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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    Exclusive: Guardian writers and editor set up group to make Guardian more transphobic

    Lee Hurley -
    A group of senior writers and editors at The Guardian met as part of the company’s ‘Diversity and Inclusion Week’ to discuss pushing gender-critical narratives 'fearlessly,' with the paper's anti-trans slant clearly not enough for them.
    trans talking points

    Trans news roundup 18 April 2023

    Lee Hurley -
    Weekly roundup on transgender issues, including music stars' clash, sports controversies, government guidelines, and activism across the globe.
    trans writes trans media watch

    Dutch regulator deems Transgender Act radio ad needlessly offensive

    transwrites -
    The Advertising Code Committee in the Netherlands rules a radio advertisement on the Transgender Act bill as needlessly offensive, following objections.
    Testosterone for women ‘a life-changer’ James Beal - Social Affairs Editor Researchers are developing the world’s first testosterone patch for women with menopausal symptoms, and the UK could be the first country to test it. Medherant, a company founded by David Haddleton, a professor of chemistry at the University of Warwick, aims to start clinical trials this autumn. If these go well, Haddleton said the potential to improve women’s lives was huge, including helping them with their sex drive — as they cannot be prescribed testosterone for this on the NHS at present. Some instead turn to irregular doses of a gel that is approved only for use onmen, experts say. Testosterone is an essential hormone for women and its production drops heavily after the menopause. Oestrogen and progesterone hormone replacement therapy (HRT) patches — which stick to the skin to deliver medications — are available. However, there is no testosterone patch for women suffering with adverse symptoms from the menopause. Professor Haddleton said: “The work we’re doing at Medherant and at Warwick isn’t just theoretical, but instead aimed at a problem women are facing which can drastically affect their everyday lives and jobs. “This could deliver a product that is much needed and is just not available. With the technology already proven to work we can use our new patch to remove needless misery from women’s daily lives. We hope this will transform life for women suffering from postmenopause issues nationally and indeed globally.” Guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in 2015 recommended testosterone supplementation be considered for menopausal women with low sexual desire if HRT alone was not effective. The new patch is intended to address this gap in menopause products and provide treatment for women that can be made widely available.

    The Times’ hypocrisy: Testosterone for cis women a “Life-Changer” but poison for trans people?

    Lee Hurley -
    Times' hypocrisy: praises testosterone patch for menopausal women, yet demonises its use for trans people. Question media's double standards.
    rosie duffield

    Rosie Duffield’s Times trans article, Labour and Policy Exchange

    Lee Hurley -
    Rosie Duffield has so many complaints about her transphobia that Labour allegedly has an email folder dedicated to her alone. With staffers reportedly instructed...
    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.
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