Inviting organisations to talk about issues in schools can be a positive thing: for example, the Time For Inclusive Education campaign helps battle the bullying of LGBT+ kids. But what if the organisation has a track record of falsification and shock tactics?

In an article about the tactics of anti-abortion groups, The Overtake notes that the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child regularly gives presentations to Scots schoolchildren. 

Statistics for England are “unavailable”, but in Scotland SPUC delivers talks in around 50 schools per year, often to meet a curriculum need.

The SPUC declined to let the writer see any of the materials they use to meet this curriculum need.

That’s deeply worrying. Here’s The Guardian, 11 years ago:

Spuc, for example, tells teenagers there are links between abortion and breast cancer, although organisations such as Cancer Research UK and Breakthrough Breast Cancer have consistently presented research to prove there is no link. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) categorically states that abortion is not associated with an increase in breast-cancer risk.

Here’s The Overtake, this week.

a catalogue of educational leaflets are available from its website, many of which make for interesting reading. Its Abortion Pack includes a quotation from Dr Thomas Stuttaford which claims an “unusually high proportion” of women who had undergone an abortion later developed breast cancer. “Such women are up to four times more likely to develop breast cancer,” he says.

Its pamphlet on Abortion and Women’s Health, dated April 2017 and authored by devout Catholic Dr Greg Pike, persists with the view that the relationship between abortion and elevated risk of breast cancer is “a controversial question”

The facts, the science, hasn’t changed in the last decade.

That’s just one example. The organisation also makes false claims about mental health and about how contraception works.

Back to The Guardian:

Many anti-abortion organisations refer to “post-abortion syndrome”, whose symptoms can include panic attacks, relationship problems, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse, and depression. In fact, it is not a recognised medical condition. In August, the American Psychological Association concluded: “There is no credible evidence that single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental-health problems for adult women.”

…Spuc opts for both types of pictures. Having watched its presentation, labelled “standard abortion talk 2008”, I am not surprised to hear that in one class of 16- and 17-year-olds shown the presentation in July, half the students left distressed and some were physically sick.

I can’t help wondering what the Venn diagram of “people who don’t want kids to learn that LGBT+ folks exist” and “people who are fine with forced birthers peddling verifiably false claims” would look like.

Letting religious groups peddle demonstrably false information and make children vomit isn’t balance. It’s bullshit.

The Guardian:

Nobody I spoke to suggested that anti-abortion views should be shielded from young people. But, says Furedi, any discussion in school must be honest and provide accurate, impartial and up-to-date information. “Better still,” she says, “let’s move it out of the RE room and be much more upfront about the fact that one in three women will have an abortion at some time in their lives and that basically, if you’re fertile and sexually active, you are at risk of an unwanted pregnancy.”

Children should learn about abortion. I’ve had several conversations with my 11-year-old daughter about it, conversations in which both sides of the argument have been explored. But it’s a health issue, not a religious issue, and should be taught as such.

 

One of the things that characterises the anti-trans movement in the UK is its use of crowdfunding, essentially an online begging bowl. But unlike many women’s organisations, the anti-trans groups don’t seem to put much effort into promoting their crowdfunders; also unlike many women’s groups, they attract suspiciously large donations.

For example, the Transgender Trend group (effectively one individual, a sculptor who’s found a new career spreading anti-trans scaremongering) recently banked two anonymous donations totalling £35,000 within minutes of each other. Crowdfunding doesn’t usually work like that. Donations are usually £10 here, £20 there: even three figures is rare.

In recent months, UK anti-trans groups and individuals have raised over £280,000 via crowdfunding. That money’s been raised to pay legal costs for cases that never went to trial, to raise money for “living expenses” and to sit in individuals’ bank accounts while they borrow from it to help their cash flow. A lot of it is apparently sitting around, unspent.

When over a quarter of a million pounds has mysteriously appeared (and sometimes, mysteriously disappeared), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that something rotten is going on here: tax evasion, dark money, possibly money laundering and in some cases what looks awfully like grifting.

We know the US religious right has spent millions on funding supposed grassroots groups throughout Europe via dark money, and we know that the UK anti-trans movement has strong links with the US religious right.

At least £279,729 has flowed into the coffers of UK anti-trans groups recently. That’s likely to be the tip of the iceberg: one group paid for a Metro wrap-around, market value £45K, before it started seriously fundraising; others accept donations via PayPal, which aren’t public (the UK Brexit party used this method to disguise its donors)).

There’s an astonishing amount of money being moved around here.

Imagine what a difference that kind of money could make to organisations such as, say, Rape Crisis Scotland instead of paying for bigots’ bedding.

Where’s the money coming from?

It’s not a great day for news about trans people. In Antwerp, a teenage trans woman was gang raped by three men on her very first day presenting female. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, no doubt upset some of her transphobic members by tweeting about it:

Important to remember that – far from being responsible for the actions of abusive men – trans women, just like all women, can be and often are the victims of male violence. https://twitter.com/britlgbtawards/status/1146742980272893956

Stories like this don’t stop the scaremongering about trans women, which often makes malicious allegations about trans-inclusive individuals and organisations. When they’re not shouting at women on Twitter, the anti-trans group calling themselves Women Make Glasgow are demanding Stonewall be banned from schools for “lobbying school children in an environment where no-one is allowed to do this.”

Stonewall’s Colin MacFarlane:

Yet again facts don’t seem to matter. We don’t ‘lobby’ school children we train teachers & educational professionals on how to create inclusive learning environments for ALL young folk.

Why is that work with teachers so vital?
Nearly half of LGBT young people and 71% of trans young people are bullied simply for being who they are.
Nearly one in twenty young LGBT people have received death threats
41 % of young people hear nothing about LGBT people in schools

Teachers tell us that they want to get it right for their LGBT pupils and that’s why they come to us for help.

You can read our full School Report here. 🚨some of the stats here may be triggering. 🚨

https://www.stonewallscotland.org.uk/system/files/school_report_scotland_2017.pdf

Here’s a typically measured, intelligent response – the first one in the thread.

@Cmacf76 It’s ok if you want to get into kids’ pants? Eh? What sicko world have we created for today’s children?

Incidentally, other responses show another problem beyond basic bigotry: misinformation recycled as fact. One commenter asks about kids being expelled for saying there are only two genders; the story they’re alluding to has nothing to do with Stonewall and the school concerned, in Scotland, excluded the teenager for breaking its no-exceptions rule prohibiting pupils from filming teachers in classrooms.

It’s not just LGBT+ charities. Any organisation that says it isn’t opposed to trans inclusion becomes targeted. Recent examples have included charities such as Scottish Rape Crisis and Scottish Women’s Aid.

Here’s Brian Dempsey, a lecturer at the University of Dundee’s law school, writing in response to a piece in Scottish Legal News.

The feminist women’s groups who have most experience of fighting for and delivering women-only safe spaces, including Scottish Rape Crisis, Scottish Women’s Aid, Engender, Zero Tolerance all have experience of operating services on a self-declaration basis and they strongly support reform.

Your report points out that the majority of funding for these and other effective, well-established feminist organisations comes from the Scottish government. The implication that dedicated feminists are actively undermining women’s safety for the sake of government money is both unfounded and distasteful.

The claims come from the same place as the leaflets being put through Glasgow doors claiming 82% opposition to proposed gender recognition reform. As The Ferret points out, that claim is false.

The latest survey of attitudes in fact shows majority support across the UK, as PinkNews reports:

Despite public protests, 59 percent of the UK population – including 47 percent of Conservative voters – back teaching LGBT-inclusive relationships education in schools.

56 percent of people are also in favour of trans people being able to self-identify their gender, which comes as the government is expected to respond to its consultation on potential reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in the coming weeks.

Human rights shouldn’t be subject to popular opinion: in living memory there was a 3/4 majority against civil rights for people of colour, a 3/4 majority against civil rights for gay people and so on.But it demonstrates that despite the best efforts of the bigots and their friends in the media, most of the public is on the right side of history.

Let’s post this picture again.

Everybody in this photo is trans, and it’s important that you see that. Because conventionally attractive trans women are the last thing the anti-trans bigots want you to see.

One of the things the “reasonable debate” crowd really like to do is to scour the internet to find photos of the ugliest trans people and crossdressers they can find. If they’re dressed badly or inappropriately, all the better. They then share those photographs, mocking them, sometimes using the #transisbeautiful hashtag, sometimes adding images of people who aren’t trans at all such as exhibitionists in fishnets. Look at the freaks!

Leaving aside the point that mocking women’s appearance for not matching up to societal standards of beauty is one of the least feminist things you can do that doesn’t involve teaming up with racists, anti-semites, forced birthers, the Murdoch press and the religious right, there’s a reason they do it.

The reason is simple. Caricatures make it easier to hate.

Whenever anti-trans bigots try to spread fear of trans women (and it’s always women; trans men like Michael Hughes spoil their narrative), there’s a particular mental image they want you to have: a “hulking”, sweaty, “burly” “man in a dress”. I’m using the quotes deliberately, because those are the words and terms you see again and again: words such as hulking and burly are used to imply danger, while “man in a dress” is a much more loaded term than “trans woman”.

And of course, there are trans women who look like shit. I’m often one of them. That’s what comes from a lifetime spent in ignorance about trans people, trying not to be trans in a world that tells you there’s something wrong with you, and finally coming out with zero knowledge of how to do clothes and makeup properly long after testosterone has ruined your chances of ever being young and beautiful.

But the focus on the people who don’t look like unremarkable or even beautiful cisgender women is deliberate and malicious in the same way that racists’ caricatures of black people or anti-semites’ caricatures of Jewish men were/are deliberate and malicious: they want you to imagine the caricature every time you hear about trans women, or black people, or Jewish men, because it’s so much harder to hate people who are perfectly ordinary. If the differences aren’t dramatic enough, the bigots will simply invent some more.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

The photo is from a website that collates pictures of the world’s supposedly worst-dressed people (I’ve obscured their face). I don’t know the context; for all I know the person pictured is a goddamn saint who just happens to have pretty crap clothing choices. But if I wanted you to think negatively about trans people, to imagine “burly”, “hulking” people you might be scared or suspicious of, it’s a pretty good example of the kind of thing I’d share.

I could quite easily do the same thing with anti-trans bigots, finding photographs of the ugly ones or just photos that make them look like they’ve escaped from some kind of institution. I won’t, though, because I don’t have that kind of poison in my heart.

Let’s try another picture. This one’s ideal – it’s a scary tran in a toilet!

Not so scary, is she? This is Sarah McBride, a trans woman and US politician who was abused at work by anti-trans bigots visiting from England; the bigots are leading lights in the UK anti-trans moment and regularly featured in print and broadcast media. One of them spent much of this week sharing ugly and/or unflattering pictures of trans women for her social media followers to mock.

Let’s try another.

This is Brae Carnes, a trans woman from Canada, using the toilet the bigots would like her to use.

Which of the photos is closest to the mental image you have when someone says “trans women in the ladies’ toilet”? I bet it’s not either of the photos of trans women in toilets I’ve used here. It’s likely to be much closer to the person in the terrible outfit.

And of course, that’s exactly what the bigots want. It’s why they share the photos.

I’m not suggesting here that McBride and Carnes are “the good ones” because they fit people’s expectations of what “normal” women look like. We’re just as valid if, like me, we’re horse frighteners. I’m simply pointing out that it’s very easy to make a particular group look alien and perhaps even dangerous by focusing on the worst, most extreme examples (in the eyes of the people you want to convince) because we still largely associate physical beauty with goodness and purity.

It’s a trick. Don’t fall for it.

It was Edinburgh Pride day yesterday.

SNP MSP Joan McAlpine spent much of it indulging in the “legitimate debate” she’s so fond of by circulating faked tweets in order to create a social media pile-on against a trans ally and human rights campaigner.

At the actual event some anti-trans activists came along to shout their “reasonable concerns” at the marchers.

Here’s one of the marchers, a cisgender woman.

…I heard shouting, and I looked to the corner to see who that was. I’m used to being shouted at by the fringe Christians, so I looked over to see if it was them (again).

It wasn’t. It was a small group of white, ostensibly middle class cis women screaming hate at us. At Pride – an event that was initially a response to police brutality against mostly black trans women.

…I’m a cis lesbian, and because of this sort of behaviour, I am scared to go the public bathrooms much of the time.

I am routinely challenged when trying to go to the toilet and I am anxious every time I walk into the women’s changing room at the gym.

I was once followed into the toilet in a pub in Cowdenbeath by a man who tried to kick the door down and attack me because, y’know, women’s safety.

That was the most serious attack, but it was by no means an isolated incident. The attack by the anti-trans protesters yesterday was part of that continuum of violence.

No trans woman has ever made me feel unsafe. They have always respected my boundaries and my dignity.

These people yesterday made Pride an unsafe place for women like me, and for my trans pals and allies.

Today, the Scottish Government and the SNP effectively threw trans people under the bus. After a lengthy public consultation that found the general public and women’s groups overwhelmingly in favour of its proposals for gender recognition reform, the next step is… to water down the proposals and have another consultation and maybe water them down some more.

It’s a terrible decision: the Government has capitulated to the bigots, ignoring the results of its own consultation. It has backtracked from its manifesto commitment to bring gender recognition in line with best practice to proposing a minor tweak to the current system, reducing the recognition criteria from two years to either six or nine months (six months living full time plus a three month waiting period, or three and three; it’s unclear at the moment) – something that bears no relation to international best practice.

I’m not going to dwell on it, on the affirming message it sends to the bigots or on the inevitable uptick in anti-trans abuse it’s going to engender. Instead, I’ll tell you a story.

Every year a man, a religious man, stands at the entrance to Glasgow’s Pride event. Through his microphone he shouts fire and brimstone, punishment and damnation. And every year the crowd of beautiful LGBT+ people, of families and of allies grows larger, and louder, and more vibrant, and more diverse, and more beautiful. Few notice him. Even fewer care.

So let the bigots shout. Let them shout until their eyes pop and their throats rip and their lungs burst. Let them shout at clouds and at crowds and at a world that’s leaving them far behind.

All they have is hate.

We have love.

And love will win.

The love my friends and family have for me, and that I have for them, does not require a certificate.