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.
Scotland’s parliament will begin debating the gender reform bill this week, so I wrote to my MSPs asking for their support. I suspect my email is unusual, because I know what the law is and what a GRC does. As I’ve been shown again and again, most anti-trans voices either don’t, or pretend not to.
I’ve had four responses, three of which – from the SNP, from the Scottish Greens and from Scottish Labour – were unequivocally supportive of reform. The fourth, from Conservative MSP Annie Wells, is extracted here:
However, I should add that I am aware there have been concerns raised regarding safeguards for children and young people in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. This is a very sensitive area, however the welfare of children and young people must come first. That means balancing the need to help those who are suffering from gender dysphoria with the need to protect vulnerable children and young people who are unsure of their identity and risk embarking on gender hormone treatment prematurely. We will not support any reforms that put the welfare of children and young people at risk.
Gender recognition has nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of children or any medical treatment. Nothing. This isn’t so much a dog whistle as an entire pet shop display of the damn things.
Apple TV’s The Problem With Jon Stewart began its new season last night with an episode about the “gender wars”. It struck me that it couldn’t be made in the UK: it featured parents of trans children and experts in trans medicine, but not an audience of bigots shouting “penis!” and “groomer!” at them.
Instead, Jon Stewart let the Attorney General of Arkansas slowly hoist herself on her own petard by asking something really simple: what’s the evidence behind your anti-trans legislation? The answer, inevitably, turned out to be: there isn’t any.
This is a masterclass in interviewing.
It’s interesting to compare this with the last few days’ coverage of JK Rowling, who donned an anti-Nicola Sturgeon t-shirt designed by a far-right goon to protest against the Scottish Government’s plans for gender recognition reform and ended up on the covers of all the major newspapers. There hasn’t been any attempt whatsoever to ascertain whether Rowling’s anti-reform beliefs are right (spoiler: they’re not; the evidence, or lack of, is here: “when asked about evidence of abuse and concerns, no witness was able to provide concrete examples.”). Too much of our media has no interest in establishing the truth when there’s a culture war to push.
In the 30 days from 27th June this year, the UK press published 1,142 articles about trans people, mostly trans-hostile with claims of hate groups taken as fact. That’s 33 anti-trans articles a day. Between them, the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail publish up to 27 trans articles a week, most of them hostile. On just one day, those papers published 26 articles about trans people; the Telegraph alone published 11.
There’s a saying I like: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As Stewart so deftly demonstrates, the anti-trans mob don’t have any evidence to back up their assertions; they are at odds with the entire medical establishment, because ultimately their “reasonable concerns” boil down to a belief that trans people are icky weirdos.
If our journalists were doing their job, the current anti-trans moral panic wouldn’t exist and hate crimes against LGBT people wouldn’t be up 42% year on year, with anti-trans hate crimes up 56%. Culture wars may be a game in newsrooms, but they’re terrifyingly real for the people they demonise.
A typically incisive piece by Parker Molloy on the censorious clowns who claim that legitimate criticism of what they say and write is the same as the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie.
That is the problem people have with the “cancel culture” discourse. It’s selective, it flattens important distinctions between horrific acts (beheadings and physical attacks!) and free speech (dissent, boycotts, protests). The “cancel culture” brigade sure loves to claim that speech it doesn’t like (dissent, boycotts, protests) is a threat to speech, while sitting mostly silently on actual threats to free expression, like the Republican plan to use obscenity laws to make certain books on LGBTQ topics illegal to sell, the Republican-led purgingof booksfromschooland locallibraries, and the Republican-led re-writing of textbook standards to remove “divisive” issues. Funny how none of that is “cancel culture,” and yet they think someone speaking out against J.K. Rowling’s factually incorrect rants about trans people (i.e. using their freedom of speech) represents a threat to the very concept of “free speech.” The reason is simple: one of these advances their own agenda, the other doesn’t.
