An interesting and balanced article in that hotbed of radical leftism, the Financial Times: The front line of the new gender wars. It looks at the Catholic Church’s war on so-called “gender ideology” and how it’s been picked up by right-wing populists and religious conservatives worldwide. The article attempts to give context to the culture war in which trans people find their very existence weaponised.
From the US and Brazil to Poland and Hungary, tilting against “gender ideology†plays to a particular constituency: disaffected voters who perceive they have been marginalised due to identity politics gone mad, and that their needs have been subordinated to the interests of outsiders, be they foreign or dark or queer.
To this constituency, the special pleading of an entitled minority threatens to encroach on the wellbeing of the majority. What makes the politics of this so complex, in the US and the UK at least, is that people putting forward this argument find themselves aligned with some feminists.
We are a charity which works with schools, teachers, and educators to tackle prejudice-based bullying. We provide anti-bullying sessions and gender stereotypes/equalities workshops to schools, and produce resources to include LGBT people and history in the curriculum.
…For a number of months, we have been receiving the most hurtful – and dangerous – posts and messages from individuals who appear to be opposed to LGBT themes being included within education. We have never had to deal with anything like this before.
…We cannot continue to sit by as individuals do this to us. Trolling is one thing – but what they are doing is dangerous, prejudicial, and hateful. Please report tweets like this if you see them. We cannot address this alone.
…LGBT people and charities are regularly called groomers, pedophiles, abusers. This is unacceptable and horrific.
…It’s not just us. Many LGBT organisations have been receiving this for months; as have national women’s charities, youth organisations, politicians. Lying like this about people or groups on social media is dangerous & can have serious consequences. It needs to stop.
Please do read the whole thing. It’s horrifying, and utterly typical of the abuse LGBT+ organisations and supporters of LGBT+ equality receive on social media. And it’s increased dramatically in the last two years.
Here’s Pink Saltire:
This type of abuse is commonplace towards LGBT+ groups and has a real impact on us all.
Sisters Scotland:
The online abuse, slander, misrepresentation and lies that the LGBT community face on the daily destroy lives. It bleeds from online toxicity in to abuse in the media, and straight into abuse in the workplace, at home, in the streets. These prejudiced narratives pushed influence the narratives lived by the LGBT+ community. Their voices and strength are crushed under the weight of this. It’s up to all of us to ensure we give that strength back, that we raise those voices, make them louder and challenge those that seek to silence them.
Dr Rebecca Crowther of LGBTI Scotland:
It claws in to our personal social media accounts too & of course our minds, our mental health, our bodies. I couldn’t & wouldn’t type some of the names I’ve been called. I could never share the mysognynistic homophobic bullying & gaslighting I’ve received. That all of us have.
And the worst part? Nothing I have received even compares remotely to the horrific bullying and abuse my trans siblings have been subject to.
SNP women’s convener and TIE Campaign chair Rhiannon Spear:
Constantly being called a pedophile or a child groomer because I support LGBT rights cannot become normal + I refuse to let it become normal.
We are seeking legal advice + will take action where we can.
The rhetoric needs to change.
Abuse against LGBT+ people is rising in the UK, and that rise corresponds to the increasingly violent rhetoric being used about us and our allies in print and on social media. The people calling LGBT+ people and charities paedophiles on the internet are just echoing what high-profile Twitter accounts and newspaper columnists are saying. Violent words ultimately lead to violent acts.
Former comedy writer Graham Linehan’s Twitter account was finally closed this weekend. The move came a week after another nasty troll, Katie Hopkins, lost her account for the same reason: repeated violations of Twitter’s hateful conduct policy.
The stories are almost identical, but the reporting isn’t. And the best way to demonstrate that is to show you the way the same outlets reported the stories in their headlines.
Sky News:
– Katie Hopkins permanently banned by Twitter for breaking ‘abuse and hate’ rules
– Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan banned from Twitter after trans comment
RT.com:
– Katie Hopkins permanently suspended from Twitter to keep platform ‘safe’ from ‘hateful conduct’
– Twitter permanently suspends ‘Father Ted’ writer after he replies ‘men aren’t women’ to pro-trans tweet
Guardian:
– Katie Hopkins permanently removed from Twitter
– Twitter closes Graham Linehan account after trans comment
Daily Mail:
– Katie Hopkins is BANNED from Twitter for breaking rules on hate speech
– Father Ted creator Graham Linehan is suspended from Twitter after stating ‘men aren’t women’
As you can see, each publication has framed the two stories very differently, and that’s apparent in many more publications than the ones I’ve quoted here. When Hopkins’ tweets have been referenced in headlines, if they were mentioned at all, they were usually prefixed with words like “vile” and “hateful”. There’s no such context in the headlines about Linehan.
Maybe that’s because all of those publications have run anti-trans story after anti-trans story, anti-trans column after anti-trans column.
Quick question: who claims that trans rights advocates are a front for a sinister cult sacrificing your children: the washed-up comedy writer or the award-winning newspaper columnist?
This is the trailer for Disclosure, a new documentary on Netflix helmed by the incredible Laverne Cox. It’s ostensibly about the way trans people have been represented (or in the case of trans men, not represented) in film and TV, but it’s really about what it’s like to live in a world that constantly tells you you’re not welcome.
It’s an American programme, and that means there are some differences between it and any UK equivalent. For starters, it got made. And it provides proper representation of all kinds of trans people, not just unrepresentative rich white women. But its US focus means there’s no room for the portrayal of trans and gender non-conforming people in other countries, such as Little Britain, the IT Crowd and what felt like all TV comedy in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK.
It’s an intelligent, insightful programme: rather than damn programmes or films outright, many of the contributors explain how on the one hand a portrayal was appalling, but on the other it was the only time they had ever seen someone like them on screen.
But even those stories are often heartbreaking. Imagine how it feels to finally come up with the courage to tell your best friend that you’re trans and to be asked, “what, like… Buffalo Bill?”
Buffalo Bill was the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs who murdered women and wore their skin like a suit.
Over the course of the programme a clear theme emerges: the way trans people are portrayed or erased on screen has a powerful effect on how other people see us, and on how we see ourselves.
It also makes a strong case that the portrayal of trans people as deceptive and disgusting is directly connected to the violence many trans people experience, particularly trans women of colour in North and Central America. In just the last week, my news app has brought stories of three trans women’s murders: one shot in the face multiple times after revealing her trans history; one found dumped by the side of a motorway; and one dismembered and thrown into a river. A cisgender man is in custody accused of her murder and mutilation.
I cried quite a lot watching this, and for me there were two scenes in particular I wish everyone could see. The first is a simple montage showing some – not all, but some – of the films where a man’s discovery that a woman he liked was trans caused him to vomit, something that started in The Crying Game and was then amplified sadistically in many comedy shows and films; and the second is Jen Richards trying not to cry as she talks about how her family told her she would only be welcome if she did not come as herself.
It’s the sensation that’s sweeping the nation: posting puerile Photoshops of Brendan O’Neill’s big stupid head every time Spiked runs one of his big stupid articles.
The Brendan O’Neill forehead meme is perfect – one of the few perfect memes this year has produced (as er, Esquire of all places has correctly pointed out). Formally, it works because – a bit like the Galaxy Brain meme – it has the scope to get exponentially ever-more ridiculous, as O’Neill’s forehead expands to become larger than the Hindenburg; larger than most skyscrapers; larger than the Earth itself. Recent attempts by O’Neill, clearly rattled by the meme, to shield his head with a hat have been easily incorporated – who knows where it might go next.
…[By] refusing to take O’Neill seriously, and turning him into a figure of fun. It responds to his unreason exactly as it should be responded to: with some (much more playful and funny) nonsense of its own. There is no point engaging with this clown, the Forehead Meme communicates, he must be mocked and scorned from public life.
Morgan Spurlock in a promotional image for Super Size Me (2004)
Have you ever wondered why so much news output is junk?
It’s because of the big board.
As journalist Mic Wright explains, the big board was popularised by Nick Denton of Gawker media. It’s a big screen that everybody in the newsroom can see, and it shows you in real time which stories are getting the most attention.
What Gawker did a decade ago is commonplace in newsrooms now, because most media outlets have become dependent on traffic-based advertising revenue. As a result every significant media outlet pays close attention to its traffic: “which reporters/writers/columnists are killing it and whose stuff is absolutely eating dirt,” as Wright puts it.
And sadly, it’s usually the lowest-quality content that’s killing it. Â You can see that for yourself: while media outlets don’t let you see their big board, many of them do show you what content is the most read (and often, most shared and/or most commented on).
In 2011, Nick Denton explained that this system worked really well for everything but “the worthy topics”: “Nobody wants to eat the boring vegetables. Nor [do advertisers] want to pay to encourage people to eat their vegetables.”
He was right, and the food comparison is a good one: many of us would much rather eat Big Macs than broccoli, and the stats show that we are similarly drawn to unhealthy news output: the dogwhistling columnists, the manufactured outrage, the reinforcement of prejudice, idiocy rather than analysis.
But the downside is the same too. As Morgan Spurlock demonstrated in Super Size Me just before the big board became a newsroom staple, there are terrible consequences to consuming a diet made mainly of junk.
The UK government’s plans to roll back trans rights suffered a setback this week when tens of thousands of cisgender women emailed the Prime Minister to say “not in my name”. I don’t believe for a moment that the plans have been dropped – as today’s Guardian notes, Dominic Cummings was focus-grouping trans rights in the Autumn as a topic the conservatives can use to attack Labour – but it was a welcome reminder that anti-trans voices do not speak for most women.
Poke a prejudice, almost any prejudice, and pretty quickly the conversation goes straight down the toilet. Those opposed to civil rights, LGBTQ rights and the Equal Rights Amendment all have historically boiled their bigotry down to some wild-eyed fear about what equality in any form will mean to the state of our public restrooms. Black people peeing with white people, men with women, straight people with gays people, trans with cis — oh, the horror, the horror.
As I’ve written before, the difference between the mainstream US media and the mainstream UK media is dramatic. Last night BBC’s Newsnight – which previously gave extensive coverage to an anti-trans piece in the BMJ without revealing that the article it was covering was written by the journalists who were covering it – once again decided to scaremonger about trans teens’ healthcare by getting the same journalists to essentially tell the same story again.
There was lots of scary music and lurid claims from conveniently anonymous sources, but no time to explain how the system currently works. Coincidentally, knowing how the system actually works is at odds with scary tales of children being railroaded at high speed into irreversible treatment.
The parent of a trans kid detailed the process in the I Paper last year, when waiting lists were shorter – they were 20 months for a first appointment then; it’s now 27 months and climbing.
Once you are seen for the first time, there follows a lengthy assessment process, involving a minimum of six appointments with two psychologists who assess and challenge the child over a period of at least six months, often stretching to years in limbo. Each appointment is a lost day of education and work, with long journeys to London, a second Gids centre in Leeds, or a handful of satellite clinics.
If this long assessment period is ever concluded, “hormone blockers†may be prescribed. These are designed to pause puberty, which allows the young person time to reflect on their gender. The medication is well understood, considered reversible, and has been used safely for nearly 30 years for transgender young people and considerably longer for treating early onset puberty.
Given the timing, it seems rather suspicious that Newsnight chose this of all weeks to reheat the same innuendo from what looks very much like a mendacious campaign. But it appears to have had the desired effect, with endless commenters on Newsnight’s social media comparing trans healthcare providers to Dr Mengele, claiming that this is a scandal akin to Thalidomide and describing an NHS facility as a “child abuse clinic”.
You may recall similar rhetoric being used before people started bombing abortion clinics or taking assault rifles to pizza parlours in the belief that Hilary Clinton was skinning babies in the basement.
Something happened in Glasgow’s George Square last night.
Tale #1: two rival groups of protesters clashed. One group was there to “protect statues” from vandalism.
Tale #2: more than 200 far-right loyalist goons set out to attack a peaceful pro-immigration protest, assaulting protesters, passers-by and the police.
Both tales are true, but they’re framed very differently and effectively describe two different cities.
The first one has appeared in multiple media outlets.
The second description is the real one.
The far-right thugs shouting racist and sectarian slurs – “Fenian bastards” was a favourite, judging by the videos I’ve seen – and sieg-heiling in our streets, the people who just days ago assaulted non-white people and young women in similar scenes, were not counter-protesters and were not there to protect statues. They were coordinated by the National Defence League, the successor to the SDL, a group of fascist clowns who go out intending to inflict violence. Their social media is plastered with the Red Hand of Ulster and the Union Flag, acronyms such as FTP and all the usual far-right tropes.
To suggest, as some media outlets have done, that they were in any way equivalent to the gentle, joyful, anti-eviction protesters whose event they deliberately targeted isn’t balance. It’s false equivalence.
I joked on Twitter last night that the bigots “need to work on their messaging: if they claimed to have ‘reasonable concerns’ about ‘statue erasure’, The Herald would give them a column”. But there’s some truth in it. Whether it’s sectarian hooligans or more genteel bigotry, false equivalence is very dangerous.
False equivalence doesn’t just mislead people about the story. It prevents progress. How can you take action against vicious, violent bigots if you won’t admit that there are vicious, violent bigots in the first place?
There is no doubt that people have been radicalised by the internet, and by this particularly horrible corner of it. There are just too many cases like Slyman’s, where we can see, in the pattern of YouTube likes, Facebook groups and Twitter follows, someone entering the funnel at one end – watching Jordan Peterson videos, or listening to the Joe Rogan Experience – and then, six months or a year later, fully “red-pilled”, accusing Hilary Clinton of child murder or calling for a second civil-war in the US.
(One particularly curious thing about this as a Brit is that that’s even the journey of radicalisation of much of the UK far right. God knows we have our own pathways too – with Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins playing major parts – but the number of Trump t-shirts and MAGA hats at British fascist gatherings is wild.)
But in this case, six days just feels too quick for the normal radicalisation narrative to fit.
Hern asks a frightening question: what if the algorithms that push content to us can push us over the edge?
if YouTube’s recommendation algorithm had learned to recognise the signs of someone on the edge of a psychotic break, and had learned that if you show them a lot of QAnon videos at that stage in their life engagement goes through the roof, what would be different from the tale we’ve just heard?
We’re still not taking the problem of online radicalisation seriously enough. Part of it is human, where extremists use cult tactics to recruit people to their cause and create echo chambers of increasingly extreme ideology. But a great deal of it is automated, and that automation not only rewards extremism but promotes it to the people least able to sort fact from lurid fiction.
Five days after he watches his first Q video, he is live-streaming his belief that the local radio station is sending him coded messages from Q. Later that day, the song You Spin Me Round by Dead Or Alive convinces him the Deep State is coming to kill him, and he gets in the car with his wife and kids and begins his drive.
It’s been interesting to compare the US and UK press reaction to JK Rowling’s blog post about trans people: in the US it’s been met with widespread revulsion, with many opinion pieces by cisgender women outraged by her claims to speak on their behalf. It’s also led many publishers to commission trans women to talk about their experiences. This, by former Human Rights Campaign press secretary Charlotte Clymer, is particularly good.
Clymer says she finds it hard to believe Rowling’s claim that she “knows trans people”. As she writes:
Folks who have trans people in their lives — and actually care about them — know how much trans people generally go out of their way to accommodate cisgender people.
As Clymer is quick to admit, trans people are no more of a monolith than any other group. But very many of those of us who are out will relate to her experiences of the “fairly common actions we take just to be in the public square and avoid risking violence and discrimination from cisgender people.”
I haven’t been to the gym since I came out.
Nor me, even though there’s a really good and really cheap council-run facility just around the corner from my flat. I haven’t been swimming either, bar on one foreign holiday with my kids (during which I was yelled at by a woman at the beach).
I’m terrified of changing rooms because of the possibility of confrontation.
When I travel out of state, I look up nondiscrimination protections for where I’m going, including airport layovers.
I don’t travel much, but I did a lot of research before the aforementioned foreign holiday and had to rule out multiple destinations because they aren’t LGBT-friendly. If it means going solo I don’t typically consider gigs or events that aren’t in my own town any more, because I’m increasingly worried about my safety if I venture far from home. And at home I’m careful not to travel by public transport if there are big events such as football matches or concerts by particularly laddish musicians taking place. I’ve left many events early to ensure I’m not getting the late bus or train home.
[if] there’s a long line to use a public restroom, I usually walk away if I can help it
I do this too. There have been nights out where my fear of confrontation has outweighed significant physical discomfort. Before lockdown I’d be very careful not to drink too much at gigs so I could avoid having to use the toilets at all.
Even in places where we have legal protections, I worry about being a burden. I don’t want to cause headaches. I have faced discrimination in places where it was illegal and let it go because I wasn’t sure whether it was worth it. And I feel terrible about that. I feel guilty.
Transgender and nonbinary people are constantly adjusting and revolving our lives around the preferences and feelings of cisgender people, not because we want to do that but because there aren’t enough hours in the day to fight every battle and not enough rights to guarantee our safety.
I’d describe it as walking on eggshells but perhaps tiptoeing through a minefield is a better analogy: stepping on an eggshell isn’t going to harm you.
