I’m a big fan of Snack magazine, the independent Scots arts, entertainment and culture magazine, so I’m really delighted to be in its pages this month talking about Small Town Joy. You can read this month’s magazine online for free here.
Category: Media
Journalism, radio and stuff like that
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Violence
In a full-page article in The Telegraph today, Sex Matters’ Maya Forstater claims that the tens of thousands of peaceful pro-trans protesters who took to the streets yesterday are a “violent mob” because one of the protesters scribbled on a statue with a bit of chalk.
On Twitter today, Sex Matters supporter and washed-up former comedy writer Graham Linehan is urging his thousands of followers to physically attack any women they think may be trans.
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Demons, daily
Researcher Lee Hurley tracks anti-trans articles in the English press, and the totals are in: in the last year alone, just three English newspapers – The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph – ran 1,075 articles about trans people, almost all of them anti-trans. So if you’re a reader of any of those papers, you’re being sold an anti-trans story every single day.
It’s a horrendous statistic but if anything it underplays things: just yesterday The Sunday Telegraph ran five anti-trans articles in a single edition. And the Scots press is similarly obsessed.
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A tale of two ERs
The Pitt has become one of my very favourite shows. It’s a hospital-set drama with a huge heart, originally conceived as a follow-up to the 1990s series ER in which Noah Wyle played a young doctor. Unfortunately – or fortunately, given the result – ER writer Michael Crichton’s estate nixed that so Wyle created a stand-alone series instead. This time around Wyle plays a grizzled veteran who’s trying very hard to keep it together while under incredible pressure. He’s fantastic, as are the rest of the ensemble cast.
There’s a minor story in The Pitt featuring a transgender woman, and it’s really interesting to compare that with the trans storylines in ER. Because ER’s portrayal of trans and intersex people was vicious.
[Content warning: slurs]
Writing on Tumblr, Brin (aka Brinconvenient) describes multiple episodes of ER featuring trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people. The first, ER Confidential, was broadcast in November 1994. Brin goes into detail for that episode but to summarise: the trans woman is played by a cisgender man, she’s treated with disgust and hostility by the show’s stars, and she’s called a slur by one of the nurses. Her story arc ends with her jumping off the roof of the hospital because she’s too old and too mannish to be a believable woman.
Brin was 16 at the time.
Just think of the message this episode sends. Are you a young trans kid? Better transition while you’re young or not at all, because you’re on a clock – you have an expiration date. If you transition later, you’re just going to look like a man in a dress, everyone will clock you, everyone will find you disgusting, and they’re right too. You’ll get called names, you’ll get the barest modicum of tolerance, if you’re lucky, and even then, you’ll be kept at arm’s length.
And hey, if you get old? Or older, really, because you don’t even have to be THAT old, then your life is over. It’s best just to kill yourself instead of not passing.
I was an ER watcher too. So I got that message loud and clear – not just in that episode, but several times.
There were plenty more examples.
over 15 seasons, 331 episodes, ER had a total of 5 explicitly trans women and one explicitly intersex women (and zero trans or intersex men).
None of them have a happy ending.
As Brin says, “the general cis idea of trans people is informed by all of these Sad, Angst, Tragic Trannies ™”, and while things have got better we’ve had decades of this stuff in popular culture (I go into a lot of examples of that in both of my books). Other shows were just as careless/callous: for example NYPD Blue, another show I watched religiously, consistently showed trans people as sex workers, dead sex workers or ludicrous caricatures, had the star characters insult and misgender those characters, and titled a 2003 episode about the murder of a trans sex worker “Tranny Get Your Gun“. This was considered completely normal and entirely acceptable.
I don’t know if Noah Wyle set out to try and do better now than his character did in ER. But The Pitt gets right what ER consistently got wrong.
First of all, the trans woman is played by a trans woman (the luminous Eva Everett Irving). Tasha is a glamorous, likeable and fun character, a sommelier to the rich and famous. She’s not in the ER because she’s trans; she’s in the ER because she’s got a nasty cut on her hand. The hand is fixed, the deadname on her file is quietly corrected by one of the medical students, and she’s off again to her glamorous life. She’s not there to make the main characters sad, or to be a tragic figure. She’s just another patient.
That shouldn’t be remarkable. But sadly, it is.
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A troubled Adolescence
(Contains spoilers for the TV drama Adolescence).
Like many people I was gripped by the Netflix drama Adolescence, which tells the story of a teen murder victim. Except as Jude Doyle points out, it doesn’t tell you very much about the victim at all.
While it’s beautifully shot and features some incredible performances, it’s a story that wants you to feel sorry not for the murdered girl, but for the family of her murderer – and to some extent, for the murderer. And as soon as you realise that that’s what it’s doing, it becomes a very different and much less successful piece of television.
Doyle makes a good argument that the drama is ultimately superficial (which perhaps explains why the Labour government is so keen on having it shown in schools, despite the show itself pointing out the uselessness of showing videos to bored and fractious teenage boys).
It’s uninterested in engaging with the darkness it purports to be exploring to any significant degree: it throws in a few signifiers about the “manosphere” of online misogyny, but it doesn’t engage with the reality of it or the fact that misogyny is not something that was invented by social media, a “a weird Ringu-style Internet curse that happens if your son gets too much screen time”. Male violence of the kind portrayed in Adolescence is what you get when your society tells men that they are entitled to control women and their bodies. And god knows, that’s not a message that men are only just encountering.
With one key exception – which Doyle praises, and writes about in detail – there are hardly any female characters, and the ones that do appear are woefully underwritten; the teenage girl whose murder is at the centre of the drama is barely a cipher.
Doyle:
“making a miniseries about Toxic Masculinity and only focusing on male characters is like making a miniseries about Hitler and only focusing on his painting. It’s not until you see who’s getting hurt, and how badly they’re hurting, that you get the point.”
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Victim blaming
The Mail, the Telegraph and the Times are all framing a horrifically violent attempted murder in the same way: they’re blaming the victim. Of course they are. She’s trans.
[I don’t usually come back and edit posts but I’m going to fix this for clarity the day after posting it, because it was written in a hurry and got the timeline slightly wrong.]
The attack was on a teenage girl who’d been flirting with a young man. He’d been told that she was trans, but when he asked her if that were true she said no; the girl had previously been attacked for being trans and seems to have been concerned for her safety if she’d said otherwise. They kissed, and the young man asked her to perform oral sex on him. He filmed the act without her knowledge or consent and shared it online on Snapchat.
When the video circulated, the young man was told again that the girl was trans. He asked her again, but this time he told her that he’d stab her if she lied. So she said yes, she was trans. The young man and his friends then conspired to lure her into a trap.
The girl was jumped in the street by the young man and several other people in a sustained attack during which she was stabbed multiple times, stamped upon, kicked and robbed. Their friends filmed the attack and shared it online; the most violent of the attackers, the one who brought a knife it to stab her, was a young woman who later posted a Snapchat story which included footage of the attack, an image of the victim on a ventilator and a number of transphobic slurs.
The Mail describes this as being targeted “over her trans identity lie”; The Telegraph says she was stabbed “after lying about her gender”. The Times puts the last two words in quote marks but the headline is still “Transgender teenage stabbed 14 times by Snapchat gang ‘for lying’”.
The Metropolitan Police rightly called it a “horrendous and violent assault on a young woman, motivated by the fact she is transgender”. But the response on social media and Mumsnet is to call the girl a rapist, say that the attempted murder was her own fault and demand her prosecution for not disclosing her gender history to the young man who filmed her performing oral sex without her knowledge or consent and who conspired to plan her attempted murder. His criminal behaviour doesn’t matter; she, the self-proclaimed defenders of women say, was asking for it. She had it coming. Although of course they don’t call her “she”.
This is the world that “gender critical” journalism has created: a world where trans kids are beaten up if they tell people they’re trans and stabbed if they don’t. The UK press and the bigots they platform have blood on their hands.
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Bots and brooms
I meant to post this a while back: a piece I wrote for Gutter magazine about the “content industry” and what it means for artists.
Of course there has always been business around art. The music business, the art market, the publishing industry, the comedy circuit, the comic book trade and others have all seen their share of bandwagon boarders and cold-eyed careerists. But for most of that time the art and the business have co-existed, however awkwardly and inequitably. What happens when there’s all business and no art?
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The Missing
I was honoured to lend my voice to The Missing, an episode of The Quilt, the LGBTQ+ audio exhibition and podcast in association with the Queer Britain museum. It’s an oral history of queer lives in the UK; this episode, the third in a series of eight, focuses on Scotland from the Highland Clearances to the loss of Glasgow lesbian bars.
It’s available from wherever you get your podcasts, and directly from this link.
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Misreporting
Let’s do this again, shall we?
There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported.
First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in the press. Complaints that the charity did not have effective safeguarding policies or that it had inappropriate ties to gender identity clinics were unfounded. The commission tried very hard to find evidence of those things because it really, really wanted to – during the inquiry one member of its staff, clearly an anti-trans activist, forgot to use their own personal account and was caught retweeting an unfounded allegation against the charity on the Commission’s own social media – but failed.
That’s not to say Mermaids is perfect. It isn’t, and there were failings identified in its management. But the core allegations that have been in the press for two years now were bullshit.
It’s also worth noting that yet again, the BBC reporting of this is using anti-trans activists’ dog-whistles: we’ve previously had “gender ideology” used to describe trans people existing, and now we have “trans-identified” to describe trans kids. The use of “trans-identified male” and “trans-identified female” are common in bigot circles; the terms are intended to delegitimise trans people and suggest they’re not trans.
Next up: another bigot fucked around and found out. In yet another case reported widely as a nice teacher losing their job just for saying “sex is real” or misgendering a student, Camilla Hannan has been barred from teaching. And if you look at what the tribunal found rather than what the press is telling you it found, you’ll see that Hannan outed one of her LGBTQ+ students online – a massive safeguarding breach as well as horrific behaviour for any teacher – and that her remorse appeared to be “self-serving”: the judge suggested that “Miss Hannan’s remorse stemmed from being caught, rather than from reflections on her own behaviour.”
Over in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis claimed that when Donald Trump said this week that “Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent”, “lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth.” It does not contain a kernel of truth.
Lastly, we have the inquest into the murder of trans teen Brianna Ghey. In a report that went out of its way never to describe Brianna as “she”, a girl or a young woman, The Times focused on the real victim here: her killer. He was “set for Oxbridge” and was “a good child with good morals”. That’s good morals as in spending “weeks plotting Brianna’s murder after drawing up a ‘kill list’” and then stabbing her 28 times. The good-morals bit is from a statement by the boy’s mother, who of course is going to come to her child’s defence. But the tone of the reporting here and elsewhere strongly suggests that the real tragedy as far as the press is concerned is not that a young trans girl is dead, but that two cisgender people are in prison for killing her.
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“Hopeful and broken”
Juliette, who writes the Kierkegaard’s Lunch blog, has written a dual review of the Will and Harper road movie where Will Ferrell goes on a trip with his recently transitioned trans friend Harper Steele. The first half of the review is for cisgender people:
Watch it all and pick a side. Because you can’t be neutral – and one side is winning this fight.
It’s not the side that meets Harper with compassion and humanity…
And the second half is for trans people.
Above all, perhaps be ready to watch it and to feel both ‘I’m glad they made this movie’ and ‘I’m broken that they still felt they had to make this movie’. I have been watching movies and reading books trying to explain to cisgender people that we are humans, with feelings, not monsters, rapists or freaks for over 40 years.
I think Juliette is articulating something I’ve been feeling a lot lately: we’ve had decades of programmes and movies and books that have tried to say something very simple, which is that trans people are people. And yet we’re going backwards, not forwards.
I had hoped that some of all this, and all the rest, might have moved the dial to a place of greater understanding and decency towards us. For a time I thought it was happening. These days, it often feels like faith in that progress was delusional.
It’s something I think about in relation to this blog, because I’m so tired of writing about the same things over and over again: a group of anti-trans bigots will do something terrible, and nobody gives the slightest shit. Today it’s the news that those friends of JK Rowling, the Tufton Street anti-trans group Sex Matters and our own anti-LGBTQ+ weirdos For Women Scotland, intend to compile a database of every trans woman competing in sports in the entire UK. Given that there are no trans women competing in elite sport, it’s very clear that the role of this database – which seems illegal under multiple laws – is to find targets for harassment and abuse among people taking part in grassroots sport. You’d have to be very stupid to believe that it’s got anything to do with any kind of fairness, let alone protecting any participants.
Yesterday, it was the news that multiple senior figures in NHS trans care have boycotted the WPATH conference, the international conference on transgender health, but attended a conference by the anti-trans, religion-based pseudoscientists of SEGM, an organisation opposed to all gender-affirming healthcare. The SPLC, which tracks hate groups, says that SEGM is the hub of the “anti-LGBT pseudoscience network”.
Also yesterday, it emerged that Elon Musk has so far contributed $50m – that we know of – to fund anti-immigration and anti-trans propaganda.
The day before it was the US school district whose genital-obsessed weirdos carved new windows in its mixed-gender toilets so that adults could watch children urinate, the presidential campaigns blasting anti-trans ads all over the TV, and the presidential candidate claiming that US schools are transgender surgery factories.
And the day before, and the day before, and the day before.
As I’ve written before, to be trans right now, to be talking about being trans right now, feels like the curse of Cassandra, fated to know the truth but never be believed. We’ve watched our healthcare, already wretched, be dismantled. We’ve watched our employment rights, already precarious, attacked on multiple fronts. We’ve watched our politicians embrace beliefs that just a few years previously were largely and rightly considered abhorrent. And through it all, instead of reporting on this the bulk of the press is supporting it.
It’s hard to see a light at the end of this tunnel. I know there is one. But it seems very far away.