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.

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?"
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

The biggest story that got most people talking in Trans Land this week featured JK Rowling and absolutely no trans people, again.
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.
summarise from a pro trans perspective and explain why this is unworkable - Tories to allow ban on trans women in single-sex spaces The Guardian3 Jun 2024Jessica Elgot Deputy political editor Kemi Badenoch has said the Conservatives will change the Equality Act to rewrite the definition of sex and allow organisations to bar trans women from single-sex spaces, including hospital wards and sports events. The party will make clear that the protected characteristic of sex means biological sex, enabling those who wish to bar male-bodied people from organisations or activities to do so. The minister for women and equalities said: “Whether it is rapists being housed in women’s prisons, or instances of men playing in women’s sports where they have an unfair advantage, it is clear that public authorities and regulatory bodies are confused about what the law says on sex and gender and when to act – often for fear of being accused of transphobia, or not being inclusive.” Last year, Badenoch asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to advise on the change. The equalities watchdog said the new definition would make it possible to exclude trans people from same-sex spaces even if they hold a gender recognition certificate. The law will still protect against discrimination based on the status of gender reassignment, the Conservatives said. The party also said it would change the law to make gender recognition a reserved matter that only the UK government could legislate on, a reaction to the row over the Scottish gender recognition bill, which was blocked by Westminster. Announcing the change, Rishi Sunak said that he wanted to enshrine the right to single-sex spaces in law. “The safety of women and girls is too important to allow the current confusion around definitions of sex and gender to persist,” he said. Sunak and the Conservatives have used gender and trans rights as a key plank of their election strategy against Labour and Keir Starmer. Article Name:Tories to allow ban on trans women in single-sex spaces Publication:The Guardian Author:Jessica Elgot Deputy political editor Start Page:4 End Page:4

The Trans Agenda #32 Tory cruelty ramps up

The Trans Agenda #31 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday if you are subscribed. You can also...
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The Trans Agenda #35 Puberty blocker ban upheld

The Trans Agenda #35 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday if you are subscribed. You can also...
Grhama Norton in the Sunday Times, 18/09/22

Graham Norton: JK Rowling ‘enjoys’ fighting on Twitter

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Graham Norton said that he believes JK Rowling enjoys fighting on Twitter after comments she made to him.
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

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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...
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Understanding the “WPATH Files” debate

The biggest ‘story’ doing the rounds at the minute is that anti-trans activists have released a series of documents they call the "WPATH Files" but, as usual, they're nonsense
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The Trans Agenda #7 Prison for providing trans healthcare in the UK?

The Trans Agenda #7 Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday to Friday morning if you are subscribed....