Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Weaponising media

    Detroit Pride this weekend.

    Another day, another bunch of saddening headlines: armed neo-Nazis with a police escort intimidating Pride attendees in the US, lesbian women attacked in the street in England, the usual raft of anti-LGBT hatred in the press.

    Two UK stories stood out for me, because they demonstrate two elements of the same thing: how anti-trans individuals and groups play the media and social media.

    First up, Edinburgh University. An anti-trans event led to the mass resignation of the university’s staff pride network and lurid headlines about an attack on one of the speakers.

    The reporting of this has been interesting. The staff pride network quit partly because of the event, but mainly because the university attempted to stop them from publicly criticising it. Fans of irony may want to use the words “silencing” or “erasure” here. They were also appalled by the university’s withdrawal from the Stonewall workplace equality index in “a reversal of the progress that the network has made over the last three years. We feel viscerally upset that the good work over the last three years is being undone.”

    For most of the media, however, that wasn’t the story. The story, the bit that appeared in headline after headline, was that one of the speakers, Julie Bindel, was physically attacked by a trans woman.

    Except she wasn’t.

    Bindel, a well connected journalist and activist, has long agitated against trans people, and tends to attract protest when she speaks: some university LGBT+ groups have attempted to have her events cancelled on the grounds that they encourage hatred of LGBT+ students. Immediately after the Edinburgh event, she tweeted:

    I was physically attacked as I left the event for the airport.

    Except she wasn’t. She was shouted at.

    I’m sure that was frightening, but a professional writer should know the difference between “physically attacked” and “shouted at”. Such as, “shouted at by protester” won’t get you in the papers; “physically attacked” will.

    When PinkNews approached her for comment on the apparent difference between what she said on social media and what actually happened, Bindel  said: “I despise your woman-hating, anti-lesbian rag, and would rather give Donald Trump a massage than speak to you.”

    It’s as if there’s some kind of agenda here.

    Did someone say agenda?

    Last week, the NSPCC threw Munroe Bergdorf under the bus. Bergdorf, a trans woman, is hate figure for anti-trans bigots; given the blurred lines between them, the alt-right and racists of various stripes the fact Bergdorf is a woman of colour no doubt played a factor too.

    The news that Bergdorf was going to be one of the public faces of the NSPCC’s Childline led to a storm of protest and a cowardly decision by the NSPCC to “cut ties” with her.

    The furore was spearheaded by Times columnist Janice “trans people are sacrificing our children” Turner. It claimed that Bergdorf was a “porn model” (a deliberately inflammatory reframing of the fact she once posed for Playboy) who shouldn’t be around children (one of the oldest tropes in the bigots’ playbook) and mobilised Twitter users to say they would cancel their direct debits to the charity.

    Was any of it real?

    Twitter user Helen, aka MimmyMum (parents of trans kids use pseudonyms on Twitter because of the abuse they’re subjected to) analysed the protesting accounts and found an interesting pattern. They don’t seem to follow the accounts of child protection groups or charities such as the NSPCC. But they do follow the most rabidly anti-trans pressure groups.

    It’s as if there’s some kind of agenda here.

    Update:

    Many people have pointed out the apparent double standards of the NSPCC and of the activists here.

    Previous Childline/NSPCC ambassadors have included the topless model Melinda Messenger and lingerie model Abby Clancy, neither of whom have attracted the attention of Janice Turner and the “protect children” crowd. By a strange coincidence, Messenger and Clancy are not black or trans. And the NSPCC’s current ambassadors include the cisgender, white, footballer Wayne Rooney, who has been arrested for drunk driving and whose controversial sex life includes many allegations about infidelity and the use of prostitutes. Nobody seems to have a problem with that either.

    That the NSPCC could do this while proudly flying the pride rainbow has upset many, including UK Black Pride.  “To the spineless leadership of the NSPCC,” they posted earlier, “remove the rainbow from your branding. You’ve quite the journey ahead to prove you’re worthy of flying our flag.”

  • Straight talk about “straight pride”

    One of the “straight pride” organisers out for a walk.

    Most of the coverage I’ve seen of the so-called “straight pride” march apparently happening in Boston has demonstrated how broken much of the media has become. It’s been treated in “and finally…” style, a gently amusing little story in much the same style as a cat on a skateboard or a dog that can say sausages.

    Whereas the reality is that it’s a stunt by a bunch of violent neo-Nazi thugs who want to create a white Christian ethnostate, who are preparing for a race war and who believe non-compliant women should be raped.

    Tee-hee! Here’s Carol with the weather!

    The organisation behind the proposed march is a rebrand of Resist Marxism, a violent, far-right group with very strong links to neo-Nazi extremists. Leader Mark Shahady organised a violent rally in late October to which he invited the notorious Proud Boys, who attacked protesters.

    In December, Shadady hosted an anti-immigration “debate” where a known neo-Nazi organisation called Patriot Front provided “security”. As Antifash Gordon, an anti-Nazi activist, writes on Twitter:

    Patriot Front is an openly neo-Nazi organization that endorses the use of “ethnostate rape gangs” to police the behavior of white women after they win the race war they think is coming. https://unicornriot.ninja/2018/americans-fascists-inside-patriot-front/

    Their leader is a member of Resist Marxism.

    These lovely gentlemen attended the Boston Women’s March this year, where they attacked attendees. There’s footage of Sahady attempting to assault a trans woman.

    There is much, much more of this. Gordon has a long thread providing evidence.

    Here’s how the Guardian chose to cover it: with a sideways look at the hilarity of a straight pride march.

    Do say: “If Straight Pride had been invented sooner, they might not have had to close all those branches of Burton.”

    Don’t say: “Where are all you guys going? The Boat Show’s that way!”

    Apparently there’s a lighter side to ethnofascism, violence and rape.

    In fairness The Guardian has since reported on the background of the organisers, but like most such coverage it’s too little too late. A stunt by some utterly despicable, vicious, bigoted people has become a global news event, a funny little item at the end of a broadcast, yet another opportunity for the far right to spread their hate.

    This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a snigger.

  • A bit of the white stuff

    The various candidates for the Conservative party leadership haven’t just been falling over themselves to be sexist and homophobic. Some of them have been keen to talk about their pasts as drug hoovers too. Michael Gove has spoken about his use of cocaine while Andrea Leadsom has admitted to smoking cannabis. That makes her the sixth candidate to admit taking drugs. The others are Rory Stewart, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt and Dominic Raab.

    It’s all very amusing, and most people don’t clutch their pearls at the idea of any adult taking recreational drugs. Or at least, we don’t until we look at the anti-drug policies these hypocrites have long supported or promoted. For example in 1999, Michael Gove allegedly hosted cocaine parties while writing in the Times about how he opposed liberalisation of drug laws.

    Physicians have long urged UK governments and the Conservatives in particular to change their approach to drugs. In 2016, the Royal Society for Public Health concluded that the “war on drugs” didn’t deter drug misuse but did prevent people from getting help and inhibited harm reduction efforts. As Jane Dacre, president of the Royal College of Physicians, told the BMJ: “The criminal justice system is not the place to address the often complex needs of people addicted to drugs.”

    Professor David Nutt, former senior drug advisor to the government, puts it simply.

    …the attitude of politicians to drugs has always been very dishonest. They seem to feel that it’s OK for them to break the law but not for others to do the same.

    It’s not just OK for “them”, but for people like them too. Cocaine use is widespread in media and political circles, and has been for a very long time. If you’re, say, a Times columnist, a tabloid editor or a Conservative politician, there are very few consequences to recreational drug use. Whereas if you’re black, possessing cannabis will get you deported.

    The war on drugs is recognised globally as a failure: it does nothing to stem supply or demand, but it does ruin thousands of lives and puts thousands of people in prison.  Very few of those people are white Etonians.

    Politicians lie about drugs. They pretend to be ingenues offered mysterious white substances at dinner parties, unable to tell the difference between icing sugar and cocaine. They pretend that they only made their “mistake” once. And they pretend that they regret doing it, when their only regret is that the papers got wind of it.

    What they never seem to regret is the damage done by the unnecessary criminalisation of people who do exactly what they do, but who don’t have the right skin colour or didn’t go to the right school.

  • The reason is there is no reason

    I politely declined to go on a radio programme last night. The topic was YouTube’s selective enforcement of its anti-harassment and hate speech rules, with a look at the wider issue of online abuse, but the other contributor would be an antagonist who’d argue that the real victims of online abuse are the people who do the abusing.

    I’m not going to help legitimise that.

    We often assume that someone on the other side of a debate is just like us: if it turns out that our facts are wrong, we change our views. It’s a nice idea that’s been ruthlessly exploited by people who aren’t interested in facts. Demolish argument #1 and they’ll calmly switch to argument #2, even if it completely contradicts the previous argument. The goal is not to be right. The goal is to win, to tire you out or goad you until you snap.

    As I’ve written before, what these people do is not a debate; it’s a performance. And you can see a great example of it in Donald Trump’s justifications for his ban on trans people serving in the military.

    You may recall that when Trump originally promised to ban trans people, the reason was because the presence of trans people “erodes military readiness and unit cohesion”. It was a “military decision”.

    A few months later, that was dropped after the military said “no, it wasn’t”. Suddenly it wasn’t a military decision. It was a financial one. The government didn’t want to pay the cost of trans people’s surgeries.

    That one was debunked too. Now, he’s saying it’s because trans people “take massive amounts of drugs”.

    Whether they’re true or not (they’re not, of course) doesn’t matter. He might as well tell us that the ban is because a mysterious hooded figure came to him in a dream, or that somebody told him that trans people are fatal to mice. The reason for the trans ban is that Trump wants a trans ban.

    We’re confusing the beginning and the end. Trump didn’t decide to implement a trans ban because of X, Y and Z. He decided to implement a trans ban because he decided to implement a trans ban. X, Y and Z are merely flags of convenience; if they don’t fly, he’ll try A, B and C.

    It’s cruel, of course, as are the other anti-trans (and anti-women) activities of the administration. They’re not based on evidence, but on a desire to hurt specific groups of people.

    The cruelty isn’t an accident. The cruelty is the point.

    The same process was visible with Betsy DeVos, the US education secretary. DeVos says that her office “is committed to ensuring all students have access to their education free from discrimination,” and the way to do this is to discriminate against trans students. When asked if she was aware of the negative effects discrimination has on trans students, she said “I do know that. I But I will say again that [my office] is committed to ensuring all students have access to their education free from discrimination.”

    Of course it doesn’t make sense. It’s not supposed to. DeVos doesn’t care about evidence because the decision is not based on evidence. She wants to discriminate against trans students because she wants to discriminate against trans students.

    The cruelty isn’t an accident. The cruelty is the point.

    The same thing happens with the various anti-trans groups that have sprung up from nowhere to agitate against the rights and dignity of trans people, claiming to respect “genuine” trans people while fomenting hatred against them. Their ground is constantly shifting: as each specious argument is shown to be false, a new one takes its place.

    Like Trump, the reason they hate trans people isn’t because X, or Y, or Z, so their views won’t change if you discredit X, or Y, or Z. They hate trans people because they hate trans people.

    The cruelty isn’t an accident. The cruelty is the point.

  • The voices in our heads

    Image by Jhonis Martins, Pexels.com

    I originally posted a version of this to a trans forum in response to someone who’s having a really hard time with body image, with feeling that they look ridiculous, with being trans in a world that isn’t always a nice place for trans people. I thought it was worth posting a version of it here.

    I think most of us have a voice inside us that amplifies everything negative we’ve ever heard, that makes us think the worst about ourselves. The world can do a good job of kicking away at our confidence if we let it.

    Making us think we look ridiculous is part of that. We buy into it. But there’s nothing ridiculous about being yourself, about having a bit of fun with things. Maybe we don’t look quite like we’d like to, but nobody else does either. My very beautiful cisgender friends aren’t happy with their bodies or appearance either.

    I’m finding counselling helps me get a handle on this. It’s helping me to silence the negative voice, to notice when I’m imagining the worst possible outcome or coming to the worst possible conclusions: I’m disgusting, I’m fat, everybody hates me, I’m a failure as a human being, if I go out I’ll be yelled at, laughed at or killed. All that good stuff.

    It’s helping me to understand that the little voice is usually wrong, that I can choose not to listen to it, that I can choose to think and act positively.

    You don’t necessarily need to go to counselling to do any of those things. It’s just a matter of recognising patterns, about realising that all too often we choose to amplify the voices that make us sad while ignoring the ones that don’t.

    Here’s an example. When my women friends, who I really care about and whose opinions really matter to me, pay me compliments I immediately discount them. But if some wanker on a bus gives me a dirty look I will conclude that I look ridiculous, I’m a pathetic failure and I might as well kill myself.

    I don’t necessarily realise I’m doing it, but I’m making a choice. In that example I’m choosing to think the worst. I’m choosing to see the world as negatively as possible. I’m choosing to reject anything positive and accept everything negative.

    Being aware of that is half the battle.

    Being aware of your thought patterns doesn’t mean there aren’t any wankers in the world. But it does help you realise that it’s up to you whether you make room for their bullshit in your head. It’s your choice whether to base your world view, your sense of self, on somebody you don’t know and whose opinion is of no consequence at all.

    It takes time and effort to get there, and there will still be bad days. But when you become aware of the patterns, you have many, many more good days. You realise that your negative voice will say pretty much anything to try and hurt you. You realise that it’s full of shit.

    You’re a better person than the voice in your head says you are.

    The world is a better place than you tell yourself it is.

    Here’s an example from this week. I stood up on a stage with a guitar and played some songs to a room full of strangers. The voice in my head told me that I was fat, that I was old, that I didn’t pass, that I was a freak, that I was a mess, that my songs are crap, that if I got up on that stage I’d be a laughing stock.

    And I ignored it, and I had fun, and I was awesome.

    You are too. Don’t let that voice tell you otherwise.

  • More pride-washing

    We’ve seen Donald Trump metaphorically wrap himself in a Pride rainbow while viciously targeting trans people and letting trans asylum seekers die. Now it’s the UK Home Office’s turn to wave the rainbow flag while persecuting gay people.

    Here’s their proud logo.

    From the same week, here’s the story of the man they want to deport because they refuse to believe that he’s gay. And  here’s the story of another gay man they’re deporting to face persecution.

    Late last year, figures showed that the number of LGBT+ asylum seekers refused by the Home Office increased by 52%. 78% of asylum claims that included a reference to sexual orientation were refused in 2017, up from 61% in 2015.

    This is damning (emphasis mine):

    The data, which the government only started publishing last year, shows that of the 5,316 asylum applications made on the grounds of sexual orientation over the three year period, 3,776 were refused.

    Of the 2,908 claimants who appealed their negative decisions over that time, more than two thirds had their rejections overturned

     

  • False Pride

    The other day, I told the most powerful man in the world to take a flying fuck at the moon. America’s criminal-in-chief had the gall to post this on Twitter:

    As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of countries worldwide that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation. My Administration has launched a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality and invite all nations to join us in this effort!

    This is the same administration that imprisons immigrants on the basis of their sexual orientation and is introducing legislation that would make it legal for healthcare providers and emergency services to let LGBT+ people die. Like very many LGBT+ people, I felt like sharing my disgust.

    Trump’s tweet is an example of the utter hypocrisy that happens during Pride Month, which is when most of the US Pride parades take place. Brands plaster the rainbow over everything: look at us! We’re down with the LGBT!

    In fairness, some brands appear to mean it. Brands such as Nike and Levis have been LGBT-friendly since long before Pride Month became part of the marketing calendar. IKEA has long been among the most progressive and inclusive employers.  Others, such as Wagamama, use it to announce decent things such as the introduction of gender-neutral toilets.

    It’s great to see public support for LGBT+ people: it wasn’t that long ago homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name,” after all. Collectively, the support during Pride Month is good to see and a very visible reminder to the bigots that they’re on the wrong side of history.

    But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some pride-washing going on, companies slapping on a bit of rainbow paint in acts of corporate hypocrisy.

    Tech companies are a good example of that. Facebook likes a bit of Pride, and by all accounts it’s pretty good to its LGBT employees. But it’s also where some of the most vicious anti-LGBT+ abuse takes place, the home of rabidly anti-LGBT+ individuals and groups. Its love of low taxation also means it has a history of donating to some of the most anti-LGBT+ politicians in America, effectively helping to fund hatred. And as for Twitter…

    Other brands are bad too. Paddy Power will once again do its thing for Pride this year, but those of us with longer memories haven’t forgotten its 2012 advert that encouraged viewers to laugh at trans women. Some of the biggest brands with rainbows on their products sponsored the Winter Olympics in Sochi a few years ago, turning a blind eye to the introduction of an anti-gay “propaganda” law. If you use the Wi-Fi in McDonalds, you’ll see its family filter comes from that haven for transphobic bigots, Mumsnet. My Facebook timeline is currently full of Pride-branded merchandise that doesn’t donate a penny to any LGBT+ organisations, often using designs ripped off from LGBT+ artists.

    Here’s a fascinating fact. Last year, the pharmaceutical company Gilead sponsored New York Pride and donated to LGBT+ charities. Gilead makes Truvada, a pill that can almost eliminate the risk of contracting HIV. Gilead can clearly afford to throw a few coins at the gays: if you don’t have insurance, Truvada is $2,110.99 per month.

    It’s not wicked if we wrap it in a rainbow

    It’s interesting to look at Pride-related advertising through a critical lens: if the adverts include any LGBT+ people at all, and very many of them don’t, who do you see? How are they portrayed? The glossy ads I see are very white and stick to a very narrow range of portrayals. Good luck spotting a non-passing trans woman, a bull dyke or a gay guy who doesn’t look like Michelangelo’s David.

    They are also incredibly, often hilariously, safe. “Love is love”, the copy says, but the corporate approval doesn’t seem to extend to actually showing that love. Much safer to show a rainbow-striped hamburger with two chaste models than two LGBT+ people hugging, let alone kissing.

    That narrowness is symptomatic of a wider issue. When you support Pride, what are you celebrating? Who are you supporting?

    I’ve mentioned before that sometimes “I supported gay marriage” is the new “some of my friends are black”, a fig leaf that hides intolerance of or even bigotry towards anybody who isn’t “one of the good ones” such as loudly feminine men, genderqueer and non-binary people, trans women and men and anyone with (to the straights) awkward or unpalatable opinions. Some of the marketing around Pride Month feels the same.

    Pride started with a riot

    Marketing isn’t brilliant at history, so it’s worth remembering what Pride Month actually is. It’s a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, when a bunch of LGBT+ people got pissed off with the police. At the time, it was illegal for women to wear fewer than three pieces of feminine clothing or for men to dress as women. The police would regularly raid places such as the Stonewall Inn and force the patrons to “verify their sex”, arresting anyone who didn’t stick to gender norms and sexually assaulting some of them.

    Wikipedia describes what happened on 28 June 1969:

    Those dressed as women that night refused to go with the officers. Men in line began to refuse to produce their identification. The police decided to take everyone present to the police station, after separating those cross-dressing in a room in the back of the bar.

    …A scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs was escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon several times. She escaped repeatedly and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described as “a typical New York butch” and “a dyke–stone butch”, she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for, as one witness claimed, complaining that her handcuffs were too tight. Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains unknown (Stormé DeLarverie has been identified by some, including herself, as the woman, but accounts vary), sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at bystanders and shouted, “Why don’t you guys do something?” After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went “berserk”: “It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.”

    That’s what the rainbows are commemorating: a bunch of LGBT+ people losing their shit.

    Pride is a celebration. But it’s a celebration that rages and mourns. It rages against a society that others, fears and hates us and it mourns the many people who died from a big disease with a little name. It rages against those who want us to hate ourselves and to hurt ourselves, and it mourns the lives lost to that hatred. It rages against the pundits and the priests and the politicians who want to deny us our humanity, and it mourns the many LGBT+ children who never got to become LGBT+ adults.

    Put that on your billboard.

  • “We know for a fact that the facts are not facts”

    I saw this on Reddit just after I wrote this post.

    You may recall the recent furore in the Scottish press over Glasgow Live’s policies for trans people in public spaces such as gyms and swimming pools. The policy – we’ll do what the law says we should do – led to the publication of yet more anti-trans columns and a flood of online abuse against trans people.

    One of the inconvenient facts about the policy, which activists claimed would lead to the abuse of women, is that it had been in place for several years with no problems whatsoever.

    That can’t be true! said the bigots. We demand evidence!

    The evidence is in. Since the policies were enacted, how many complaints have there been about trans people?

    None.

    The response? Inevitably: “fake news!”

    Representatives from the group Forwomen.scot said they were “astonished” by the statistics, adding: “We know for a fact there have been several complaints about the policy.”

    Susan Sinclair, who tweets as Scottish Women, added: “The best way to measure whether or not women are concerned about women only spaces and services being inclusive isn’t to go by the number of complaints they’ve received.”

    The fact that there have not been any complaints is not a fact. And anyway, even if facts really were facts you can’t measure the number of complaints by counting the number of complaints. Why do you hate women?

    They do this over more serious issues too, such as inclusivity in rape crisis centres. When rape crisis charities tell them that they have been trans-inclusive for years without incident, and that trans women are vulnerable women, they get the same response: your facts are not facts because they are not the facts I believe the facts should be. Why do you hate women?

    These are the voices columnists write approvingly about in our newspapers, that broadcast media expects trans people to “debate”, that our MSPs invite to Holyrood to discuss whether we should have human rights.

    Update: Apologies. It turns out there was one complaint. But it wasn’t about a trans woman. It was about a cisgender woman verbally abusing a trans woman.

  • There are no gays in Malta

    This is what “reasonable debate” about trans people looks like.

    Update: that’s not even the maddest thing these yahoos and their supporters have claimed today. Apparently it’s impossible to raise estrogen levels to typical female levels artificially, which is going to be a surprise for the endocrinology profession and the many cisgender women on hormone replacement therapy. Oh, and they’re also arguing that testosterone is not made by the testicles. No, apparently it’s made by the penis, which is a magical hormone tube.

    Meanwhile in the reality-based community, here’s a trans woman who was denied healthcare because the doctor hated trans people.

  • Not mad. Not bad. Just normal.

    There isn’t a single day when I don’t see somebody claiming that trans people are mentally ill and/or degenerates. Here’s some geniuses from this morning.

    A huge problem is that public awareness of trans people – and of what the medical consensus is about trans people – is incredibly out of date.

    For a long time, normal human variety and behaviour has been pathologised – that is, labelled as a medical problem when it isn’t.

    A good example of that is in the pathologisation of women. In the Victorian era, women who rebelled against domesticity could be labelled insane and thrown into asylums. Doctors considered women to suffer from an invented condition called “hysteria”, a condition that should be cured by finding a husband. In the 1950s, women were routinely sedated to deal with their unhappiness. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminism was considered by many to be a medical problem.

    And that’s before we get to the queer folk. In the US, homosexuality was classified as a medical condition until 1973. It isn’t, of course, but the supposed science was based on gender beliefs about the supposedly essential qualities of men and women. To put it simply, if you weren’t a manly straight man or a girly straight girl there was clearly some sort of medical problem.

    The treatment was harsh. Some people were given electro-shock therapy, a practice that continues in China to this day, or aversion therapy, or other supposed cures that caused great damage.

    The Bible of psychiatric conditions for US doctors is the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual, or DSM for short. It’s a reference manual produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and its first two editions included homosexuality. The APA was very resistant to improved scientific knowledge because it contradicted its members’ beliefs that gay people had a “degenerative” condition.

    American psychiatry mostly ignored this growing body of sex research and, in the case of Kinsey, expressed extreme hostility to findings that contradicted their own theories.

    Some gay activists were complicit in this.

    …some mid-20th century homophile (gay) activist groups accepted psychiatry’s illness model as an alternative to societal condemnation of homosexuality’s “immorality” and were willing to work with professionals who sought to “treat” and “cure” homosexuality.

    It’s easy to condemn now, but “be nice to them, they’re mental” was a step forward from “throw rocks at them, they’re perverts”.

    Eventually, though, science won: fact beat faith, and homosexuality was no longer a medical condition in the DSM III onwards – although it remained a “sexual orientation disturbance” until 1987. Nevertheless, “APA’s 1973 diagnostic revision was the beginning of the end of organized medicine’s official participation in the social stigmatization of homosexuality. Similar shifts gradually took place in the international mental health community as well.”

    There was a wider context to this: the World Health Organisation’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, ICD for short. In 1948, the WHO published version six of the ICD, ICD-6, which classified homosexuality as a “sexual deviation”.

    The ICD listed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1992.

    Most people understand that gay people are perfectly normal, but until very recently the official medical literature said otherwise. And that legitimised hatred.

    As a result [of removing homosexuality from the DSM and ICD], cultural attitudes about homosexuality changed in the US and other countries as those who accepted scientific authority on such matters gradually came to accept the normalizing view. For if homosexuality was no longer considered an illness, and if one did not literally accept biblical prohibitions against it, and if gay people are able and prepared to function as productive citizens, then what is wrong with being gay? Additionally, if there is nothing wrong with being gay, what moral and legal principles should the larger society endorse in helping gay people openly live their lives?

    The result, in many countries, eventually led, among other things, to (1) the repeal of sodomy laws that criminalized homosexuality; (2) the enactment of laws protecting the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in society and the workplace; (3) the ability of LGBT personnel to serve openly in the military; (4) marriage equality and civil unions in an ever growing number of countries; (5) the facilitation of gay parents’ adoption rights; (6) the easing of gay spouses’ rights of inheritance; and (7) an ever increasing number of religious denominations that would allow openly gay people to serve as clergy.

    Most importantly, in medicine, psychiatry, and other mental health professions, removing the diagnosis from the DSM led to an important shift from asking questions about “what causes homosexuality?” and “how can we treat it?” to focusing instead on the health and mental health needs of LGBT patient populations.

    Guess what? The DSM and ICD also pathologised trans people. The DSM detailed “gender identity disorder” until 2013, when DSM-5 reclassified it as “gender dysphoria” – not perfect, but better.

    The widely circulated belief in a made-up condition called Autogynephilia (short version: trans women are either narcissists or confused gay men; as ever, trans men aren’t given much thought) has been thoroughly debunked; being trans is not considered a mental illness in the DSM any more: the problem isn’t being trans, but the distress that comes from trying not to be.

    The same thing is happening with the ICD. As the WHO announced last year, “transsexualism” is being removed from ICD-11 – so the diagnosis I have, of “transsexualism male to female ICD10 F64”, will be consigned to the history books. The change was ratified this month by the Assembly of States of the WHO.

    As with the DSM, some concerns remain (not least whether US insurers will continue to pay for trans people’s transition-related healthcare).

    Here’s the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.

    While the removal of gender identity from the list of mental illnesses is a positive step, several concerns remain with the ICD11, and I call on WHO member states to continue improving the text to promote respect of human rights.

    Such concerns include the term “gender incongruence” retained in the ICD11 which may lead to interpretations suggesting abnormality, as well as the continued listing of gender incongruence in childhood in the ICD.

    I particularly regret that no progress was achieved in the ICD11 toward depathologisation of intersex people, and that terms such as “sex development disorders” continue to appear in the text. Language in the ICD Foundation suggesting sex “normalising” surgeries remains, which is of major concern.

    As with the DSM, it’s not perfect, but it’s better. As the Commissioner says:

    The pathologisation of trans people has served to justify serious violations of their human rights over the years, including attempts to “cure” them through conversion or reparative therapies; psychiatric evaluations, and sterilisation. In many countries, legal gender recognition is only possible upon medical diagnosis.

    Science, knowledge and understanding isn’t a fixed point. We now know that feminist women are not hysterical or insane. We know that you can’t pray the gay away or make people straight by electrocuting them. And we know that being trans isn’t an illness.