they’d had with medical professionals. The responses included being told the following:
“Come back next year to see if you change your mind.”
“You have to be attracted to men if you’re really trans.”
“Pack it in, you’re too big for that sort of nonsense.”
“If you continue on this path you’ll lose your job, your family, your friends, you’ll be neither male nor female & no-one will ever love you.”
“Why can’t you just live as a tomboy for now?”
“It’s just a perversion and you should be closer to God and your parents.”
Much of the media – and much of the government, including a Prime Minister who didn’t appear to give a shit about the exams catastrophe or anything else that’s actually important – is huffing and puffing about the Wokerati Thought Police Black Lives Matter Political Correctness Cancel Culture Gone Mad “ban” on singing Land of Hope And Glory at the Last Night of the Proms.
There’s no ban. We can’t have entire venues full of people singing because there’s a bloody pandemic.
We’re somehow now on day three of #Promgate, and the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph – as well as about half of the government – are raging about what the Sunday Times in its headline gently refers to as the “BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’â€.
…I hate to be the one saying “you know we’re in a pandemic, right?â€, but you know we’re in a pandemic, right? If I didn’t know better, I’d think the political right was deftly exploiting our national inability to ignore culture-war bait in order to obfuscate bigger stories, like, I don’t know, the fact that things are going badly for the government, literally all of the time. How many more times do we have to watch this happen? What do four more years of this government have in store for us? Five hundred children somehow catch the plague due to government negligence and the Express front page is “EU demands hungry Brits RENAME Cornish pastiesâ€? After the 2022 banking crash, Boris Johnson stands behind a podium and vows that, despite the rumours, “the woke left will never make poppies illegalâ€?
Jessica Valenti writes about the Aaron Coleman saga in the US.
The short version: Coleman, a Democratic candidate, “committed serious harassment and sexual misconduct when he was a teenager: Between the ages of 12 and 14, he bullied one girl so badly that she attempted suicide; extorted another classmate with a nude photo which he later sent to her friends and family (which legally amounts to distributing child pornography, among other things); and harassed a third young woman for months.” Credible allegations of more recent abusive behaviour including physical violence are emerging.
Coleman initially dropped out of the campaign but changed his mind after a lot of men offered their very vocal support: what you might call “himpathy”. Supposed defenders of women suddenly decided to throw women under the bus to defend the prospective politician.
Valenti:
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, for example, tweeted last week that the 19-year-old was being “sabotaged†over “middle school misconduct†(which sounds nicer than revenge porn, I suppose), and questioned whether minors should be tried as adults and sentenced to life in prison — as if not being able to hold public office is somehow akin to incarceration.
…Men might want to take a pause and examine why they are now repeating the same argument Republicans trotted out during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings: that not elevating a man to public power is a life-ruining consequence for something they did when they were a minor.
What is most disturbing, though, is why these men — who, again, claim to be on the side of women — would be so eager to throw their considerable platforms and support behind Coleman in particular. As New York writer Sarah Jones put it, “there are plenty of working-class progressives who are not sex pests.â€
Something very similar is happening here over the Alex Salmond trial. Supposedly progressive men have decided to ignore all the evidence that Salmond has a long track record of inappropriate behaviour; some have gone on to demonise the women who testified against him.Â
The concern is entirely for the perpetrator, not the victims.
So as men who claim to be our allies go on a tear about how feminism ruined a young man’s life, some food for thought: The young women who Coleman harassed will likely never run for office. It’s not exactly something you can do when nude photos of you at 12 years old have been spread around the internet.
…I wonder if the “progressive†men on a mission to convince the public that he deserved a second chance would spare a tweet or two for the girls who never got a first one.
I think this is very much part of it:
There are some — like the men who blamed the [#metoo] movement for ruining men’s careers — who don’t want a future that doesn’t tolerate harassment or assault. Too many men they know, or like (or see in the mirror every day) would be impacted.
I volunteer with SWIM, a charity dedicated to equality in music, and their latest wheeze is called Swimspire: members are asked to share any key lessons they’ve learnt, and I’m one of the members they asked.
My four aren’t specifically for music, as I think they apply to work generally:
If you don’t want to make yourself thoroughly miserable about the state of the world, don’t read the Reddit group r/QAnonCasualties. It’s a forum for people who’ve lost or are losing friends and family to conspiracy theories.
Mum, stepdad and brother have been well down the rabbit hole since about 2013-2014.
Started with flat earth, now I’ve heard almost all conspiracies you could imagine. Doctors are bad and all drugs are bad, vaccines cause all health problems, billionaires eating babies, flouride, 5g. It all started because YouTube. God. Damn. YouTube.
Another:
Since we’ve been in lockdown [my two best friends have] become consumed by Plandemic misinformation, anti-mask and COVID denial stuff, and my friend admitted to me the other day that she supports Trump because “he’s the only one doing anything about the child trafficking.†She’s gotten a medical exemption from wearing a mask because she thinks the virus is a lie.
I haven’t mentioned this, but I won’t trust her around my newborn since she’s not being safe with the virus, and I also have a condition that puts me in the highly risk category.
In many cases the slide into conspiracy theories began with trauma.
[My boyfriend’s mother]Â really started to subscribe to conspiracy theories over 20 years ago, when her other son (BF’s little brother) was diagnosed with severe autism. That son died last year, just before his 25th birthday, after suffering from seizures his whole life. She blames vaccines for all of it.
Unsurprisingly, she is very suspicious of COVID-19 and masks, has already stated she will never take a COVID vaccine, doesn’t understand BLM or the protests, etc… and yesterday at dinner, she asked us if we knew about “pizzagate”. I braced myself. She claimed that some of BF’s cousins opened her eyes to this theory and she’s starting to believe it.
This one’s from the UK, a woman writing about her boyfriend:
His Grandad has just passed away and I think he was in a vulnerable place making him more susceptible to all this. He was researching more and more, joining more and more groups on Reddit/Facebook, watching countless videos and basically just spending hours and hours getting deeper ‘down the rabbit hole’
…I feel like I’ve lost my boyfriend. He’s normally so level headed and sound minded and normally so smart and switched on but now he’s been brainwashed by these people
It’s a terrible litany of destroyed friendships, families and relationships, made all the sadder by the knowledge that the people who’ve been sucked in by this bullshit believe that they’re the rational ones.
This is absolutely breaking my head, because at this point any sort of rational discussion hits an immense brick wall. How can you argue with someone who always says that all your souces are “fake news”, and all her sources are correct?
It’s also very clear that these conspiracies are spreading far beyond their usual audience.
Gemma Stone, writing on Medium:
Recently, an anti-trans activist was spoken to by police over a suspected hate crime. Suzy Ireson has been quite prolific in posting anti-trans propaganda around public places, with a direct intention of drumming up hate for trans people and making trans people feel intimidated. She even gleefully admits to doing this on social media profiles, all egged on by other known hateful anti-trans campaigners.
This is how the media should have reported on this story, it should have just been a very simple “bad person doing bad thing†kind of affair. Except that’s not what we got when The Mirror got their hands on it.
The Mirror piece was written by a vocal supporter of anti-trans activists who has written multiple anti-trans pieces for the right-wing press.
The Mirror ran with the title “Mum in hate crime probe after pro-JK Rowling stickers amid trans rights row†which is very clearly slanted in making her seem like a sympathetic character in this narrative.
It’s happening again today. A woman in the US, Sasha White, has been fired by her literary agent employer for posting a mountain of abusive tweets about and to trans women, including tweets advocating violence against them. Inevitably it’s being framed as a brave feminist silenced by the sinister trans lobby rather than a tiresome bigot getting the sack for bringing her employer into disrepute. It’s important to note that her employer is very and vocally LGBT+ friendly and represents a number of LGBT+ authors.
Suzanne Moore has tweeted her support, Toby Young has already been in touch with her. It’s surely just a matter of hours before The Spectator offers her a column and JK Rowling calls her a hero.
Stone:
Transphobes and bullies are framed as innocent little victims who didn’t do anything wrong, while trans people are framed as monstrous, authoritarian and dangerous.Â