Are the Ku Klux Klan racist? According to the Klan, they are not. They just have reasonable concerns about white people’s rights. As they put it in their flyers:

“Why can’t pro-white rights organizations exist without being labeled racist?”

As the Anti-Defamation League explains, the flyers are part of a strategy to “normalise white supremacy”: members no longer wear their robes and hoods and they dissociate themselves from violence. They claim that the fact that their followers are viciously racist is just a coincidence and nothing to do with them. “Members want to be able to express their white pride without being branded white supremacists – members prefer the term white separatists.” They argue that the rights of “other races” negatively affect theirs.

What the KKK is trying to do is to rebrand itself, and part of that is to attempt to redefine what racism means. In their definition, racism basically comes down to lynchings and burning crosses: if you’re not actively doing them, you can’t be a racist organisation.

That, of course, is  bullshit. And it’s why we don’t let white racists define what racism is or isn’t, because their definition excludes pretty much all forms of racism. Hate groups don’t get to define what is and isn’t hatred.

Let’s go back to that statement from the KKK flyer and change two words.

“Why can’t pro-women’s rights organizations exist without being labeled transphobic?”

All the anti-trans hate groups claim that they aren’t transphobic. And that’s true, if your definition of transphobia excludes almost every form of transphobia, including your own past actions.

In many cases, the high-profile anti-trans groups were co-founded by viciously transphobic people. Some now claim that their previously abusive anti-trans social media was run by the previous administration, with whom they now have no connection. Others pretend that their founding meetings featuring people calling trans women “parasites” and “bastards” who deserved violence and mocking trans women’s appearances never happened. And others’ bigoted founders – people who publicly called trans women “sick fucks” and claimed Jewish conspiracies – have conveniently died. They no longer wear their robes and hoods and they dissociate themselves from violence. The fact that many of their followers are abusive on social media is just a coincidence and nothing to do with them.

The one thing that really annoys hate groups is when people rightly call them hate groups. And as the UnCommon Sense blog explains in detail, many of these groups clearly function as hate groups.

A hate group is:

“…an organisation that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

As Buzzfeed’s Patrick Strudwick put it, these groups are telling us:

We’re not transphobic, we just think you’re a danger to children, women, society, lesbians, gay men, feminism, yourselves, and should be excluded from everywhere we decide you shouldn’t be, and should be denied treatment, demonised, pathologised, ridiculed and debated endlessly.

What’s hateful about that, apart from all of it?

The former deputy editor of the New Statesman, now of The Atlantic, posted this to Twitter:

There’s a lesson there, but it’s not the one Lewis thinks it is.

The reason the GRA wasn’t turned into “culture war fuel” wasn’t anything to do with the Blair government. It was because we didn’t have people spending the best part of two years writing endless articles and constantly going on BBC programmes to talk about how it would redefine the word woman, expose children to predators, force children into surgery and all the other nonsense that’s been flying around for the last couple of years.

That’s not to say people didn’t make those claims. They did. One of the most outspoken opponents was Norman Tebbit, who described gender reassignment surgery as a “practice of sexual mutilation” and tried to wreck the GRA in the House of Lords. Politicians raised concerns about redefining the very meaning of men and women, about trans women dominating women’s sport and about having trans women in female prisons. Tebbit even invoked the spectre of child killer Ian Huntley. Made-up stories about Huntley supposedly transitioning have been used to argue against GRA reform now. Politicians also claimed that trans people were merely suffering from “a serious psychological problem” and that the GRA would bring us into “a dark future of coerced totalitarian-style law making.”

What’s different today is the media. While the same things were said about the GRA then as about GRA reform now, they weren’t amplified and repeated by the press again and again over a period of years. We didn’t have social media and its troll armies, or publications more interested in garnering web traffic than accurate reporting, or current affairs programmes that considered their mission to deliver “a shot of adrenaline” instead of present facts. That’s the lesson.

The other point, that the Blair government deserves credit for its introduction, isn’t true either. The Blair government didn’t introduce the Gender Recognition Act because it wanted to. It did it because it had to, because it was breaking the law. In 2002, the European Court of Human rights ruled that refusing to change a trans person’s birth certificate was a breach of their rights under Article 8 and Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The government’s defeat in Goodwin v UK was a key reason for the introduction of the Act.

Blair doesn’t deserve credit; trans people didn’t create or propagate this culture war.

Incidentally, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 effectively undid the damage caused by an older court case, Corbett v Corbett, in 1971. That set back trans rights a great deal because a millionaire, Arthur Corbett, wanted to divorce his wife, April Ashley, without giving her any of his money. By arguing successfully that Ashley, a successful female model, was not and could never be a woman – that penetrative vaginal sex with her didn’t count because her vagina wasn’t there at birth – Corbett was able to get the marriage annulled. Before Corbett v Corbett trans people’s birth certificates were generally changed on the quiet; afterwards, trans people could be and were outed by people in positions of authority, often with awful consequences for their lives and careers.

[Content note: suicide]

Last night I stepped off a stage and ended up in 1971.

My brother and I were the featured act at an open mic night I’ve played at many times before, a mix of musicians and comedians. It’s fun, although inevitably you have to put up with the odd person whose pub pals have told him he’s hilarious and who really isn’t. Last night’s example of that was the old man who got up on stage after our (fantastic, if I say so myself) performance.

I’ve seen him before. He’s a peddler of seventies-variety “take my wife, please” jokes with a whiff of misogyny to them. Last night the whiff became a stench. His new material is about lap dancing, his horror of women who groom their pubic hair, and in a piece he’s clearly very proud of, a horrible nightmare in which a beautiful woman turns out to be “a ladyboy”.

He isn’t the only stand-up to decide trans jokes are where it’s at. Last night, popular US stand-up Dan Telfer wrote on Twitter:

I am so fucking sick of transphobic jokes at stand-up open mics. It is absolutely everywhere and comedians who pretend it‘s not are in denial. There is nothing awkward or yucky to joke about here, cis folks. Take a long hard look at your bullshit shock jokes, for fucking serious.

it clearly touched a nerve: the post has been liked by 31.4 thousand people so far. Lots of comedians are doing the same stale jokes like it’s 1971.

Nobody’s saying you can’t make trans jokes. I did last night, on the very same stage between songs, and got some big laughs. But if your punchline is “Ugh! Trans!” then you’re a hack.

Last night’s hack didn’t have any new spin to offer, no hilarious take: his joke was that he had a dream, there was a sexy woman in it, she was trans. The expectation was that the room would share his disgust, but it didn’t and he died on his arse. Judging by the daggers he was looking at me later, he blamed me for that.

Good. I usually hate seeing comics die on stage, no matter how bad they are, but this was thoroughly deserved. I had to sit ten feet away – our table was at the very front – from a man who hoped to mine laughs from sharing his horror of bodies like mine. Imagine how it feels to sit through that, to feel every pair of eyes in the room turn to look at you as it becomes clear what the punchline is going to be. Those feelings linger long after the hack has come off stage.

“Ugh, trans” isn’t a punchline. It’s a punch down. The idea of trans people deceiving straight men is so commonly used as an excuse for violence and sexual violence against us that there’s a name for it: the trans panic defence. The idea that trans people are disgusting, horrific, worthy of nothing but contempt – a trope that is still very common, especially in comedy – keeps many of us in the closet and continues to harm us when we’re out of it. If the world keeps telling you you’re a monster, it’s hard not to believe it.

When I got home from the gig last night, I read a long blog post by another Scottish trans woman, Becca, roughly the same age as me. “After six years of being on hormones and presenting completely female, I am still getting misgendered far too frequently and as the years have gone by, the sheer hopelessness of it all has finally sunk in,” she wrote. “I would honestly rather be dead than seen as a ‘man in a dress’.”

It was a scheduled post, timed to go live hours after it has been written. By the time it was published, Becca had stepped in front of a train.