I was thinking some more about yesterday’s idiotic Washington Post editorial that attempted to blame women for men’s loneliness. Posting on Bluesky, writer Ian Boudreau made an excellent point:
If guys are suddenly very lonely it’s probably worth asking what they expected by following the advice of influencers who tell them to be maximally selfish, and who sneer at thoughtfulness, kindness, generosity, and genuine courtesy as weakness and wokeness.
He’s right. What these influencers offer – and it’s not just men’s rights activists but also various other anti-woke grifters preying on the unhappy – is isolation, because that’s what their business depends on. The lonelier you are, the sadder you are, the more isolated you become, the more of a hold they can have on you. It’s cult programming for profit, and it’s doing enormous damage to so many people.
There’s an astonishing editorial in the Washington Post today about a looming marriage crisis – its framing, not mine – in which it highlights an apparent problem: increasing numbers of single women don’t want to marry whiny fascist man-babies who get their life advice from misogynists such as Andrew Tate. And rather than come to the obvious conclusion, which is that said men should stop being whiny fascist man-babies who get their life advice from misogynists such as Andrew Tate, the editorial says:
This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise.
That someone does not, you’ll be amazed to discover, mean the men.
The article is quite rightly being destroyed in its own comments section, but it’s yet another sign of a problem that newspapers don’t like to cover: the homogeneity of newsrooms and their reliance on content written by external sources with agendas, in this case a blog by the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. It’s yet another attempt to paint right-wing men as victims of a censorious society rather than victims of their own bad behaviour and poor choices, incel rhetoric made palatable by the columnist class.
Twitter informs me that it’s 15 years today since I first posted on the service. I don’t post there at all now; I’ve unfollowed everybody and locked my account, and unless there’s a change of ownership and a huge change in culture I don’t anticipate returning.
It’s sad. For its first decade or so, Twitter was net positive: for all its flaws – and I’ve been reporting on and giving talks about the misinformation and disinformation on the service for many years now – it was an incredible communications platform for everything from breaking news to ridiculous flights of fancy. What Elon Musk has done to it in just one year is as tragic as it was predictable.
Over the last few days big brands such as Apple, IBM, Sony Pictures, NBC Universal and many more (but not, so far, the BBC) have pulled their advertising from the service in response to Musk endorsing a blatantly antisemitic tweet. It’s a welcome move, but it’s also an overdue one: Musk has been endorsing, amplifying and paying money to the worst bigots on Twitter for a long time now, and these brands were quite happy to have their advertising dollars used to finance that.
There are two things worth pointing out here. The first is that despite widespread publicity around Twitter’s lurch into bigotry the brands seemed perfectly happy with Twitter as recently as Friday, before a Media Matters investigation highlighted specific examples of the brands’ ads being positioned next to pro-Nazi content and even tweets praising Hitler. And secondly, the brands have not said they’re cancelling their advertising; they’re just pausing it. What we’re seeing here isn’t brands developing a backbone; it’s brands trying to ride out what they hope will be a short-lived PR storm.
In 2013, then-London mayor Boris Johnson described an Australian political trick which would come to be known as the dead cat strategy.
There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.
Johnson himself has used it many times when in self-inflicted political peril, but the most recent example of it was yesterday when it was deployed by Elon Musk to distract from news that under his leadership Twitter has lost $25 billion in value in just one year. His dead cat of choice, like that of many politicians, was anti-trans bigotry – and it worked. There’s much more discussion online of whether, as Musk claims (bizarrely), “cis is a heterosexual slur” than of Musk’s disastrous time in charge of the social network.
What he’s doing so transparently is the same thing the entire right wing media establishment, backed by conservative billionaires, has been doing with the entire anti-trans panic.
In many cases the people pushing anti-trans nonsense don’t necessarily believe it; it’s just convenient and when it stops working they’ll find another kind of cat to throw. But while I think this is absolutely a dead cat strategy, I also think that with Musk it’s coming from a more personal place: one of his children is trans and wants nothing to do with him. Which is worth bearing in mind whenever Apartheid Clyde, Space Karen, Poundland Iron Man or whatever else you’d like to call him embarks on another round of transphobia. He’s the trope made flesh of the racist, vaccine-denying, gammon-faced Fox News viewer furious that their kids don’t visit any more.
On a slightly related note, Musk also announced yesterday that he intends to turn Twitter/X into a dating app. Suggested names in my social media feeds so far include OKStupid, Plenty of Fash, OKKKupid and my own contribution, Fash-ly Madison.
The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK affiliates: there’s a lot of Russian oligarch money in there too, especially in mainland Europe. You might argue that Paul Marshall, a significant funder of right-wing media in the UK including UnHerd and GB News, is part of the same pattern – the super-rich funding outlets that push division and portray the world’s most privileged people as victims of sinister, shadowy “elites”.
Artwork by Wassily Kandinsky, accused of degeneracy by the Nazis
One of the tactics used to dehumanise minorities is to claim they have no culture, that they produce no art – because how can they when they’re not fully human? So it’s not a huge surprise to see disgraced former comedy writer Graham Linehan on his pity party tour claiming in the Daily Mail that trans people “produce no art”. There are “no great trans films”, “no great trans creators”… you get the idea.
And it’s a very old idea.
In far-right and religious extremism, the only art of value is the art produced by the in-group. Art and culture produced by members of the out-group is worthless, degenerate, corrupt, and the people who produce it and consume it are untermensch. Subhumans.
Here’s an explanation from 1942:
The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.
Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.
A subhuman and nothing more!
That particular screed was edited by Himmler.
The Nazis also railed against art specifically from the 1920s onwards, calling it Entartete Kunst – degenerate art. They claimed that such art was created by people corrupted and enfeebled, by people whose goal was to corrupt the minds of others and whose art was not in keeping with racial and sexual purity, that some works were “an insult to German womanhood”.
They started by demonising it, then by confiscating it, then by disappearing the people who made and consumed it.
The Nazi eradication of what was claimed to be degenerate in the symbolic realm of the visual, literary and performing arts was, quite logically, an early warning signal of a philosophy that would soon be applied to selective groups of human beings. Like the paintings that were rounded up and the books that Hitler burned, ostensibly degenerate people were soon dealt with in a final solution.
People on social media are dunking on Linehan with endless lists of great trans artists and works. But they’re falling into the trap, which is to distract. Linehan knows full well that there are great trans creators; before his decline into madness he used to praise some of them, and there’s no way that he’s unaware of, say, Wendy Carlos or The Matrix. But the issue is not that whether there are great trans artists. Of course there are. The issue is the ongoing mainstreaming of far-right views, in some cases actual Nazi views, in the mainstream press without criticism or challenge – and the cowardice of people who could and should be decrying those views rather than promoting them.
Someone made the rookie mistake of asking writer and academic Julia Serano to come on air and discuss the bigot dog-whistle “what is a woman?” Serano declined, and explained why.
“What is a woman?” is not intended to be a question. It’s a slogan created and championed by UK “gender critical” activists who strongly oppose the social and legal recognition of trans people, with some even calling for eliminationist measures that would morally mandate us out of existence. Whenever gender-critical activists pose the “what is a woman?” question to politicians, organizations, celebrities, etc. (as they are wont to do), they are not looking to start a nuanced discussion or debate. Rather, they want a yes-or-no answer to their real question, the only question that counts in their minds: Will you support our anti-trans beliefs, policies, and legislation?
Serano’s right, of course. “What is a woman?” is a loaded, rhetorical question asked by the kind of people who praise the Taliban or Russell Brand for “knowing what a woman is”, and it’s asked in much the same way as “when did you stop beating your wife?”
It is a question with an agenda, and it is based on an underlying assumption, a belief, that there is a single, immutable definition of what a woman is. And of course, that isn’t true.
The term “woman” is a classification and as Serano says, it has different criteria and meanings in different contexts. So for example in genetics, the criteria might be chromosomes; in reproductive health, reproductive anatomy; and in everyday conversation, social class: “people who move through the world as women and are interpreted and treated (and sometimes mistreated) as such.”
…if I mentioned having a conversation with a woman that I know from work or ran into at the store, you wouldn’t think at all about her chromosomes or reproductive organs (unless, of course, you were some kind of creep).
Serano writes:
…we all understand that “woman” is a broad category that comprises roughly half the human population. By necessity, it includes all sorts of diversity and seeming exceptions to the rule.
This is why, in everyday life, nobody ever asks the question “what is a woman?” In fact, the only people who bother to raise the issue these days are anti-trans activists.
And the reason they raise it, and the reason so many cisgender men parrot it, is because it’s a distraction from the very real issues all women experience, cis and trans. Because if we were to focus on any significant danger to women, we wouldn’t be looking at trans women. We’d be looking at cisgender men and some cisgender women too.
The Guardian reports today that the latest social attitudes survey shows that the UK is becoming more liberal in almost every way – with the notable exception of attitudes towards trans people. Since 2016, the first time such attitudes were recorded, people have become much more hostile to trans people:
The proportion of the British public describing themselves as “not prejudiced” towards transgender people fell from 82% to 64% between 2021 and 2022, when the latest survey took place.
So the number of people who say they’re prejudiced against trans people has doubled in a year. That’s astonishing, and horrifying.
What could possibly have happened since the apparent golden age of 2016? If you go through The Guardian and The Observer’s coverage of trans issues in 2016, you’ll see that it’s very different from what they published in 2018, and things are even worse now: it turns out that “occasionally publishes hateful shit”, which was those papers’ position pre-2017, was as good as it was going to get.
The big change in this period, of course, was the arrival of faux-feminist anti-trans groups and their immediate embrace by journalists in the left-wing press as well as the right. That happened in mid-2017 and grew very quickly, and you can see the change in the coverage and the language used.
Initially at least, the anti-trans charge was led not by the right wing press, but by the left – notably the Guardian and The New Statesman. By 2018, the editorial policy of most of the UK press was clearly and often ridiculously anti-trans as the moral panic got into high gear.
This is exactly what we saw in the period leading up to the introduction of Section 28.
As I wrote in my book:
[by 2018] newspapers’ star columnists were regularly railing against the invented evils of “trans activists” who were “silencing women”, and evangelical groups were being given a platform to describe support for trans and non-binary teens as “child abuse”, deliberately and cynically conflating changing gender markers with having “mutilating surgery”. The level of coverage was ridiculously one-sided, completely disproportionate for a minor change affecting such a small minority of people, and was an attempt to direct public opinion rather than reflect it.
And direct it they have: in a very short time the press-driven hate campaign has seen a massive change in people’s attitudes towards legal gender recognition – something that doesn’t affect you at all if you aren’t transgender. From the Guardian report:
while 58% of the British public agreed in 2016 that transgender people should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate changed if they wanted,that figure had dropped to 30% by 2022, suggesting an overall gradual erosion in support towards transgender rights” since 2018.
The law today is the same as it was in 2016. What’s changed is the obsessive coverage of it, and of us.
There’s a long list of villains here: not just the pressure groups and the journalists but the US right, the BBC, Channel 4, social media, the cowardice of the Theresa May government, the skeptics movement, the “mummy bloggers” and Mumsnet, the Hands Across The Aisle coalition and many more. One day somebody who isn’t risking financial ruin under UK libel laws will write the damning exposé the whole sorry saga deserves, hopefully making some of its key actors unemployable in the process. But for now, here’s the issue in a nutshell: since 2016, The UK’s leading left-wing paper has been a crucial part of a highly successful right-wing campaign to promote intolerance of and prejudice against some of the most marginalised people in the country. Well done, everybody.
The UK Prime Minister, as I’m sure you’ve seen, has promised to ban “heavy-handed measures” that don’t exist: “taxes on eating meat”, “sorting your rubbish into seven different bins”, and so on. He has previously spoken against other things that don’t exist, such as children identifying as cats, once again with the full-throated support of the right-wing press.
It’s easy to mock this stuff, and I’m happy to, but it’s also very frightening: when politicians invent and rail against imaginary enemies, they’re not so much flirting with fascism as sticking their tongue down its throat. What we’ve seen in the war on trans people – the weaponisation of absolute bullshit – is now being used more widely. We’re in a very dark place.
The Huffington Post has an interesting exposé of the people making good money from bad takes and pseudoscience: you can make tens of thousands of dollars presenting pseudoscience in the employ of anti-trans religious extremists. And while the article is mainly about the US, the UK gets a look-in too. You may recognise the names here from their very frequent appearances in the UK press.
The spike in anti-trans legislation means states need even more experts to defend it. And in order to deepen the bench, states have started enlisting academics who aren’t in health care or don’t even primarily research humans. One is a Manchester University professor named Emma Hilton, who mainly studies a particular species of frog and how it offers an understanding of inherited human genetic disorders. Hilton is a founder of a British group, Sex Matters, that advocates for legally segregating spaces by sex. She earned $300 an hour last year defending bans on trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams in Utah and Indiana.
By way of explaining why she was qualified to weigh in on school sports, she told one court, “I participate keenly in sports at an amateur level, playing netball recreationally.”
“Our understanding of human biology is in part a result of the study of animal models,” Hilton said in an email. She declined to address the relevance of netball, which is like basketball without dribbling.
Another is Michael Biggs, an Oxford sociology professor who admitted in court to writing transphobic tweets under the pseudonymous handle @MrHenryWimbush and described himself as a “teenage shitlord [turned] Oxford professor.” “Transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons,” reads one representative post.
Florida paid Biggs $400 an hour to defend its Medicaid ban.
