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.

The culture wars over trans people have made their way to the philosophers’ community, with some high-profile anti-trans people wrapping their views in philosophical arguments. Unfortunately, Luke Roelofs writes, those arguments don’t make sense.

This is a long read, but it’s interesting if you’d like to understand why issues such as policing bathrooms are so complex and potentially bad for all women.

Here’s a quick extract.

So in practice, ‘gender-critical’ doctrines just provide rationales for policing gender nonconformity. And the big lie at the heart of it, that people are seeking transition to better fit gender stereotypes, justifies this by painting the nonconforming people being policed as the real gender police.

Just like with bathrooms, the whole GC discourse about gender roles ultimately functions to obscure the real stakes and the real options. You can police people’s gender expression, or you can dismantle the prison of gender, but you can’t do both. GCRF [Gender Critical Radical Feminism] is a feminist fig leaf waved in front of social conservatism.

One of the things anti-trans writers like to go on about is the spectre of “detransition” and surgical regret: according to them, trans-related surgeries are acts of mutilation that many people will go on to regret.

As ever, the facts tell a very different story. I’ve mentioned previously that the NHS in England reported a detransition rate somewhat different from the 80% claimed by the anti-trans mob: it was 0.47%.

Here’s more data, this time covering surgical regret rates from a much bigger sample: 6,793 people over 43 years.

Despite the large increase in treated transgender people, the people who underwent surgery but regretted their decision was 0.5%.

By comparison, the regret rate for knee replacement surgery is 20%.

As Christine Burns MBE, author of Trans Britain, points out:

If any other branch of medicine had such good results the doctors involved would be given medals. It says volumes about the state of mind of anti-trans commentators that they keep on trying to pretend that an outstandingly successful medical treatment is vastly regretted.

Back in March, I wrote about the people protesting outside a Birmingham school over inclusive education and noted that while the protests were reported as Muslim, many of them were Christians. Also in March, I wrote that “US money is incoming and these protests will become more widespread.”

Yesterday, INews reported that the protests are going nationwide thanks to the sudden appearance of “grass roots” activist groups.

We’ve seen this pattern over the last couple of years with anti-trans groups, many of which have proven links with the US religious right. But trans people were only the testing ground for the evangelicals and their money.

Now the focus is moving onto the wider LGBT+ community and women’s reproductive freedom. That was always the plan.

A network of fringe activist groups such as Stop RSE, Parent Power, The Values Foundation and the School Gate Campaign have been set up over the past year, and campaigners are reportedly preparing to step up protests in September, encouraging parents to challenge the “radical sexualisation of kids” at schools.

The School Gate Campaign, set up by an evangelical Christian mother, claims on its website that teaching children about gay people “hijacks and potentially perverts the course of natural child development.”

Claiming that teaching about other people is “radical sexualisation” is of course a key claim of the religious right. Compare and contrast the bit from the article with the Family Research Council, the US’s horrific anti-LGBT+ evangelical group, who said this earlier this year:

“Parents across the country pulled their children out of public schools on Monday for the “Sex Ed Sit Out”—a grassroots awakening of frustrated parents who are sick of the sexualization of children in their taxpayer-funded schools.”

Same tactics. Same messaging. Same objective.

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.