Sky News, prop. R Murdoch, has given strange prominence to the launch of a new charity.

Let’s start with a question. Detransitioning from what?

What do you think transitioning means? To most, it’ll mean hormones and surgery. And as the article makes clear, to Sky it definitely means hormones and surgery.

But that’s not what Evans, the founder of the charity, detransitioned from. She’s written extensively online about her story. She was never diagnosed with gender dysphoria; was never prescribed hormone blockers; never had surgery. During the ten years she was supposedly living as a man she still presented female.

It’s important to tread carefully here, because the current system places undue emphasis on psychiatric assessment: being trans is not a mental health issue and you’re still trans if you don’t have a diagnosis. And many trans people for various reasons have to present as their birth gender from time to time.

However, if you’re telling a national news outlet that you lived full-time as a man for ten years,  hated anyone seeing your feminine body and tightly bound your chest for a decade, low-cut swimsuit pics from the middle of that period tend to undermine that. And if you are claiming that there is an epidemic of young women being rushed into hormone treatment and surgery, and you are using your own experience as evidence of that, you need to be able to back up your claims.

Quite simply: it’s dishonest to claim experience of a system if you do not have that experience, to say “it happened to me!” if it didn’t happen to you.

“I had short hair and hated periods” doesn’t cut it.

“I had short hair and hated periods” is a very common trope among anti-trans activists, many of whom say things along the lines of : “I was totally butch when I was a teen, I bought my shirts from the boys’ section and wore Doc Martens and didn’t like having cramps and if that was today I’d be rushed into surgery and given phalloplasty.”

That isn’t just attention-seeking nonsense by people lucky enough not to have experienced dysphoria. It’s completely offensive to trans men. It essentially says they’re faking it, that strangers on the internet know them better than they do. It shows a lack of knowledge of what it’s like to be a trans man, of the discrimination and prejudice they experience and of the system as it works (or more likely, doesn’t work) for them.

I know several trans men and what they’ve gone through makes my own transition seem like a pleasant stroll through a leafy park on a sunny day. I genuinely don’t know how some of them cope against such incredible obstacles. And I know for certain that none of them is being rushed through anything. Quite the contrary. One person I know is in a lot of distress after repeatedly being refused any help whatsoever. Others have been treated appallingly by supposed health professionals. All have languished for many years on too-long waiting lists.

These articles don’t exist in isolation. They are fuel for the anti-trans bigots who are already gleefully sharing the Sky article as yet more “evidence” of a rush to surgery that doesn’t exist. The crowdfunder will no doubt attract the usual dark money from people who don’t want any trans folk to get any kind of healthcare or support, and who see this as yet another way to get anti-trans misinformation aired.

And it is misinformation. The Sky article doesn’t do basic research, makes baseless claims and uses anecdotes from two people, one of whom hasn’t had any medical treatment, as “evidence” of a supposed epidemic of medical malpractice.

The article here is not about people who experimented with their gender presentation or adopted gender-neutral names. It repeatedly uses phrases such as “detransition to their biological sex” and talks about surgery. The message, which is right there in the headline, is that hundreds of people are seeking help to “return to their original sex”.

Sky:

There is currently no data to reflect the number who may be unhappy in their new gender or who may opt to detransition to their biological sex.

Oh yes there is. The surgical regret for gender reassignment surgeries is less than 2% worldwide. That’s massively lower than the regret rate the majority of the most common surgeries including cosmetic surgery. Gender reassignment surgery is known to be extremely successful in improving trans people’s mental health. Here are some stats from the American Journal of Psychiatry, published yesterday.

We also know the detransition rate of people attending an NHS Gender Identity Clinic in England, which includes people who only undergo social transition as well as those who have medical help. It’s 0.47% from a sample size of 3,488 people. That’s three people, two of whom re-transitioned.

Detransitioners exist, and they need and deserve sympathy and support. There are some really awful stories of people who attempted to transition and found life to be just as unbearable because of the transphobia they faced, so they returned to the gender they were assigned at birth. Many will try again later in life; they won’t always be successful then either.

I can’t imagine what that must be like. To go through transition once is hellish. To go through it and then have to reverse it, before perhaps trying again…

Thankfully, though, those ordeals are incredibly, incredibly rare. And what the poor sods who go through it really don’t need is a bunch of attention-seekers and fantasists claiming to be detransitioners because they had short hair when they were 17.

I feel sorry for anyone who has found it hard to work out who they are. But that sympathy stops when somebody takes their own personal hurt and turns it outwards, as appears to be the case here.

The idea that trans people or some sinister trans lobby is pushing people towards transition is nonsense. Trans people, trans healthcare specialists and trans allies are the last people who want people’s gender presentation policed or people undergoing treatment they don’t need. Butch women, femme guys, non-binary identities, genderqueer and genderfuckery: we’re all for it. We know how difficult, traumatic and painful transition can be and the last thing we’d want is anybody to go through any of it unnecessarily.

But that’s not the story Sky wants to tell. Given a chance to scaremonger about the sinister trans lobby once again, the most basic tenets of journalism are ignored. All Sky News needed to do was ask a couple of simple questions about the validity of the claims being made and the whole thing would have fallen apart.

But that’s not how Murdoch outlets work, is it?

Here’s a simple question. What’s the purpose of anti-discrimination legislation?

Is it (a) to protect vulnerable people from discrimination, for example in employment, education or health care? Or is it (b) to enable people to be howling arseholes to vulnerable people?

If you answered (b), you may be a religious extremist.

I’ll preface this with my usual disclaimer: #notallchristians. This isn’t about Christians. It’s about arseholes.

An industrial tribunal has ruled against a disability assessor who wanted to be an arsehole to transgender people. The assessor refused to use trans people’s correct pronouns in defiance of DWP rules and the Equality Act and would rather lose their job than treat people with basic politeness.

The man goes by the title and name of Dr David Mackereth, but as he believes you should be able to call people what you like based on your sincerely held beliefs, I believe that I should call him Mrs Janice McBigotface and give her female pronouns. I sincerely believe that I can be an arsehole too!

Mrs McBigotface was represented by the Christian Legal Centre, whose business is based on representing some of the world’s worst people and losing in court. In the meantime, however, they get lots of headlines that distort the facts of the case and feed into a fictional narrative of Christianity under attack from political correctness gone mad.

This was no exception: for example, newspapers talked of Mrs McBigotface’s refusal “to refer to ‘any 6 foot tall bearded man’ as ‘madam’” in her meetings with DWP supervisors; as the tribunal notes, that exciting quote wasn’t used in any meetings and didn’t appear in any documents or testimony until a year later, by which point the claimant was being coached by the CLC. That was a year after the first lot of press coverage, which clearly wasn’t hysterical enough.

Was Janice “interrogated about her beliefs” as the coverage and her submission claimed? No. Was she asked to “renounce her beliefs”? No. Were there any discussions about six-foot bearded ladies? No. Was she even suspended for her behaviour? No: she stopped coming to work because she “felt too distracted” by the pressure of being asked to be polite to people: “in no sense could that be construed” as a suspension. The tribunal called the claimant “a poor witness whose perception of events was skewed”.

The verdict, which is linked in the BBC story, is perfectly clear. The law protects you from discrimination; it does not enable you to be a complete prick to other people and escape the consequences.

Mrs McBigotface refused to call people by their pronouns, which is a very basic courtesy, in an environment where people are already feeling scared and stressed. That refusal continued even when people had legally changed their sex to female on all official documentation, and McBigotface appears to have taken some satisfaction in talking about  how she was going to lose her job for it.

The impression the tribunal’s notes gives is that Mrs McBigotface was a kind of DWP Ricky Gervais, deliberately misgendering trans people and then, when someone said “Janice, maybe you should stop being such a dick to people, you’ll end up losing your job”, saying “That’s what the PC woke police want, isn’t it? They want to martyr me! But I shall stand proud against the forces of evil and continue to be a total dick to trans people, just like Jesus probably was, or something!”

According to Twitter, finding that it’s okay and legal to sack someone for breaking the law and being a prick to vulnerable people “is just like the Nazis”, “profoundly disturbing” and “a shameful case of religious persecution”.

No it isn’t. It’s much simpler than that. People’s right to religious belief is subject to article 9.2 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

The tribunal found that by refusing to treat trans people with respect and then demanding an unworkable and offensive triage system for trans clients, the claimant was infringing those rights and freedoms.

It’s really very simple. If  you don’t want to be sacked for being a dick to people, don’t be a dick to people.

It’s Sunday, so of course The Sunday Times is running more hit pieces on trans women.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The clue’s in the caption. Verity Smith isn’t a trans woman. He’s a trans man, assigned female at birth and now transitioning to male.

The juxtaposition of headline and photo are clearly deliberate and malicious: you’re expected to see the words “trans women” at the same time as you see the very male rugby player in the photo.

And when the writer posted it on Twitter he tagged the anti-trans activist group Fair Play For Women (who he interviewed in the piece, enabling them once again to make unsubstantiated and unchallenged claims about “well funded and powerful trans lobby groups”) and the vocally anti-trans athlete Sharron Davies.

It’s notable that the online version – the one people will share – is more inflammatory than the printed one, which doesn’t do the same malicious juxtaposition. Here’s the printed one:

The article itself describes “bearded or heavily muscled” trans men, not trans women.

Smith has endured a lot since coming out.  As he told CNN:

“I’ve been escorted off the pitch, outed on the internet, assaulted and pinned down and had blood spat in my mouth and the police wouldn’t do anything about it. That’s been the lowest point for me, just being dragged off the pitch and not being able to walk out there with the rest of my team having not done anything wrong other than be myself.”

Smith’s experience is what the anti-trans activists The Times loves so much would like all trans sports players to go through. First, he had to seek written permission from the sport’s governing body in order to be allowed to play at all. Second, he only plays in the team appropriate for the gender he was assigned at birth, not the gender he actually is. And thirdly, he has endured awful physical and verbal abuse on the pitch, around it and on the internet for which nobody has been held accountable.

And that’s still not enough. He also has to see his image used in a blatant attempt to make people hate and fear trans women.

And it works. The article – and the photo – is already being shared on social media by anti-trans bigots.

I’m not scaremongering; I’m not a snowflake; I’m not paranoid. There is a demonstrable anti-LGBT+ agenda at The Times and The Sunday Times, and while most of their energy is currently directed at trans women they are already beginning to target the rest of the community. This was the Scots editor on Friday:

The language here is telling. Can you believe that they’re teaching kids AS YOUNG AS THREE all about the gays?

What are they being “taught about same-sex couples”?

The first level, designed for preschool to P1, includes slides explaining that “some families have two dads”, and recommends books such as Mommy, Mama and Me, about lesbian parents, and King & King, in which a prince marries a man.

Imagine if children discovered that someone in their class might have same-sex parents.

We have been here before, of course. In the 1980s, the completely innocuous book Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin became the centre of a media-driven moral panic – a panic that would lead to the infamous Section 28, which banned the supposed “promotion” of homosexuality in schools.

Back then, The Sunday Times – which was hardly a friend to gay people at the time – wrote in an editorial: “[Clause 28] is a throwback to a more intolerant age. It has no place in the new Britain.”

In January 1988, it printed an op-ed by Simon Callow. He wrote:

In recent years – so terribly recent – the work of erasing centuries of crude superstition and fear has begun, so that now everybody realises (what was always true anyway) that they know at least a couple of gay people, and that they are, after all, give or take the odd flourish, much like everyone else, sometimes nicer, sometimes nastier – that some children have gay parents, that some brothers have gay sisters, that some employees have gay bosses, that some priests are gay, some teachers, some criminals, some saints.

Thirty years later and the same newspaper is pushing “crude superstition and fear”.

Update, 1 October

A correction has appeared on the digital edition:

In Today’s Scottish edition of The Times, the odious yahoos at For Women Scotland – a single-issue anti-trans pressure group – get a headline claiming that women’s services are being “starved by trans funding”.

Is it true? Of course it isn’t.

Here’s Jeffrey Ingold, head of media for Stonewall UK, on Twitter.

1/ This anti-trans group has been ‘disqualified’ from government funding because they are actually trying to break the law. The 2010 Equality Act makes clear that trans people can access single-sex spaces aligned with their gender identity.

2/ The group then claims that women’s organisations who aren’t trans-inclusive are being ‘deprived of government funds’, but there is no evidence or examples given of where this is happening (spoiler: because most of these services are trans-inclusive already).

3/ So who is being ‘starved’ for funding as the headline suggest? Well, it has to be this group… which the article shows to be a single-issue lobbying group against GRA reform – meaning they don’t actually even provide any services for women/girls to qualify for funding anyway

4/ Meaning this whole article is based on the bigotry of one anti-trans group to try and pressure the Scottish Government to stop supporting funding for services that help all vulnerable women, including trans women. Which… is their legal duty. Not that that’s mentioned…

“Lobby group isn’t being given government money because it doesn’t qualify for government money” is hardly newsworthy. But if that group hates the trans, then The Times is all over it.