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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Daily Mail use trans people to target Penny Mourdant

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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The Trans Agenda #15 Rainbow ban, Truss v Ferrets round 2, tribunals, jobs +more

The Trans Agenda #15 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday to Friday if you are subscribed. You...
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?’

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?"
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The Trans Agenda 13

The Trans Agenda 13 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday to Friday if you are subscribed. You...
The Guardian/The Observer building in London, where Nick Cohen has been suspended from. It shows their logos in the window with a bicycle chained to the street sign out front.

Guardian try to heal internal anti-trans bigotry with meditation

As The Guardian editorial management continue to refuse to take control of the warring factions within the company, allowing members of the Gender Critical cult full reign, they've opted to bring in outsiders to try and solve the problem.
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The Trans Agenda #2 5 March 2024

News you need, the perspective you won't find anywhere else. The trans community's guide to UK news and politics and our place in it.
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Trans Bites: Issue 1 June 2023

Hello, and welcome to Trans Bites, the newsletter that alerts you to the big stories affecting trans people in the UK today that the UK national media don't want to tell you about.
MP urges police to probe trans charity Daily Mail13 Oct 2022By Martin Beckford Policy Editor LIZ Truss has backed calls for a thorough investigation into transgender youth charity Mermaids after an MP urged that the police are called in. The Prime Minister agreed that the controversial organisation should be ‘ properly looked at’ after a Tory backbencher accused it of failing to keep children safe. Mermaids is already facing the prospect of a Charity Commission investigation over allegations that it was sending chest binders to children as young as 13 against their parents’ wishes. And one of its trustees quit after it emerged he had spoken at an event organised by a paedophile support group. Some public sector organisations including the Department for Education, NHS trusts and councils are now removing links to the charity – which supports transgender young people – from their websites. Raising the controversy in Prime Minister’s Questions for the first time, Tory MP Miriam Cates said: ‘For years, despite whistleblowers raising alarm, Mermaids have had unfettered access to vulnerable children. ‘Does my right honourable friend [Miss Truss] agree it’s taken far too long for these concerns to be taken seriously and [that] it is high time for a police investigation into the activities of Mermaids?’ The Prime Minister replied: ‘ It’s very important that underage teens are able to develop their own decisionmaking capabilities and not be forced into any kind of activity. ‘On the subject of the investigation she raises, of course ‘Concerns have been raised’ those matters should be properly looked at.’ The Charity Commission said: ‘Concerns have been raised with us about Mermaids’ approach to safeguarding young people. ‘We have opened a regulatory compliance case and have written to the trustees.’ Mermaids has not responded to the claims in Parliament but yesterday said it was reducing the hours of its helpline because of ‘ abuse towards staff and volunteers’.

Liz Truss backs biased call for police to investigate Mermaids

Liz Truss has backed calls from an MP with an anti-LGBTQ+ record for police to start an investigation into Mermaids after the matter was raised at Prime Minister's Questions on Thursday.
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Daily Telegraph mislead with headline about Mermaids as smear continues

As part of their ongoing Mermaids smear campaign, the Daily Telegraph have produced yet another misleading headline and article as they attempt to pressure the Prime Minister and police into opening an investigation.
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Why representation matters: Doctor Who and the Star Beast

Exploring the impact of trans representation in Doctor Who, this article delves into the show's sensitive portrayal of transgender characters and its message of love and acceptance.