The Daily Mail, as I’m sure you’re aware, has spent many years now demonising “cross-sex hormones” and the people who take them for reasons such as not wanting to die.
This is from tomorrow’s front page.
Category: Media
Journalism, radio and stuff like that
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Ignore the experts
There’s a good piece about the puberty blocker ban in The Guardian by Aidan Kelly, a doctor, in which he explains how we’ve ended up in the farcical situation where fashion writers, bigoted journalists and arrogant celebrities are considered experts in trans healthcare but clinicians and prestigious medical organisations are not.
In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities.
This simply wouldn’t happen in any other kind of healthcare, but in the UK the entire discussion has been given over to people who get their information from Twitter. Which perhaps explains why there’s been virtually no reporting on the international condemnation of the Cass Review from health professionals, or of the extensive analyses that demonstrate that the government is prioritising ideology over evidence in its healthcare policies.
There’s a good overview here, from the US organisation FAIR:
Though there is much more evidence now to support gender-affirming care than in 2008, there is also a much stronger anti-trans movement seeking to discredit and ban such care.
British media coverage has given that movement a big boost in recent years, turning the spotlight away from the realities that trans kids and their families are facing, and pumping out stories nitpicking at the strength of the expanding evidence base for gender-affirming care. Its coverage of the Cass Review followed suit.
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“Where are the commentators?”
There’s a good piece in today’s National by Caitlin Logan on the issues that real feminist groups are campaigning on while faux-feminists have been scaremongering about trans people.
Logan identifies key issues including inequality in the social security system – inequality that means by 2027 the average income of women will have dropped by 7% compared to 3% for men – and inadequate statutory maternity pay; inflexible working patterns; and the severe issues that affect immigrant women.
Where is the Labour Party on these issues? Where are the commentators, anxiously debating the state of women’s rights because of this bleak picture? Where are the journalists, asking political leaders – again and again and again – what they plan to do about it?
With crushing inevitability, the very first comment on the online article is a dismissive one from an anti-trans man, part of the same pattern that comes up again and again when women are being patronised or worse by genital-obsessed weirdos; the overwhelming majority of “gender critical” posters are straight men.
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Distraction
A new study by researchers at Loughborough University has found that women’s issues have been largely ignored in this election campaign, with women rarely given a media platform to discuss women’s issues unless they’re demonising trans people.
There was an example of this just this week, when BBC News published a front-page story asking what each party had to say about women’s rights. It didn’t discuss women’s rights at all; just what the parties had to say about trans women.
And as ever, whether that’s malice or incompetence doesn’t really matter; by distracting people from the very real issues affecting women and girls, and the growing threat to their healthcare and rights from the political and religious right, it’s doing an excellent job of keeping women marginalised.
There’s a good letter in today’s Herald newspaper by Gemma Clark, a dedicated campaigner for women’s rights.
There are urgent women’s rights issues being completely ignored while the political discourse centres on the gutter politics of body parts and bathrooms. Neither the Labour nor Tory manifesto mentioned abortion, which is rather shocking given the uptick in women and girls being charged with so-called ‘illegal abortions’.
Rape conviction rates remain so low that it is effectively decriminalised. Labour will not commit to undoing the two-child benefit cap (also known as the rape clause). People wait years for a diagnosis of endometriosis. Maternity care is in crisis. Schools are in crisis, particularly in Glasgow, where school communities face teacher staff cuts on a scale we have never seen before. Only yesterday I watched a checkout operator struggling to remove the security cap from a container… it was a container of baby formula. We are living in a country where people are having to steal to feed their children.
And instead of talking about this, politicians and the press constantly distract from it with a completely manufactured panic over trans women. People are being silenced for sure, but they aren’t the highly privileged people cosplaying as victims on the front page of our national newspapers with the full support of the Prime Minister and Rupert Murdoch.
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Dead children don’t matter
If you were in any doubt that the trans “issue” is a moral panic and that trans lives don’t matter to almost all of the media, the UK newspapers have provided ample evidence over the last few days.
Every single paper, not just the right-wing ones, has ignored the news that the puberty blocker ban has been implicated in the deaths of 16 children and that the NHS and Cass Review appear to have tried to cover that up; instead, they have devoted endless column inches to whether Labour can become hateful enough to trans people to satisfy JK Rowling.
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What changed
Jude Doyle’s piece on “the transgender tipping point” spurred one of its quoted experts, Julia Serano, to expand on her comments. As ever with Serano, this is worth reading: Revisiting The “Transgender Tipping Point” Ten Years Later.
I do believe there was a truly positive development for trans people taking place in the early 2010s that is potentially worthy of the moniker “tipping point.” For most of my life, the trans experience was typified by isolation and invisibility. Most of us grew up not knowing any other trans people and this sense of isolation was reinforced by how infrequently trans people and issues were covered in the media. Even as an adult, it was really hard to find trans community, especially if you weren’t living in a major city. Gender-affirming care was also extremely difficult to access, both because there were very few providers and most adhered to a strict gatekeeping system wherein only a select few “true transsexuals” (people who would be “passable” and heteronormative post-transition) were allowed to transition. This only added to the sense that very few trans people existed.
What changed, as Serano goes on to explain, was twofold. One, the internet suddenly enabled us to find information and support that was previously hard or even impossible to find. And healthcare, previously very hostile, moved to a more informed and evidence-based model that understood transness wasn’t a disorder to be cured but just part of human nature.
Those two changes were seismic; we got to see that we were not alone, and that we were not broken. And naturally that meant that more of us felt able to come out and be who we are.
As Serano says, the tipping point in the media was a confection, and it mistook trans visibility for trans acceptance. But there was a very real tipping point for trans and non-binary people in “trans autonomy and agency, where gender-diverse people could finally speak for ourselves and choose our own trans trajectories.”
Despite the best efforts of the media, and the UK media in particular, there has been a massive shift in trans visibility – and with that visibility comes understanding and acceptance. Serano points out that at the time of the “tipping point” article, just 9% of Americans said they knew somebody who was trans. By 2021 it was 42%. That means more trans and gender non-conforming people can see that they’re not alone, and that more people who aren’t trans can see that we’re no different from them.
As I’ve written endlessly, hatred thrives on ignorance; it’s one of the reasons the bigots want to ban any form of trans representation, and prevent us from living normal lives. But that genie isn’t going back into its bottle.
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Ten years tipped
Jude Doyle is on superb form in this piece looking back at the famous “Transgender Tipping Point” cover of TIME. As the piece says, it often feels like we’ve tipped vertiginously backwards with open bigotry against us running unchecked in the press, politics and social media. Who’d have thought ten years ago that in 2024, “transphobe” would not just be a career option but a very lucrative one?
As one of the contributors, Katherine Cross, told Doyle, not all trans people were thrilled with the TIME cover. “there was a fear that this meant the Eye of Sauron was upon us, that whatever safety was afforded by the shadows of public ignorance was well and truly gone now.” Those fears proved to be well founded, and warnings by other marginalised people – people who knew very well that increased visibility often means little more than painting a target on people’s backs – were sadly prescient.
Doyle interviews another excellent writer, Parker Molloy, and the two discuss the way in which mainstream media effectively threw trans people to the wolves.
“The media, once eager to spotlight our stories for clicks and headlines, has largely abandoned us, leaving trans people to fend off a wave of hostility on our own. It feels bleak,” Molloy says. “It feels like we’re on our own, and I just have a hard time imagining things getting better in the near future.”
Doyle somehow manages to remain optimistic, and there are positives: we have a much wider and better informed community than we did ten years ago, and despite the bigots’ best efforts trans and non-binary people are not going to return to the bad old days when the world could pretend we didn’t exist.
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Balance
Lee Hurley of Trans Writes has been tracking trans-related articles in the UK press: The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and Private Eye.
In the 23 days since 16 April there have been 126 articles about trans people in those publications.
121 of them were negative.
5 were neutral.
0 were written by trans people.
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Complicity
The Guardian has published a thoughtful article by playwright Jonathan Cash about the 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, which he was injured in. The bomb was planted by a far-right sympathiser, a man who believed that gay men should be put to death. If you’re going to read the whole piece, which is very powerful, be aware that it contains some horrific details of victims’ injuries.
Cash’s article includes some sections that The Guardian’s own writers, and their peers in other publications, should think about.
The bombing campaign heralded a change in attitude from some of the UK’s most popular newspapers. Until then, the words “poofs” and “queers” were used in editorials, even in front-page headlines, especially since the advent of the HIV pandemic. Similarly hateful words were used to describe people from other minority groups. These words, in print, encouraged constant, casual discrimination and affected the way that LGBTQIA+ people and ethnic minorities were talked about and treated.
As far as I am concerned, every single journalist, editor and newspaper proprietor who contributed to these attitudes in print is complicit in the deaths of three people who were standing just feet away from me, and the life-changing injuries of many others, both physical and psychological.
…If you don’t call out derogatory words about people who are somehow regarded as different, hate is normalised and you’re complicit.
In the UK we’ve already seen two trans girls stabbed, one fatally, and anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes – and anti-trans hate crimes specifically – are soaring. Too many writers’ words are contributing to an increasingly violent climate.
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SLAPP happy
One of the reasons that Jimmy Savile got away with his abuse for so long was the UK’s libel laws. Savile was highly litigious, and would send his very expensive lawyers after any publication that so much as considered reporting allegations about him.
The fact that the allegations were true was irrelevant. Savile was rich, and that means he could use the law as a weapon. And he did, from the 1960s until his death in 2011. For five decades he used his money to stop people telling the truth about who and what he was.
As Meirion Jones explained in The Guardian, The Sun wanted to expose him in 2008 and had multiple signed affidavits from his victims, but – yet again – did not publish. “They would be facing the best QCs money could buy, representing a man who could potentially call Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher, the heads of charities, the head of the BBC and the pope as character witnesses. The best guess of the lawyers was that a libel action could cost a million pounds… this wasn’t the first or last time that Savile escaped because of our libel laws, which rewarded his deliberate targeting of vulnerable victims. Off the record, journalists have told me of multiple attempts to blow the whistle on Savile from the 1960s onwards that failed because newspapers could not afford the legal risks involved.”
When even The Sun can’t afford to be taken to court, imagine the chilling effect on smaller publishers and individuals. In Britain, the rich can silence the truth by threatening legal action – action that, even if the defendant were successful, would financially ruin them. As a result, the truth about some famous people will not emerge until they die.
This kind of bullying is known as a SLAPP – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation – and the UK government describes SLAPP actions as “an abuse of the legal process, where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust one’s opponent via improper means”. The Law Society says that “Unlike genuine defamation claims – which typically arise out of an attempt to protect or repair the claimant’s damaged reputation – SLAPPs go further, aiming to prevent lawful investigations and discussions about matters of public interest.”
SLAPPs are legal in the UK, and they – or the threat of them – remain one of the favourite bullying tactics of oligarchs, super-rich individuals who can afford to abuse the legal system. But they have limited reach, which is why you’ll typically find them used only against UK residents who can’t afford to go to court. The oligarchs who use SLAPPs and SLAPP threats rarely, if ever, go after people with money, and they can’t stop people in other countries from telling the truth about who or what they are.
This post isn’t about Jimmy Savile.