Illustration by Leyla Baxman.
TW: Transphobia, Homophobia
Over the past few years, there has been a dangerous and recurrent rise in transphobic hate speech. Politicians, media personalities, and twitter trolls alike have all taken to attacking trans people under the guise of moderate, even logical, views about protecting women. But where did this come from, and what can we do to change the narrative?
There has been a dramatic change in the amount of articles written around transgender people, which in the last decade has increased by 414%, a report has noted. This dramatic change has been seen as a result of the increasing visibility and presence of trans people, an awareness which has brought positive change along with a line of hateful trolls. Yet, the transphobic comments seen under Instagram posts and on Twitter have not remained there; instead, they have morphed into our newspapers, political manifestos, and the stories we consume.
In 2016, the Conservative government started to review the gender recognition act. This shifted the conversation from the lives of trans-people to questioning trans-rights, changing the stories we see in our national media outlets. One Managing Editor of a national daily tabloid told IPSO in a report:
“The type of stories we carry has changed. When the trans thing first started 10 years ago, we used to do simple stories about trans pioneers—the first trans pilot, for example. We did a whole series of personal, human interest stories, and wrote sympathetically about their challenges. But the public has lost its appetite for these stories and they have dried up. Now it’s all about the political debate, schools, Karen White (a transgender woman who was admitted to the female prison estate and sexually assaulted inmates).”
The constant desire for the press to create newsworthy stories has created a rising focus, not on the lives of trans people, but their validity, their existence, and the rights which they ‘deserve’. The ‘Trans Debate’ has thus become absorbed into a wider ‘culture war’, as a signpost, and highly reductionist, divide between left and right. It is being used as a political tool, creating an issue which draws readers from both sides of the argument, but leaves trans-lives at stake. National media has helped not only to create, but also continue this toxic news cycle which dehumanises and uses trans-lives to create clickable articles. A similar phenomenon occurred with queer people during the 80s, preying on people’s misunderstandings and fears to create a climate where being transphobic offers popularity and even prestige.
This same toxic cycle is reflected in politics, where it is used to gain cheap political points. It seems scarcely believable in the current political context that merely a decade ago the Conservative Party seemed to be embracing diversity and promoting equality. The rise of David Cameron and the coalition government, despite being a Conservative government, now seem like halcyon days of tolerance. At that time, there was a brief, alas too transitory, bipartisan acceptance of progressive equality policies: the government pushed the same-sex marriage bill through Parliament in 2013 by 400 votes to 175, a historic step forward, and by a margin much more healthy than in other countries where similar votes were far more contentious. Indeed, the US is only now in the process of making same-sex marriage federal law, rather than resting on the now-shaky foundation of a Supreme Court decision. Cameron’s A-list of promising parliamentary candidates prioritised women and those from minority backgrounds, and included now-prominent figures such as Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel, Shaun Bailey, and Liz Truss. While the Conservative parliamentary party is still far from representative, the A-List undoubtedly made great strides towards making the leadership at least more diverse.
What went wrong? How did we get from an era where it seemed tolerance, respect, and equality for all were commonly accepted principles to one where trans people’s identities are constantly questioned and criticised by politicians? How did transphobia become not just an acceptable political talking point but, even worse, a way to score cheap political points?
Indeed it seems that, in the current political culture, casual transphobia is seen as a quick way out of a crisis. Undermining the identity and rights of the trans community is seemingly not even controversial: it has become a line of argument that is simply assimilated by Conservative politicians, who frequently use it as a way to distract from other, more controversial issues. It seems no coincidence, for example, that on the 6th April, while the government was mired in the growing ‘partygate’ scandal and trouble surrounding the announcement that Channel 4 would be privatised, that Boris Johnson gave an interview where he supported the exclusion of trans women from female sport, that went on to dominate the headlines. His words are carefully crafted to build a transphobic consensus, to make his bigotry seem ‘reasonable’ and ‘justified’: “I don’t think biological males should be competing in female sporting events. Maybe that’s a controversial thing to say, but it just seems to me to be sensible”.
With the sole exception of tax policy, trans rights and the wider culture war marked the main clashing point in the current leadership election. Kemi Badenoch focussed her campaign almost entirely based on feeding the flames of the culture war. Penny Mordaunt was actually criticised for her record of supporting trans rights, while Liz Truss sought to capitalise on this trend and emphasise that while she was Minister for Equalities, she did absolutely nothing to advance equality for the trans community.
Is it an accident that the government’s ban on conversion therapy excluded such a ban on conversion therapy for those changing their gender identity? Or was it a deliberate, calculated measure designed to ‘sweeten the deal’ for their backbenchers who are largely reactionary to such legislation, and whose votes would prove crucial as the government was weakening by the day?
Can we really believe that when Johnson reopened the trans women in sport issue on the 27th June it was because he had a deep interest in the regulations of competitive swimming, or because he wanted to break the news cycle covering his party’s loss of two crucial by-elections three days before? That day, The Independent made a frankly chilling observation that his propagation of bigotry (including agreeing that there is a difference between being a woman and being a trans woman) was tactical: “Some have interpreted the Conservatives’ move to heighten the debate around trans rights as a way of widening divisions on the subject within the Labour Party”.
It truly shows the dire state of society when such high-profile hatred is not immediately condemned by all. When instead of fighting bigotry, the political machinery of the governing party strategically uses hurtful tropes. They attempt to deliberately undermine the identity of a whole subsection of the population, humiliate them publicly, instil fear and incite further hatred, all for their own self-serving political purposes. What sort of society have we created where it is seen as acceptable to harass and bully trans people, just to change the subject on the news?
We decide what is and is not acceptable from figures of authority. As children, we are encouraged to emulate those above us, like parents and teachers. And so when our politicians, journalists, ministers, and leaders spread fear and harmful stereotypes, so do we; they become ingrained in our consciousness and culture. When they decide that such hate speech is acceptable and even praiseworthy, couching it in the language of ‘respectability’ and protecting women, it becomes acceptable in the general public. Lies and stereotypes that aren’t immediately criticised and challenged become opinions, and opinions that aren’t countered become ‘facts’. We need to realise and speak up when our politicians and journalists are being transphobic, whether blatantly or covered in terms like ‘biologically female’, ‘born male’, or ‘female-bodied’, all of which dehumanise and treat trans-people as objects. A study in 2020 found the number of transphobic hate crimes had quadrupled in the last 5 years, showing real effects on real people. We cannot let it slide.