Media Watch

    Trans Writes Media Watch keeps an eye on legacy publishers, mostly right-wing print as the worst culprits, to highlight the misinformation and smear campaigns being spread about trans and non-binary people.

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    It’s easy to roll our eyes at trans issues. But what if we’re wrong? Jeremy Clarkson Jeremy Clarkson Next image › As we all know, JK Rowling recently expressed an opinion on the transgender debate, and she wasn’t just cancelled, she was erased. They put her in the delete bin, and then afterwards, all her former fans, and even the actors and actresses she’d made famous, emptied the bin into a landfill site so seagulls could feast on her eyes. Mercifully, I’ve always known I would not suffer a similar fate, because I’ve always had exactly the same views on transgenderism as I do on Victorian literature or trees. It’s not something that’s ever interested me, so why should I bother forming an opinion on it? If I want to get fed to the seagulls, I could think of a million other ways of going about it, all of which would be far more satisfying than calling Eddie Izzard a man or laughing at Sam Smith’s insistence that an interest in angling makes you a “fisherthem”. The fact is that I don’t know any transgender people. I once saw a very tall lady in Selfridges who had an Adam’s apple and hairy hands, but that’s it. That’s my only actual real-world experience of the issue and it left me completely underwhelmed. However, in recent times, the transgender issue has come to dominate the news so completely that I’ve been forced to pay a bit more attention. We are being asked whether schoolchildren should be allowed to change gender and whether a man can go to a women’s prison. This is big stuff, when you think about it. And there’s more. In the past week alone, there’s been a row about the new gender-neutral lavatories at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and we learnt that officers in the Metropolitan Police are to be stopped from investigating crime so they can spend more time learning about “faer” and the hundred or so different pronoun options that are available to modern-day youth. And then there was Baroness Fox, who was uninvited to speak on the cancel culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, because she’d retweeted a Ricky Gervais joke about transgender people. Meanwhile, we have Piers Morgan, who’s making a good living from the debate, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, whose charity will now be supporting the Global Boyhood Initiative, which challenges traditional gender roles. Oh, and on Thursday, World Athletics, the governing body for those who like to run around and jump over things, announced that anyone who went through male puberty may not take part in female events unless they are — deep breath — DSD (differences of sex development) intersex people whose testosterone levels have been below 2.5 nanomoles per litre for a period of at least two years. It would be easy at this point to roll your eyes and think the world’s gone mad. But hang on a minute. Because what if you’re wrong? When I was at school in the Seventies, we were aware that the homosexual act was kind of technically possible, but the notion that anyone would do such a thing was of course laughable. And then a few years after Rock Hudson died of Aids, Freddie Mercury got it and died too. We were in shock. You mean he . . . you know? And then Elton John announced he had a predilection for members of the same genital grouping. And suddenly the floodgates opened. In school we’d always joked that one of the teachers was gay, then it turned out he was. And so was one of our friends. And now, just 40 years on, I feel weird for never having tried it. I went to a gay wedding last year and in January I spent a happy week cruising (on a boat) round the Caribbean with a gay couple. And it’s not a recent thing, either. It wasn’t invented by Alan Turing. Leonardo da Vinci was gay. So, probably, was Richard I, and James VI, and Florence Nightingale. Sir Ian McKellen reckons even Shakespeare swung both ways. Gayness, then, has been around since the very beginning. Well, not the very beginning obviously — we wouldn’t have got far if Eve had been a lesbian — but close to the beginning. So, what if it’s the same deal with transgenderism? Has that also been going on for years? Will we discover in the coming decades that half those brave Tommies in the First World War trenches were secretly hoping to have their old chaps shot off so they could go home and put on a frock? Think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body We know that in the early 20th century, a boy in California decided he was a girl. She called herself Lucy, married a man and, when that failed, opened a brothel. Where, during a routine venereal disease check, it was discovered that she had a penis. So, off she went to prison. And that, to me, has some troubling Turing overtones. I realise, of course, that the whole trans debate has been hijacked by lunatics who glue themselves to stuff and claim to be from a gender that doesn’t even exist, and I know too that there is some kind of civil war going on between fiercely women women and women who just say they’re women. This creates a noise that’s annoying to most of us, but think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body. I believe that this is possible and I accept that it creates several problems for society, and not just in the lavatory or in a prison or in the school high-jump competition. But how can we address these issues when every teenage halfwit is muddying the waters by claiming to identify as a bat and inventing a pronoun that wouldn’t even be allowed in a game of Scrabble? “Faer”, my arse.

    Jeremy Clarkson asks ‘What if you’re wrong about trans people?’

    Lee Hurley -
    In a recent Sunday Times column, Jeremy Clarkson discussed the prevalence of transgender issues in the news and, although he makes jokes and uses problematic language throughout the piece, he posed an important question: "What if you're wrong?"

    Christine Jardine stands up for Trans Rights in heated debate with Julia Hartley-Brewer

    transwrites -
    Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine recently demonstrated her commitment to trans rights in a heated debate with TalkRadio's Julia Hartley-Brewer. The debate was centered around the issue of trans prisoners and the treatment of trans individuals in the criminal justice system.
    trans writes trans media watch

    An open letter to James O’Brien about trans people

    Lee Hurley -
    Dear James, Perhaps you would indulge me here a little as I try to guide you on an issue you seem to be having some problems with – the ‘transgender debate’.

    Keir Starmer is blowing it in his chase for right-wing votes

    Lee Hurley -
    For the longest time, I wasn’t sure what to make of Keir Starmer. Turns out, my first impression that he seemed like a 6ft...
    green party rosette

    Green Party politician suspended over Eddie Izzard complaint

    Lee Hurley -
    The Green Party's Alison Teal has been suspended after Eddie Izzard using the toilet annoyed her.
    Club Q tributes

    Club Q shooter’s dad happy he’s not gay

    Lee Hurley -
    The aftermath of the massacre at Club Q continues to show clearly how dangerous the world has become for LGBTQ+ people.
    BBC attempt to launder reputation of Graham Linehan of Graham Linehan; the image shows the BBC log on a curved red-brick wall.

    BBC call transphobic letter a ‘report’

    Lee Hurley -
    When is a report not a report? When it's a letter seen by a transphobic journalist at the BBC.
    trans writes trans media watch

    Times omit pronouns for Eddie Izzard

    Lee Hurley -
    The Sunday Times managed to contort themselves into all sorts of shapes this weekend in order to write about Eddie Izzard without using any pronouns.
    trans writes trans media watch

    Right-wing media ramp up anti-trans coverage

    Lee Hurley -
    The Daily Mail, Times and Telegraph all produced lot of trans-focused content in their Saturday editions and most of it is horrible.
    trans writes trans media watch

    Daily Mail use trans people to target Penny Mourdant

    Lee Hurley -
    The Daily Mail seem determined to block Penny Mourdant from becoming the Conservative Party's next leader - and therefore the UK's next Prime Minister - as they target her once again using her previous stance on trans rights.
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