Category: Bullshit

  • Baa baa bullshit

    When I was young, the press routinely made up stories about the “loony left”. Probably the most famous one is the story that nurseries were getting kids to sing “baa baa green sheep” instead of “baa baa black sheep” because the nursery rhyme was racist. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it was a deliberate…

  • Incompetence and malevolence

    A superb piece by Parker Molloy on the awful people dominating the discourse around trans people. When you’re discussing a topic solely on the grounds of whether or not someone is allowed to talk about something, you’re able to completely sidestep ever having to address the actual content. If you want to have a “discussion”…

  • Murdoch’s minions want Section 28 back

    The Times has posted its latest culture war piece, in which parents are “shocked” by “graphic sex education in school”. Apparently “one mother says her son has ‘gone from finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist to being told about anal sex’’, which is definitely a thing that actually happened. It’s a good piece to study…

  • Fight club

    One of the key attack strategies of the anti-trans movement is to attack the idea of trans women participating in sports. It’s quite clever, because elite athletes are very different from us “normal” people: people like Michael Phelps or Sharron Davies are basically freaks of nature. Davies has been (wrongly) tagged on the internet as…

  • The smoking gun

    Today, The Telegraph and Radio 4 gave extensive coverage to a brand new anti-trans group supported by various famous transphobes. Meanwhile in America, Mother Jones reports on the smoking gun that proves collusion between evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians and supposedly grass-roots lobby groups. Many of the key players are also active in UK anti-trans activism.…

  • All the things she said

    I’ve seen my name in print quite a lot recently, but it hasn’t all been book-related. I’ve been dragged into the culture war because of a BBC Radio Scotland item I contributed to, and as a result I ended up in publications ranging from PinkNews to The Independent and the LA Times. As a journalist,…

  • Horse Child and Dinosaur Boy

    Writing in The Spectator, Mary Wakefield has a terrible tale to share. “A friend in the education world has told me he knows of several British schools in which children are identifying as animals. There’s a horse child who’s taken out by staff for gallops; a boy dinosaur who is fed on strips of meat.”…

  • Profits of doom

    This graph is astonishing, if unsurprising: the UK press is publishing an average of 38 articles about trans people per day, most of them negative. Writing in advertising industry site Outvertising, Marty Davies makes it clear that brands, via advertising, are funding this – and that online advertising incentivises it. “We’re finding ourselves funding a…

  • Street of shame

    Private Eye magazine would like you to believe that the magazine is a brave outsider, fearlessly speaking truth to power and exposing media hypocrisy. The reality, of course, is that it’s part of the same incestuous bubble as the media it reports on. Here’s an example. Normally, a high profile left-wing writer leaving a high…

  • Number crunching

    “Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Brianna Ghey: 0.5 Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Isla Bryson: 16,427.1 The first is a victim of a terrible crime, likely targeted for being trans; the latter a perpetrator of a terrible crime, in which her trans status…