Tea Uglow did an interesting thing. They took screenshots of articles containing the word “transgender” on a few English news outlets. Over the last 12 months, there were 878 articles. That doesn’t include publications such as the New Statesman, which has been home to a lot of anti-trans voices, and to regional press such as The Scotsman, The Herald and The National, all of which frequently print a disproportionate amount of content from anti-trans voices. It also doesn’t include articles that use “trans” instead of “transgender”, of which there are many more.

Uglow:

They’re not all bad – but they’re not all necessary.

We hope this serves to understand what 3 ‘articles’ a day about your community feels like.
Obviously, if we tried to track all ’trans’ articles online we would need someone clever.

We stopped when results felt irrelevant. i.e. Transgender is mentioned in many hundreds of ‘news’ or opinion pieces without relevance to the news item in question. (Here’s looking at you Sunday Times)

No, it’s not scientific. Yes, the methodology can be questioned.
Knock yourself out / Do better / Or.. perhaps, just leave us alone.

It may be a relatively small chunk of the anti-trans coverage we’ve seen in the last two years but it’s still a thoroughly saddening read. Trans people are repeatedly painted as a faceless, sinister mob that somehow has a stranglehold on politics and the media despite there being no trans politicians, columnists or editors.

In the popular press, all trans people are activists and all anti-trans activists are not activists. People who call trans people unspeakable things and threaten violence against them are just ordinary mums and dads with reasonable concerns. People who keep getting suspended from social media for online abuse get to present themselves as innocent victims of political correctness gone mad. People who hound women who disagree with them off the internet are portrayed as noble defenders of women. People who roundly abuse trans people until someone snaps get to claim they’re the victims, not the perpetrators.

You don’t have to read all 800-plus pieces to see the patterns. Again and again articles talk about the dangers of legal reform by scaremongering about completely different legislation. Articles repeatedly lie that children are given cross-sex hormones (they aren’t) and surgery (they really, really aren’t). Straight white men dust down their anti-gay columns from the eras of section 28, the lowering of the age of consent and the equal marriage debate and do a search and replace to swap “gay” for “trans”.

There are fair and balanced articles about trans people, but not many. It’s easy to find articles trying to persuade readers that the Mermaids charity is trying to force kids to have surgery (which doesn’t happen). Good luck finding profiles of any families they’ve helped. Private GPs who treat trans people are demonised, but the crisis that forces so many trans adults to go private or to take a dangerous DIY route is rarely mentioned. It’s easy to find stories about the invented dangers of trans women in prisons but not ones about the actual violence trans people in prison experiences; or pieces about the invented dangers of minor legislative reform but none about the actual experiences of the only people who will be affected by it.

All too often the same writers trot out the same bullshit. To them it’s a game, something to chortle about to their friends on social media. They know it’s cruel, because the cruelty is the point.

It’s not a game for the people they’re defaming.

Hate crimes against all LGBT+ people are up considerably since the press decided that actually, it’s okay to hate some LGBT+ people again. As anti-trans sentiment has increased in the press and online, it’s lead to a massive, disproportionate increase in hate crimes against trans people. What’s typed on a screen makes its way to the streets.

This is not about legitimate debate. This is about the full power of the press being used to target, defame and demonise a tiny, vulnerable minority of people. We’re not a mob. We’re not a lobby. We’re people just like you. And right now, we’re very, very frightened.

Here’s The Sun newspaper in 1992.

If you think that sounds familiar, have a read of Terry Sanderson’s Media Watch column from that month, May 1992. Sanderson spent a quarter of a century battling against bigotry in UK newspapers, and sadly the publications and the writers don’t seem to have changed much.

There was Julie Burchill:

Julie Burchill is rapidly becoming the most prominent commentator on gay issues in the straight press… the message comes over loud and clear that Julie has reached the conclusion that gay men are the ultimate oppressors of women. This, I think, is her problem. It is because she imagines all gay men hate women (or, worse still, patronise them) that she has got this bee in her bonnet about Aids.

Burchill would later turn her ire towards trans women, who she now appears to believe are the ultimate oppressors of women.

There were single-issue pressure groups gaining disproportionate press coverage for their intolerant views and allegations of sinister lobbies endangering children:

During the election campaign The CFC (prop. Stephen Green) was issuing press releases like confetti.

Nearly all of them concerned homosexuality. At the CFC’s prompting, The Sun reported (26 Mar): “Social workers are telling ten-year-old kids in care that gay sex is part of growing up.”

…The Daily Express (23 Mar) saying: “Labour and Liberal Democrat policies on gay rights would put children at risk from homosexuals.” Mr Green “condemned” the politicians concerned saying that any changes in the law would “endanger children”: What The Daily Express failed to extract from the CFC’s press release was revealed by The Independent (3 Apr). The CFC had actually said that Neil Kinnock and David Steel have supported “the child sex movement” (which is the CFC’s term for the gay movement).

There was dubious crowdfunding for publications advocating dangerous conversion therapy:

Mr Green revealed to the Independent that “he’s nearly raised the £11,000 he needs to publish a book on homosexuals provisionally entitled Emotional Orphans.” The book will explain “how homosexuals may achieve heterosexuality” which he says is a “painfully difficult process”.

There were newspapers deliberately equating being LGBT+ with being a criminal:

“Outrage as boy is handed over to lesbian criminal” said The Daily Mail (I Apr) with The Sun announcing: “Lefties put boy in care of lesbian jailbird”. Note how the words “lesbian” and “criminal” become interchangeable in these circumstances: which is the more horrid prospect for the small boy to cope with?

And there was the “they’re coming for your children” moral panic as illustrated in the “gay peril” cutting at the top of this post.

Awful, isn’t it? Two years later the Sunday Times, which railed against the so-called homosexual lobby, argued that HIV wasn’t the cause of AIDS and that saying so was the “HIV bandwagon” pushed by “the legions of the politically correct”. Andrew Neil, the editor at the time, believed that the link between HIV and AIDS was a conspiracy theory and that discussion of it was a “public misinformation campaign”.

Also in 1994, the newspapers fired their final salvos in their crusade against moves towards equalising the age of consent for straight and gay people (the age for straight people was 16 but in 1994 it was decreased from 21 to 18 for gay people. Equality wouldn’t happen until the following decade).

Sanderson:

Naturally the “we must protect the children” argument was trotted out repeatedly. This is a sensitive area, and consequently was played for all it was worth by “family” groups and other politically and religiously motivated opponents of change.

…The Daily Express, meanwhile, distorted the British Medical Association’s support for a lowering of the age of consent to 16 by headlining it: “Teenage Aids scourge” (January 14th).

Richard Littlejohn had some thoughts, calling Peter Tatchell a “professional sodomite” who “holds recruiting drives outside schools”.

And then there was the Telegraph.

The article was illustrated by a cartoon that Goebbels wouldn’t have been ashamed of. It showed lock gates imprinted with the word “consent” being opened ready to engulf the unsuspecting people below.

Ms Burrows, a woman of extraordinary fanaticism, alarmingly claims in her article that “a homosexual lifestyle reduces life expectancy from 75 to 42”. Where on earth does she get such a statistic? Why, from the Family Research Institute of Washington.

The Family Research Institute is described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the US organisation that tracks neo-Nazis, race hate organisations and other lovely people, as an anti-LGBT hate group.

This might sound familiar too.

This latest gem about the reduction of life expectancy has been repeated at least twice over the radio by members of these “family” groups, and in neither instance was it challenged.

Then, like now, bigots were given a platform to spout vicious bullshit about marginalised people without fear of challenge; then, like now, national newspapers incited fear and hatred of LGBT+ people; then, like now, the regulators did nothing and the victims’ pockets weren’t deep enough to fight the newspapers’ lawyers.

A lot can change in 25 years, but apparently not in the UK mass media.

In a study that’s caused much appalled amusement, researchers at Penn State have discovered that men avoid things such as using reusable shopping bags for fear others will perceive them as gay.

It’s interesting but not surprising that the policing of this stuff is done by both men and women.

In a series of studies, the researchers evaluated specific pro-environmental behaviors that previous research suggested were seen as either “feminine” or “masculine” and examined whether they affected how people were perceived.

They found that men and women were more likely to question a man’s sexual orientation if he engaged in “feminine” pro-environmental behaviors, such as using reusable shopping bags. They were also more likely to question a woman’s sexual orientation if she engaged in “masculine” pro-environmental behaviors, such as caulking windows.

A man with a Bag For Life is gay; a woman doing minor DIY is a lesbian.

The researchers found that participants whose behaviors conformed to their gender were seen as more heterosexual than those whose behaviors did not conform to their gender, which may suggest participants were using traditional gender roles as clues to sexual identity.

There’s a whole knot to unravel here, but ultimately it’s about the way we – often unconsciously – reinforce stereotypes. A man who does the recycling isn’t manly; a woman who can fix something isn’t womanly. Clearly, that means they’re gay.

These beliefs are so facile there’s no point digging into them here. But the wider point is that these beliefs aren’t just perpetuated. They’re policed.

It’s not just the policing by others that happens, although God knows that happens. We police ourselves too. We internalise the rules and actively try to ensure we don’t break them for fear of the consequences. Sometimes we pass on those rules to our siblings or our children, sometimes as advice and sometimes as mockery.

Every day in myriad ways we’re told to stay in our lanes.