The Observer, this week, : “Gender identity clinic accused of ‘fast-tracking’ trans patients.”
The Guardian, its sister paper, two days later, reporting the hellish, many-years wait for trans people to get any treatment whatsoever:
Trans men and women are being left humiliated and desperate after seeking care from their GP, according to a Guardian investigation that has shed light on serious flaws in how the NHS treats transgender patients.
Being trans is a bit like Chinese water torture sometimes. It’s not that the individual drops hurt; it’s that they don’t stop. So for example being misgendered by someone who hears a male voice isn’t upsetting on its own if that’s the only occurrence that day, but being called a man four times during a ten-minute radio programme by a presenter who knows your name and pronouns is profoundly embarrassing.
This is one of the reasons trans people do things like voice therapy or very stereotypical female presentation, incidentally. We do it because it makes life a little bit easier. If you don’t immediately hear my voice as male, maybe you won’t call me sir, or a man, or refuse to accept I’m the policyholder when I’m on the phone to your call centre. I don’t particularly want to modify my voice, not least because it’s a lot of work, but I can do without the arguments.
The worst, though, is the constant attacks on trans people, the misinformation and propaganda that appears in the media. It’s not so much that it gets printed. It’s that it gets shared online by people you may come into contact with personally or professionally.
For example, I’m supposed to be going to a music organisation’s launch day soon. The organisation is for women and it’s explicitly inclusive of trans women, something its organisers have also confirmed to me privately. And yet I’m not sure if I’m going to go, partly because a couple of the key figures who’ll be there on the day have shared anti-trans stories on social media.
I don’t think these people are bigots; they shared what they thought were legitimate news stories in a kind of “oh, for fuck’s sake” way (I know one of them through work and we’ve always got on very well, although I haven’t met her since I started transition). But it means they have shared content that states people like me are fraudulently gaining access to women’s spaces.
How do you sit comfortably in a women-only event when you know that?
How do you read the room without wondering who else has those views, or who has much more extreme views? Are the informational and networking opportunities of the day worth the risk of some kind of confrontation from someone who does not believe you should be there?
That’s what the drip, drip, drip of anti-trans polemic does. It makes you afraid. Afraid to take part in things even when you’ve been invited. Afraid to be in spaces you’re entitled to be in. Afraid to do normal things. Afraid to show up. Afraid to speak. Afraid to just sit in a room.
The next time someone tells you and tens of thousands of other readers that they’re being silenced by those awful trans people, think about that and ask yourself: who’s really being silenced here?
The ever-entertaining A Thousand Flowers blog has resurrected its Weekly Wanker slot for the Herald newspaper columnist Iain McWhirter, who has appointed himself as defender of women against the sinister trans agenda. It’s an amusing read, but it’s also fuelled by righteous anger.
If you aren’t familiar with ATF, it’s a Scottish blog that often does the basic legwork supposedly respectable, responsible journalism doesn’t – so for example while major Scottish newspapers were running scare stories about trans people’s threat to women’s refuges and other crucial resources, running op-eds wondering what Scottish women’s groups might think, ATF actually picked up the phone and asked all 40+ of those groups. The response: they’re already trans-inclusive and the newspapers were misrepresenting them.
Back to the Weekly Wanker.
Iain’s a long established Scottish hack who’s perhaps best know as The Da of The Yes Das, one of the few mainstream journos supportive of independence in the run up to the 2014 referendum. More recently though, his failed attempts to understand the basics of the emergency facing Scotland’s trans community has resulted in a string of absolute shitfests.
As ATF points out, McWhirter appears to be completely ignorant of the current legal situation, of science and of the trans-inclusive policies of Scottish women’s groups. And he’s not the only person spreading fear and long-debunked bullshit, for which the Scottish media seems to have a huge appetite.
in reporting uncritically on these dodgy new groups and amplifying only the views of a tiny, vocal minority of loudly “silenced†transphobes, space simply isn’t being given either to trans groups or to the women’s groups on the front line. Under the comments to Iain’s latest outburst, there were further attacks against groups like Rape Crisis Scotland, Engender and Womens Aid – and their staff – who were accused of actually being secret bigots who were just too scared to say so, SILENCED, in case they lost their funding or jobs. We’ve already refuted this lie, by calling every Women’s Aid group in Scotland, every group we spoke to said they were trans inclusive already – but the transphobes won’t believe these women, it suits them to call women who work with survivors cowards and liars instead. Who’s silencing who exactly?
…
These targeted and relentless attacks against women’s groups by the anti trans lobby are deeply sinister and we need to continue to resist them. The people who peddle lies and bigotry won’t rest until Rape Crisis Scotland has been replaced by a random website run by people hating on orange cats and Women’s Aid is just a badly filled in form about the “dangers†of trans kids. They want to undermine the credibility of women’s groups so they can claim that space and funding for themselves.
Women and men, cis and trans people, gay people, bi people and lest we forget the “heteronormative†lesbians Iain’s been bashing out his one handed columns about, all need to speak up for those being attacked and undermined by the latest wave of moral panic which has infected the Scottish media. Otherwise, we risk both trans groups and women’s groups being undermined by bigotry and hatred.
Last year, there was a concerted smear campaign by anti-trans activists against the Mermaids charity. It began with misleading articles in major newspapers such as The Sunday Times (articles that have since been corrected after IPSO found them to be based on false allegations) and culminated in an organised campaign to get the Lottery fund to cancel its grant to the charity.
The campaign was extremely ugly. I’ve seen Mermaids’ CEO repeatedly libelled online, and the charity itself described in such a way you’d think it was harvesting humans for their blood. That’s not as bizarre an image as it might sound: some of the anti-trans mob are anti-semitic too and claim that trans organisations are funded by The Jews for reasons far too insane to detail here.
The campaign was spearheaded by two people: an obsessive, washed-up sitcom writer and an obsessive, washed-up newspaper journalist. The writer urged the notoriously transphobic members of a particularly toxic section of Mumsnet to bombard the Lottery fund with complaints. Bombard they did.
The lottery fund has now investigated all the allegations and published its report. Over 40 pages it makes it very clear that the anti-trans activists’ claims run the gamut from utterly unsubstantiated to ideologically-driven bullshit.
I’m not going to go through the whole thing line by line (it’s here if you want to do that.) It appears to be pretty balanced: there are areas where Mermaids can clearly do better, Â and it makes recommendations in those areas.
But the takeaway here is that the lurid allegations against the charity, the terrible things that  the campaigners allege, are not true. The charity doesn’t push anybody towards medical treatment or refer anyone to anything. It doesn’t use false statistics to exaggerate the mental health issues of trans children. It doesn’t provide misinformation about sexual development and it doesn’t conflate gender non-conformity with being trans.
There was lots of innuendo, but no actual evidence.
There’s a lot of innuendo about. This weekend, the Sunday Times published tennis star Martina Navratilova’s thinky thoughts about trans people – thoughts, you’ll be amazed to discover, that weren’t very trans-friendly. Navratilova is on the advisory board and is an ambassador for the Athlete Ally LGBTQ sports charity. Or at least she was until they fired her this morning. In a statement, the charity explained that her comments were “based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence.”
A “false understanding of science and data” perpetuating “dangerous myths” is something you see a lot of in the specific allegations the Lottery fund considered and rejected.
It’s not just an important report for Mermaids. It’s important for LGBT people generally, because the same “protect the children” mob also wants to pressure organisations to defund any charity that is trans-inclusive – a list that doesn’t just include trans charities (Scottish Trans Alliance, Gendered Intelligence etc) but also any charity that is trans supportive – so Stonewall and even the disabled kids’ charity Allsorts are on the online activists’ hit list.
That collection of targets gives the lie to the claims of “reasonable concerns”. There’s nothing reasonable about this. It’s hatred.
Some trans people are, understandably, experiencing schadenfreude: the campaign didn’t just fail, but it was directly responsible for a crowdfunding campaign that put another quarter of a million into the charity’s coffers. But while it’s fun to see bigots thwarted, this isn’t the last such campaign we’ll see.
This hatred isn’t driven by facts, but faith. The response to the Lottery fund’s report isn’t “well, they’ve investigated it and it turns out we were wrong!” but “Let’s find out where these people live and make their lives hell.” Some of the activists are discussing making crank calls to the Mermaids’ helpline to make the phone lines unavailable. Others are claiming conspiracy or continuing to peddle the most vicious libels.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen it before. Many anti-trans activists are very friendly with US right-wing evangelicals of the anti-abortion, restrict-women’s-rights variety; some of the higher profile figures in the anti-trans movement are also demonstrably racist and islamophobic. Their hatred, these tactics, won’t suddenly go away. They’ll be used against other charities too.
The message to other charities from this campaign is simple: if you aren’t on the same side as the evangelicals or the far right, it could be you.
Let’s talk about toilets, shall we? Writing in The Daily Dose, Ingebord van Lieshout describes how “pee’d off” Dutch women are waging war for gender-neutral toilets.
It’s an issue throughout the world, where so-called “potty parity” doesn’t exist: if you use the ladies’, you can expect long queues at any kind of public event.
In The Atlantic, Hoe Pinsker asks a simple question: the long lines for women’s bathrooms could be eliminated. Why haven’t they been?
Sexism is part of it, of course, but a lot of it is money. Regulations only stipulate the minimum number of toilets for men and women that need to be provided; beyond that it’s usually a financial decision, and that decision is still largely in the hands of male architects and other male stake-holders.
As Pinkster notes, all kinds of studies take place to analyse issues such as how long people will have to wait for a lift. But “it’s rare for developers to undertake any sort of timing study for bathrooms, even though it’s not clear that waiting for a toilet is any less important than waiting for an elevator.” And it’s difficult to add extra toilets to places that have already been built.
One option is to designate more bathrooms as gender-neutral, an option we already use in places where there isn’t much space – such as aeroplanes, small cafés and everybody’s bloody house. If we did more of that, fewer women would be queuing for so long.
If the bigots would stop howling about trans people we might be able to recognise the many pluses of gender neutral toilets, which The Guardian described in late 2017.
making existing WCs gender-neutral requires little more than changing the signs on the door. And it perfectly equalises the waiting times for men and women.
The difference is dramatic.
Suppose that we have a male and a female multi-stall toilet with six stalls each. We have 150 males and 150 females answering the call of nature over a one-hour period. Then the average waiting time for men is roughly 27sec and for women roughly 7min 40sec. This seems close to what we see in toilets in West End theatres. If we make them gender-neutral, then the average waiting time will go to 36 seconds – a small increase for men but a substantial decrease for women.
There are other benefits too. Male bathrooms often don’t have baby changing facilities, or sanitary facilities for people who were assigned female at birth but who identify as male or non-binary. They can be more useful for disabled people whose carers are of a different gender. And they are cheap.
And yet there are still some vocal people who’d rather make  women stand cross-legged past the point of discomfort than allow gender-neutral toilets. For example, this month a member of an anti-trans pressure group has written to East Renfrewshire, Angus, Dundee and Edinburgh councils (and of course, to the newspapers covering those areas) decrying gender-neutral toilets in primary schools, because of course primary school children are dangerous predators. Elsewhere, anti-trans activists demand trans people are excluded from toilets, propaganda that’s led to anti-trans bigots abusing women who don’t look “female enough” because they have short hair or aren’t conventionally pretty. That’s just taking the piss.
Every few months, a new bunch of ageing transsexuals will write a letter to The Guardian or they’ll write an open letter on the internet in which they moan about the “transgender umbrella” and how it’s just too broad. Various different people have been writing the same thing since about 1973, and while the names sometimes differ the song hasn’t really changed: look at all these pervs and weirdos claiming to be like us! They’re not proper transsexuals like we are! They make us sick! We refuse to be associated with them! Let’s throw them under the bus!
I’d do a parody of it, but Natalie Reed already did a great job seven years ago.
You know, I’m sick of all this “umbrella term†nonsense. Why should I be associated with a bunch of freaks like drag queens, “butch trans dykes†and non-op transgenders? I’m a real transsexual, a real woman. I fought hard in order to be able to be accepted as a woman, and having a bunch of people who aren’t even interested in getting surgery, or wearing skirts, or doing guys, going ahead and jumping into our “community†and making us look bad is just undoing all of what us real transsexuals, who are really women, fought to attain. I’m sorry, but male means penis and female means vagina. You just need to accept that. It’s common sense. Yes, there are women like me who are born trapped in men’s bodies, who get surgery to have vaginas and therefore become women, but you can’t just say “I’m a woman†and have your “self-identification†magically make your penis no longer a penis. It’s crazy and ridiculous, and you make us women who were simply born with a physical defect and sought to have it corrected look crazy and ridiculous too. I don’t care what you transgenderists want to do with your weird perverted fetishes and such, but don’t go dragging us real women who are really transsexual down with you.
These are the people who join hands with rabid anti-trans bigots and who actively campaign against trans rights. Reed rightly describes them as “the capos and Quislings of the trans community, passing on information to the guards of the gender prison in exchange for an extra cookie on their lunch tray.”
This is important, because legal rights depend on definitions. Under UK law, I am protected from discrimination; if you punch me, it’s a hate crime. But that has only applied since I decided to undergo some form of transition from male to female. Before that decision I was still trans, but I wasn’t trans enough in the eyes of the law.
The most recent example of the “we’re true trans and everyone else can get stuffed” is in the form of a blog demanding the charity Stonewall stops fighting for transgender rights (no link, because arseholes). Not all transgender rights, though. Just the rights of people who aren’t exactly like the people writing the blog post.
Not everybody who’s under the trans umbrella will take hormones, change their name or undergo surgery. But the people who would fire us, evict us or beat us up don’t care. Nobody asks to see your Gender Recognition Certificate before deciding whether to punch you.
I’m one of the so-called “true transsexuals” these clowns claim to be: I’ve got the medical diagnosis and the 12-weekly needle in the buttocks to prove it. But I don’t feel that I’m any more valid than someone who’s non-binary, or who decides that the risks of social, hormonal transition aren’t worth it, or anybody else of whom the desiccated gatekeepers disapprove.
Reed again:
Concepts such as “The Transgender Community†or “LGBTâ€/â€The Queer Community†are not meant to be overarching ideas of who and what we are. It isn’t meant to blur distinctions. The Transgender Umbrella doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge that cross-dresser is different from transsexual is different from drag queen is different from genderqueer, no more than using “Queer†is to imagine that gay men and trans women are the same thing. These are political coalitions.
You see, we may understand those nuances and differences. We know the difference between intersex and genderqueer, cross-dressing and drag, trans man and butch lesbian… but the haters don’t. They don’t really care. They see a big icky rabble of icky queers and they want us gone, no matter how exactly we differ from their heteronormative, cisnormative expectations.
We’re all different, but we all have one thing in common: we’re under attack.
These kinds of internecine divisions, hoping to somehow move forward in cultural acceptance by ridding yourselves of the unseemly lower classes of whatever, do absolutely nothing for progress. What they do is reinforce the scaffolding on which the oppression was based (for instance, the idea that certain kinds of gender are more valid or “real†than others). Whatever extra cookie you may get on your tray when lunch is served in the prison, you’re still stuck in that prison, still dependent on the guards, and will remain so until we cooperate effectively and build a tunnel.
If the only way to save yourself is to use other people as a human shield, you’re not worth saving.
One of the most widely circulated anti-trans stories is that Soham child murder Ian Huntley is trans. The Star reported it 10 months ago, and it’s regularly trotted out by anti-trans groups and repeated in newspapers.
Look what Jeremy Vine posted today.
It’s from yesterday’s Star.
Like the vast majority of such stories, it was a complete fabrication. Good luck waiting for the retractions from The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman, The Sunday Times’ Janice Turner, The Telegraph, Fair Play For Women, The Spectator’s James Kirkup…
The point here is not that bad people cannot be trans, or that trans people cannot be bad. The point is that some newspapers, journalists and celebrities are not objective or ethical when it comes to writing about trans people, and will print pretty much anything if it supports the narrative of a sinister transgender agenda. The Huntley story was always, obviously dubious, and yet none of the people who wrote about it bothered to do the simplest bit of journalism: get on the phone and find out if it was true.
This is happening far too often for it to be anything other than malicious. UK newspapers have repeatedly had to retract stories about trans people because the stories were untrue. Those stories have been used by anti-trans bigots to campaign against trans people’s rights, and to spread fear and hatred of trans people. This particular story produces 95,000 Google results and is used so frequently that ten months since publication, anti-trans activists were posting about it on Twitter this morning – just before Vine posted the photo of the retraction.
The stories, and the fear and hatred they engender, live on long after the inevitable retractions.
You might not be aware of this, but the anti-trans stance of English (and more recently, Scottish) newspapers is greeted with bafflement in the rest of the world. The New York Times tries to explain English anti-trans activism for its readers.
If the idea that transphobic harassment could be “feminist†bewilders you, you are not alone. In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.
There, the most vocal trans-exclusionary voices are, ostensibly, “feminist†ones, and anti-trans lobbying is a mainstream activity.
This is peculiar to mainland Britain. When anti-trans bigots tried to export their bile to Ireland, huge numbers of Irish feminists told them to piss off.
So why is England so different? Edie Miller suggests that “the answer lies in part to the coalescence of a certain set of ideas in a very specific circle of voices in the early 21st century — voices that later went on to hold high profile positions in much of the U.K.’s print and broadcast media.” Between those voices and the anti-trans obsessives of Mumsnet – “Mumsnet is to British transphobia more like what 4Chan is to American fascism”, Miller writes – a moral panic has ensued.
But why England? Back to the NYT.
In other parts of the world, including America, mass movements in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s around the effects of globalization and police brutality have produced long overdue dialogue on race, gender and class, and how they all interact. In Britain, however, the space for this sort of dialogue has been much more limited. As a result, middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have.
Many of these people believe they are doing God’s work. But they’re working for the other guy.
This is the latest story in the Times and Sunday Times’ ongoing campaign against trans people. Even by those low standards, it’s a pathetic attempt at turning something innocuous into a hit piece.
The tweet in question was posted in November. Here it is:
Excellent @scotgov #TransInclusion event bringing #colleagues together with inspirational trans role models & those involved in improving the experiences of trans people at work & in our society @jacqui_gavin @Mermaids_Gender @ScottishTrans @Diversity_SG pic.twitter.com/QePRnSr9CP
— Leslie Evans (@PermSecScot) November 15, 2018
It’s a thoroughly unremarkable bit of political social media, and the supposedly inflammatory poster – the fourth image in the tweet – is a pretty innocuous “don’t be a dick” poster suggesting that it’s possible to be pleasant and respectful to trans people. It’s worth pointing out, because the Times never does, that the major women’s groups in Scotland – Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, Zero Tolerance, Close The Gap, Engender and Equate Scotland among others – are proudly trans-inclusive.
“Pro-trans bias”.
Lets unpick that, shall we?
“Pro-trans bias”. Bias is a negative word; it means to be inclined or prejudiced for or against a particular group, usually in an unfair way.
To put it in this context is to say that to be pro-trans (or as I’d put it, pro-not being a dick to trans people) is a bad thing. The entire article is based on the flimsy premise that to post something mildly supportive of trans people is somehow shameful and something a politician shouldn’t be doing. It implies that by suggesting we should perhaps not be bastards to trans people, the politician is biased against non-trans people.
The headline’s doing a lot of work, isn’t it?
As ever, you can illustrate the point by changing the words. Swap “trans” for “catholic”, “jewish”, “Asian”, “black”, “gay”, “disabled”.
As I say, bias is prejudice for or against a particular group. It’s something you’d be guilty of if, say, you accused a politician of “pro-trans bias” over an innocuous, two-month-old tweet but failed to report (let alone criticise) the UK government officials who repeatedly meet with rabidly anti-trans groups (Transgender Trend and Fair Play For Women twice and A Woman’s Place three times, with FPFW invited to a further two “round tables” to discuss limiting trans people’s rights) or the MPs who post anti-trans sentiment to social media.
It’s the kind of thing you’d be guilty of if your columnists were activist supporters of anti-trans groups but failed to declare that in their regular anti-trans columns.
It’s something you’d be guilty of if you repeatedly ignored the medical consensus on trans people in favour of scaremongering from activist groups.
It’s something you’d be guilty of… you get the idea.
Anti-trans bias in the press is so commonplace that to simply detail it would be a full time job, but the Times/Sunday Times has become so blatant it’s almost a parody of itself. If you buy these titles you’re helping to fund this bullshit.
I think most of us have had the classic anxiety dream where we’re standing up in front of people and we’re either naked or in our underwear. I pretty much lived it today – although, you’ll be pleased to read, I was neither naked nor dressed only in my underwear.
I was at Stirling University, where I’d been asked by a friend to deliver a guest lecture about internet things. To say I was nervous about it would be a major understatement. I barely slept last night. I don’t stand up in front of people very often, I haven’t addressed a room full of strangers for many years and I haven’t delivered such a long presentation in 21 years.
Not only am I desperately out of practice, but I also have the added anxiety-inducing fact of being trans.
Imagine the anxiety dream, but instead of doing it naked you’re doing it in a frock (if you’re male-bodied; if you’re female, imagine being in one of those horrible, scratchy hallowe’en costumes: anything you’d expect to get an odd reaction in a professional setting).
Presenting male wasn’t an option, partly because it would have been a cop-out and partly because I’d been specifically asked as part of a policy of having more inclusive speakers – not just the same rotating cast of straight, white, cisgender men.
It was fine, of course. Better than fine. The students were a genuinely nice bunch, nobody seemed in the slightest bit perturbed by the disconnect between my voice and my presentation – a disconnect that was bigger than usual today because God has a sense of humour and I have a cold that’s lowered my already-deep voice half an octave below its usual floor – and once the initial terror subsided, I found myself enjoying it. Not so much that I’m going to start volunteering to do tons more, but enough to make me think I made the right decision by saying yes.
I was speaking to my lecturer friend before the lecture, setting the world to rights, and I said (in a different context) that progress is often something you only really see in the rear view mirror: it’s only when you look back that you can see how far you’ve travelled. For me, today was a great example of that.