Learning to say sorry when we mess up is important. It’s important when you’re a rambunctious 3 year old smashing up plants, it’s important when you’re an adult and an editor forced to publish bigotry, and it’s important when you’re a prominent community voice trying to lead by example. It’s important to recognise and understand what you have done wrong and then to apologise, sincerely, for having done it.
I would go on and dissect more of this UCLan style guide but its really all just the same. A complete disregard for transgender lives and an attempt to make transphobia easier to practice in the media for bigots. The point isn’t fairness, equality, accuracy or balance. Its simply to create a double standard wherein the actual identity of a transgender person becomes part of the story – something that is literally never on the table when cisgender people commit crimes.
My personal, Gemma Stone, opinion on this is that we should escalate it as far as it will go; and then keep on complaining if we have to. It seems like a minor thing, one article about us portraying us as sexually violent – but its more than that. In my opinion a victory here is getting the article taken down and sending the message to the BBC that what they did was dangerous, harmful and will not be tolerated.
Many have also remarked on the fact that the list describes itself as being there to promote books that “readers might not have read before”. That includes Susheila Nasta, who worked on the project and spoke to BBC Radio 4 on the subject. She adds that the Philosopher’s Stone was on the longlist of 153 books, but didn’t make the final cut. With the reasoning for that being that “its a children’s book”.
Specifically, it was viewed as such because it did not require any medical intervention. It respected bodily autonomy! You could and can still obtain a new birth certificate without ever desiring hormones and surgery. Sure, you are still subject to the intrusive Gender Recognition Panel’s whims, about to be set back a bunch of cash you probably couldn’t afford, gatekept by a crap healthcare system to hell and have no non-binary options at all. But theoretically, its totally possible to be a woman with a penis, by law.
So we took the opportunity yesterday to have a little bit of Trans Day of Visibility just for us, as a treat. Trans Writes performed a soft-launch, just intended for people to know the site existed and to have an explore. There’s still a lot of work we need to put in before we’re ready to call the site fully open. Transgender people did not care a damn and just shouted “shut up and take my money!” at us instead, in an amazing outpouring of love and support for our little project.
I did hope to have everything sorted out fully by today, #TransDayOfVisibility, but sometimes the stars don’t align just right and you get super busy with other projects and neglect the one that doesn’t currently help pay your bills. Instead my co-founder and I have decided to do a soft-launch of our new trans led site for platforming and elevating transgender voices around the world. Welcome to Trans Writes.world
The BBC are a corrupt and institutionally transphobic organisation. We’ve known this for a while and I’ve covered multiple occasions demonstrating that exact fact. Including the not too distantly recent time they tried to use a cisgender sexual predator as evidence that trans women are “pressuring women into sex”. This event is no different as they attempt to turn Graham Linehan into a sympathetic character.
I was super proud to be commissioned for Indy Voices a few years ago. I sent every piece to my parents like “look, its me,…
I just don’t have the words for this one, which is not stellar since I am a writer. When it was just one or two…