Nancy Kelly of Stonewall brings data to the human rights party.
…younger people, non-religious people and people with higher level educational qualifications are all more likely to have positive views of trans people.
Oh, and women. Yes, women are more likely to have positive views of trans people… The current narrative of ‘women feel threatened by trans rights’ that is the cornerstone of anti-trans rights campaigns simply doesn’t stack up with the evidence we have.
As predicted, the UK government has abandoned its plans for gender recognition reform. Not only that, but instead of making life marginally better for trans people it has decided to make life much, much worse.
GRA reform isn’t the story here, although it’s worth noting in passing that, as in Scotland, around 70% of respondents were in favour; the government claims that the result was “skewed” by an “avalanche” of pro-reform submissions while ignoring the fact that every single anti-trans group in the UK, and many other organisations including religious groups and US conservatives, urged people to make anti-reform submissions. Apparently the will of the people only matters if they give you the result you want.
The real story is this. Months after the conservatives were asking focus groups whether trans rights were a culture war hot-button they could weaponise against Labour, they apparently intend to follow in the footsteps of the US and Hungary by attacking trans people’s existing rights.
According to the Sunday Times:
New protections will be offered to safeguard female-only spaces, including refuges and public lavatories, to stop them being used by those with male anatomy.
That’s a bathroom bill straight out of the US Republican playbook.
Trans women who haven’t had surgeries have been using the ladies for decades, as they should: presenting female in the gents is an invitation to get your head kicked in, or worse.
It’s also part of being able to get legal gender recognition. In order to get a Gender Recognition Certificate under the system the government will now not reform, you need to produce evidence that you have lived uninterrupted in your correct gender for at least two years. If you’re applying for a GRC, as I am, the gender recognition panel may ask you to produce evidence that you’ve been using the correct toilets, as the panel did with me.
You do not need to have had surgery to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate, and in fact such a requirement would be illegal under human rights legislation: legal gender recognition can’t be contingent on sterilisation.
I’m sure US-style bathroom bills would ultimately be defeated here, but that doesn’t mean the next few years are going to be easy for trans people and the wider LGBT+ community. The nasty party has taken its mask off.
The Guardian on the Polish presidential election:
[The party] has often hit out at gay rights and what it calls “LGBT ideologyâ€, in rhetoric that is popular with parts of its base and the Catholic church.
Among other things, Duda’s new charter pledges no support for gay marriage or adoption by gay couples, with Duda describing the latter as part of “a foreign ideologyâ€. It also seeks to “ban the propagation of LGBT ideology†in schools and public institutions – language reminiscent of a notorious Russian law targeting so-called “gay propagandaâ€.
…The messaging does have an effect. In a survey last year, when asked to name the biggest threat to Poland, the most popular answer among men under 40 was “the LGBT movement and gender ideologyâ€.
The messaging does have an effect. And yet the Guardian, and many other UK papers, happily and frequently platforms the very same arguments about trans people that the Polish far right perpetuate about the wider LGBT+ community. It’s usually worded more diplomatically than in Poland, but the message is the same: we need to protect our children from dangerous predators who do not deserve human rights.
The messaging does have an effect. In the US, the hitherto uncontroversial existence of trans people has been weaponised by the Christian Right and its supporters in the Republican Party. Yesterday, to mark the 4th anniversary of the most lethal massacre of LGBT+ people in US history, the US government formalised a new rule that removes anti-discrimination protection from LGBT people in healthcare. Unless state laws say otherwise, it is now perfectly legal for doctors to refuse to provide any medical treatment to LGBT+ people and women who have had abortions. Not just transition-related treatment, or abortions. Any medical treatment.Â
This began with scaremongering about trans women in toilets. It does not end there.
The messaging does have an effect.
Gabrielle Bellot on how it feels to be a trans person who loved the Harry Potter books, and how it feels to be a trans person more generally.Â
It’s emotionally and spiritually exhausting to debate your identity; sometimes, you just want to log off social media and take a walk or hug someone you love for support, curling up in your own small safe harbor, where, at least for a bit, no one is accusing you of being a freak, a pervert, an abomination who does not belong in the annals of this Earth.
At other times, I want to shout my barbaric yawp from the rooftops. I want to scream no, fuck off, I won’t let you demean me. This is who I am, this is foundational to my sense of self, and I didn’t choose to be like this, would never pretend to be something that has brought me so much pain and loss. I want to scream that I gave up so much when I came out as trans—my former home country, any hope of a good relationship with my family, old friends, any chance of a simple life—but stuck with it, anyway, because transitioning was essential for me, rather than some silly choice. I had to come out, or I couldn’t keep living because the pain, the dissonant music of living a lie, was too much.
I want to yell in these moments, until I start to cry.
[I’d originally posted about the “don’t mention the war†episode of Fawlty Towers and said John Cleese approved the 2013 edit that removed the racial slurs. Cleese has since given an interview to The Age expressing his anger at UKTV for removing the unedited episode, so it seems he didn’t approve of the edit after all.]
June Tuesday, writing on Medium: JK Rowling and the Reasonable Bigotry.
The UK’s transphobia is many-pronged — our conservatives, religious fundamentalists, alt-right, ‘rational men’, and so all exist here, too. But virulent and aggressive anti-trans feminists have a culture and history specific to Britain, and their views trickle down into the respectable views of those with ‘reasonable concerns’.
Tuesday makes a point that many others have made about Rowling’s latest broadside: nothing in it is new. It’s just a collection of hackneyed anti-trans tropes, many of them reheated anti-gay and anti-lesbian tropes, beloved by Twitter bigots, the far right and religious conservatives. You could do a point by point explanation of why it’s wrong, as Andrew James Carter has done, but these points have been debunked again and again and again to virtually no effect. In some cases they were debunked fifty years ago.
The reason it’s had no effect is that it doesn’t get published. The UK media is overwhelmingly anti-trans. Papers that previously claimed AIDS was an invention of the “homosexual lobby” run sustained campaigns against the “trans Taliban”. Papers that presented Andrew Wakefield as a brave campaigner against a medical establishment pushing supposedly dangerous vaccines now present anti-semites, homophobes and racists as brave campaigners against a medical establishment pushing supposedly dangerous medical treatment. Papers that once traded in vicious homophobia have pivoted to equally vicious transphobia.
The information is out there, but there’s no interest in publishing it because it doesn’t drive traffic, reinforce the prejudices of readers or give those readers their daily two-minute hate. That’s because in the UK, there is an entire industry of columnists and commentators who pay their mortgages by punching down against one of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in society.
To them, trans people aren’t people. They’re a magic money tree.
It seemed a good time to repost this, by Gray Crosbie.
We are your neighbours, siblings, sons and daughters. #TransDayOfVisibility pic.twitter.com/ybG7uclKRt
— BBC The Social (@bbcthesocial) March 31, 2019
Micha Frazer-Carroll wrote this for Gal-Dem last year:
Everyone loves a laugh – but at whose expense?
…post-watershed blackface, that operates under the guise of the comedy sketch show, found its own, horrid golden age in the early 00s. For many marginalised people, it was a truly cursed era of TV that not only mocked blackness, but dabbled in transphobia, fatphobia, misogyny, classism and ableism. Just a cursory look through the characters that graced our screens throughout those years looks like a tick-box list of offenses.
The watchword at the time was ‘edgy’. If people complained, it meant you were doing something right.
… It’s not about hurt feelings or being “offended†(whatever that means anyway) it’s about the damage that is done to certain communities by consistent trash representation in the media. The effects of comedians seeing our identity as a game add up – and have tangible, real world effects
As Frazer-Carroll points out, times have not changed. Black people have not suddenly decided blackface is offensive; other minorities have not suddenly become aware of ableism, transphobia and so on. It’s just that before social media, their legitimate complaints and justified anger were so much easier to ignore.
It took me a very long time to realise how good Bruce Springsteen is: like many people, I misinterpreted Born in the USA as a tub-thumping, chest-beating, USA! USA! USA! anthem and didn’t investigate further. I’m a lot older and a little bit wiser now, and while I wouldn’t call myself a fan – I don’t own most of his albums, and I’ve only seen him live once – he’s written some of my very favourite songs. Walk Like a Man is one of them, and it makes me cry every time.
Well so much has happened to me
That I don’t understand
All I can think of is being five years old following behind you at the beach
Tracing your footprints in the sand
Trying to walk like a man
Springsteen wrote it about trying to be the man his father expected him to be and feeling that he was falling short; his relationship with his dad was rocky, his father unimpressed by his artistic leanings and his long hair. But good songs can take on a life beyond the specific circumstances they were written about, and Walk Like A Man is a very good song.
Here’s Naomi Gordon-Loebl, writing in The Nation, on “the queerness of Bruce Springsteen.”
In “Walk Like a Man,†from 1987’s Tunnel of Love, Springsteen sings about the lessons he learned from his father and whether he’ll ever know what he needs in order to “walk like a man  the words seemed to perfectly encapsulate my experience of growing up in a body out of alignment with my gender, trying to walk a path that was not made for my feet and being constantly, painfully aware of the dissonance.
Me too. Gordon-Loebl and I were driving in different directions – as I understand it she’s a masculine-presenting gay woman, whereas I’m a trans femme –  but we clearly drove the same road and had the same connection with this song.
That line about being “painfully aware of the dissonance” really resonates with me. It’s a great way to describe the fear and frustration and sadness I felt throughout my old life, my frustration at being unable to perform a role my peers did automatically and effortlessly. I never lost that feeling of being five years old, trying and failing to walk like a man.
As Gordon-Loebl says, Bruce Springsteen couldn’t be more straight. But that doesn’t mean his songs can’t reflect other people’s experiences too. There’s a powerful melancholy to much of his music, and many of his best songs are about people who don’t fit in and who yearn to escape the circumstances they’re in. It’s no wonder that they resonate with people who feel suffocated.
But no matter where it comes from, there is an unmistakable echo of queer loneliness in his work. “Everybody’s got a secret, Sonny, something that they just can’t face,†Springsteen sings on “Darkness on the Edge of Town.†“Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop…. I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost / For wanting things that can only be found / In the darkness on the edge of town.â€
…Perhaps nothing is so fundamentally queer about Springsteen as the pervasive feeling of dislocation that’s threaded through his work, the nagging sense that something has been plaguing him since birth, and that he’s dreaming of a place where he might finally fling it off his back.
Little Britain has been removed from all UK streaming platforms due to concerns about the use of blackface by its two stars, David Walliams and Matt Lucas. The comedy sketch show, which first aired in 2003 on BBC Three, has been removed from Netflix, BritBox and BBC iPlayer – with the pair’s follow up, Come Fly With Me, also taken down by Netflix for the same reason.
It wasn’t just racist. As Matt Lucas admitted a few years ago, the whole programme was “cruel” and wouldn’t be made today. It traded in lazy stereotypes: shirkers pretending to be disabled, shrieking fat women, deluded transvestites, Thai brides and other tabloid targets. Defenders claim it was satire, but it was nothing of the sort. It was an extended exercise in punching down, its catchphrases shouted at minorities in the street.
The usual grifters are claiming terrible censorship, and they’re much more outraged about this than they are about, say, racism or police brutality. But despite their claims of a ban, nobody is stopping them from watching it: it’s still available on pay-per-download. And of course, they can buy it on DVD and rack it next to their box sets of Love Thy Neighbour.
Update, 12 June:
The Sun appears to be driving a false narrative that Black Lives Matter protesters are demanding the removal of endless other TV shows. They aren’t. There is no “furious race row” over Gavin And Stacey, but there is a pretty transparent attempt by the Murdoch press to delegitimise protests against racism by pretending they’re about trivia.