No Clicks for Bigot-Backers

Why are certain media reviews on this website not linked?

Since the UK Supreme Court ruling on the “definition of a woman,” mainstream UK media has been inundated with articles celebrating the “end of gender ideology.” According to media-tracker Lee Hurley of The Trans Agenda, “the trans community’s guide to news and politics and our place in it,” mainstream UK papers such as The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and surprise-surprise, The Daily Mail, published 28 pieces in the wake of the SC ruling. Of these articles, not a single one was written by a trans person. A tiny portion made space to acknowledge the impossible struggle ahead for ordinary trans people. All, in one way or another, applauded the SC’s decision and touted a “return to sanity.”

Since that ruling, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has demanded that changes to public single-sex spaces be fast-tracked, effectively banning transgender people from participating safely or meaningfully in public life. Guidance issued by the EHRC, the supposed human rights body tasked with implementing the SC’s ruling, remain opaque, convoluted and broadly unworkable, allowing for the banning of trans people from any single-sex space, including those that match their gender assigned at birth. Private businesses may also find themselves charged with “sex-crime offences” for not providing sex-segregated toilets, which means that businesses which have a single, all-gender toilet for clientele may be forced to close access to those toilets, or build entirely new ones – which is frankly insane. Do you have any idea how hard/costly it is to remodel a bathroom in Central London?

Moreover, the EHRC guidance is not legally enforceable under the provisions of the 2010 Equality Act. Despite this, politicians, professional transphobes, and, most devastatingly, mainstream media are treating the EHRC guidance as law. When journalists whom the public trust report falsehoods, amplify hatred, suppress dissent, stoke hysteria, and demonize an entire class of human beings, society as a whole suffers. UK readers of The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, viewers of BBC News, are all being manipulated into believing that trans people – including children – are a threat to public safety.

I’m not a journalist. But I am a trans nonbinary person who will be directly effected by this new legislation whenever I travel in the UK, and I am outraged, heartbroken, and horrified on behalf of my trans siblings who live in the UK and are currently trying to find a way to exist in a country which has made their existence illegal. Feminism and free speech have not won the day. As I have said before, no opinion is more protected in UK mainstream media and public discourse than the opinion that trans people are monsters. No opinion more hallowed, coddled, and drowning in cash. No opinion more entrenched in the halls of the powerful and the morally corrupt.

And, of course, the media. The Guardian, a supposedly progressive-leaning media outlet, and The Times, have both published articles that shamelessly seek to skew public opinion in favour of transphobia.

While The Times is available only to subscribers, non-paywalled outlets like The Guardian depend on clicks and donations to make ends meet. Visitors to my site are perfectly welcome to access news however they wish. But I get to be the boss here in my little corner of the internet, and the boss says, “no clicks for bigot-backers.” Anyway, screenshots are forever!

Trans women are still women. Trans men are men. Nonbinary people (uh, trust me on this one) exist. No stroke of the pen can unwrite that reality.

La lucha sigue, cueste lo que cueste.