By people who see themselves as
Two University of Bath senior lecturers have a piece in Jacobin about…you’ll never guess…”transphobia” and moral panic and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Sorry sorry I’m awake now – yes transphobia and moral panic and transphobia. The subhead presents their claim.
Britain’s moral panic over the trans “threat” is often promoted by people who see themselves as liberals. But their transphobia echoes the same reactionary themes long used to demonize minorities.
Or to put it another way, their evil echoes the same evil long used to be evil to saints. Compelling argument; can we talk about something else now?
No. Pay attention. These are senior lecturers telling us.
The horrific murder of Brianna Ghey has put transphobia in Britain’s news headlines yet again, with police currently investigating it as a potential hate crime.
That is of course horrific but is it necessarily more horrific than the vastly more “yet again” murders of women that don’t generally get this level of sanctimonious attention-calling?
Violence targeting trans people is unfortunately not rare. In 2022, Vice reported that “the number of homophobic hate crime reports in the UK has doubled and the number of transphobic hate crime reports has tripled over the last five years”.
That’s a hell of a non sequitur. Doubled from what? One to two? Telling us the unknown number has doubled does not tell us that violence targeting trans people is not rare.
It is essential to see such extreme actions as part of a broader discursive environment — one that links together mainstream, far-right, and extreme-right actors.
That is, it’s essential to see one murder as somehow connected to feminist women doing feminism. It’s essential to bullshit about this one murder in such a way that it becomes the fault of feminist women who dispute the ideology that claims men are women if they say they are.
The disproportionate and generally negative focus against trans people across the media spectrum has been well documented. In a 2020 report, the Independent Press Standards Organisation in the UK noted that there had been a 400 percent increase in coverage of “trans issues” between 2014 and 2019. Many mainstream public actors have also used their huge platforms to push anti-trans narratives into the mainstream, emboldening extreme-right activists.
What these two senior lecturers call a “generally negative focus against trans people” is in fact mostly an ongoing argument about the ideology that claims gender trumps sex and people are whatever gender they say they are. It’s not “a focus against trans people”; it’s an encyclopedia of arguments about women and sex as opposed to gender and women’s rights.
Many mainstream public actors have also used their huge platforms to push anti-trans narratives into the mainstream, emboldening extreme-right activists.
“Narratives,” they say. We stupid feminist women are just telling stories. Women are too dumb to make arguments.
Then they admit that many of “these actors” are not in fact right wing, but that just makes us all the more sneaky, doncha know.
But individual intentions aren’t all that matter. The anti-trans discourse they’re joining in supports a more global reactionary movement by reinforcing key far-right tropes and giving mainstream legitimacy to forms of exclusion.
Back atcha, chums. The anti-feminist discourse you’re joining in supports a more venomous reactionary movement by reinforcing the breath-taking misogyny of men who claim to be better at womaning than women are.
Jumping ahead a little (yes, they’re boring – of course they are) –
This also relates to the memetic nature of how the threat of “trans ideology” and “social contagion” is discussed in political and media circles. For example, it is common to see stories about dramatic 3,000 percent or even 4,000 percent increases in referrals to the youth gender identity service, which turn out to represent an increase from mere dozens of referrals per year to stabilization at the number of referrals we should broadly expect, if existing estimates of the size of the trans population are correct.
Wait, what was that you said at the beginning? Oh yes –
Violence targeting trans people is unfortunately not rare. In 2022, Vice reported that “the number of homophobic hate crime reports in the UK has doubled and the number of transphobic hate crime reports has tripled over the last five years”.
Ahem.
After that we get paragraph after paragraph of academicky posturing and name-checking that never grapples with the actual issues. Tedious, pretentious, and wrong.
H/t Mostly Cloudy
Remember: doubling or tripling is a problem, but increasing thirty-fold is just stabilizing.
Doublethink on parade.
Sigh. Jacobin used to be such a good magazine. I knew they bought into the gender woo-woo, but it didn’t dominate the magazine like it does now.
As for the article in the Guardian which Jacobin complains about:
A recent opinion piece in the Guardian is particularly illustrative of this, suggesting that men in the Labour Party (often gay men) who defend trans rights are more of a threat than infamous violent misogynist Andrew Tate.
That Guardian article didn’t suggest that, it merely *compared* the behaviour of people like Lloyd Russell-Moyle to Tate, noting Russell-Moyle was behaving like Tate on a smaller scale.
Also, odd that the piece aggressively dismisses “the fear that trans women will attack cis women within such [gendered] spaces”. No mention of our old friend Isla Bryson / Adam Graham here.
Here’s that piece, which I hadn’t seen before. By Catherine Bennett.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/28/forget-andrew-tate-what-about-the-host-of-misogynists-in-labours-ranks
But how do we know those estimates are correct? What are they based on? The article they link to bases its estimate on the percentage of Canadians who identified themselves as trans or non-binary (0.19% and 0.14%, respectively) in the census, but how do you know that percentage is stable? It could well be subject to the same cultural forces that are increasing the number of referrals. I mean, if 0,14% of Canadians identify as Taylor Swift fans, does that mean there’s a legacy of Taylor Swift fandom oppression?
When people go on about doubling or tripling numbers without telling what the actual base is, I like to point out that zero doubled is – zero. Zero tripled is – zero.
As for rad fems being mainstream – WTF? When did this happen?
Of course it is Mermaids that interpret the IPSO research as finding reporting, “disproportionate and generally negative “.
If you actually go and read the official summary you will see that the tone and focus of coverage has developed from “Disrespectful” (mostly mocking, it seems) through “Human Interest”, with coverage of transgender celebrities and persons of note; to “Policy and legislation”, ie coverage of the GR Act, with an increasingly “questioning” tone.
It also notes that there has been a measurable evolution in terminology, with most articles using preferred pronouns now.
I guess that Mermaids feel that being asked questions is negative and who can blame them when the answers don’t look good for the TRA side.
I think we need to know what they mean by “hate crime” when it comes to reporting jumps in statistics like that.
My own definition is that hate crime is a way to add severity to a crime that is motivated by hatred due to racial or social status of the victim. (and should cover violence against women.) I wonder if they are counting every instance of wigged men being called “sir,” and that could certainly explain the rise.
Don’t forget limericks.
And suffrage ribbons.
“Men are not women” isn’t a far right trope; it’s baseline human thought all around the globe. This strange idea truly takes root in puberty when we’re evaluating who we want to fuck and what they look like.
Now we’re to pretend otherwise?
From the article:
Finally, much disinformation is splashed in headlines about detransitioners, ignoring that these numbers are very low in comparison to other medical procedures and can even find their source in social pressure and the climate of transphobia.
But the only sources it gives for this are a GenderGP piece and an article where Dr. Jack Turban was a contributor -hardly unbiased sources.
The article perpetrates the myth that desisters and detransitioners aren’t real, that children and teenagers don’t make mistakes about their “gender identity”, and that anyone who stops transitioning is only doing it because of “society’s transphobia”, not because they or their medical carers made mistakes.
This article from Reuters is a good example of the research on detransitioners that Fran Amery and Aurelien Mondon ignore:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-outcomes/
So detransition is a product of social pressures, but transition per se is self-caused? ‘Kaaay. That seems entirely rational and not at all dogmatic.
Mostly Cloudy, thank you for linking to that Reuters article. It is excellent.
Interesting – Elaine Graham-Leigh wrote an interesting article for “Jacobin” about the persecution of the Medieval Cathars by the Catholic Church:
https://jacobin.com/2023/01/albigensian-crusade-marxist-history-feudal-power-catholic-church-capitalism-oppression
Now what’s notable is that Elain Graham-Leigh is also on the “Gender-Critical Left”. She has written a sympathetic review of the film “Adult Human Female” from a Marxist perspective:
https://www.counterfire.org/article/adult-human-female-review/
Wouldn’t it be good if Jacobin gave E G-L an article to discuss “Gender-Critical Marxism” ? Dream on….