It’s not a great day for news about trans people. In Antwerp, a teenage trans woman was gang raped by three men on her very first day presenting female. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, no doubt upset some of her transphobic members by tweeting about it:

Important to remember that – far from being responsible for the actions of abusive men – trans women, just like all women, can be and often are the victims of male violence. https://twitter.com/britlgbtawards/status/1146742980272893956

Stories like this don’t stop the scaremongering about trans women, which often makes malicious allegations about trans-inclusive individuals and organisations. When they’re not shouting at women on Twitter, the anti-trans group calling themselves Women Make Glasgow are demanding Stonewall be banned from schools for “lobbying school children in an environment where no-one is allowed to do this.”

Stonewall’s Colin MacFarlane:

Yet again facts don’t seem to matter. We don’t ‘lobby’ school children we train teachers & educational professionals on how to create inclusive learning environments for ALL young folk.

Why is that work with teachers so vital?
Nearly half of LGBT young people and 71% of trans young people are bullied simply for being who they are.
Nearly one in twenty young LGBT people have received death threats
41 % of young people hear nothing about LGBT people in schools

Teachers tell us that they want to get it right for their LGBT pupils and that’s why they come to us for help.

You can read our full School Report here. 🚨some of the stats here may be triggering. 🚨

https://www.stonewallscotland.org.uk/system/files/school_report_scotland_2017.pdf

Here’s a typically measured, intelligent response – the first one in the thread.

@Cmacf76 It’s ok if you want to get into kids’ pants? Eh? What sicko world have we created for today’s children?

Incidentally, other responses show another problem beyond basic bigotry: misinformation recycled as fact. One commenter asks about kids being expelled for saying there are only two genders; the story they’re alluding to has nothing to do with Stonewall and the school concerned, in Scotland, excluded the teenager for breaking its no-exceptions rule prohibiting pupils from filming teachers in classrooms.

It’s not just LGBT+ charities. Any organisation that says it isn’t opposed to trans inclusion becomes targeted. Recent examples have included charities such as Scottish Rape Crisis and Scottish Women’s Aid.

Here’s Brian Dempsey, a lecturer at the University of Dundee’s law school, writing in response to a piece in Scottish Legal News.

The feminist women’s groups who have most experience of fighting for and delivering women-only safe spaces, including Scottish Rape Crisis, Scottish Women’s Aid, Engender, Zero Tolerance all have experience of operating services on a self-declaration basis and they strongly support reform.

Your report points out that the majority of funding for these and other effective, well-established feminist organisations comes from the Scottish government. The implication that dedicated feminists are actively undermining women’s safety for the sake of government money is both unfounded and distasteful.

The claims come from the same place as the leaflets being put through Glasgow doors claiming 82% opposition to proposed gender recognition reform. As The Ferret points out, that claim is false.

The latest survey of attitudes in fact shows majority support across the UK, as PinkNews reports:

Despite public protests, 59 percent of the UK population – including 47 percent of Conservative voters – back teaching LGBT-inclusive relationships education in schools.

56 percent of people are also in favour of trans people being able to self-identify their gender, which comes as the government is expected to respond to its consultation on potential reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in the coming weeks.

Human rights shouldn’t be subject to popular opinion: in living memory there was a 3/4 majority against civil rights for people of colour, a 3/4 majority against civil rights for gay people and so on.But it demonstrates that despite the best efforts of the bigots and their friends in the media, most of the public is on the right side of history.

Let’s post this picture again.

Everybody in this photo is trans, and it’s important that you see that. Because conventionally attractive trans women are the last thing the anti-trans bigots want you to see.

One of the things the “reasonable debate” crowd really like to do is to scour the internet to find photos of the ugliest trans people and crossdressers they can find. If they’re dressed badly or inappropriately, all the better. They then share those photographs, mocking them, sometimes using the #transisbeautiful hashtag, sometimes adding images of people who aren’t trans at all such as exhibitionists in fishnets. Look at the freaks!

Leaving aside the point that mocking women’s appearance for not matching up to societal standards of beauty is one of the least feminist things you can do that doesn’t involve teaming up with racists, anti-semites, forced birthers, the Murdoch press and the religious right, there’s a reason they do it.

The reason is simple. Caricatures make it easier to hate.

Whenever anti-trans bigots try to spread fear of trans women (and it’s always women; trans men like Michael Hughes spoil their narrative), there’s a particular mental image they want you to have: a “hulking”, sweaty, “burly” “man in a dress”. I’m using the quotes deliberately, because those are the words and terms you see again and again: words such as hulking and burly are used to imply danger, while “man in a dress” is a much more loaded term than “trans woman”.

And of course, there are trans women who look like shit. I’m often one of them. That’s what comes from a lifetime spent in ignorance about trans people, trying not to be trans in a world that tells you there’s something wrong with you, and finally coming out with zero knowledge of how to do clothes and makeup properly long after testosterone has ruined your chances of ever being young and beautiful.

But the focus on the people who don’t look like unremarkable or even beautiful cisgender women is deliberate and malicious in the same way that racists’ caricatures of black people or anti-semites’ caricatures of Jewish men were/are deliberate and malicious: they want you to imagine the caricature every time you hear about trans women, or black people, or Jewish men, because it’s so much harder to hate people who are perfectly ordinary. If the differences aren’t dramatic enough, the bigots will simply invent some more.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

The photo is from a website that collates pictures of the world’s supposedly worst-dressed people (I’ve obscured their face). I don’t know the context; for all I know the person pictured is a goddamn saint who just happens to have pretty crap clothing choices. But if I wanted you to think negatively about trans people, to imagine “burly”, “hulking” people you might be scared or suspicious of, it’s a pretty good example of the kind of thing I’d share.

I could quite easily do the same thing with anti-trans bigots, finding photographs of the ugly ones or just photos that make them look like they’ve escaped from some kind of institution. I won’t, though, because I don’t have that kind of poison in my heart.

Let’s try another picture. This one’s ideal – it’s a scary tran in a toilet!

Not so scary, is she? This is Sarah McBride, a trans woman and US politician who was abused at work by anti-trans bigots visiting from England; the bigots are leading lights in the UK anti-trans moment and regularly featured in print and broadcast media. One of them spent much of this week sharing ugly and/or unflattering pictures of trans women for her social media followers to mock.

Let’s try another.

This is Brae Carnes, a trans woman from Canada, using the toilet the bigots would like her to use.

Which of the photos is closest to the mental image you have when someone says “trans women in the ladies’ toilet”? I bet it’s not either of the photos of trans women in toilets I’ve used here. It’s likely to be much closer to the person in the terrible outfit.

And of course, that’s exactly what the bigots want. It’s why they share the photos.

I’m not suggesting here that McBride and Carnes are “the good ones” because they fit people’s expectations of what “normal” women look like. We’re just as valid if, like me, we’re horse frighteners. I’m simply pointing out that it’s very easy to make a particular group look alien and perhaps even dangerous by focusing on the worst, most extreme examples (in the eyes of the people you want to convince) because we still largely associate physical beauty with goodness and purity.

It’s a trick. Don’t fall for it.