Herald columnist Iain Macwhirter, pictured, has gone off on one about trans people again. Yesterday he claimed on twitter that calling cisgender women cis “is the most extreme form of misogyny”, which I’m sure will be news to many women who’ve endured much worse things than being accurately labelled with a latin prefix.
Cis is to trans what straight is to gay; nothing more, nothing less.
He’s yet another example of something that happens again and again:
Ageing, straight, cisgender person writes about trans stuff, gets it wrong
A couple of trans people say “hey man, that’s not cool. You’re wrong about X.”
Ageing, straight, cisgender person shouts “DON’T YOU OPPRESS ME YOU TRANS BASTARDS!” and becomes a rabid anti-trans activist
It’s not the first time; it won’t be the last. So let’s just re-read this A Thousand Flowers piece from February about MacWhirter’s long opposition to women’s rights and disregard for the views of women’s groups.
So what exactly is Macwhirter’s history of standing with Scotland’s women when they asked for protection? Oh aye, he opposed all that feminism gone mad.  Yer New Definitely Feminist Hero last got a menshie on ATF for his opposition to the years of work done by women’s organisations, to pass the landmark Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Bill, which he condemned as “mince†in another Herald Da-sterpiece.
…Macwhirter is, sadly, far from alone in being a man guilty of uncritically parroting a tiny group of anti trans activists, while not doing even the most shallow bit of digging or asking any of the women’s organisations you’d imagine any journalist writing about gender would have on speed dial.
One of the tricks the far right likes to use is phony science. They claim “facts don’t care about your feelings” while putting their feelings above actual facts, such as how human biology works.
these “protectors of enlightenment†are guilty of the very behavior this phrase derides. Though often dismissed as just a fringe internet movement, they espouse unscientific claims that have infected our politics and culture.
Biology is more complex than you learned when you were 12.
Nearly everyone in middle school biology learned that if you’ve got XX chromosomes, you’re a female; if you’ve got XY, you’re a male. This tired simplification is great for teaching the importance of chromosomes but betrays the true nature of biological sex. The popular belief that your sex arises only from your chromosomal makeup is wrong. The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change.
…the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real.
Do read the whole thing. It’s a really good explanation of how amazing human development is.
Meanwhile in the UK, a handful of academics got an open letter published in The Times with that far-right trope: preventing them from being bigoted towards trans and non-binary students means universities are silencing their free speech and curtailing their academic freedom. Just asking an academic to use students’ correct pronouns is tantamount to locking them away in a gulag for the rest of their lives.
To give you a flavour of the great minds of the 30 signatories, the names include Stuart Waiton. Waiton, an occasional contributor to Glasgow’s Herald newspaper, believes children don’t have human rights, that parents should be allowed to hit their children and that the Scottish government is in thrall to a powerful transgender lobby; he recently stood as a Brexit Party candidate.
…trans people have been made into a convenient scapegoat for the idea that a group (or generation, or class) of people are forcing others to change the way they are speaking. That the phantom authority in question is simply good sense — that it makes sense to refer to trans women as “she†because, well, we look, speak, act, dress, and identify as women, and many of us have estrogen rather than testosterone in our bodies — can be ignored in favor of the paranoid fear that someone else is coming to dispossess us of our language.
Whether intentionally or by accident, the arsey academics are on the side of the far right, of people who want to harass and bully others under the guise of freedom of speech or academic freedom.
The entire movement against the supposed silencing of free speech in education is a far-right movement, which is why here in the UK it’s being driven by right-wing publications such as The Spectator and The Times (and the right-wing-funded Spiked). Here’s a good piece about its US version, which UK right-wingers have copied as part of bringing the US culture wars to the UK.
Fascist politics seeks to undermine the credibility of institutions that harbor independent voices of dissent until they can be replaced by media and universities that reject those voices.
…Universities, they say, claim to hold free speech in the highest regard but suppress any voices that don’t lean left by allowing protests against them on campus.
…Where speech is a right, propagandists cannot attack dissent head-on; instead they must represent it as something violent and oppressive (a protest therefore becomes a “riotâ€).
Attempting to characterise legitimate protest and even legitimate criticism as violence and oppression is something the far right (and their anti-trans fellow travellers) have been doing for some time now: it’s where bigots’ bogus claims of silencing and erasure come from.
Back to the letter. If 30 signatories are enough for publication in The Times, I wonder how prominent this response from many other academics will be: at the time of writing, it has more than 1,700 signatories (update, the same day: more than 4,000 now before checking for duplications etc.)
We are a diverse range of professionals working in higher education and research institutions. Together we register our support for the inclusion and safety of all staff and students, including trans individuals and gender-diverse people.
…Diversity training addresses equality, diversity and inclusion for all protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. Stonewall promotes an inclusive environment, in which the rights of trans and gender-diverse people are placed on an equal footing with the rights of other historically disadvantaged groups. This addresses the needs of our trans colleagues and students, including use of their chosen pronouns and respecting their gender identities. None of this limits our academic freedom.
I’m writing about some really horrible things today so let’s start with something beautiful instead: here’s Swedish group Erato covering Robyn’s Call Your Girlfriend.
Here’s what I grew up seeing on the breakfast table (content warning: vicious homophobia and transphobia including offensive slurs).
Poofters. Benders. Shirtlifters. Bumboys. Lezzies. This was how British tabloid headlines referred to gay men and lesbians in the 1980s — an echo of the taunts heard on the street before a beating. The stories beneath would expand on the pejoratives, justifying them with news of “sick†“evilâ€, “predatory†gays; all arising from a presumption: that readers would agree.
…In a typical example from 1985, Sanderson is left returning fire on one homophobic piece after the other, all drawn from a single month. The first, a Sunday People spread under the headline “Ban the Panto Fairiesâ€, saw the comedian Bernard Manning arguing that gay actors should not be allowed on “television, on stage, in clubs or pubs†in order that they don’t “corrupt the childrenâ€.
…It wasn’t just the national newspapers. In the same column, Sanderson selected a delightful mezze of local paper bigotry. “Gays are EVIL†was the headline in a recent edition of the Bromley Leader. The Plymouth Evening Herald described a mere advert for a gay club as “an offensive gay club posterâ€. While the Solihull Daily Times blared in a headline: “Row over poofs and queersâ€.
In the same column, he reported that The Sun, Britain’s bestselling newspaper, had “negative gay stories almost every day for the past few weeksâ€. In one, the paper branded a council leader “barmy†for campaigning for black and gay people to be protected from murder.
It’s shocking to see how little regard the papers had for human lives. As Strudwick writes, the AIDS era produced some astonishingly vicious journalism in papers such as The Times.
Shortly after The Sun’s near-daily anti-gay coverage, The Times declared its official position in a leader editorial: “Many members of the public are tempted to see in AIDS some sort of retribution for a questionable style of life.â€
The Sun and The Times are both owned by Murdoch, as was The News of The World.
“The News of the World carried ‘gay plague’ headlines in three consecutive issues,†wrote Sanderson, detailing each one: “Victims of gay plague long to dieâ€; “My doomed son’s gay plague agonyâ€; “Art genius destroyed by gay killer bugâ€.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Sun ran a headline asking, “is it wise to share a lavatory with a homosexual?”
…The Sun then called gay men “walking time bombs†with the “killer disease AIDS†who are a “menace to all societyâ€
Even when the evidence was clear that heterosexuals also had HIV, The Sun, wrote Sanderson, “still insisted that AIDS sufferers were ‘gay plague victims’†and merrily printed headlines unencumbered by facts: “Beer mugs may spread the diseaseâ€.
There’s a generation of LGBT+ people who read this stuff daily. When some of us finally came out in later life, people around us expressed surprise. Why didn’t we come out earlier?
Here’s The Sun on 12 December 1987, when I’d just turned 15.
Perverts are to blame for the killer plague.
The Telegraph:
The homosexuals who have brought this plague upon us should be locked up… Burning is too good for them. Bury them in a pit and pour on quick lime.
Broadsheets advocating for the murder of gay people; tabloids demanding they be locked up. The national press celebrating anti-gay hate crimes. Even The Guardian got in on the act.
[Sanderson] accuses the outlet of “giving a voice to people who should never have one in a paper like that, simply because they felt they should have balance.†Sometimes it was worse than that. Media Watch highlighted the reporting of a vicar who had been caught cottaging, entrapped in a public toilet by a policeman, but rather than criticise the police The Guardian published the defendant’s home address.
Publishing a gay man’s home address during a time of homophobic murders and petrol bomb attacks. No doubt The Guardian later ran a story pondering the mysterious rise of anti-gay hate crimes.
As Sanderson notes, the focus later moved to trans women in columns containing ‘phrases such as “man in a dressâ€, “dicks in chicks’ clothingâ€, “shemalesâ€, “trannies†and a warning to trans people: “You really won’t like us when we’re angryâ€.’
The media regulator proved toothless for many years, and when it did finally rule against the press – against Garry Bushell’s Sun columns – they doubled down on the abuse.
And now, as Sanderson says, “the whole thing is starting again.”
The same slurs, the same publications, often the same writers. There are growing demands for Section 28-style legislation to prevent children being “exposed” to the existence of LGBT+ people. Newspapers are telling their readers to be afraid of people in toilets. A tiny, vulnerable minority is being victimised by some of the most powerful people in the world. Hate crimes have doubled; for trans people they’ve trebled.
The newspapers didn’t stop the abuse because of press complaints adjudications, because the had a change of heart, or because they discovered basic human decency. They stopped because their readers didn’t share their hatred. There wasn’t money in it any more.
the backlash eventually ebbed, says Sanderson, as newspapers began to realise “which way the wind was blowingâ€. Their readers were changing before they were.
The current anti-LGBT+ abuse won’t stop until the same thing happens. That means voting with your feet, with your web browser and with your wallet.
If you buy the papers that are currently conducting a vendetta against LGBT+ people – such as the Spectator, The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, even The Guardian – or read anti-LGBT+ content online, you can’t claim to be supportive of LGBT+ people.
Your money means you are part of this. You’re funding it. You’re fuelling it.
You are paying the wages of people who make a living inciting hatred against people.
Cis women’s intolerance should not be a legitimate reason for limiting the rights of trans women. The idea that all trans women should be denied civil rights because a trans woman might someday commit a crime is the essence of bigotry and goes against feminist values.
That’s not to say The Guardian doesn’t sometimes print voices supportive of trans people. It does, albeit vanishingly rarely, in what looks rather like an attempt to deflect criticism of its overwhelmingly negative portrayal of trans people – criticism of which goes back many years.
I was at a talk last night by Juliet Jacques, whose transition diaries appeared in the Guardian from 2010 to 2012. The diaries were longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011, but Jacques was under no illusions that the editors had any interest in reporting trans issues beyond tokenism: her attempts to describe the wider picture, both cultural and political, had to be done by stealth.
This attack and the ensuing media circus are par for the course in 2019. In both my native United States and here in the United Kingdom, it always has been and still is open season on the bodies of (in no specific order) people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants. I have evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation. That has nothing to do with the merit of my character.
…The commodification and exploitation of my face came at the expense of other victims whose constant persecution apparently does not warrant similar moral outrage.
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. Â “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.”
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/
Do say: “If Straight Pride had been invented sooner, they might not have had to close all those branches of Burton.â€
Don’t say: “Where are all you guys going? The Boat Show’s that way!â€
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
