The Sunday Times published its usual collection of anti-trans scaremongering at the weekend. One story in particular managed to demonstrate everything that’s wrong with the former paper of record: it was based primarily on the comments of an anti-trans activist, and it presented fake science as fact.
This is the same newspaper that told its readers AIDS was a PR move by the homosexual lobby, remember.
Yesterday’s story once again attempted to conflate puberty blockers with cross-sex hormones, trotted out the completely discredited idea of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” which only exists in the minds of bigots, and presented Michael Biggs as an impartial expert.
Professor of Sociology and Fellow of St Cross College Michael Biggs has been posting transphobic statements online under the Twitter handle @MrHenryWimbush, The Oxford Student can reveal.
The Twitter account, named Henry Wimbush and still online at the time of publication, has been tweeting statements such as “transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons†since first Tweeting in January.
Biggs is a contributor to Transgender Trend, which is linked to the US Christian right and advocates dangerous and discredited conversion therapy.
The paper, The Australian, is owned and its editorial policy steered by one Rupert Murdoch.
Guess who owns and steers The Times.
Today, The Sun warned its readers about the national census being queered by the “transgender agenda”.
Guess who owns The Sun too.
Update:
Incidentally, The Sun’s piece is based entirely on the false claim that trans people want to change the way the census records their gender. They don’t. As the Equality Network points out, the demand for change is coming from anti-trans academics who want to change the government’s guidance.
Anti-trans bigots are the climate change deniers of gender: despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they’re full of shit, they continue to lobby against life-saving action and push long-discredited pseudoscience.
One of their favourite conspiracy theories is the idea that being trans is contagious, that it’s a conscious choice and that you can be persuaded to become trans through peer pressure. This social contagion conspiracy theory has been debunked endlessly, but it still persists – so this report by the Australian Psychological Society won’t change any bigot’s mind.
The APS isn’t mincing its words here.
“Empirical evidence consistently refutes claims that a child’s or adolescent’s gender can be ‘directed’ by peer group pressure or media influence, as a form of ‘social contagion’,†APS Fellow Professor Damien Riggs said.
“To say that there is a trans-identity crisis among young Australians because of social media pressure is not only alarmist, scientifically incorrect and confusing, but is potentially harmful to a young person’s mental health and wellbeing.
“There is no evidence to suggest that such approaches work in terms of changing a person’s gender. What such debunked ‘therapies’ do produce, however, are high levels of shame, disrespect and distress.
Belief in “social contagion” goes hand in hand with belief in conversion therapy, the dangerous and discredited “pray the gay away” so-called cure that’s caused incredible damage to so many LGBT+ people: if you believe that being LGBT+ is a choice, then you’re likely to believe that people can be persuaded not to be LGBT+.
Of course, it doesn’t work like that. But bigots’ feelings don’t care about facts.
What conversion therapy does do is persuade LGBT+ people to kill themselves. The latest study into such “therapy” demonstrates yet again that there’s a strong link between it and mental health problems, including suicide attempts. Exposing transgender people to conversion therapy makes them twice as likely to attempt suicide.
The bigots don’t see that as a problem, though: to them, one less trans person in the world is a result. These are people who are currently crowing about the prospect of Brexit-related medicine shortages cutting off trans women’s HRT supplies. Who cares if diabetics don’t get their insulin or cancer patients don’t get essential medicines? If it hurts (or better still, kills) trans people, it can only be a good thing.
You don’t need to wear a swastika to be part of a hate group. Some of the most hateful people in modern society could be your neighbours.
Here’s an example. The crowdfunding site GoFundMe has finally pulled down the page raising money for campaigns against inclusive education in schools (but not before they raised thousands). Here’s one of the key groups who campaigned for the page’s removal, the British Humanist Society:
‘This homophobic crowdfunder was in support of protesters who have been holding disruptive and intimidating rallies that have absolutely no place near a school. There is strong evidence that the protesters involved in these demonstrations have been uttering outrageous homophobic slurs and even calling members of school staff paedophiles which surely was in breach of GoFundMe’s terms.’
The backlash against LGBT+ equality encompasses trans rights and relationship education at schools. It is co-ordinated and well funded and originates in the US. OpenDemocracy:
At the London meeting of Christian conservatives this summer, our reporter – posing as a prospective teacher, to learn what these campaigners were telling teachers about sex education – found an energised opposition movement.
In a room filled with LGBTIQ children’s books, tea and biscuits, the keynote speaker argued that equalities legislation “is not all-powerfulâ€. Rather, he said it can be limited to protect “health and morals†of other students or teachers.
This was Roger Kiska, in-house lawyer at the Christian Concern group that organised the event. He previously worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian right ‘legal army’ and one of a dozen US groups that openDemocracy revealed have spent millions of dollars in Europe.
Christian Concern, you’ll be amazed to discover, is a great believer in the efficacy of conversion therapy. Their communications manager claimed in late 2018 that conversion therapy is “just about any practice that offends the taste of social liberals” and added:
If ‘conversion therapy’ means anything at all, it should surely refer to a process that treats people with cross-sex hormones, damages fertility and cuts up their bodies to portray them as something other than what they really are. In other words, gender reassignment.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the same argument – using exactly the same words and phrasing – that the anti-trans activists use.
TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK, helped along by media leadership from Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of “silencing women†and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,†language that sounds an awful lot like Trump speaking about immigrants.
According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate with the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader UK skeptical movement in the early aughts — which was hyper-focused on debunking “junk science†and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of “non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,†Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. “Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, ‘Biology isn’t bigotry.’ In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.†(See scientific racism, eugenics, and the justification for slavery that black people were intellectually inferior to white people.)
Mumsnet has become a breeding ground for transphobic voices; a space where they can laugh about sabotaging an NHS surveyaimed at LGBTQ+ users and scorn trans participation in sport, or ponder that trans rights are a millennial issue. On Twitter, where transphobia has less of a platform, ‘Gender Critical’ users began to recommend Mumsnet as a safe space for cis women to openly attack the trans community.
Twitter has since become much more of a safe space for transphobes, but even it draws the line sometimes and bans some of the most abusive users. More of that in a moment.
Burns is particularly good on the links between English women building personal brands on the  back of transphobia and the US religious right. She describes the links between the most prominent English transphobes – including some high profile journalists – and US evangelical groups, and notes the way in which the work of transphobic English academics is used by evangelical front groups to advance anti-LGBT+ and anti-women legislation.
One of the key differences between England and the US here is race. In the US, “White Feminism” – feminism that centres on white, often heterosexual, often middle-class women to the exclusion of other women – has largely been shown the door. So when people come along demanding the exclusion of a particular group women, in this case trans women, feminists can see history trying to repeat.
the recent gender-critical wave has largely failed to gain traction in the US outside of the very far-right spheres. “I don’t think American women are buying it,†she said, pointing out that nearly every major US feminist advocacy group is vocally pro-trans rights and inclusion. “It’s because they understand what it means to be marginalized. They understand that any strict rules placed around gender are to the benefit of nobody.â€
Self-declared feminists with transphobic views were previously described as TERFs, which is short for trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Some women claim that the term was coined by trans people (it wasn’t; it was coined by feminists), that it’s a slur (it isn’t; it describes a very specific set of views among people who describe themselves as radical feminists) and that the term is misogynist (it isn’t; a significant number of TERFs are straight, cisgender white men with very unfeminist views who nevertheless claim to be feminists so they can be abusive to trans women).
We’re in “the real racism is calling the racists racists” territory here.
People who previously proudly identified as TERFs now describe themselves as “gender critical”. Burns quotes Gillian Branstetter of the National Center for Transgender Equality:
Branstetter compares the deployment of so-called feminists to oppose trans rights to the white nationalist movement rebranding themselves as the “alt-right†to achieve a veneer of respectability.
“It’s portraying it as this divide within the progressive movement or this divide within the LGBTQ community that only serves to benefit people who hate women and the LGBTQ community, including Heritage, the FRC [Family Research Council], and the ADF. Certainly, we should not be shocked that they’re desperate to sort of put up decoys — I just can’t imagine how you can walk through the doors of the Heritage Foundation as a heralded guest and continue to call yourself an advocate for women’s equality.â€
The comparison to the alt-right is important, because there are significant links between the anti-trans movement and the far right. Some of the anti-trans activists detailed in the Vox piece are loud supporters of Tommy Robinson and spout anti-immigration rhetoric; others have formed alliances with right-wing politicians or have right-wing publications on speed dial. Some even dig up old tropes of “scientific racism” but aim their pseudoscience at trans people rather than people of colour.
Whether intentionally or accidentally, they’re playing with fire. Across the world, right-wing politicians rail against so-called “gender ideology” which to anti-trans activists means trans rights but to the right, often means feminism and women’s reproductive rights too.
The far right sees anti-trans activists not just as allies, but as potential recruits. Neo-Nazis on message boards (including the boards where “incels” discuss their hatred of women) talk openly of their intention to “redpill” (reeducate) anti-trans women to make them “tradwives”, which the NYT describes as “the housewives of white supremacy”. They believe that these women’s ideologies are already very close to their own.
Over the past few years, dozens of YouTube and social media accounts have sprung up showcasing soft-spoken young white women who extol the virtues of staying at home, submitting to male leadership and bearing lots of children — being “traditional wives.†These accounts pepper their messages with scrapbook-style collections of 1950s advertising images showing glamorous mothers in lipstick and heels with happy families and beautiful, opulent homes. They give their videos titles like “Female Nature and Advice for Young Ladies,†“How I Homeschool†and “You Might be a Millennial Housewife If….â€
But running alongside what could be mistaken for a peculiar style of mommy-vlogging is a virulent strain of white nationalism.
As if to illustrate the point, just last month many of the “gender critical” people finally banned from Twitter for sustained abuse and harassment of trans women found a new home.
I’ve sung the praises of Heather Havrilesky on this blog before: the agony columnist for New York’s The Cut is an interesting, insightful, compassionate and sometimes uncomfortable read.
My darling girl, my only child, is now a “they,†with a very masculine appearance, and a new life that is unfamiliar to all I know. I felt lost, bewildered, and deeply sad when they came out, and I have not been able to recover. What makes it all so much worse is that I feel extremely guilty about my sadness, and afraid that any acknowledgment of it, even inadvertently, will immediately label me a transphobe, which I am not.
It’s a long letter, and the response is even longer. As often happens with Havrilesky’s columns, it doesn’t go where it first appears to be going.
You want what you want. It’s not logical. You want your girl.
I want to give you the space to want that. That doesn’t mean, “Hey, call your kid and tell them that you want them to be a girl again.†But you need space. Sometimes in life we want things that we can’t exactly justify or defend. We’re embarrassed by things that we can’t explain, and it’s even more embarrassing to realize that. We want to be better than we are. We want to rise above our bizarre, irrational desires, but it feels impossible. I have empathy for that.
I have empathy for it and I also want to scold you a little.
I have a lot of sympathy for the parents of trans and non-binary people, to the point where I can understand the fury and denial that leads some of them to excommunicate their family members and even become anti-trans activists (my understanding does not mean approval, of course: some people weaponise their own hurt and cause devastating harm to others).
But while I appreciate that it’s incredibly hard for them, it’s even harder for their children.
And what’s already incredibly hard is made much worse if their own parents don’t accept them. According to the charity The Trevor Project:
LGB youth who come from highly rejecting families are 8.4 times as likely to have attempted suicide as LGB peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection.
Another study, of trans and gender non-conforming people specifically, reported attempted suicide rates of 33% for those with supportive families and 57% for those without.
Multiple studies show that the difference between LGBT+ people’s suicide, self-harm and substance misuse rates doesn’t appear to be because they’re LGBT+; it’s the way the world, and their family in particular, treats them.
Havrilesky:
Where is the child that you loved? Are they gone the second they take off the princess dress? How do they feel, underneath their carefree words, when you seem unable to move forward with them? How do they feel about how much you love who they really are, underneath the princess dress?
…Part of what you shared with them and taught them lives in their current choices. Their strength is a reflection of your past together. Their independence is an echo of what you taught them.
I don’t know if I agree with everything Havrilesky writes here, but I’d recommend reading the whole thing: it’s a really fascinating column that makes some interesting and thought-provoking arguments.
You need to try to slowly move away from this place of shock and sadness and start to recognize how thoughtful your child is, and how hard they’ve worked not to look away from this world, in all of its pain and its disappointments. You need to realize that their independence is an echo of yours.
Yesterday, I blogged about right wing parties deliberately stoking anti-LGBT+ sentiment for political gain.
Last night:
‘According to one insider, Number 10 has been polling “culture war†issues, such as transgender rights, to see whether they can be weaponised against Labour in northern working-class constituencies.’https://t.co/5iB7AAMVhn
The Conservatives deny the report, as they denied reports last week that the Prime Minister would prorogue Parliament.
Leaving aside the implication that the Tories think everybody north of Watford is a bigot, there’s a very cynical calculation here. Trans people are such a tiny minority you can demonise them without losing a significant number of votes.
Sure, your attack ads will get many of them beaten up, maybe keep a few more in the closet, persuade a couple more to kill themselves. But that’s okay. They don’t really vote anyway, and when they do they don’t vote for the Conservatives.
The much-hyped Boston event took place this weekend and proved that – surprise! – it’s a front for the far right. To all intents and purposes it was a Make America Great rally, complete with police pepper-spraying counter-protestors.
David here at the Boston Straight Pride Parade has been going on for the last 10 minutes ranting about how the Jews faked the holocaust, rule the world and created the LGBT movement to destroy America pic.twitter.com/awkkds7AAd
Bigots cannot count on a silent majority to look the other way anymore, so how do they continue to dig in their roots?
Easy. Construct a parade in direct contrast to Pride, tapping into the homophobic leanings of those not quite convinced to join the alt-right. After all, if LGBTQ people get their day, why shouldn’t straight people? Claim straight people as an “oppressed majority†facing discrimination from the city of Boston. Claim that denying straight people their right to parade in the street is unconstitutional. Gather the wavering masses under a single umbrella and disseminate the us-and-them mentality from there. When fascism can’t take hold through overt means, move it underground. Create a system of cycling dog whistles. Enmesh bullied kids into a toxic echo chamber of propaganda and build a new generation of fascists. Easy.
There will be other Straight Pride events, because what these rallies do is tell racists and bigots three things. One, you are not alone. Two, you are in the right. And three, the police and the state are on your side.
Here’s how that pans out elsewhere.
In Poland, July’s gay pride march was watched by spectators from over 30 anti-LGBT, mostly far right groups who outnumbered the marchers four to one. Those spectators didn’t just watch. They attacked the marchers with rocks. Dozens of LGBT people were physically assaulted before, during and after the event. Journalists were spat on and beaten. The police, while present, didn’t appear to do very much.
Both the Catholic Church and the Polish state actively work to create a hostile environment for the gay community.
…The ugly scenes in Bialystok were not an isolated incident. Several Polish regional parliaments have declared their districts to be “LGBT-free zones†in recent months…
…Officially the government decries the violence seen in Bialystok, but at the same time hints that LGTBQ groups are out to provoke. The education minister Dariusz Piontowski has questioned whether such marches should be allowed since they “awaken resistance†in the wider public.
The government stance is also backed by a powerful conservative media that has loaded Poland’s newstands with brazenly anti-LGBTQ magazine covers. One publication, Sieci, warned of a “Massive attack on Poland comingâ€, while another, Do Rzeczy, showed a mocked up prime ministerial podium flanked with rainbow flags.
A third, the Gazeta Polska, went even further, printing a cover warning that the LGBTQ movement wanted to “destroy their civilisation†and giving readers a “LGBT-free zone” sticker showing a black cross over a rainbow flag.
This is happening throughout Eastern Europe and in Russia, but it’s also happening elsewhere. Anti-LGBT sentiment is being deliberately stoked by right-wing politicians and media in Western Europe and in North and South America too. And that’s what Straight Pride marches are all about. They’re organised by the far right; the marchers are from the far right; their banners and memes and outfits are from the far right. And their claims of being oppressed, of being silenced… they’re from the far right too.
Let’s not play their game and pretend Straight Pride marches are about sexuality, or about gender identity. They’re about white supremacy.
As Anthony Oliveria put it on Twitter:
reviewing all the footage from the Straight Pride Parade hey so quick question I don’t spend much time at straight events are there always so many swastikas when we gays aren’t around or
Corinne Engber believes that the strategy is ultimately doomed.
Ultimately, this recruitment attempt will fail before it begins as the environment of the country leans toward support for Jewish people, people of color and LGBTQ people.
There’s been a lot of publicity over a new study into the so-called “gay gene”; the study reports that although there doesn’t appear to be a single genetic marker for gay people, there may be several. Similar studies have attempted to find a genetic marker for trans people.
Here’s why that’s scary.
This image was posted by Antony Tiernan, and in response the writer Huw Lemmey noted the context: “over a million British people still buy this paper every day.”
Let’s be optimistic and believe that nobody would choose to abort a baby whose genes suggested they might be gay or trans. That doesn’t mean genetic screening for LGBT+ people couldn’t happen, or couldn’t be misused.
The problem with any kind of genetic screening is that it’s a guide. For example, I’ve just had my genes analysed and I have a slightly raised risk of pulmonary disease. That doesn’t mean I will get it. It just means there’s a higher likelihood than perhaps you have.
One of the things I was screened for is abnormalities relating to the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which we know are implicated in many cancers. I’m clear – but the screening only checked a small proportion of the thousands of potential variants. I could still have a difference in one of those genes that means I’m more likely to get cancer.
Now imagine I’d been screened for genes linked to being trans. The same thing could apply: you could check for 100 different anomalies, and that could come back negative – but there could be hundreds upon hundreds of other genetic variations that you don’t check for, and which have contributed to me being the fabulous trans woman you see today.
Why does that matter?
It matters because if we developed a genetic test for LGBT+ people we might decide to use it in asylum claims, because one reason people claim asylum is because they face persecution for being LGBT+ in intolerant countries. Imagine: we could easily differentiate between the real asylum seekers and the fakers!
Far-fetched? Last week a British judge rejected an asylum seeker’s application because he didn’t seem gay enough. He contrasted the man’s demeanour with that of another man who “wore lipstick” and had an “effeminate” manner.
In that case, the judgement was appealed and has been sent back for review. But what if the judge had rejected the applicant because his genes “proved” he wasn’t gay?
It could also be used to “prove” that people are lying about their sexuality or gender identity in other circumstances. There’s already fierce and often malicious debate over whether some trans people are “trans enough”, so for example anti-trans bigots are keen to differentiate between “true” trans people, who they pretend to care about, and “fake” trans people – people like me who haven’t had surgery – whose human rights they want to curtail and whose healthcare and support services they want to defund.
Could failing genetic testing mean I’d be denied NHS treatment such as hormone therapy?
In the early 20th Century, out of context IQ testing was used to justify the forced sterilisation of black and hispanic people.
the notion of feeble-mindedness, at least partly determined by IQ tests, was used as a justification for the Supreme Court’s notorious Buck v. Bell decision, which allowed forced sterilization for “insanity or imbecility,†mostly among the population of prisons or psychiatric hospitals.
One of the links in that article goes to a study of pseudoscience on women’s suffrage.
many scientists supported the antisuffrage argument of “physical force,†claiming that women lacked inherent energy needed to physically enforce laws and should be excluded from voting. A secondary argument claimed that such cyclic elements as menstruation and menopause made women too irrational to vote.
More recently, halfwits in Silicon Valley have been pushing the bullshit theory that men are better suited to tech jobs because of exposure to “prenatal testosterone”.
Sexuality and gender identity are complicated and multifactorial, and they are normal variations in human behaviour and biology. That means there can never be a reliable genetic test for being gay or being trans, and we should be scared of anyone who wants to create one.
As TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger writes:
…as long as there is science—which means forever—there will be people willing to misuse what it teaches.
…at a time when politicians and publications (including, on occasion, the UK arm of this one) have made trans people’s – and in particular young trans people’s – existence a target for “debateâ€, there is some nice, uncomplicated good in a young trans person playing a young trans character on a beloved, long-running program.
If longstanding viewers couldn’t think of a single trans person before, now they can.
If a young trans person has never seen someone they could relate to onscreen, now they will.
And to that one young person, it could mean an awful lot.
Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers in studio (L-R: Atom Willard, LJG, Marc Hudson) Credit: Bryce Mata
I went to see Laura Jane Grace and The Devouring Mothers last night. It was a fun gig, introduced me to music I hadn’t heard before and made me feel a whole lot better about myself. That’s because like me, Grace is trans.
Grace is slightly younger than me – she’s 38 – but like me she began transitioning relatively late in life, in her case at the age of 32. That means like me she had to go through male puberty and grow a male body. Grace looks much more feminine than I do – she has better genes, is younger than I am and has had facial feminisation surgery – but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that you can tell she’s trans. This, to me and I suspect the many trans and non-binary people in last night’s crowd, is really helpful. As I’ve said many times before, some of the most powerful words in our language are “you are not alone”.
When you’re the trans singer/guitarist in a noisy rock band, seeing a trans singer/guitarist in a noisy rock band is very life-affirming.
Visibility, representation, matters. I spent unhappy decades without any role models such as Laura Jane Grace: the only trans people I saw were either the butts of cruel comedy or the miserable subjects of miserable documentaries.
Things are different now. We have the internet, of course, and books such as Grace’s own memoir and those of trans figures such as Juno Dawson, Janet Mock and Sarah McBride are helping trans people (and cis people!) better understand what it’s like to be trans or non-binary, and of course the visibility of actors such as Laverne Cox is enormously helpful too. Five years ago Time magazine was moved to declare the “transgender tipping point”, and trans people have never been so visible.
This story, to me, is huge. Teddy Quinlivan is the new face of Chanel. The 25-year-old model came out as trans two years ago, and as you can see she looks a bit prettier than I do. That’s mostly genetics, of course, but Quinlivan also started hormones when she was 17. The younger you begin transition, the better the results. Your body is still forming so the hormones can be very effective, and things like long hair and a smooth face don’t require thousands of pounds and months or even years of painful procedures to achieve.
Quinlivan has what some of us call “passing privilege”: she looks like a pretty young woman because that’s exactly what she is, and she’s treated as such by society. She could easily have kept her trans history secret, but she chooses not to: she chooses to use her platform to help change people’s perceptions of trans people.
As she says:
“There’s a stereotype of transgender people based on what’s shown on Maury Povich or Jerry Springer. It’s that there’s something mentally wrong with them, that they are incapable of serving in the military or existing in the workplace normally. But that’s not true at all. I am proof—a successful model who happens to be transgender. And I think fashion, in terms of social power, is the most important industry. Advertising has tremendous impact in terms of who and what we find attractive…. If legislation is being made on my behalf as an American citizen, then it’s incumbent on me to speak up for the transgender taxpayers who deserve the same dignity and respect that a cisgender person receives.”
Another very beautiful trans woman who doesn’t keep her history secret is Munroe Bergdorf, who lost her job as the face of L’Oreal after a coordinated campaign against her. As she says, having some pretty trans people on magazine covers isn’t enough.
While media visibility, representation and public awareness are at an all-time high, trans people also face soaring levels of violence and a startlingly transphobic mainstream media presence, as well as bullying and harassment on social media… while some community figureheads are rightfully having their time to shine, this is not an accurate reflection of the reality of how it feels to be transgender in the UK today.
But visibility still matters.
I often say that if I had seen a Laverne Cox or a Janet Mock in a magazine when I was younger, everything that I was feeling during my adolescence would have begun to make sense a lot sooner. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I started to find transgender role models that I could truly relate to, and by that point I had internalised so much self-hate with regard to my gender and racial identity that it stopped me sharing how I felt with other people – a vicious cycle which severely impacted on my mental health.
Like many trans people, I have to battle against the cumulative effect of years of being told that people like me are sick, that we’re deviants, that we’re perverts… you don’t need me to go through the charge sheet when some newspapers reprint it every week.
What Bergdorf is describing is what anti-trans bigots try to convince you is “social contagion” or their invented illness, “rapid onset gender dysphoria”: it’s understanding that there are other people like you, and that they and you are just as valid as anybody else. It’s realising that you don’t have to fight who you are for the most important years of your life.
To see the visibility of people like Laura Jane Grace, Teddy Quinlivan, Munroe Bergdorf and others is bitter-sweet: I’ve been trans all my life but I didn’t know that was okay until middle age – long past the point where I had any chance of going through life looking like an ordinary woman, let alone a pretty one. So I’m happy for the trans kids growing up now, and sad for those of us who had to grow up long before the transgender tipping point.
Bergdorf:
We must start working towards a time where trans people are not only celebrated on screen, but also in real life.
On a dull autumn day in 1964, two NHS doctors strapped a 17-year-old boy into a wooden chair in a dark, windowless room and covered him in electrodes. During hours of so-called therapy, they repeatedly electrocuted him while showing him images of women’s clothing.
At work, Carolyn bound her developing breasts to hide the effects of her treatment. But in 1994, a journalist learned she was taking hormones, and Carolyn’s personal life was plastered across tabloids claiming it was in the “public interest” to report the secret of a high-profile head teacher.
It gets considerably more upsetting. Consider this a massive trigger warning.
These stories matter. They matter because anti-trans activists still believe in attempting to “cure” trans people. They matter because newspapers still claim monstering trans people is in the public interest. And they matter because right now someone is doing just what Mercer did: trying to hide who they really are.
This story, to me, is huge. Teddy Quinlivan is