Countering the constant flood of anti-trans bullshit is a Sisyphean task that many of us simply haven’t the time or energy to deal with, but a particularly egregious example is doing the rounds right now and it’s important to debunk it.
The lie: the Scottish gender recognition reform bill was rushed through by the Scottish Government.
3 large scale consultations, amassing over 43,000 responses with a large majority in favour of reform
67 hours of parliamentary debate and evidence gathering (during which anti-trans groups did not provide any evidence to substantiate their lurid claims)
25 hours of parliamentary debate on proposed amendments at stage 3
A clear parliamentary majority in favour of reform at every stage of the bill
As Kelley writes:
This is one of the most consulted on bills in Scottish Government history. This is democracy and devolution in action. This is implementing a fundamental human right for trans people in Scotland. To consider triggering a constitutional crisis to block it is shocking.
A ban on gender affirming care is not the endgame here. With attacks on gay people rising through book bans and Don’t Say Gay or Trans bills, all LGBTQ+ rights are in the crosshairs. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project makes that clear when he claims that the debate over gay marriage was a sham and that “essentially we went from Obergefell and gay marriage to now sex changes for gay minors, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers.”
The ADF is a key driver of the anti-trans movement in the UK and in Scotland too, with its representatives given columns in the Scottish and national press without any explanation of who they are and what they represent; they typically provide witnesses in anti-trans legal cases too, such as the (now reversed) ban on puberty blockers in the UK.
The anti-trans movement in the US is a Christian Right assault on LGBT+ people. And so is the UK one, although it tries to convince itself otherwise. Whether it’s Scottish Nationalists standing with the right-wing Christian fundamentalists, bored millionaires publicly supporting avowed anti-feminist Christian theocrats or self-proclaimed left-wing writers throwing themselves into the warm embrace of the Daily Mail, The Times and The Telegraph, anti-trans bigots in the UK are doing the work of the religious right.
A key part of the Christian Right’s strategy is to frame trans people’s basic human rights as a “debate”, in much the same way creationists pushed the idea of “teaching the debate” as a way to get fundamentalist religious beliefs into classrooms. As Katelyn Burns writes in Xtra, that “debate” is no such thing: it’s a constant barrage of anti-trans propaganda. Whether due to malevolence or incompetence, supposedly liberal journalists are doing the devil’s work.
There’s an article in today’s (Glasgow) Herald claiming that a ban on conversion therapy will “criminalise parents”, throw psychotherapists in prison and have you arrested if you question your child’s gender or sexuality.
It’s nonsense, and it’s based almost entirely on baseless claims by the Christian Institute – the same Christian Institute that the same newspaper described as anti-LGBT “Christian Fundamentalists” in 2017 when it had yet to join the anti-trans culture war.
The charity has previously campaigned against gambling, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, opposing same sex marriages and seeking to raise the age of consent. The charity once produced an organ-donor style plastic card that read: “In the event of my death, I do not want my children to be adopted by homosexuals”.
None of that context is in today’s piece, despite being extremely relevant. It’s almost as if that’s a calculated editorial decision.
if you are indeed one of those suddenly convinced that the trans issue is desperately worrying, ask yourself this question: How come you never thought it before?
Is it a coincidence that you suddenly started thinking and fretting about it at exactly the same time as the Tory press started to fixate upon it at a time when the Conservative Party is in dire trouble?
You never cared about trans women in toilets, even though they’ve been there for decades and never did you any harm. You never cared about trans women athletes because they’ve been competing in the Olympics for 20 years. You’re only worried about them now because the right-leaning media is telling you to. Last time it was migrants. Time before that teachers. Time before that junior doctors. Time before that judges. Time before that people on benefits. Time before that gay people and HIV. Time before that…
When we do ban conversion therapy, like so many other countries have done and will do, it’ll become very clear that the fundamentalists lied. But don’t forget who passed them the mic to spread those lies.
Many LGBT+ people who’ve come out have been told by friends or family, with some bafflement, that there “weren’t any signs” that they were gay or trans. And I think that’s really interesting, because I think there are two main reasons for that. The first is that the signs people expect are often based on stereotypes. And the second is because many people – not all LGBT+ people, but many of us – make damn sure we don’t reveal who we are if we haven’t come out.
Let’s start with the stereotypes. When the only LGBT+ people portrayed in the media are from a particular mould – trans women but not trans men; straight trans women who fancy men but not gay trans women who love women; gay men who are hyper-camp but never gay men who are hyper-masculine, and so on – then many LGBT+ people simply don’t match the stereotypes people expect us to be. And in the case of trans women there’s the added confusion of drag. How could I have been trans when I didn’t spend my teens strutting down the high street dressed like RuPaul and destroying the locals with my savage drag queen wit?
If those are the signs you’re looking for, then no. There were no signs.
But there’s more to it than that, I think. It’s something Zoe Violet writes about in this poem for Tacoma West, “When you come out as trans and your mom says ‘there were no signs’”. Here’s an extract:
But of course, there were no signs There were no signs because She was the city planner She was the civil engineer …She plastered you with circles and arrows Posted warnings and named all the places
This isn’t exclusively a trans or LGBT+ thing, of course. As a parent I’m acutely aware that I’m the town planner and enforcer of my kids’ environment, and there are all kinds of ways in which I can make it clear what is and is not acceptable. And words are only a small part of it. What we do can undermine what we say: for example, a friend of mine was told through her early teens that no matter what she was going through, she could talk to her mum about it free from judgement or censure. And when she told her mum she’d started birth control before turning 16, her mum went ballistic. She didn’t confide in her mum ever again.
It’s not usually that blatant, though. It’s something we tend to absorb by osmosis. It’s in how the people around us react to things, such as a boy wanting to wear nail polish or a girl who doesn’t want to do stereotypically girlish things. It’s in the jokes others tell and the sitcoms they laugh at, the churches the kids are taken to, the clothes allowed and the behaviours discouraged, the newspapers bought and the books left lying around, in the conversations kids overhear and in the phrases they learn (man up, be brave, boys don’t cry, good girls don’t, if you don’t stop crying I’ll give you something to cry about), in the friends on the approved list and the ones excluded from it.
As the cartoonist Sophie Labelle put it, every time you laugh at the idea of a man dressed as a woman, a trans girl gets more scared to come out.
And then there’s school. As Michael Franti of rap group The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy wrote in The Language of Violence:
The first day of school was always the hardest The first day of school, the hallways the darkest Like a gauntlet the voices haunted Walking in with his thin skin, lowered chin He knew the names that they would taunt him with Faggot, sissy, punk, queen, queer Although he’d never had sex in his 15 years
Collectively these are the circles, arrows and posted warnings of Violet’s poem: they set out the territory we inhabit and tell us where the boundaries are. Some people become enforcers of those boundaries, and others become their victims. At school, LGBT+ people are much more likely to experience bullying; outside of it, they are much more likely to experience hate crimes, sexual assault and discrimination of all kinds. In our cities, LGBT+ people account for a disproportionate number of homeless people; they’re more likely than straight, cisgender teens to be made homeless by their parents or to be fleeing parental violence.
You don’t need to have experienced these things directly to understand them. When every road and every junction is plastered with warnings, you know very well what might await you should you fail to follow the permitted path – or if you show any signs that you might be considering a different route.
Here’s a photo from the GRR Bill debate in the Scottish Parliament yesterday.
The response on Mumsnet, aka Prosecco Stormfront, was swift. “They can’t help themselves,” one poster wrote. “…it’s typical male pattern aggressive sexualised behaviour”.
Others agreed, until they realised that the protester isn’t a trans woman; she’s an anti-trans woman, Elaine Miller of For Women Scotland. Miller decided that she’d flash her (fake) pubic hair in front of an audience including schoolchildren. If it weren’t for the fake pubes, that would have been an arrestable sexual offence.
You’d think that effectively committing a sex crime in the Scottish Parliament – it wasn’t initially obvious that Miller was wearing a wig over tights and initial reports claimed she was flashing her genitals – would be newsworthy, and I have no doubt that had Miller been a trans or non-binary person she would be all over the front pages and leading the broadcasts today. The fact that she isn’t speaks volumes.
After writing a very honest and often horrific account of her teenage experiences online, a trans woman I know was approached by a sympathetic journalist who wanted to share her story: amid the “debate” over banning conversion therapy, the journalist wanted to make her readers aware of its horrors and lasting damage.
My friend was wary, especially given the publication, but the journalist was very persuasive. Promises were made about photos, context and framing; the journalist offered to share the final piece for approval and to make any last-minute changes.
You can probably guess what happened next.
What was supposed to be an informative, sympathetic story became a hit piece. The photos that the writer promised not to use were used. The framing was changed, the context too. Online, the sole link to her social media wasn’t to the main account page or any of her conversion therapy posts; instead, the site linked to an old retweet of a joke post about the late Queen’s handbag colours that details the handkerchief code for various sex acts.
In this case the paper was the Daily Mail, but these tactics are used across the media. In this case I think there are multiple breaches of the IPSO code, but even if the regulator found in her favour months from now the damage is already done. She’s been discussed by hundreds of people online in the most awful ways, and the paper could still twist the knife further if one of its rabid columnists decides to use her as a subject for yet another anti-trans screed.
My friend was aware that this might happen but took a calculated risk, hoping that the article would help raise awareness of what conversion therapy and associated horrors entails. But the paper, and many like it, are waging a culture war in which marginalised people are only ever the enemy.
Trans Media Watch has spent a very long time monitoring mainstream media’s coverage of trans people, and its guidance is very helpful. It’s important to have trans and non-binary people telling their stories, but all too often publications and broadcasters have already decided which stories they want to tell – and if your story doesn’t fit, they’ll change it until it does.
I have been expecting a mass shooting at a gay bar for at least a year. This is not because I’m clairvoyant, but because I am a gay person with eyes and ears. The mass-murder at Club Q in Colorado Springs on November 19 was the result of what is now all-too-familiar rhetoric—a campaign that is both a cynical attempt to gain political power and a conscious effort to inspire stochastic violence that murders gay and trans people on the theory that there should be fewer of us.
The only reason this hasn’t happened in the UK yet is because we don’t have the same access to guns. The rhetoric may be (slightly) milder, albeit not online, but there is the same intent: to create a climate of fear and rage against trans people that encourages someone to act violently. It’s hardly a new tactic: the line “will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?” is attributed to Henry the second, and he was kicking about in the twelfth century.
Miller:
What liberals are desperate to call “legitimate debates” are united with the cruder, crasser incitement of less-sophisticated reactionaries by the same underlying argument: that some nebulous group of queer and trans “activists” are pushing an “agenda” that might permanently mutilate children, who must be protected from the threat. Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo say it’s drag queens committing sexual abuse in gay bars. Abigail Shrier says it’s the “transgender craze seducing our daughters” into “Irreversible Damage.” The liberal outlets describe it as misguided doctors and activists going too far, contributing to a social contagion of trans kids. All of them are making versions of the same argument designed to convince different audiences of the same age-old blood libel about queer people: that we are preternatural abusers from whom your children need protecting.
I had my annual gender clinic appointment yesterday, and I asked about a referral I’ve been waiting two years for. Ah, the doctor told me. We made an appointment for you about that in May.
That’s the first I knew about it. I hadn’t received a text, letter or email, so of course I didn’t go. The next available appointment? The end of February 2023.
This is how trans people lose years of their lives on waiting lists.
Another trans woman I know emailed the same gender clinic after four years on the waiting list with no sign of a first appointment. We’re sorry, the reply said. When you registered with us, the wait time was 16 months. Now it’s 55 months. Our service does not fall into the same waiting list criteria as our services in the acute sector, and therefore we do not fall under the treatment time guarantee of 18 weeks.
Throughout the 43 films, 14 television series, and various Scooby-Doo spinoffs created since 1969, Velma’s character has generated a massive following of lesbian and bisexual women who grew up watching those meddling kids unmask costumed culprits.
I love this detail:
William Hanna and Joseph Barbara drew inspiration for the character from child actor Sheila Kuehl, who played a tomboy in the 1950s family series The Stu Erwin Show and, years later, became the first openly gay California legislator.
…we Scots are brilliant at mining comedy from pretty dark seams sometimes, and we’ll tell the most horrendously embarrassing stories to make our friends laugh. I’ve done that all my life, so it was natural to do it in the book too.
