Something that’s puzzled me for a while is how so many people believe that Donald Trump and his administration are pro-LGBT+ when they’ve been so viciously anti-LGBT+: from the transgender military ban onwards, they have mounted a sustained attack on the basic rights of LGBT+ people in an ongoing campaign to remove the most basic human rights such as protection from discrimination in housing, healthcare and employment.

The most recent example of that is the November 1 rule that will allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBT+ parents. Agencies that receive federal grants will no longer have to abide by non-discrimination guidelines thanks to new “religious freedom” exemptions, exemptions that also apply to sexual health education, youth homelessness programmes, drug and alcohol recovery programmes and other key services.

It’s a horrible backwards step that’s going to have terrible effects on some of the most vulnerable people, so why aren’t more people up in arms about it?

Because they don’t know about it.

A study by MediaMatters found that the majority of America’s top newspapers didn’t report it. Of the top 50 titles, 28 didn’t publish a single item in print or online about the new rule.

Of the papers that did report it, many uncritically quoted extremist anti-LGBT+ evangelical groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. Only one paper, the New York Daily News, reminded its readers that these organisations have spent decades inciting hatred of LGBT+ people.

The lack of context means that people are incredibly ill-informed.

It is also crucial for media to cover individual actions like the new rule as one piece of the Trump-Pence administration’s broader, vehemently anti-LGBTQ record. The New York Daily News and The Washington Post provided two good examples of this in their reporting, as both contextualized the rule as part of the larger attack and rollback of LGBTQ rights. Most coverage unfortunately failed to do this, which may mislead readers into thinking the administration’s attacks on LGBTQ rights could be a one-off occurrence.

As MediaMatters explains, the mainstream US press was keen to portray Trump as pro-LGBT+ during his presidential campaign on his say-so, and it has conspicuously failed to report on anti-LGBT+ actions by his administration since he took power. That has left a vacuum the right-wing press and social media have been only too keen to fill with propaganda.

In the absence of meaningful mainstream reporting on Trump’s anti-LGBTQ onslaught, right-wing and evangelical media often dominate coverage of the issue and twist the attacks on basic LGBTQ rights into a fight for “religious freedom.”

The news media’s job is to report and contextualise, to educate and inform, to speak truth to power. When it fails to do that, whether by bias or omission, it becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

There’s a famous quote by Maya Angelou: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

It means that when someone shows you a clear red flag, you shouldn’t ignore it. Someone who disrespects you will continue to be disrespectful. Someone who is violent will continue to be violent. Someone who is hateful will continue to be hateful.

So I’m not joining in today’s surprise that Rod Liddle has written another hateful, racist piece for the hateful, racist Spectator. Liddle showed us who he was when he accepted a police caution for punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach, when he was found using a pseudonym to post racist remarks on football forums, and in pretty much every column he’s ever excreted for The Spectator and other vile rags.

Here in Scotland, a whole bunch of people have decided to show who they are thanks to a fabricated furore over a census question.

If you haven’t actually seen the question, here’s a screenshot from the census’s quality testing report, which this entire story has been based on.

The above question has been reported as the PC lobby forcing Scots people to choose from a “baffling” list of 21 sexualities. The reality is much more tedious. The list is for autocorrect entries so that if people choose the “another way” option, it’ll offer some other suggestions (and help harmonise the data by ensuring consistent spelling).

The story originated in the Murdoch press and was quickly picked up by the Scottish Daily Mail. We already know who these publications are, but they’re showing us again.

The Sun story is around 650 words. Its interviewees are an anti-trans academic and activist (this story has no connection to trans people at all), an unnamed Tory spokesperson, an evangelical anti-LGBT+ Christian group and the Catholic Church. The Daily Mail sought comment from an additional, extremely fringe, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT evangelical group who railed against “gender madness”, even though the story has no connection with anybody’s gender.

You’d think such obvious, politically motivated culture war framing – concoct a story about so-called identity politics, get the evangelical rent-a-gobs to damn it, tell your readers that the queers have gone too far this time and encourage them to post foul homophobic and transphobic vitriol in your comments sections – would prevent grown-ups from sharing it.

But you’d be wrong. People who previously limited their online abuse to abusing trans women, including senior newspaper journalists, bloggers and political figures, have seized upon this non-story, abusing the entire LGBT+ community for something the Murdoch press made up and standing proudly alongside some of the most viciously anti-women, anti-LGBT groups in the country.

They showed trans people who they were months and in some cases years ago. And now they’re showing you.

When people show you who they are, believe them.

In today’s Scottish Sun, there’s a story about the 2021 census.

Like most things the Murdoch press prints in its ongoing campaign against LGBT+ people and trans people in particular, it isn’t true. It’s just an excuse to get the usual crowd of reactionaries – anti-trans academics, vocally anti-trans MSP Joan McAlpine, the Catholic Church and the evangelical Christian Institute – to mouth off about how it’s loony left political correctness gone maaaaaaaaad.

There will not be 21 options. There will be four: straight, gay/lesbian, bisexual or other. It’s the same question and set of responses that’s been used in a range of UK surveys for many years.

The list The Sun is talking about is for predictive text in the online form. When someone types into the “Other” field, the idea is to have autocorrect suggest options that other people have used in previous surveys.

As The Equality Network explains:

The list of 21 terms that the Sun prints is a list of the most common answers that people who select Other have given in past surveys.

If you select Other in the online Census, one of those terms may pop up (as a suggestion only) if it matches the first letters you type.

This bullshit is only going to get worse now an election is looming. In September, it emerged that the Tories were polling “culture war” issues they could use to sow division via the right-wing press. Human rights for trans people is one of those issues.

Update, 31 October

The way this is playing out in print and social media tells you a great deal about the people trying to spread hate. They aren’t just anti-trans. They’re anti-LGBT+. This story isn’t about gender. It’s about sexuality. And people are trying to weaponise it against the wider LGBT+ community.

Labour activist and gay man Duncan Hothersall on Twitter:

The census sexualities question stushie is really exposing the dishonesty at the heart of the “legitimate concerns” movement. MSPs and journalists ranting about “21 different sexualities” are compounding a basic misunderstanding into a revolting, and frankly homophobic, attack.

The attacks are coming from supposed LGB supporters who don’t really like the L, the G or the B any more than they like the T. From bloggers and social media trolls who are as homophobic as they are transphobic. From people who have moved from trying to police gender to trying to police sexuality. From people sharing a platform and often an ideology with Christian fundamentalists and the far right.

As Hothersall puts it:

Anti trans rhetoric leads to anti LGB rhetoric. Excusing hate legitimises more hate. Do better.

The Christian Post is yet another evangelical newsletter from America, and it’s part of an axis that includes the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council – two organisations with strong links to the British anti-trans movement. It’s just published an article about the “trans cult” that could have been lifted from The Sunday Times.

You know how these things go by now. Sinister cult members stealing children by the dead of night, chopping bits off them, selling them to Satan.

Here’s Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager for the US National Center for Trans Equality.

The article is astonishing in its sensationalism, but quite typical of anti-trans fear mongering. The Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council use similar language. The goal is to activate disgust–an extremely strong emotion–in the reader.

It’s why almost all of these articles talk about a sinister push towards surgery for children, even though children do not get gender confirmation surgery. When they can’t scare you about surgery, they’ll tell you that children are being given cross-sex hormones. That doesn’t happen either. And when they’ve ran out of things that don’t happen to scare you about, they’ll redefine “children” to mean “32-year-olds”.

The Sunday Times was doing it today, in yet another piece about the “state-sponsored sterilisation of trans children”. The “children” in the article were 20, 21 and 32. The article is uncannily similar to the one in the Christian Post.

It’s worth looking at the Sunday Times piece in a bit more detail, because the most shocking revelation was that one of the “children” – the 32-year-old – had committed suicide after a history of such attempts. The fact that the parent repeatedly misgenders their dead child suggests that lack of parental acceptance and support might just have been a factor. We know that the suicide rate for trans people with accepting families is the same as the wider population; for those with unaccepting families, it’s sky high.

If like me you’ve experienced the gender clinic system, there’s a lot of this story that just doesn’t add up. If this person, as stated, had a history of clinical depression, anxiety and suicide attempts, nobody from the GP to their psychiatric assessors would have ignored that let alone recommended transition in any form as the way to fix their problems.

Another parent, a father, said:

“I couldn’t change my daughter’s mind so I have to change the minds of those doing this to her.”

His child, who would presumably prefer to be called his son, is 20.  Does that sound supportive and accepting to you?

My daughter is not transitioning, she is being transitioned by an LGBT cult and by medical professionals.”

Which suggests that again, the adult child has undergone extensive psychiatric assessment by those “medical professionals”.

Last but not least, our case study, now 21. They have been persistent, consistent and insistent about their gender identity for five years and did not access any NHS gender services until they were an adult.

“I trusted the NHS with my child and cannot believe the harm it has done,” their mum says.

What terrible procedures did they make her child endure?

[The child] has had no medical interventions.

So in five years of attending gender services, the NHS has pushed the woman’s child – her adult child – towards no medical treatments whatsoever.

This, somehow, is evidence of the NHS pushing children – child children, not adult ones – into treatments that we know the NHS does not provide to children.

But of course, nobody wants to let the facts get in the way of a good satanic conspiracy theory.

The points Branstetter makes about the Christian Post piece, and similar pieces by the Heritage Foundation and FRC, apply just as well to the Sunday Times piece and most of the other anti-trans scaremongering in the UK press.

But it also relies on tropes we see in any number of moral panics and conspiracy theories. PizzaGate + QAnon– like Satanic panics of the 80s–all rely on secretive cabals sacrificing children under cover of night. But it’s actually an ancient fear even older than that.

One of my favorite reads this year was @annamerlan‘s deep dive into the state of conspiracy theories today. She does a wonderful job finding the common threads through 9/11 trutherism, anti-vaxxers, and many more to discover what makes these absurd ideas so appealing to so many.

On PizzaGate, she notes the fear of child sacrifice is an anti-Semitic trope dating to the Middle Ages. Such “nocturnal rituals” are used to justify violence against other groups (namely Jews)

You can find the same myths in anti-native writings of European colonialists, anti-Roma sentiment throughout the last few centuries, and anti-Semitism up to the current era.

The primary purpose of these myths is playing into parental fears. They hope to animate a protective instinct against a ghostly “other”, unleashing an animalistic rage that will excuse any violence against the targeted group.

…By animating fears of child abduction, ritual abuse, and sexual exploitation, anti-trans activists are–knowingly or not–following a very old roadmap for justifying oppression. The goal is to build so much fear that the cost trans people pay will be deemed a worthwhile bargain.

They also try to fudge the other side of the equation–are trans people really oppressed? How suicidal are they? Are they really facing *that* much violence?

It’s a two-pronged strategy: you tell people that trans people are dangerous even though you know they are not. And you tell people that trans people do not face any victimisation or discrimination, even though they do.

…If trans people are a cult–dangerous and deranged–and the potential cost is your own children, then such framing justifies oppression of us by any means necessary. All the violence and rape and poverty and suffering trans people face is, in their eyes, an acceptable cost.

Its important to note that the exchange posed by them is, of course, completely imaginary. Nothing about trans people, our rights, or our health care is a danger to anyone. Period.

You’ll find that the majority of anti-trans hate groups claim to care about “real” trans people. But they don’t. That’s why they offer no solutions, accept no statistics, believe no experts. They are motivated not by a desire to help anyone, but to hate and hurt people.

And if you don’t believe me, ask yourself: What is the conservative solution to anti-trans discrimination? How would these activists end anti-trans violence, raise trans people out of poverty, or stem the public health crisis taking trans children by suicide?

Their solution, of course, is to deny that any of these issues exist.

They don’t have an answer because they don’t care–and they need you not to care, either. They need you to believe trans people are a sickly cult of perverts unworthy of your empathy, let alone equality. They need you to believe the price is just too high to pay.

Piers Morgan, who used to write homophobic stories in The Sun before that became socially unacceptable, is currently making hay from the idea that there are more than 100 genders. It’s based on a comment made in a video where someone was rather clunkily trying to express the idea that gender is a spectrum.

We’re familiar with the gender binary: male or female, boy or girl. But most binaries are shortcuts. There’s a whole world of colours between black and white. We use binaries to simplify that, but sometimes they over-simplify. The trick is to understand them for what they are: quick descriptions that apply a lot or even most of the time, but that aren’t the only possibilities.

The thing about this 100 genders thing is that when I go to LGBT+ and trans-specific events, nobody’s talking about it: the most obscure identity I’ve ever heard somebody describe themselves as is “non-binary”. Nobody’s getting irate about this stuff because they’ve got more important things to worry about, like basic human rights such as access to healthcare and not being murdered.

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there coming up with ever-longer lists of possible genders, but those people are generally in the corners of social media and academia. Going too far is what they do.

It’s important to question who’s telling you a story that makes a particular group look bad. These myriad genders are regularly trotted out by the right-wing press, but I simply don’t encounter LGBT+ people talking about it. It appears to be a classic case of people taking a couple of really extreme and/or niche views and trying to persuade people that they represent the entire group.

Put it this way. Piers Morgan isn’t talking about the healthcare crisis for trans people or the elevated suicide rates among LGBT+ teenagers, the things that really affect LGBT+ people and that LGBT+ people really do care about. He’s just pointing and laughing at them and trying to get you to point and laugh too.

Here’s an example of a big story about genders: Facebook’s infamous 50-something genders, which were then increased to 71. This was widely reported as 71 genders. It wasn’t. It was 71 possible responses on a form, most of them duplicates or slightly different ways of saying the same thing. For example:

Cis, Cisgender, Cis Female, Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender Female, Cisgender Male, Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman

…Trans, Trans*, Trans Female, Trans* Female, Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Trans Person, Trans* Person, Trans Woman, Trans* Woman, Transfeminine, Transgender, Transgender Female, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transgender Person, Transgender Woman, Transmasculine, Transsexual, Transsexual Female, Transsexual Male, Transsexual Man, Transsexual Person, Transsexual Woman

The Royal Opera House in London used to do the same (and probably still does; I haven’t checked in lately). When you buy your tickets you can choose from these titles:

Advocate, Ambassador, Baron, Baroness, Brigadier, Canon, Chaplain, Chancellor, Chief, Col, Comdr, Commodore, Councillor, Count, Countess, Dame, Dr, Duke of, Earl, Earl of, Father, General, Group Captain, H R H The Duchess of, H R H The Duke of, H R H The Princess, HE Mr, HE Senora, HE The French Ambassador M, His Highness, His Hon, His Hon Judge, Hon, Hon Ambassador, Hon Dr, Hon Lady, Hon Mrs, HRH, HRH Sultan Shah, HRH The, HRH The Prince, HRH The Princess, HSH Princess, HSH The Prince, Judge, King, Lady, Lord, Lord and Lady, Lord Justice, Lt Cdr, Lt Col, Madam, Madame, Maj, Maj Gen, Major, Marchesa, Marchese, Marchioness, Marchioness of, Marquess, Marquess of, Marquis, Marquise, Master, Mr and Mrs, Mr and The Hon Mrs, President, Prince, Princess, Princessin, Prof, Prof  Emeritus, Prof Dame, Professor, Queen, Rabbi, Representative, Rev Canon, Rev Dr, Rev Mgr, Rev Preb, Reverend, Reverend Father, Right Rev, Rt Hon, Rt Hon Baroness, Rt Hon Lord, Rt Hon Sir, Rt Hon The Earl, Rt Hon Viscount, Senator, Sir, Sister, Sultan, The Baroness, The Countess, The Countess of, The Dowager Marchioness of, The Duchess, The Duchess of, The Duke of, The Earl of, The Hon, The Hon Mr, The Hon Mrs, The Hon Ms, The Hon Sir, The Lady, The Lord, The Marchioness of, The Princess, The Reverend, The Rt Hon, The Rt Hon Lord, The Rt Hon Sir, The Rt Hon The Lord, The Rt Hon the Viscount, The Rt Hon Viscount, The Venerable, The Very Rev Dr, Very Reverend, Viscondessa, Viscount, Viscount and Viscountess, Viscountess, W Baron, W/Cdr

Facebook’s 71 options are nothing compared to the 200-odd here. It’s exactly the same thing – titles that matter to the holder and maybe their peers, but hardly anybody else –  but you won’t find oleaginous presenters scoffing at that because they want to get an honorific one day too.

I’m not suggesting we should shoot the messenger, as appealing as the thought of Piers Morgan in front of a firing squad might be. But it’s important to look at who the messenger is. Not all messengers are honest.

For example, when I first came out my options about the supposed trans lobby were very different from the ones I have now. And the main difference is that back then, I didn’t know many trans people or organisations. My information came from a handful of journalists and an even smaller handful of idiots on the internet. Some of those journalists turned out to be in cahoots with bigoted pressure groups; some turned out to be listed as formal supporters by US evangelical outreach groups; still others just turned out to be hateful arseholes. They were deliberately framing stories in the worst possible way in order to demonise what I now know to be a very ordinary group of perfectly decent people who often have very difficult lives and who don’t deserve to live in the climate of fear and hatred that’s being created around them.

I’ve written before about the loony-left reports of the 1980s, many of which were entirely fabricated, and about the anti-trans (and anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim, and anti-disabled people, and anti-working class people) stories routinely run by certain outlets today. The idea that newspapers and other media outlets don’t lie is a wonderful one, but it just isn’t true.

The stories we’re told are shaped by the people who tell them. All too often those people have an agenda.