The New York Times has done what the UK press has refused to do: it’s exposed disgraced Observer and Private Eye columnist Nick Cohen as an alleged predator.

Cohen has written multiple articles and posts accusing trans women of being a danger to women while, according to the NYT, sexually harassing multiple women. When the NYT put the allegations to him, he claimed it was a stitch-up by the Russians and trans people.

Cohen’s behaviour was apparently an open secret in media circles: he had the nickname “The Octopus” and many women journalists have said other women warned them about him. The publications that knew about the allegations but chose not to expose him included those notable “we must protect women” publications The Guardian and The Observer – who let him go amid much secrecy – and Private Eye.

It’s interesting, and predictable, to see who’s rushing to defend him. In a now-deleted tweet, former Guardian/Observer anti-trans columnist (now Times anti-trans columnist) and long-time Woody Allen defender Hadley Freeman was quick to excuse his serial harassment on the grounds that he was probably drunk when he did it, which makes it all okay, and anyway he said sorry. It’s a good example of Freeman’s tendency to write what she’d like to be true rather than what’s actually true: some of the allegations refer to harassment that he did long after he stopped drinking, and he hasn’t said he’s sorry.

And also on Twitter, @euanyours is providing a list with citations of the “protect women” crowd who rushed to Cohen’s defence when Good Law Project head Jolyon Maugham attempted to get people to believe women. That list includes a who’s who of very high profile anti-trans voices of the I’m So Silenced variety. If they regularly appear in the right-wing press, they’re in the list.

Mark Berry on Twitter:

The glee with which trans people – including me – are sharing the story is for a simple reason: it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-trans journalism, which may pretend to be about protecting women but which has no interest in protecting women from actual sexual predators. People who have written multiple columns about the need to remove human rights from entire marginalised groups to “protect women and girls” are on the side of the abusers, not the abused. And that’s because the so-called gender critical movement has never been about protecting anybody from anything; it’s about eliminating trans people from society.

Also on Twitter, @scriblit puts it beautifully:

Look at the photo, then the headline, then back at the photo. What kind of person do you think the police are cuffing?

That’s right! A far-right, anti-trans, “gender critical” thug!

But of course, that’s not what you’re supposed to see here. The Telegraph, very deliberately, is encouraging you to think that this is a trans person or ally. It isn’t. He’s a former member of the neo-nazi EDL, a thug who turned up in support of Kellie-Jay Keen’s anti-trans rally. Maybe he was there to offer a nuanced critique of the works of Judith Butler, as far-right thugs so love to do. Or maybe he just wanted to crack some trans kids’ heads. It’s a mystery!

The Telegraph knows what it’s doing and what he is, but it wants some of those sweet, sweet anti-trans clicks that it seems so dependent on lately. And now the far-right media ecosystem has burst into life and will forever circulate the photo as supposed proof of how violent trans people are.

This isn’t journalism. It’s hatemongering. And if you write to the press regulator to complain, you’ll be told that it isn’t breaking any rules. And that’s true, because the rules don’t exist to protect the public; they exist to protect newspaper proprietors.

I’ve written many times about the asymmetry of trans coverage: of the hundreds of stories and items published and broadcast about trans people every week, hardly any of them feature trans people or allies and most platform anti-trans activists, often misleadingly presenting them as ordinary mums or feminists with “reasonable concerns”. So you’d think that when trans people are given a platform, we’d gladly take it.

Nope.

With very, very few exceptions I stopped accepting invitations to talk about trans issues more than a year ago after it became very apparent that I was being set up. The best I could hope for was the chance to listen to an anti-trans fanatic spouting lies that I would only be given 30 seconds to try and counter; sometimes I would be ambushed, only told when I went on air that the item I’d been asked to come on was actually an excuse for someone from Spiked to talk shite about trans people for almost all of it. I’m much more cynical now, and on a few occasions I’ve listened to items I’ve declined to appear on and had my fears confirmed: mostly they’re intended to titillate, not educate; gladiatorial battles where the trans person is the Christian.

It’s easy to fall for this stuff, though. Media people are so nice, and they’ll tell you how important it is for your voice to be heard, and how keen they are to show the real story. And then they put you in a room with a bunch of pissed bigots shouting “penis!” at you.

You’d think I made that one up, but no. In May 2018, Channel 4 aired a programme called “Genderquake: The Debate”. It wasn’t a debate; it was more like an episode of Jerry Springer or Jerry Kyle. The trans participants were shouted down by an audience that appeared to be a bunch of pissed bigots; it later transpired that the audience was a bunch of pissed bigots. Posting on Mumsnet, audience member Posie Parker – yes, the same Posie Parker of “Adult Human Female” fame, an avowed anti-feminist who runs anti-trans events popular with neo-nazis – said that “we were repeatedly encouraged to heckle” by Channel 4’s floor manager. Professor Stephen Whittle, a trans man who was also in the audience, confirmed this.

Sadly it seems that Professor Whittle has been tricked again.

In October 2022, Trans Safety Network – a group of academics and researchers who do great work reporting in depth about trans rights, healthcare and anti-trans activism – posted on Twitter:

We have become aware of a documentary being produced by Brook Lapping Productions, on behalf of Channel 4 that is currently attempting to recruit transgender people and allies to talk about “the trans debate”… [we] are very concerned at reports that the suggestion of including some transgender people on the production crew “wouldn’t be impartial”. We would strongly urge anyone contacted to think about engaging…”

They also shared a document by one person who’d been invited to contribute, a document that laid out their serious concerns about the show.

And those concerns have been proven correct.

Rather than the documentary contributors were told they’d be in, a documentary trying to give a fair account of the trans “debate”, it turns out to be a puff piece about anti-trans activist, academic and author Kathleen Stock that frames trans people as sinister figures hell-bent on silencing the brave professor.

Some of the contributors, including Professor Whittle, have put together a blog about it.

On the documentary you will see many trans & non-binary (TNB) people & their allies. Most will be shown taking part in lawful but noisy protest. Only a few TNB people and one ally will speak, and only one is given any substantial opportunity to speak.

There are some specific complaints about errors and what appears to be false framing of trans people throughout the documentary, which hasn’t been broadcast yet but the contributors have been shown. But the core issue is much more fundamental: the contributors simply weren’t told that they were being invited to contribute to a documentary about Stock, whose views are well known and endlessly publicised in print, online and on radio and TV, and had they known that was the subject they would have refused to have taken part. They may not have been put in front of bigots shouting “penis!” this time, but they were tricked just the same.

In their conclusion, the contributors say:

We took part in good faith hoping to find a way forward. We all had doubts about taking part, but in the end took the production team at their word.  

We were misled and misinformed.

This is horrifically unethical, of course, and it shouldn’t happen. But deception is something trans people and allies are sadly very used to. As Elaine Scattermoon, a trans woman who herself has been tricked by a supposedly friendly journalist, posted on Twitter:

This keeps happening to the extent that most trans people in the UK I know will just refuse to take part in any TV or radio show just because there’s an extremely high chance it’s just a trap and the framing will be used against them. We’re jaded but for good reason.

Have you ever wondered why bigots all seem to recite the same talking points and use the same words? It’s because they’re working to scripts, either literally – many Christian Right groups offer step-by-step guides for you to print out that teach you how to sign up for Twitter, how to post a message and what specific words and phrases to use; some even provide the full tweets, indicating which bit you should personalise – or because they’ve memorised them.

Here are some examples of the anti-trans talking points set out by Heritage Action in the US as it fought against changes to the Title IX legislation. The goal is to demonise trans people in sports, almost all of them in non-elite, school-level sports, one of the key campaigning issues set out by the evangelical right in 2017. I’m going to use a screenshot so you can see how it’s set out.

Isn’t it funny how closely so many newspaper columns follow that template, and how many supposedly objective news items recycle the talking points?

The links are to bullshit, of course, and the one about suicide is particularly repellent: it’s a deliberate distortion of a 2011 Swedish study that found that before 1989, trans people in that country had shitty healthcare that fucked with their mental health (post-89, as healthcare and support improved, there was no increase in suicidality); the study’s author has explicitly condemned the many misrepresentations of their work.

Bigots lie, here’s Dave with the weather. I know. But look at the language. The whole document is about transgender kids, but the word “transgender” is only used twice in the entire thing (the image is just an excerpt). Instead, trans kids are called “male athletes”, “men” and “males”. The intent is to stop you seeing trans kids as the girls and boys they are.

There’s another linguistic trick beloved by bigots and frequently parroted uncritically in media, and that’s to replace “people” with “-ism” or “-ology”. So people will say with a straight face that of course, they support trans people; they’re just against gender ideology. Or of course they don’t want to eliminate trans people; they just want to eliminate “transgenderism”.

Except the only way you can eliminate “transgenderism” is to eliminate trans people.

There’s a more polite version doing the media rounds today, on the anniversary of Section 28’s introduction: a call to “remove pronouns” from schools. But pronouns here is a proxy for trans and non-conforming children; what “removing pronouns from schools” means is bullying trans and gender non-conforming children to try and stop them being trans. I’ve seen many people go for the easy dunk, pointing out the pronouns used by the person who wants to remove pronouns, but that’s falling into the trap: you’re accepting the framing, that the proposal is about stopping an abstract linguistic thing rather than harming actual children. Because harming actual children is the goal.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The escalation from “trans debate” to “trans issue”, “trans problem” and most recently, “trans crisis”; LGBT+ equality being described as a “virus”; the repeated use of “misgendering” in headlines about people who lost their jobs for despicable bullying campaigns or for gross misconduct; Again and again weasel words are used to conceal blatant bigotry, a bigotry that knows it can hide in plain sight behind euphemisms that will be repeated again and again but never challenged.

I’m very scared by this. When you call a marginalised group a “crisis” or a “virus”, when you openly call for the “elimination” of transgenderism, you are following a path we’ve seen countless times before all over the world. Defining marginalised groups as a “problem” inevitably invites a “solution”.

There’s an acronym, DARVO, used to describe the behaviour of abusers: it stands for Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. And the press does it all the time with bigots, as two of today’s news stories demonstrate.

The first story is that the head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is being investigated by a KC over multiple very serious allegations of bullying and harassment of staff. Over 20 members of staff have been interviewed by Channel 4 News, which is going to screen a report about the allegations.

The Daily Mail put it on its front page as “REVEALED: Plot to drive out equality chief who’s standing up for women”.

The second story is about a teacher, Joshua Sutcliff, who was dismissed by two consecutive schools for very serious professional misconduct. He directed pupils to a video he’d made claiming Muhammad was a “false prophet” and to his website that railed against abortion, homosexuality and Islam. He also committed a clear breach of safeguarding rules by talking about a pupil on national television in a way that made the pupil clearly identifiable. That alone is enough reason to fire him and prevent him from working with children ever again.

The Telegraph has reported this as “Teacher who ‘misgendered’ pupil banned from profession”. The details of what he was actually banned for – multiple cases of unacceptable professional conduct with no remorse or apology – are hidden behind a paywall, so most people won’t see them. As is so often the case with extremist bullies, he is represented by the Christian Legal Centre. [Update, 24 hours later: the teacher is now appearing on TV claiming that “all sin” – adultery, homosexuality etc – “deserves the death penalty.” Nice guy!]

One of the problems with this kind of thing isn’t just that it’s a complete reversal of reality. It’s that so much of the broadcast news agenda is dictated by the press, and in particular by articles like these. So there will be phone-ins about the woke mob coming after the equalities chair, and about a teacher getting the boot for a mere one-off misgendering, when neither of those things are true. But they won’t be corrected, and the broadcasters will spread the DARVO more widely. And so the moral panic continues.

There was a very odd front page story in the Washington Post a few days ago: after months and months of polls showing that most people supported trans rights and were against anti-trans legislation, the WSJ ran with a story headlined “Most in US back GOP’s anti-trans policies.”

The article goes on to say “Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children”.

But they don’t, as the WSJ’s own article details. Parker Molloy explains that in the only poll question asking specifically about trans policies:

the overwhelming majority of people who responded said that they support laws protecting trans people from discrimination.

It’s quite an achievement to take your own poll and misrepresent it to your readers. But unfortunately that’s where we are now, and where we’ve been for some time: for example the recent furore over a trans woman running in the London Marathon, a race that after a certain level becomes a charity fun run for most participants, is now consistently reported as a trans woman beating 14,000 women competitors rather than a trans woman coming in 6,160th and raising £37,000 for charities. And as a result, I think polls will start to show a move towards anti-trans sentiment among the public, due largely to constant lying in newspapers, online and broadcast media.

We now have a human centipede of hate, where anti-trans politicians feed anti-trans news stories which feed anti-trans columns which feed anti-trans politicians which feed… and the result is an ever more dangerous climate for trans people of all ages. Because while everybody pretends that this is only about protecting children, it never was – and the legislation proposed on such grounds, whether it’s the Don’t Say Gay law or laws against gender-affirming healthcare, are soon expanded to include teenagers and then adults too. Because the goal of the anti-trans movement is our elimination.

As ever this isn’t scaremongering or misinterpretation; it’s what US legislators and UK anti-trans activists say openly, and in the terrorism they inspire: yesterday’s US mass shooter claimed to be inspired by hateful anti-trans account Libs of TikTok and was deeply enmeshed in anti-trans, anti-women, anti-LGBT+ forums (Libs of TikTok quietly removed the “stochastic terrorist” description from her Twitter bio last night when it proved to be too accurate).

Molloy:

The authors of that Washington Post piece — a piece that gleefully described their own poll (which, again, found that the majority of adults support legal protections for trans people in all areas of life) as “offering political jet fuel for Republicans in state legislatures and Congress” — have blood on their hands. The same is true for the many people who saw this before it went to print and decided to slap it on the front page of the paper: blood on their hands. Their goal is clear: to increase anti-trans sentiment among the public and to advance anti-trans policies.

Like Molloy, I’m sick of this; as I wrote yesterday, it’s been more than six years now of daily scaremongering and hate. But many people are still completely unaware of what’s happening on a legislative level both here and in the UK, and part of that is groupthink and slanted reporting; a new study of UK journalists reports that LGBT+ journalists are experiencing a hostile environment where online and sometimes real-world abuse affects their ability to do their jobs, and the editorial stance of almost all UK mainstream media is firmly and often viciously anti-trans. So if we don’t talk about it, who will?

Molloy:

Just leave us alone, you horrible people. We’re human beings.

I should be annoyingly happy right now. I’m doing another book festival this weekend, and the day after I’m off to London for the British Book Awards where I’m shortlisted for Discover Book of the Year – quite exciting given that I wasn’t sure anyone would want to read my book, let alone enjoy it. And there are some other things I can’t tell you about yet that are even more fun.

All things considered, I should be a Tigger, bouncing around with excitement and driving everybody around me up the wall. But I’m not. Instead, every day feels like a slog and it’s getting harder and harder to stay positive. And that’s because every single day since I came out as trans, I’ve been subject to a war of attrition waged against trans people by bigots and their friends in the press.

That’s over six years now. Six years of the same old slurs, the same old “just asking questions”, the same long-debunked statistics and long-debunked talking points. And yet it never stops. Just yesterday, The Observer let Sonia Sodha write her weekly column about how anything bad in the news – in this case, the police arresting republican protesters at the Coronation – is all the fault of trans people. It’d be funny if it weren’t a weekly occurrence not just in the Observer but in pretty much every other paper too. The Daily Mail alone is currently running over 100 anti-trans articles a month, up from 6 a month in 2013. The Times, The Herald, The Scotsman, The Telegraph, The Express and others appear to have full-time anti-trans columnists now.

It’s relentless, and of course it has an effect in the streets: according to the Home Office, anti-trans hate crime has risen from under 500 cases in 2011/12 to nearly 4,500 in 2020/21. I have no doubt the next set of figures will be even worse.

The constant flood of bad news and of anti-trans talking points across what feels like every single media outlet has a debilitating effect on people, to the point where some of the highest profile trans people I followed when I first came out have abandoned social media: blocking bigots is a constant game of whack-a-mole, a massive time sink and a huge drain on your mental health.

Which is the point. As the late Toni Morrison famously said about racism, its function is distraction.

It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing”.

Reflecting on Morrison’s words, author and former TV reporter Aminatta Forna writes on the Luminato Festival website:

The very first time I read these words, I knew them to be true. I was in my late twenties, working as a television reporter. I was being pushed and resisting being pushed into reporting the same story, over and over – the story of white people’s, specifically, British white people’s racism. At first I regarded this, at least in part, my duty. It didn’t take long for the hidden fallacy to reveal itself. I was being asked to explain, not to black people who knew plenty, but to white people who I was being asked to pretend were oblivious to the fact of it. 

At a time where in the US trans people are having their healthcare removed, their right to exist in public removed, the safety of their children threatened, the press is full of “are trans activists too unreasonable?” by writers pretending to be oblivious to what’s happening. And with the architect of that cruelty Ron DeSantis greeted like a god by UK equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who DeSantis says wants to emulate what he’s doing in Florida, these endless articles and social media posts are deliberate distractions.

I’ve written many times that the line between anti-trans and anti-semite is often very blurry; some of the highest profile members of the anti-trans movement, and some of the highest profile anti-trans books, claim that “transgenderism” is a Jewish conspiracy. So it’s worth reminding ourselves of Sartre’s comments about anti-semites:

“They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”