Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Money for nothing

    Interesting developments at the LGB Alliance, the newly launched anti-trans group. It’s managed to raise over £25,000 in largely anonymous donations in just 11 days of existence, largely due to support from right-wing media here and in the US.

    The right-wing press and the US religious right like the Alliance because while it advances the same argument as the most hateful religious conservatives – trans people’s rights are at odds with LGB people’s rights, even though the majority of trans people are themselves LGB; trans people aren’t really people and don’t deserve human rights; trans people are icky – its figureheads are a black woman and a gay man. That means unlike straight white guys, they can’t be criticised because there have been no wicked, misinformed or bigoted black or gay people in the history of the world ever.

    The right-wing support has no doubt helped the fundraising, as it’s helped other anti-trans fundraisers in the past. But it’s interesting to look at this particular one, because this is very specifically claiming to be an alliance of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the UK.

    So why are so many of the supporters straight people from North America?

    Don’t get me wrong. It’s lovely to see so many straight people such keen allies of LGB people and putting their money where their mouths are.

    But it’s also rather strange.

    There are lots of fundraisers online for LGBT things. And almost all of them are struggling to meet their targets, whether that’s a few hundred quid for a poster campaign or a few grand to do up an LGBT+ community centre.

    What all those fundraisers have in common is the distinct lack of straight Americans and Canadians offering solidarity and throwing their money at them.

    But when a couple of people in the UK start a group designed to destabilise Stonewall, the trans-inclusive LGBT+ charity named after the Stonewall riots that were in part started by trans people, it’s a different story.

    Why would straight people from the US and Canada be so passionate about destabilising the UK’s main LGBT+ charity?

    If only there were some kind of explanation.

    Anyway. £25K and counting. That’s a lot of money. Where’s it going? It isn’t a charity yet so it doesn’t need to tell you.

    Here’s where it isn’t going. It isn’t going to help homeless LGB people, who – including trans kids – account for 24% of the UK’s under-25 homeless population. It isn’t going to lobby for proper funding of live-saving PReP medication for gay and bi men (and some trans women). It isn’t going anywhere near any cash-strapped LGBT organisations at all. It’s going on marketing, and on salaries, and on a launch event that will no doubt scaremonger about trans people.

    It’s possible that the £25, 257 and counting is being donated by people who are also donating to other organisations – real ones that are registered charities. But it’s unlikely. Anti-trans crowdfunders consistently attract a very different funding pattern from other charity crowdfunders, and this appears to be no exception.

    For two years now the crowdfunders of anti-trans organisations have all followed the same pattern: supposedly grassroots organisations raising five-figure sums within days of going online, with promotional support from the US Christian and conservative right on social media and sometimes in major publications too.

    The LGB Alliance has now raised its funding target from the initial £25,000 to £50,000. How much of that money will go to provide practical assistance for LGB people rather than demonising trans women? The answer, I suspect, is none.

    We know how this will play out. We know this because we saw endless “protect women!” crowdfunders raising five-figure sums incredibly quickly over the last few years. That money didn’t go to fight for Northern Irish women’s reproductive freedom or marriage rights. It didn’t go to fight FGM, or fund rape crisis charities, or help women’s refuges, or go to any vulnerable women or girls.

    At least a quarter of a million pounds was raised by a handful of anti-trans groups, and much of it was spent on newspaper adverts that lied about the law, on packs urging schools to break the Equality Act and bully children, and on providing a good living for people whose previous careers had ended in failure. In one case it even bought a bigot some bedding.

    Some crowdfunders didn’t even pretend to be about protecting women. One prominent anti-trans activist crowdfunded £2,000 for her own living expenses because being a bigot is so time-consuming; another, claiming to have lost their job for speaking out about trans people, raised a barely believable £64,000 for nothing in particular.

    Others raised money for specific purposes and then changed their remit, so for example one activist raised a five-figure sum to pay for legal representation in a case that didn’t then go to court. In one particularly egregious example, activists set up a crowdfunder as a thank you to a notorious anti-trans bigot; when the bigot declined to accept the money, much of it was spent on a new mattress for an anti-trans activist.

    Not all of the people running crowdfunders are grifters. But as a rule of thumb, when the first thing someone does to “protect group X” is to ask for your money, it means they’re only interested in helping one very specific group of people.

    Themselves.

  • Not all hate preachers have beards

    Imagine if members of the Scottish Parliament invited leading far-right “race realist” figures to address the parliament about The Great Replacement, the white nationalist conspiracy theory. They would tell MSPs about how political and social elites were harming ordinary white men and women by encouraging immigration. They would claim that this global conspiracy, a conspiracy many of their followers blame the Jews for funding, will render white people powerless, and they would advocate for the rollback of decades-old equality legislation so that black and brown people would not be entitled to protection from discrimination or hate crimes.

    Would they get away with it?

    Of course they wouldn’t. But swap brown people for trans ones and that’s exactly what MSP Joan McAlpine is doing.

    To mark International Trans Day of Remembrance, which mourns trans people murdered as a result of anti-trans hatred, McAlpine is hosting a bigot party that’s going to stir up even more hatred. That appears to be its entire purpose. Various “gender critical” extremists are going to tell MSPs that political and social elites are harming ordinary women by encouraging “transgenderism”. They will claim that this global conspiracy, which their followers often blame the Jews for funding, will render cisgender people powerless, and they will advocate for the rollback of decades-old equality legislation that protects trans people from discrimination and hate crimes.

    McAlpine, a former member of disgraced former First Minister Alex Salmond’s inner circle, appears to be one of several SNP figures who are using transphobia as a wedge and trans people as collateral damage in their attempts to undermine Nicola Sturgeon.

    But her position, and the people she’s platforming, have become much more extreme. What began with disingenuous assertions about “reasonable concerns” regarding the Gender Recognition Act has become what appears to be the very deliberate, malicious platforming of hate speech.

    This latest event is to promote a “Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights”, a declaration that’s entirely about trying to remove fifty years of protections for trans people. It is not about the Gender Recognition Act of “reasonable concerns” fame, which would be bad enough. It’s about trying to roll back the Equality Act of 2010 and pretty much any relevant protections introduced since the 1970s.

    And women’s rights organisations can see right through it.

    Here’s Emma Ritch, director of the Engender feminist organisation.

    This declaration… doesn’t include women’s rights to housing, pay equality, access to justice, social security, education, or political representation. When it talks about violence against women, freedom of expression, and children’s rights it does so entirely through the warped lens of antipathy towards trans people.

    CommonSpace has spoken to all the major Scottish women’s groups, and their view is the same. As a spokesperson for Scottish Women’s Aid put it:

    We are worried that some of the debate around trans inclusion has blurred the line between free speech and hate speech.

    Here’s Christine Burns MBE, one of the people who helped create the Gender Recognition Act.

    Let’s not beat about the bush: Elements within the SNP are advocating a policy on trans people that not only contravenes a unanimous judgement of the European Court of Human Rights in 2002 but suggests ignoring administrative principles established since 1970.

    And here’s the Scottish Equality Network:

    A “Declaration” recently circulated to MSPs says that trans people should always be treated, for all purposes (legal and otherwise) as the sex that they were registered at birth. That would breach the European Convention on Human Rights, and breach UK and EU equality law.

    The speakers at McAlpine’s event will include Sheila Jeffreys, a lesbian separatist who isn’t very keen on bisexual people or straight women and who has claimed that trans people – who she calls “parasites” – are part of a government-sponsored plot to enforce gender stereotypes and wipe out homosexuality, because that’s a completely reasonable and not batshit insane thing to say. She bases this on Iran, where – according to her – cisgender gay men are transitioning to become women in incredible numbers because it’s easier to be trans than gay.

    As Wikipedia notes: “The belief that cisgender homosexuals have actually undergone sex change due to social pressure is not supported by evidence.”

    Here’s a typically measured, sensible, reasonable bit from Jeffreys where she advocates making it illegal, globally, for trans people to have gender confirmation surgery:

    Janice Raymond does not consider that legislation outlawing surgery is the right way forward. I am not so sure, and classifying transsexualism as a human rights violation would be a step towards making surgery illegal.

    – Journal of Lesbian Studies, p71, Vol 1, 1997

    Note the date. Jeffreys has been banging her hateful gong for decades.

    Jeffreys and her fellow speakers, inevitably, are the supposedly silenced free thinkers who talk endlessly about how they’re being prevented from sharing their crackpot conspiracy theories about trans people as they share their crackpot conspiracy theories about trans people in their books, in their lectures, in their national newspaper interviews and in their national broadcast interviews. And now, they’re getting to share their crackpot conspiracy theories about trans people in Parliament.

    The CommonSpace piece does a good job of showing the big picture, but the rest of Scots media almost certainly won’t: the Herald, the Scotsman and The National, as well as the tabloids, have followed London’s lead and consistently amplified anti-trans extremists.

    They have effectively silenced not just trans people and LGBT+ groups, but also the many women’s groups who recognise hatred when they see it.

  • Lies, dame lies

    The president of actors’ union Equity has written to The Sunday Mirror about its story claiming “men could be banned from playing panto dames to free up the roles for trans performers”.

    Guess what? It’s bullshit.

    Here’s her letter.

  • When people show you who they are, believe them

    There’s a famous quote by Maya Angelou: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

    It means that when someone shows you a clear red flag, you shouldn’t ignore it. Someone who disrespects you will continue to be disrespectful. Someone who is violent will continue to be violent. Someone who is hateful will continue to be hateful.

    So I’m not joining in today’s surprise that Rod Liddle has written another hateful, racist piece for the hateful, racist Spectator. Liddle showed us who he was when he accepted a police caution for punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach, when he was found using a pseudonym to post racist remarks on football forums, and in pretty much every column he’s ever excreted for The Spectator and other vile rags.

    Here in Scotland, a whole bunch of people have decided to show who they are thanks to a fabricated furore over a census question.

    If you haven’t actually seen the question, here’s a screenshot from the census’s quality testing report, which this entire story has been based on.

    The above question has been reported as the PC lobby forcing Scots people to choose from a “baffling” list of 21 sexualities. The reality is much more tedious. The list is for autocorrect entries so that if people choose the “another way” option, it’ll offer some other suggestions (and help harmonise the data by ensuring consistent spelling).

    The story originated in the Murdoch press and was quickly picked up by the Scottish Daily Mail. We already know who these publications are, but they’re showing us again.

    The Sun story is around 650 words. Its interviewees are an anti-trans academic and activist (this story has no connection to trans people at all), an unnamed Tory spokesperson, an evangelical anti-LGBT+ Christian group and the Catholic Church. The Daily Mail sought comment from an additional, extremely fringe, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT evangelical group who railed against “gender madness”, even though the story has no connection with anybody’s gender.

    You’d think such obvious, politically motivated culture war framing – concoct a story about so-called identity politics, get the evangelical rent-a-gobs to damn it, tell your readers that the queers have gone too far this time and encourage them to post foul homophobic and transphobic vitriol in your comments sections – would prevent grown-ups from sharing it.

    But you’d be wrong. People who previously limited their online abuse to abusing trans women, including senior newspaper journalists, bloggers and political figures, have seized upon this non-story, abusing the entire LGBT+ community for something the Murdoch press made up and standing proudly alongside some of the most viciously anti-women, anti-LGBT groups in the country.

    They showed trans people who they were months and in some cases years ago. And now they’re showing you.

    When people show you who they are, believe them.

  • Murdoch press in “printing bullshit” shocker

    In today’s Scottish Sun, there’s a story about the 2021 census.

    Like most things the Murdoch press prints in its ongoing campaign against LGBT+ people and trans people in particular, it isn’t true. It’s just an excuse to get the usual crowd of reactionaries – anti-trans academics, vocally anti-trans MSP Joan McAlpine, the Catholic Church and the evangelical Christian Institute – to mouth off about how it’s loony left political correctness gone maaaaaaaaad.

    There will not be 21 options. There will be four: straight, gay/lesbian, bisexual or other. It’s the same question and set of responses that’s been used in a range of UK surveys for many years.

    The list The Sun is talking about is for predictive text in the online form. When someone types into the “Other” field, the idea is to have autocorrect suggest options that other people have used in previous surveys.

    As The Equality Network explains:

    The list of 21 terms that the Sun prints is a list of the most common answers that people who select Other have given in past surveys.

    If you select Other in the online Census, one of those terms may pop up (as a suggestion only) if it matches the first letters you type.

    This bullshit is only going to get worse now an election is looming. In September, it emerged that the Tories were polling “culture war” issues they could use to sow division via the right-wing press. Human rights for trans people is one of those issues.

    Update, 31 October

    The way this is playing out in print and social media tells you a great deal about the people trying to spread hate. They aren’t just anti-trans. They’re anti-LGBT+. This story isn’t about gender. It’s about sexuality. And people are trying to weaponise it against the wider LGBT+ community.

    Labour activist and gay man Duncan Hothersall on Twitter:

    The census sexualities question stushie is really exposing the dishonesty at the heart of the “legitimate concerns” movement. MSPs and journalists ranting about “21 different sexualities” are compounding a basic misunderstanding into a revolting, and frankly homophobic, attack.

    The attacks are coming from supposed LGB supporters who don’t really like the L, the G or the B any more than they like the T. From bloggers and social media trolls who are as homophobic as they are transphobic. From people who have moved from trying to police gender to trying to police sexuality. From people sharing a platform and often an ideology with Christian fundamentalists and the far right.

    As Hothersall puts it:

    Anti trans rhetoric leads to anti LGB rhetoric. Excusing hate legitimises more hate. Do better.

  • The Endocrine Society is getting really tired of this shit

    “I’m getting pretty tired of this shit too” – estrogen, yesterday

    Do you know what endocrinology is? It’s the branch of medical science that studies the endocrine system, the glands that secrete hormones. Hormones regulate our metabolism, our physical development, our reproductive function, our sleep, our mood… you get the idea.

    The Endocrine Society is the international organisation for endocrinology experts, and it works in association with other groups such as the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Society of Andrology, the European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology, the European Society of Endocrinology, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in the study of hormone therapy for adults and puberty blocking for young people.

    These guys, gals and everyone in between are the world’s leading experts in hormones and hormone treatment. Which is probably why right-wing newspapers never talk to them, because they’d spoil their hateful fun.

    In the US, right-wing media has politicised a sad custody case involving a young trans kid, with experts such as Donald Trump’s idiot, conspiracy-peddling son and probable Zodiac killer Ted Cruz sharing their ill-informed and uneducated thoughts on subjects they know fuck-all about.

    The Endocrine Society has, frankly, had enough of this bullshit.

    In a very strongly worded editorial in their members’ magazine Endocrine News, the Society urges policy makers to shut the fuck up with their anti-trans bullshit. It’s not quite as strongly worded as that, but it’s as close as you can get in a medical journal:

    many of the claims being made about gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-incongruent individuals are inaccurate.

    …Claims that a transgender child would receive surgical or irreversible hormonal treatment do not reflect the reality of medical practice.

    …Considerable scientific evidence has emerged demonstrating a durable biological element underlying gender identity. There do not seem to be external forces that genuinely cause individuals to change gender identity.

    Suppressing puberty is fully reversible, and it gives individuals experiencing gender incongruence more time to explore their options and to live out their gender identity before they undergo hormone or surgical treatment. Research has found puberty suppression in this population improves psychological functioning.

    It is critical that transgender individuals have access to the appropriate treatment and care to ensure their health and well-being.

    …Policies concerning the diagnosis and treatment of transgender individuals should be based on science, not politics.

    You can understand their frustration. In the current climate, solid, peer-reviewed science by people who know this field inside out is being ignored in favour of the thinky thoughts of yummy mummies, religious fundamentalists and far-right trolls who claim “facts don’t care about your feelings” while yelling the latter over the former, who claim to be “silenced” by “extremists” while silencing the very people who know the subject inside out.

    The problem is not a lack of data. The problem is the same as with the anti-vaccination movement. The media is platforming scaremongering over science, feelings over facts and extremists over experts.

  • Boo!

    Thanks to an important new study, I now realise that I have been possessed by a ghost.

    It’s not just me. As this wonderful PinkNews headline puts it:

    Completely legitimate, rational and not at all offensive study says 85% of queer people are possessed by ghosts

    It seems that even in the spirit world, ghosts are stuck with binary definitions of gender: gay men have lady ghosts inside them, and gay women have man ghosts. The study does not provide an indication of what kind of ghost people like me (assigned male at birth but now transitioning, attracted to feminine people and therefore a slightly harder-to-label kind of gay) have inside us. Maybe we have multiple ghosts. There could be a ghost party going on inside me right now.

    The PinkNews piece gets some good jokes out of a nonsense “spiritual group” and its scientific approach, which finds that the symptoms of being a ghost include absolutely everything in the world ever and that the cure is to chant while never, ever thinking about really hot gay, bi or lesbian men, women or non-binary people getting hot and naked and doing hot naked sexual things to your hot naked body as you writhe in orgasmic, ecstatic joy and end up having to wipe gloopy lumps of ectoplasm off the sofa.

    WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T THINK OF THAT.

    Cheap gags aside, though, here’s a question.

    What’s the difference between bullshit, evidence-free stories claiming that LGBT+ people are possessed by ghosts and bullshit, evidence-free stories claiming they’re brainwashed members of a sinister cult?

    The answer’s simple. The UK press is not currently commissioning and publishing endless articles claiming that members of the LGBT+ community are possessed by ghosts.

  • “Oh, the sickening greed”

    Former Smiths singer and current racist Morrissey appears to have reached a new low: the man whose latest look was wonderfully described on Twitter as “a member of the EDL who’s come to creosote your fence” has found a new way to fleece his long-suffering fans.

    I was a fan of The Smiths back in the day; they were a very important band for me, and for many other misfits. It’s been a shame to see his career since that band ended acrimoniously: I can’t think of many artists who’ve shat on their own legacy with such enthusiasm for so long.

    The latest example comes from his current tour, where Moz has been doing something that’s really unusual for him: he’s been turning up to the gigs. And when he does, you can buy mementoes from the merch stall such as signed vinyl LPs for a whopping $300.

    You might think “wow. $300 is a ridiculous amount of money for a Morrissey album, even a signed one.”

    They’re not Morrissey albums.

    You might think “Okay. It’s a ridiculous amount of money for a Smiths album.”

    They aren’t Smiths albums either.

    They’re Lou Reed’s Transformer, Patti Smith’s Horses, Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. Morrissey isn’t connected to any of them. He just likes them.

    To be fair, they’re all great albums. And they’re just as great, arguably even greater, when they haven’t been signed by a racist and cost about £20 on vinyl from your local record shop.

    I’m not sure who’s more deluded. The person who thinks their signature on someone else’s album makes it 2,000% more valuable, or the super-fans who will presumably buy some of them.

  • Meat for men and little lunches for the ladies

    There’s a fun and fascinating piece from PBS News Hour about food and how it became gendered: steaks for the boys and salads for the girls. Although it’s specifically about American culture, that culture has long been exported globally; the trends there were trends here too.

    For most of history, men and women ate the same things. In the 1800s:

    Even though “women’s restaurants” – spaces set apart for ladies to dine unaccompanied by men – were commonplace, they nonetheless served the same dishes as the men’s dining room: offal, calf’s heads, turtles and roast meat.

    The changes started in the late nineteenth century with the rise of restaurants specifically marketed towards women, places they could have lunch without hearing a bunch of pissed workmen yelling over everyone. Those menus put more effort into their desserts than their mains, and the mains were what we’d consider light meals today.

    The change was served with large side of sexism. In the early 20th century:

    Self-appointed men’s advocates complained that women were inordinately fond of the very types of decorative foods being marketed to them. In 1934, for example, a male writer named Leone B. Moates wrote an article in House and Garden scolding wives for serving their husbands “a bit of fluff like marshmallow-date whip.”

    Save these “dainties” for ladies’ lunches, he implored, and serve your husbands the hearty food they crave: goulash, chili or corned beef hash with poached eggs.

    …The 20th century saw a proliferation of cookbooks telling women to give up their favorite foods and instead focus on pleasing their boyfriends or husbands. The central thread running through these titles was that if women failed to satisfy their husbands’ appetites, their men would stray.

    One of the saddest details in the piece isn’t the blatant sexism. It’s how this nonsense gets internalised. The writer, Paul Freedman, describes how some young women would adopt a “steak strategy”: ordering steak on a first date not to reject gender stereotypes but to reinforce them. They ordered steak to demonstrate to the man that “should a relationship flower, their girlfriends won’t start lecturing them about what they should eat.”

    It sounds like something from 1907, but no. It was happening in New York in 2007.

  • How hateful conspiracy theories make it into the papers

    The Christian Post is yet another evangelical newsletter from America, and it’s part of an axis that includes the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council – two organisations with strong links to the British anti-trans movement. It’s just published an article about the “trans cult” that could have been lifted from The Sunday Times.

    You know how these things go by now. Sinister cult members stealing children by the dead of night, chopping bits off them, selling them to Satan.

    Here’s Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager for the US National Center for Trans Equality.

    The article is astonishing in its sensationalism, but quite typical of anti-trans fear mongering. The Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council use similar language. The goal is to activate disgust–an extremely strong emotion–in the reader.

    It’s why almost all of these articles talk about a sinister push towards surgery for children, even though children do not get gender confirmation surgery. When they can’t scare you about surgery, they’ll tell you that children are being given cross-sex hormones. That doesn’t happen either. And when they’ve ran out of things that don’t happen to scare you about, they’ll redefine “children” to mean “32-year-olds”.

    The Sunday Times was doing it today, in yet another piece about the “state-sponsored sterilisation of trans children”. The “children” in the article were 20, 21 and 32. The article is uncannily similar to the one in the Christian Post.

    It’s worth looking at the Sunday Times piece in a bit more detail, because the most shocking revelation was that one of the “children” – the 32-year-old – had committed suicide after a history of such attempts. The fact that the parent repeatedly misgenders their dead child suggests that lack of parental acceptance and support might just have been a factor. We know that the suicide rate for trans people with accepting families is the same as the wider population; for those with unaccepting families, it’s sky high.

    If like me you’ve experienced the gender clinic system, there’s a lot of this story that just doesn’t add up. If this person, as stated, had a history of clinical depression, anxiety and suicide attempts, nobody from the GP to their psychiatric assessors would have ignored that let alone recommended transition in any form as the way to fix their problems.

    Another parent, a father, said:

    “I couldn’t change my daughter’s mind so I have to change the minds of those doing this to her.”

    His child, who would presumably prefer to be called his son, is 20.  Does that sound supportive and accepting to you?

    My daughter is not transitioning, she is being transitioned by an LGBT cult and by medical professionals.”

    Which suggests that again, the adult child has undergone extensive psychiatric assessment by those “medical professionals”.

    Last but not least, our case study, now 21. They have been persistent, consistent and insistent about their gender identity for five years and did not access any NHS gender services until they were an adult.

    “I trusted the NHS with my child and cannot believe the harm it has done,” their mum says.

    What terrible procedures did they make her child endure?

    [The child] has had no medical interventions.

    So in five years of attending gender services, the NHS has pushed the woman’s child – her adult child – towards no medical treatments whatsoever.

    This, somehow, is evidence of the NHS pushing children – child children, not adult ones – into treatments that we know the NHS does not provide to children.

    But of course, nobody wants to let the facts get in the way of a good satanic conspiracy theory.

    The points Branstetter makes about the Christian Post piece, and similar pieces by the Heritage Foundation and FRC, apply just as well to the Sunday Times piece and most of the other anti-trans scaremongering in the UK press.

    But it also relies on tropes we see in any number of moral panics and conspiracy theories. PizzaGate + QAnon– like Satanic panics of the 80s–all rely on secretive cabals sacrificing children under cover of night. But it’s actually an ancient fear even older than that.

    One of my favorite reads this year was @annamerlan‘s deep dive into the state of conspiracy theories today. She does a wonderful job finding the common threads through 9/11 trutherism, anti-vaxxers, and many more to discover what makes these absurd ideas so appealing to so many.

    On PizzaGate, she notes the fear of child sacrifice is an anti-Semitic trope dating to the Middle Ages. Such “nocturnal rituals” are used to justify violence against other groups (namely Jews)

    You can find the same myths in anti-native writings of European colonialists, anti-Roma sentiment throughout the last few centuries, and anti-Semitism up to the current era.

    The primary purpose of these myths is playing into parental fears. They hope to animate a protective instinct against a ghostly “other”, unleashing an animalistic rage that will excuse any violence against the targeted group.

    …By animating fears of child abduction, ritual abuse, and sexual exploitation, anti-trans activists are–knowingly or not–following a very old roadmap for justifying oppression. The goal is to build so much fear that the cost trans people pay will be deemed a worthwhile bargain.

    They also try to fudge the other side of the equation–are trans people really oppressed? How suicidal are they? Are they really facing *that* much violence?

    It’s a two-pronged strategy: you tell people that trans people are dangerous even though you know they are not. And you tell people that trans people do not face any victimisation or discrimination, even though they do.

    …If trans people are a cult–dangerous and deranged–and the potential cost is your own children, then such framing justifies oppression of us by any means necessary. All the violence and rape and poverty and suffering trans people face is, in their eyes, an acceptable cost.

    Its important to note that the exchange posed by them is, of course, completely imaginary. Nothing about trans people, our rights, or our health care is a danger to anyone. Period.

    You’ll find that the majority of anti-trans hate groups claim to care about “real” trans people. But they don’t. That’s why they offer no solutions, accept no statistics, believe no experts. They are motivated not by a desire to help anyone, but to hate and hurt people.

    And if you don’t believe me, ask yourself: What is the conservative solution to anti-trans discrimination? How would these activists end anti-trans violence, raise trans people out of poverty, or stem the public health crisis taking trans children by suicide?

    Their solution, of course, is to deny that any of these issues exist.

    They don’t have an answer because they don’t care–and they need you not to care, either. They need you to believe trans people are a sickly cult of perverts unworthy of your empathy, let alone equality. They need you to believe the price is just too high to pay.