There’s a famous quote by Maya Angelou: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

It means that when someone shows you a clear red flag, you shouldn’t ignore it. Someone who disrespects you will continue to be disrespectful. Someone who is violent will continue to be violent. Someone who is hateful will continue to be hateful.

So I’m not joining in today’s surprise that Rod Liddle has written another hateful, racist piece for the hateful, racist Spectator. Liddle showed us who he was when he accepted a police caution for punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach, when he was found using a pseudonym to post racist remarks on football forums, and in pretty much every column he’s ever excreted for The Spectator and other vile rags.

Here in Scotland, a whole bunch of people have decided to show who they are thanks to a fabricated furore over a census question.

If you haven’t actually seen the question, here’s a screenshot from the census’s quality testing report, which this entire story has been based on.

The above question has been reported as the PC lobby forcing Scots people to choose from a “baffling” list of 21 sexualities. The reality is much more tedious. The list is for autocorrect entries so that if people choose the “another way” option, it’ll offer some other suggestions (and help harmonise the data by ensuring consistent spelling).

The story originated in the Murdoch press and was quickly picked up by the Scottish Daily Mail. We already know who these publications are, but they’re showing us again.

The Sun story is around 650 words. Its interviewees are an anti-trans academic and activist (this story has no connection to trans people at all), an unnamed Tory spokesperson, an evangelical anti-LGBT+ Christian group and the Catholic Church. The Daily Mail sought comment from an additional, extremely fringe, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT evangelical group who railed against “gender madness”, even though the story has no connection with anybody’s gender.

You’d think such obvious, politically motivated culture war framing – concoct a story about so-called identity politics, get the evangelical rent-a-gobs to damn it, tell your readers that the queers have gone too far this time and encourage them to post foul homophobic and transphobic vitriol in your comments sections – would prevent grown-ups from sharing it.

But you’d be wrong. People who previously limited their online abuse to abusing trans women, including senior newspaper journalists, bloggers and political figures, have seized upon this non-story, abusing the entire LGBT+ community for something the Murdoch press made up and standing proudly alongside some of the most viciously anti-women, anti-LGBT groups in the country.

They showed trans people who they were months and in some cases years ago. And now they’re showing you.

When people show you who they are, believe them.

In today’s Scottish Sun, there’s a story about the 2021 census.

Like most things the Murdoch press prints in its ongoing campaign against LGBT+ people and trans people in particular, it isn’t true. It’s just an excuse to get the usual crowd of reactionaries – anti-trans academics, vocally anti-trans MSP Joan McAlpine, the Catholic Church and the evangelical Christian Institute – to mouth off about how it’s loony left political correctness gone maaaaaaaaad.

There will not be 21 options. There will be four: straight, gay/lesbian, bisexual or other. It’s the same question and set of responses that’s been used in a range of UK surveys for many years.

The list The Sun is talking about is for predictive text in the online form. When someone types into the “Other” field, the idea is to have autocorrect suggest options that other people have used in previous surveys.

As The Equality Network explains:

The list of 21 terms that the Sun prints is a list of the most common answers that people who select Other have given in past surveys.

If you select Other in the online Census, one of those terms may pop up (as a suggestion only) if it matches the first letters you type.

This bullshit is only going to get worse now an election is looming. In September, it emerged that the Tories were polling “culture war” issues they could use to sow division via the right-wing press. Human rights for trans people is one of those issues.

Update, 31 October

The way this is playing out in print and social media tells you a great deal about the people trying to spread hate. They aren’t just anti-trans. They’re anti-LGBT+. This story isn’t about gender. It’s about sexuality. And people are trying to weaponise it against the wider LGBT+ community.

Labour activist and gay man Duncan Hothersall on Twitter:

The census sexualities question stushie is really exposing the dishonesty at the heart of the “legitimate concerns” movement. MSPs and journalists ranting about “21 different sexualities” are compounding a basic misunderstanding into a revolting, and frankly homophobic, attack.

The attacks are coming from supposed LGB supporters who don’t really like the L, the G or the B any more than they like the T. From bloggers and social media trolls who are as homophobic as they are transphobic. From people who have moved from trying to police gender to trying to police sexuality. From people sharing a platform and often an ideology with Christian fundamentalists and the far right.

As Hothersall puts it:

Anti trans rhetoric leads to anti LGB rhetoric. Excusing hate legitimises more hate. Do better.

The Christian Post is yet another evangelical newsletter from America, and it’s part of an axis that includes the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council – two organisations with strong links to the British anti-trans movement. It’s just published an article about the “trans cult” that could have been lifted from The Sunday Times.

You know how these things go by now. Sinister cult members stealing children by the dead of night, chopping bits off them, selling them to Satan.

Here’s Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager for the US National Center for Trans Equality.

The article is astonishing in its sensationalism, but quite typical of anti-trans fear mongering. The Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council use similar language. The goal is to activate disgust–an extremely strong emotion–in the reader.

It’s why almost all of these articles talk about a sinister push towards surgery for children, even though children do not get gender confirmation surgery. When they can’t scare you about surgery, they’ll tell you that children are being given cross-sex hormones. That doesn’t happen either. And when they’ve ran out of things that don’t happen to scare you about, they’ll redefine “children” to mean “32-year-olds”.

The Sunday Times was doing it today, in yet another piece about the “state-sponsored sterilisation of trans children”. The “children” in the article were 20, 21 and 32. The article is uncannily similar to the one in the Christian Post.

It’s worth looking at the Sunday Times piece in a bit more detail, because the most shocking revelation was that one of the “children” – the 32-year-old – had committed suicide after a history of such attempts. The fact that the parent repeatedly misgenders their dead child suggests that lack of parental acceptance and support might just have been a factor. We know that the suicide rate for trans people with accepting families is the same as the wider population; for those with unaccepting families, it’s sky high.

If like me you’ve experienced the gender clinic system, there’s a lot of this story that just doesn’t add up. If this person, as stated, had a history of clinical depression, anxiety and suicide attempts, nobody from the GP to their psychiatric assessors would have ignored that let alone recommended transition in any form as the way to fix their problems.

Another parent, a father, said:

“I couldn’t change my daughter’s mind so I have to change the minds of those doing this to her.”

His child, who would presumably prefer to be called his son, is 20.  Does that sound supportive and accepting to you?

My daughter is not transitioning, she is being transitioned by an LGBT cult and by medical professionals.”

Which suggests that again, the adult child has undergone extensive psychiatric assessment by those “medical professionals”.

Last but not least, our case study, now 21. They have been persistent, consistent and insistent about their gender identity for five years and did not access any NHS gender services until they were an adult.

“I trusted the NHS with my child and cannot believe the harm it has done,” their mum says.

What terrible procedures did they make her child endure?

[The child] has had no medical interventions.

So in five years of attending gender services, the NHS has pushed the woman’s child – her adult child – towards no medical treatments whatsoever.

This, somehow, is evidence of the NHS pushing children – child children, not adult ones – into treatments that we know the NHS does not provide to children.

But of course, nobody wants to let the facts get in the way of a good satanic conspiracy theory.

The points Branstetter makes about the Christian Post piece, and similar pieces by the Heritage Foundation and FRC, apply just as well to the Sunday Times piece and most of the other anti-trans scaremongering in the UK press.

But it also relies on tropes we see in any number of moral panics and conspiracy theories. PizzaGate + QAnon– like Satanic panics of the 80s–all rely on secretive cabals sacrificing children under cover of night. But it’s actually an ancient fear even older than that.

One of my favorite reads this year was @annamerlan‘s deep dive into the state of conspiracy theories today. She does a wonderful job finding the common threads through 9/11 trutherism, anti-vaxxers, and many more to discover what makes these absurd ideas so appealing to so many.

On PizzaGate, she notes the fear of child sacrifice is an anti-Semitic trope dating to the Middle Ages. Such “nocturnal rituals” are used to justify violence against other groups (namely Jews)

You can find the same myths in anti-native writings of European colonialists, anti-Roma sentiment throughout the last few centuries, and anti-Semitism up to the current era.

The primary purpose of these myths is playing into parental fears. They hope to animate a protective instinct against a ghostly “other”, unleashing an animalistic rage that will excuse any violence against the targeted group.

…By animating fears of child abduction, ritual abuse, and sexual exploitation, anti-trans activists are–knowingly or not–following a very old roadmap for justifying oppression. The goal is to build so much fear that the cost trans people pay will be deemed a worthwhile bargain.

They also try to fudge the other side of the equation–are trans people really oppressed? How suicidal are they? Are they really facing *that* much violence?

It’s a two-pronged strategy: you tell people that trans people are dangerous even though you know they are not. And you tell people that trans people do not face any victimisation or discrimination, even though they do.

…If trans people are a cult–dangerous and deranged–and the potential cost is your own children, then such framing justifies oppression of us by any means necessary. All the violence and rape and poverty and suffering trans people face is, in their eyes, an acceptable cost.

Its important to note that the exchange posed by them is, of course, completely imaginary. Nothing about trans people, our rights, or our health care is a danger to anyone. Period.

You’ll find that the majority of anti-trans hate groups claim to care about “real” trans people. But they don’t. That’s why they offer no solutions, accept no statistics, believe no experts. They are motivated not by a desire to help anyone, but to hate and hurt people.

And if you don’t believe me, ask yourself: What is the conservative solution to anti-trans discrimination? How would these activists end anti-trans violence, raise trans people out of poverty, or stem the public health crisis taking trans children by suicide?

Their solution, of course, is to deny that any of these issues exist.

They don’t have an answer because they don’t care–and they need you not to care, either. They need you to believe trans people are a sickly cult of perverts unworthy of your empathy, let alone equality. They need you to believe the price is just too high to pay.