Here’s the New York Times last year: Who Cares What Celebrities Think?

Last week, just ahead of back-to-school season, New York State health officials issued emergency regulations limiting medical exemptions from vaccination requirements for kids attending schools or day care centers.

What do celebrities think about this development? Hopefully, the public won’t find out — because it doesn’t matter. But unfortunately, when it comes to opinions about vaccination, we in the media typically make two big mistakes. We treat celebrities’ opposition to or fears about vaccines as news. And in the rare cases in which their beliefs do deserve coverage because they could potentially affect public health, we too often amplify unfounded or misleading talking points without sufficiently correcting the misinformation.

Ill-informed, scaremongering celebrities have been a key part of the anti-vaccination movement as this paper notes:

Persuasion from entertainment and pop culture figures can influence health behavior and decision-making about vaccinations (eg, Tiedje et al). Celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy, Alicia Silverstone, Rob Schneider, and Robert De Niro used fear-based messaging to influence parents to avoid vaccination, particularly in claiming a false link between vaccinations and autism. Political leaders also play a role in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump shared anti-vaxx messages on social media, although in recent months he encouraged vaccinations. More recently, vocal representative Jonathan Strickland in Texas described vaccinations as “sorcery.”

The paper also talks about the problem of ill-informed sharing on social media.

Skeptics also use online platforms to advocate vaccine refusal; as many as 50% of tweets about vaccination contain anti-vaccine beliefs. Research suggests that it only takes 5 to 10 minutes on an anti-vaccine site to increase perceptions of vaccination risks and decrease perceptions of the risks of vaccine omission.

Among these social media influencers are parents who attribute the deaths of their children or illnesses they contract to “vaccine injury,” and they often take to the Internet to discuss their experiences and warn other parents. Indeed, a substantial part of the vaccine discussion takes place on anti-vaccine website discussion boards such as Age of Autism, Say No to Vaccines, and Naturalnews.com. Even on mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, anti-vaccine discussions are flourishing as these groups have closed their forums to anyone who describes themselves as “pro-vaccine.” According to Shelby and Ernst, these parents and other anti-vaccine activists “have relied on the profound power of storytelling to infect an entire generation of parents with fear and doubt”.

Perhaps the most common trope told by this group is the “overnight autism” narrative, in which a parent takes their child in to get the MMR vaccine only to watch them digress cognitively almost immediately after.

The parallels with the celebrity- and social media-driven scaremongering about trans kids are considerable.

Here’s Jack Turban writing in Psychology Today about the supposedly scientific paper shared by everybody’s favourite author.

For “overnight autism”, here’s “rapid onset gender dysphoria”:

This term comes from a paper published in the journal PLoS One, in which the author anonymously surveyed parents recruited from websites that focus on the theory that trans youth identify as transgender due to “social contagion” and online influences. Unfortunately, the paper did not survey any of the youth themselves or their clinicians. The only thing the paper established is that some people online believe that youth rapidly become transgender as a result of watching trans-related content on Youtube and Reddit… [it claims] that “a substantial proportion” of referrals to gender clinics are for youth with this “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” It provides no citation for this claim. There are no data showing that this is true.

Then there’s simply ignoring evidence that says your theory is wrong:

The paper contains a section entitled “research” in which the author quotes a number of people regarding their thoughts on medical interventions for transgender youth. However, it fails to cite any of the many papers that show medical interventions for transgender youth result in favorable mental health outcomes.

There’s ignorance about what current procedures actually are:

The watchful waiting approach is irrelevant to the discussion of medical interventions for transgender youth. Under existing guidelines, these interventions are never offered before the onset of puberty.

And there are false assertions presented as fact.

The paper claims that gender affirmative models do not allow providers to explore with patients their “underlying belief systems and motivations,” or else they will be accused of conversion therapy. This is not true. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry’s policy statement on conversion therapy clearly states providers should engage in open exploration of identity with youth. An approach is only conversion therapy if it has the pre-defined goal of a specific gender identity.

Back to the anti-vaccination paper.

In addition, it was determined that “93% of tweets about vaccines are generated by accounts whose provenance can be verified as neither bots nor human users yet who exhibit malicious behaviors.” This amplifies the misinformation that parents are exposed to, and it fuels the belief that the science behind vaccine efficacy and safety is still debatable.

Exactly the same thing is happening with discussion about trans people and trans kids in particular. The conversation is dominated by multiple “sock puppet” accounts, trolls and bots.

ideas about neoliberalism and skewed perceptions of feminist concepts of bodily autonomy and parental decision-making trumps medical expertise. Reich’s data and findings suggest that upper-class women may adopt anti-vaxx sentiments as a means for expressing independence—while tragically undermining the value and science behind herd immunity.

As with anti-vaccination, people are trying to undermine health provision that is proven to be safe, proven to have positive health outcomes and that follows internationally agreed standards – provision that is already desperately underfunded and overstretched.

In England, there is only one clinic for trans youth; the waiting list for a first appointment there is currently 27 months and there are serious concerns about the quality of care and support being offered. And adult services are in crisis. I was talking to a trans woman yesterday who wanted to know the procedure and time frame for hormone therapy on the NHS; in England you can realistically expect to wait around four years, possibly longer. In Northern Ireland you can’t even join a waiting list.

While people, trolls and bots rail against things that are not happening, the current system is failing people in need.

If it wasn’t for the internet, I don’t think I’d ever have come out. Not because I was somehow talked into being trans; forced feminisation is something that only happens in niche pornography and in the lurid fantasies of anti-trans bigots. The internet helped me come out because it finally let me see that there were other people just like me.

We cannot be what we cannot see.

Which is why Allie Crewe’s You Brought Your Own Light is so good to see. It’s a collection of 26 photos of trans people; one of them, Grace, was last year’s Portrait of Britain award winner.

I love these photographs. I love them because they’re great portraits, and because there’s a real power to them.

The endless photos I looked at before I came out, the photos I looked at as I started to consider hormonal transition, weren’t as good as these. But they were powerful too. Ordinary women, trans women, publicly documenting their transitions.

I wrote this some time ago:

I spent endless hours looking at trans women’s HRT transition timelines, the photographic evidence of the cumulative effects of hormone treatment and improving make-up skills. I actively searched for timelines of middle-aged trans women, trying to see what was the result of HRT and what was just better lighting, good makeup and a cute smile.

Looking at such images wasn’t new, nor was the strong yearning I felt to be one of the people in the pictures. I’ve had those things since I’ve had internet access. But something was different now. I no longer saw the photos as pictures of transformations that, for me, would be impossible and unattainable.

I started to see them as maps of the possible.

What struck me wasn’t the physical transformation; it was the difference in the way they looked at the camera, the smiles reaching their eyes. Even relatively minor physical transformations looked spectacular because of the difference in the way people held themselves and looked at the camera.

Each timeline was the same story: unhappy people finally becoming happy in their own skin.

I wanted that too.

I have that now. I took a photo the other night during some daft family fun and it struck me how different I looked. It wasn’t makeup or good lighting – my makeup was half-arsed and the light wasn’t flattering. I look different now. Happier.

Nobody’s going to look at a timeline of me and go “wow! I never knew such beauty was possible!” But I do think that the more of us that people get to know, the more prejudices we’ll shatter.

I’m reading a powerful and sad book just now, How To Survive A Plague by David France. It’s about the AIDS epidemic, and I’ll write about it a lot more when I’ve finished it. But in the pages describing the early years of the disease, the parallels between public attitudes to gay men then and to trans women now are really striking.

As the book notes, at the beginning of the AIDS crisis some 80% of Americans said they didn’t know any gay people. They did, of course, but those people weren’t going to tell anybody they were gay: it was far too dangerous for their careers, for their social lives, for their safety. As a result it was easy for the press and religious groups to demonise gay men as perverts, predators, a danger to children. Which they did, endlessly and viciously. The way the media treated gay men during this period and for many years afterwards was despicable and undoubtedly cost lives.

Today, 89% of Americans say they don’t know any trans people. As a result…

Visibility and representation don’t just help us understand ourselves. They also help you understand us.

When you have gay friends, colleagues and family members it’s hard to be homophobic. Likewise with trans people and transphobia.

If you plot the change in social attitudes towards equal rights, equal marriage, same-sex adoption and similar issues over the years you’ll see that as more people come out, as more people get to know those people, attitudes change. Familiarity, understanding and empathy don’t leave much room for bigotry.

The bigots will still wave their banners and push their malevolent fantasies. But fewer and fewer people will be buying what they’re selling.

This, by author Mia Violet, is very true. It’s a shame that the first section should be in any way controversial: being trans is hard in a world that treats trans people so badly.

Every now and again, someone on the internet will read a few articles about something, decide they’re an expert on the subject and start arguing with others. At its most entertaining, they pick fights with actual experts without realising who they’re talking to and get their arse handed to them on a plate.

Sadly it’s not always funny. This is where the anti-vaccination, anti-mask and anti-5G conspiracy theories come from: they’re spread by people who believe that they have stumbled upon a Great Truth, a truth that of course They Don’t Want You To Know, and they surround themselves with people who celebrate rather than challenge their ignorance.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to people with Twitter handles like BigDave23632111. It affects celebrities, journalists and other public figures too: there are few people more zealous, and in some cases dangerous, than the person with an audience who has become an instant expert with Things To Say.

All too often, what they want to say is the same old shit.

It happens so frequently with trans-related subjects that  Julia Serano, biologist and writer, wrote an article to save her having to plough through the same long-debunked bullshit again and again. She wrote it four years ago and it’s just as relevant now. 

This is not an abstract debate.

Other people’s vocal ignorance about trans people has a direct effect on trans people’s lives. For example, Janice Raymond, an ex-nun who argued that trans people should be “morally mandated out of existence” in the 1970s (a belief that’s sadly still common in so-called gender critical circles), was partly responsible for the removal of healthcare from trans people in the US.

Much of the current wave of anti-trans activism is focused on restricting the healthcare and basic human rights of trans people, and some of it threatens violence against us. Just this morning I watched a video of a US demonstration, ostensibly about supporting the police, where the protesters switched chants from “all lives matter” to “kill transgenders”, a frightening echo of what’s commonplace in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Here in the UK, it’s the fifth anniversary of the UK government’s Transgender Equality Inquiry. In those five years, the “debate” about trans people – a debate almost entirely conducted by cisgender people talking to other cisgender people about trans people – has ensured that not one of its recommendations has been implemented. Meanwhile the crisis in trans healthcare continues to worsen and hate crimes against trans people have increased considerably.

Serano:

as transgender people have become more visible and have garnered increasing media scrutiny, trans-unaware politicians, pundits, and journalists have suddenly swooped in to weigh in on these important issues — issues that (conveniently) they themselves are not personally invested in. Some of these people have very clear anti-trans agendas. Others are (perhaps well-meaning) interlopers who believe that by simply reading a few research papers and interviewing a few people here and there, they can acquire an “objective understanding” about this complex subject that spans a half-century of history. And sadly, they often center their op-eds and think-pieces on an especially vulnerable segment of our community: transgender children.

As Serano points out, there is a common thread to much of this: the idea that somehow cisgender people can be “transed”: that is, turned transsexual, as if being transsexual is something we do for shits and giggles or decide on a whim.

The decision to transition does not happen in a vacuum. It occurs in the presence of systemic societal transphobia. Every transgender person is highly aware of how pervasive this double standard is (as we face it every day). And every transsexual who transitions does so in spite of systemic transphobia. This is a testament to how intense gender dysphoria can be, or (to put it in less pathologizing language) how deeply rooted our gender identities are: We’d rather live with the stigma of transphobia than be forced to live in our birth-assigned gender.

As Serano writes, there’s also a (sometimes deliberate) confusion between being transsexual and being transgender.

Transgender is a big tent. It includes non-binary people, gender non-conforming people and transsexual people. The transsexual people are the ones who may undergo some form of social and/or medical transition. But often, articles and discussions about transgender people assume that all of them will undergo hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery. That simply isn’t true.

Much of the “debate” around trans people is based on ignorance and on bad faith. As Serano describes it, articles and discussions usually fall into one of two categories: the trans-antagonistic position, which comes from a belief that trans people are “delusional, wayward and/or misled”, and the trans-suspicious position, which mistakes the increased visibility of trans people for a “trend” where people who aren’t really trans pretend to be.

There’s no point in spending any time on the first position, because it’s simple bigotry. But the second is more insidious, because on the face of it it sounds reasonable: you don’t hate trans people; you just have reasonable concerns.

Serano:

the argument that some people are easily swayed or misled into transitioning can only be made if one intentionally denies, discounts, or downplays the existence of societal transphobia, gender dysphoria, and the legitimacy of trans people’s gender identities. In other words, this line of reasoning is condescending and steeped in transphobia.

The notion that some people who transition are not “really trans” presumes that cisgender and transgender are immutable, essentialist categories — this is absolutely not the case… Even if transitioning doesn’t pan out for these individuals for some reason, it does not mean that they were “really cisgender” all along; it simply means that transitioning was not the right path for them personally.

…If the trans-suspicious position were true (i.e., that cis people are needlessly being pushed toward trans identities and transitioning), then the clear implication of these op-eds and think-pieces is that access to gender transition (and possibly even the acceptance of, or information about, transgender identities) should be restricted to some degree.

…these op-eds and think-pieces are invariably written by cisgender authors who (as outsiders to all this) look upon this situation and reflexively come to the conclusion: “Oh no, some cisgender people are choosing or being misled into a transgender lifestyle!” But I would as ask: Why is this even a problem? I mean, so long as these supposed “cisgender-people-turned-transgender” are happy with their life choices and their post-transition lives, why should anyone even care? Frankly, I believe that this concern stems directly from the transphobic assumption that cisgender bodies are valid and valuable, whereas trans people’s are invalid and defective. It is this assumption that leads these authors to view these supposed “cisgender-people-turned-transgender” as an inherently undesirable outcome, even if these individuals wind up being happy in the end. After all, they have taken their precious and perfect cisgender bodies, and transformed them into defective transsexual ones. This helps to explain why the implicit premise of these pieces (i.e., that gender transition should be restricted in order to protect cis people) resonates with so many readers: Denying trans people access to healthcare and living happy lives seems like a small price to pay if it saves even a few cisgender people from making such a horrible mistake with their bodies.

As Serano writes, there is no evidence that cisgender people are being “turned trans”: the fact that a few people who transition decide it isn’t the right thing for them (whether that’s temporarily or permanently) does not change the fact that for the overwhelming majority of trans people who transition, transition is a positive and sometimes life-saving process with an incredibly low regret rate.

The dynamic here is quite similar to the “ex-gay” phenomenon. Conservative forces who insist that homosexuality is a “treatable disease” or merely an “alternative lifestyle” love to tout the existence of “ex-gays”

The article goes into a lot of detail about the various questions asked about trans people and trans children in particular. The highlight in the quoted text is from the original article: it’s a section that’s been highlighted by other readers.

The theme of [many] pieces is that something must be done to stop these cisgender-kids-being-turned-transgender, and the implicit solution is to curtail/limit/end childhood gender transition. Yet, in these pieces there is absolutely no consideration of how this might impact trans children who might benefit from gender transition. In fact, such oversights can lead to obvious hypocrisy. For example, authors often raise fears that some children (i.e., ones who are “really cisgender” in their minds) may be pushed into the “wrong” puberty, and thus may have to undergo expensive medical procedures to correct those bodily changes. But this precisely describes what a trans child would face if they were not allowed to transition until adulthood. If the former example concerns you, but the latter one doesn’t, then that’s a clear sign that you value cis bodies and lives over trans ones.

In her conclusion, Serano writes:

…what is really driving this debate is a difference of opinion with regards to what constitutes a “good outcome.” Trans activists and advocates like myself generally think that a good outcome is a happy child, regardless of whether they transition or not, or whether they grow up to be transsexual, non-binary, gender non-conforming, lesbian, gay, bisexual, etcetera. Trans-antagonistic and trans-suspicious people (who constantly cite “80% desistance”) seem to think that a good outcome is a cisgender child, and they seem to be willing to make transphobic arguments and subject transgender and gender non-conforming children to clinically ordained transphobia (i.e., gender-reparative therapies) in order to achieve that end goal.

There’s no doubt that life is harder for trans people than it is for cisgender people; anyone who believes otherwise is coming from a position of ignorance or dogma. But there’s no inherent reason why it should be. To be blunt, the problem isn’t us. It’s you.

Being a transgender person is not especially difficult in and of itself. But the one thing that does make transgender and gender non-conforming lives difficult and harrowing is transphobia.

The sad truth is that the people who are most vocal about trans people have nothing to say about, and no interest in, the health, happiness or safety of trans people. To them, trans lives are simply less valuable than cisgender ones.