The British Broadcasting Corporation is widely regarded as one of the premier sources in the world for news with minimal bias and maximum information. And then they published this article a few days ago. What have they done?
This is not the BBC’s first error whilst covering rainbow people. They allow their sources to misgender trans people, but won’t permit their own staff to attend Pride. (Apparently, marching for rainbow rights would brainwash them into being too biased.)
Sadly, the BC is only the tip of the iceberg. A couple of years ago JK Rowling decided to speak up. She equated the awful abuse at the hands of a cis man she should never have had to go through as something any trans woman would perpetrate against cis women, given the chance to exist in the same space. Since then, the UK is the international centre for “trans-exclusionary radical feminism”. (In practice, TERFs fixate on the trans-exclusionary part and don’t get up to a whole lot else.)
Let’s debunk the article. The entire alleged issue - that trans women are disproportionately predatory towards cis lesbians, within a wider culture where cis lesbians are pressured to sleep with trans women - goes unsubstantiated by evidence. The only attempt to justify a wider pattern is a Twitter poll of eighty members of a TERF group. If I ever want to determine if there’s an issue with anti-white racism in Aotearoa, I’ll be sure to follow the BBC’s methodology and poll Hobson’s Pledge and Christchurch’s Neo-Nazi skinheads.
Especially egregious are some of the individual examples. I'm horrified and upset to hear about the individuals who’ve been pressured into sex against their will. That is wrong, that should never happen, and anybody who has been assaulted should feel absolutely free to speak up and blast whoever hurt them. That includes feeling able to speak out against trans individuals, some of whom, like any person, will be predators, without worrying that this tars the whole community. We must all do all we can to make that possible.
However, they talk to two people who have never been hurt in the slightest by anyone trans. One is Debbie Hayton, the resident "some of my best friends are Black" of transphobia. Look, members of a minority group don’t all have to buzz around in the same hive mind. Still, if somebody spends all their time saying “I’m not like the other transsexuals, I always agree with the people who hate us”, maaaybe take their words with a grain of salt?
The other is Lily Cade, a cis lesbian who appears in the article because she turned down a proposed porn scene with another actor upon learning said actor was trans. So, nothing actually happened to her; there was nothing inappropriate about the proposition made, and she exercised her right to bodily autonomy.
The harm here to women comes from Lily, who has multiple rape allegations against her by other women. That is disgusting. The BBC has stooped to interviewing hate groups and rapists in order to scaremonger that the real hateful rapists are trans women. On the other hand, they fail to present a balanced picture or introduce original perspectives to the audience. They reached out to rainbow individuals and activism groups who unsurprisingly boycotted the piece, realised nothing from that, and decided to go ahead anyway and publish a markedly lopsided work of journalism.
This demonstrates the outsized influence of the media, and the social responsibility they hold. This article can reach people as far away as me in New Zealand, and inflame opinion throughout the UK, and yet all they really did was give eighty conspiratorial cranks on Twitter a giant platform. More generally, this demonstrates how acceptable it still is anywhere in the world to make an issue out of trans people, out of being for our rights, and out of our supposed nature. You can still get plenty of bigoted crap out there about other groups, but I’d hazard to say we’re past the days where a public figure could insinuate, for instance, all Māori people are cavemen and burglars, or that all women talk too much in meetings, and not chance getting fired. But stereotype trans women as rapists and you’ll just get backlash from people you already don’t respect. Not consequences. Consequences are reserved for trans people.
This article taps a nerve: not just the fear a few cis women have of trans women, but a wider discomfort with the concept of intimacy with trans women. So, even though it’s uncomfortable to talk about, and the BBC should never have pushed us to this place, let’s talk about that. First, let’s agree on what is fine to say. Number one, there should never be pressure on anyone to sleep with anybody. Regardless of if their attitudes towards another person are shitty, you can never have a shitty reason not to sleep with someone. It’s always, always better for someone to not sleep with somebody they don’t want to, than to be coerced into non-consensual activity. This is the most important matter at stake here.
Number two, if anybody feels that there is a pressure issue for them, they should be free to talk about that. Respectfully. I’m comfortable with labelling TERF orgs as hate groups in large part because the way they speak about trans women isn’t just in denial, but conspiratorial and dripping with venom. If you want to be respected, not just heard, stop talking about how male the jawlines and whatnots of trans women are. Yes, TERFs often act like saying "not all trans women" is the same thing as "not all men". No, it's not the same thing. One group is statistically overrepresented as perpetrators, and a lot of members seem pretty oblivious to how dangerous the world out there is for women. The other isn’t - only as victims.
Number three: yes, people have preferences. I really do not want to talk about this in detail, but to deal with the most-raised hypothetical, yes, if you learn somebody has a penis and you don’t want to do anything with that, that’s fine. That’s just how you feel.
What is absurd is to conflate preference with an entire kind of person, such as trans people. That makes about as much sense as saying you aren’t attracted to Capricorns or INTP-J’s.
There are so many wrong assumptions involved in equating “I’m not attracted to penises” with “I’m not attracted to trans women”. Assumptions about biology, despite both surgery and intersex people existing, and more broadly, that there's only one, masculine way trans women look. Assumptions that all trans women would want to use them, and that literally nothing else can be interacted with besides that. Assumptions that trans women want anything to do with people who can't shut up about how much they're not attracted to trans women in the first place.
To even be having this discussion is so egregious, and it’s far from the first time; I’ve come across these questions online a thousand times. I’m hella uncomfortable answering this, and I’m only doing so because the fucking BBC decided to start the conversation. A lot of trans people aren’t comfortable even thinking about what’s down there. In general, this sort of conversation reflects how plenty of cis people think of trans women primarily in ways to do with physical bodies, rather than as people. And, of course, as predators. This isn’t the first time this has been done: lesbians got the “you’re all scheming predators” treatment for decades, and many perfectly appropriate women are still worried about coming off as predatory towards other women to this day.
That this is one of the most common ways I hear trans people talked about also kills any chance to have similar conversations with nuance. Let's entertain the hypothetical that statistics showed a legitimate issue with trans women being disproportionately predatory towards others. The response shouldn't be to deny our womanhood or engage in ugly stereotyping. The appropriate way to deal with that would be to open up conversations about WHY this is the case.
For instance, a lot of trans women, like me, grew up in environments mostly with men, where sexual misconduct was barely talked about, and many men were more concerned about false accusations towards them than with sexual violence. Some of those attitudes might bleed over. That's a world apart from the overwhelmingly majority of women and others who grew up being treated as such. These are the sorts of potential problem areas I'd actually like to feel able to talk about - not conspiracy theories that men put years into transitioning and killing their masculinity just to manipulate and assault cis lesbians.
As applies to about every “trans debate” I bitch about, this crap is so online. What would you have to do to think that there’s a serious issue with cis lesbians being pressured to sleep with trans women? You'd have to frequently google what very pro-trans people are saying on Twitter, solely to get pissy about what they have to say. (Not that I don't do the inverse, but these pieces have to be informed with examples of what TERFs think.)
For the goddamn British Broadcasting Corporation to use their resources on making this point is unbelievable and outrageous. As I likely intend to discuss more in the future, too much of the direction of debate in valuable forums is being set by a tiny minority of well-educated people hopping on Twitter and getting worked up.
My call remains the same. Talk about real “trans issues”. Women’s issues are not false rape accusations against men and child custody statistics, they are pink taxes and pay gaps, rape culture and glass ceilings. Māori issues are not affirmative action and renaming by stealth, Māori issues are iwi relationships and whenua restoration, vaccination rates and reo education. Do unto us the same justice as for other groups: talk about what we’re struggling with, not about how fearmongers perceive us. And for god’s sake, talk about other trans people who aren’t women!
Seeing this article was certainly a personal betrayal for me. As a British citizen, I’ve watched post-Brexit Britain with rising anxiety. Between the bloody referendum and the rise of TERFs, not to mention how their actual culture of violence against women is going unresolved, the country no longer seems to offer a potential home to me. Let alone to trans people already living there.
Thankfully, these online debates speak little to my real life. I’ve never come face-to-face with open TERFs here, and despite TERFs trying to pretend they’re the champions of cis lesbians everywhere, I trust cis lesbians to have our backs. The issue is that this sort of rhetoric online can still change our perception, so we think the world is scarier than it is. I’m left worrying if cis women in my life feel pressured not to speak up about their discomfort, or are likelier to rule out speaking against shitty trans individuals because they don’t want to make a fuss over trans people in general.
We should be doing the work anyway to make sure people are comfortable speaking up when they’re uncomfortable. Anyone should feel free to put a trans person on blast without worrying that this reflects anything on the community, so long as it’s not worded in ways meant to imply as such. But this sort of rhetoric messes with almost every context where people genuinely are comfortable with those around them, creating needless stress for those who already have enough on their minds.
What’s more, this sort of article, and wider argument, centers discussion yet again on what cis people think of trans people. This takes away room for trans people to bring up our own anxieties. Even if those anxieties are baseless (e.g I’m nervous about going into women’s bathrooms, but nobody else is fussed), it’s still Fear 101 to be able to talk about what concerns you, show vulnerability, and admit you’re scared of something. There’s little latitude for that when you instead feel like you should be consoling cis women for taking up the same spaces as them. This stuff is already complicated - no need to make it more so.
Let’s get it right going forward. Media outlets ought to ensure their pieces are fair and balanced, or else not run them at all and pick something more important to talk about. Not crappy “both-sides” balance that’d give half the mic to hate groups, but a discussion that respects and demonstrates compassion for trans people on all sides, and simply presents different points of view about the way forward for us. And balance what they choose to talk about. Talk about trans issues a lot more, and TERF fear (and trans women) a lot less. We’ll see if there are consequences for this article, or if it’s still open season on us.
Maybe in the 40s and 50s, everybody will reflect mournfully on the moral panic about trans people a few decades ago. Just like we’re doing now for gay people in the 80s and 90s. Plenty of the people alive today were part of making that panic happen, and yet aren’t speaking up to prevent a repeat of the mistake. Can we please skip to the part where we’re past the worst of this? I’d like to get on with my life without being made a worrywart of, please.
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