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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Grhama Norton in the Sunday Times, 18/09/22

Graham Norton: JK Rowling ‘enjoys’ fighting on Twitter

Lee Hurley - 18 September 2022

green party rosette

Green Party politician suspended over Eddie Izzard complaint

Lee Hurley - 25 November 2022

Why representation matters: Doctor Who and the Star Beast

Felix F Fern - 5 December 2023

trans writes trans media watch

Times omit pronouns for Eddie Izzard

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

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?’

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

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 - 24 November 2022

When is a report not a report? When it's a letter seen by a transphobic journalist at the BBC.

Sunday Mail page 5 showing Angela Raynor with the headline 'Stone the crows! Tories accuse Rayner of Basic Instinct ploy to distract Boris' Full Alt Text: https://pressreader.com/article/281569474285911

Gender critical cult silent over Mail’s Rayner misogyny and Shriver abuse

Lee Hurley - 25 April 2022

Self-declared feminists who are ‘only concerned about women and girls’ have had little-to-nothing to say this week on either the Sunday Mail’s misogynistic hit-piece...

trans memorial manchester via sparkle

Media ignore desecration and destruction of trans memorial in Manchester

Lee Hurley - 30 August 2022

The horrendous news that the memorial to transgender people was urinated on by multiple people before being irreparable damaged was not covered by any of the national newspapers in the UK

trans writes trans media watch

Times omit pronouns for Eddie Izzard

Lee Hurley - 31 October 2022

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.

Why representation matters: Doctor Who and the Star Beast

Felix F Fern - 5 December 2023

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.

green party rosette

Green Party politician suspended over Eddie Izzard complaint

Lee Hurley - 25 November 2022

The Green Party's Alison Teal has been suspended after Eddie Izzard using the toilet annoyed her.

trans rally at Downing street

Major media mostly ignore massive trans protest outside Downing Street

Lee Hurley - 11 April 2022

It will come as no surprise to most trans people that the majority of the mainstream media completely and utterly ignored thousands of people...

trans talking points

Trans talking points: Bailey, Joyce + more

Lee Hurley - 20 September 2022

As it has been very quiet in the papers since the death of the world's largest landowner, I thought it a good idea to...

2 pages from the Daily Mail on "JK Rowling and the female feud tearing the literati apart"

Trans people do nothing, media blames them anyway: The week in trans 21/08/22

Lee Hurley - 21 August 2022

The biggest story that got most people talking in Trans Land this week featured JK Rowling and absolutely no trans people, again.

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