Not Every Issue With Two Sides Is A Valid Debate… Especially With Lives At Stake
By: Carrie O'Neill
Tags: Journalism, Transgender, Irish Politics, Media Criticism, Terfs

One of the first rules of good journalism — or, indeed, any good writing — is to understand the subject matter at hand before setting pen to paper. Unfortunately, it seems that this is not a rule that applies to the subsector of the establishment commentariat known as the opinion columnist. This may seem like a particularly harsh view to hold, but unfortunately it is the most charitable interpretation I can come up with of the nine days’ wonder ‘debate’ about Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism that has recently gripped the mainstream Irish press.

Although there has been an increase in the last couple of months of Twitter accounts claiming to represent anti-trans Irish feminist organisations — many of which mysteriously turned out to be associated with IP addresses in the UK, as British TERFs sought to astroturf (pun intended) support in Ireland — this particular wave of commentary seems to have been inspired directly by events in the UK itself.

Suzanne Moore, the long-running Guardian opinion columnist who came under fire earlier this year for publicising the signatories of an internal petition to management over the paper’s increasingly-transphobic editorial line, left the paper. Within a week, she had a large column (and front-page banner) in the Daily Mail bemoaning her fate as an honest-to-goodness feminist leftist ‘silenced’ by a cult of macho woke-bro-ism. It was self-pitying. It was inaccurate; anyone saying that the Guardian’s noted tack centre-rightwards since it endorsed the Lib Dems in 2010, its increasing support for the idea that any criticism of Israeli government policy is anti-Semetic, its blinkered, middle-class-dad-rock-centric culture coverage, its support for the anti-Corbyn wing of Labour, and the exodus of several of its more leftie columnists and most of its lefty readership (myself included) to the New European is somehow indicative of an aggressively-woke, cultishly-pro-Corbyn culture within the paper is at best being economical with the truth. It praised J.K. Rowling’s public support of violent transphobia. It managed to find room for a brief tangent into criticising sex workers. It displayed a staggering lack of self-awareness — at one point Moore mentions being told by younger staff that she was out-of-touch with the ideals of a new generation of leftists, and yet later in the column she professes to find the volume of opposition from younger staff to the paper’s transphobia shocking and unforeseen. To top it all off, it was incredibly badly written, amounting to little more than a self-pitying confessional equating corporate macho culture and the undervaluing of female workers to people supporting equal rights for all with no central thesis beyond “it’s important to discuss challenging ideas and topics”. If I was grading it as a piece of undergraduate writing, it would have scraped a pass. Tellingly, it also contained a weirdly specific insistence that ‘gender critical’ figures don’t want a trans equivalent of Section 28, the since-repealed legislation (vigorously supported by the Mail at the time) outlawing education on LGBTQ issues, along the lines of the anti-‘homosexual propaganda’ laws we see today in places like Poland and Russia.

Why is this telling? Because a few days after Moore’s column was published, Kiera Bell won her case against the NHS shifting the goalposts of Gillick Competency when it comes to giving puberty blockers to minors. In a statement issued after the case, her lawyer argued in favour of laws governing how trans issues can be talked about. Her lawyer, who has previously worked with the ProLife Alliance on cases seeking to raise the homosexual age of consent and attacking abortion rights. Hardly the kind of person a crusader for women’s rights would hire, surely? Hot on the heels of this case comes one, again supported by people with ties to anti-abortion and anti-contraception groups, seeking to raise the age of medical consent for trans treatments to 25 — led by a woman who is trying to stop her (legally-of-age and compos mentis) child from medically transitioning. There is of course no way that these cases could then be used as precedent to restrict access to other forms of healthcare; surely these right-wing Christian anti-abortion groups are just funding them out of altruism! Indeed, the entire concept of ‘LGB without the T’ was invented by the US Christian right to split the LGBTQ rights movement, but of course there is nothing suspicious about somebody claiming to be a feminist activist and then palling around with the hard right. Just as there is absolutely nothing questionable about Suzanne Moore claiming to be censored for being a good feminist lefty while getting a front-page banner and a full column in the Daily Mail, a paper well-known for its incredibly leftwing editorial line which has included publishing paparrazi photos of scantily-clad minors with lascivious headlines, supporting Hitler and the British Union of Fascists (in leftwing British circles it is, to this day, derisively referred to as the Daily Heil), supporting Brexit, supporting the Tories, and running an anti-Semitic smear campaign against Ed Milliband which prompted Alistair Campbell — possibly the most knowledgeable person on the state of British political journalism — to dismiss the tabloid as “run by a bully and a coward”. Indeed, one of Moore’s fellow high-profile TERFs, Graham Linehan, tore into the paper’s inbuilt misogyny in an episode of Have I Got News For You. This is definitely the right home for someone who is just standing up for true liberal feminism.

The Bell case is a perfect example of the kind of jumping-through-hoops the anti-trans lobby will go through to justify limiting trans rights: she was on puberty blockers as a teen, then fully medically transitioned, then detransitioned and blamed the blockers for putting her on an irreversible path to surgery. The key demand of her case is that minors going on puberty blockers — a treatment which is entirely reversible and in no way experimental, despite what the Observer’s editorial might tell you — for gender dysphoria will have to demonstrate not only that they understand the effects of the treatment (the bar for Gillick Competency) but also the effects of any other potential treatments for gender dysphoria that they might run the risk of considering once they turn 18 — a ludicrously, unprecedentedly high bar to cross. This will not, of course, apply to minors taking puberty blockers for any reason other than gender dysphoria. Not only this, but the Bell case flies in the face of pro-abortion feminist rhetoric: when the Irish anti-abortion lobby wheeled out a story of someone who had an abortion and regretted it, the response all round (not just in Ireland) was that while this was truly sad, it was utterly unreasonable to base a state medical policy that would impact everyone on one person’s negative experience rather than on medical science. Bell’s negative experience is her own, but the opinions she formed as a result of it fly in the face of the medical consensus and yet somehow this was not seen as a reason to question changing the law to suit her whims.

This kind of hoop-jumping is what TERFs put trans people through all the time. If we don’t engage in debate with them or answer their questions, we’re a cult with no willingness to engage in debate. If we do engage, they shift the goalposts of their conditions for accepting us each time we speak. If they provoke us or our allies into an angry response — especially if we’re trans women — then that anger is violence, and violence in their rhetoric is coded as masculine, thereby ‘proving’ that we are just big mean misogynists. If they get angry themselves, if they — as has happened — boast on social media about assaulting children in bathrooms to ‘prove’ they’re trans and don’t belong there, or get banned from Twitter for recurring hateful conduct (looking at you again, Linehan), or reply to our tweets with “41%” in reference to the trans community’s suicide rate, or send us death threats… well, that’s just the emotional response of a true feminist defending the entire female gender from extinction.

And that, unfortunately, is at the lesser end of the spectrum. Over and over again, British TERFs — and remember that TERFism is mostly a British phenomenon — have been given an inch and taken a mile in a perfect mirror of the tactics used by the American alt-right. First they insisted on heavy levels of gatekeeping for access to trans healthcare, meaning that the vast majority of people making it to the very first stages of treatment such as blockers were people who were already desperately committed to the long haul. Then they claimed that the fact that the majority of people who made it through this stringent gatekeeping system went on to transition was proof that getting treatment was a slippery slope. And while they claim to simply be defending minors from transitioning too soon, there is a painful pattern here.

Julia Serrano has talked about this already here, but in my own words:

A child who socially transitions is unacceptable to TERFs, because many do not follow through so it’s just play-acting. A child who seeks medical transition is unacceptable to TERFs, because they’re too young to understand. A teenager who tries to transition is unacceptable to TERFs, because ‘it might all just be them responding badly to puberty changes’. An adult who tries to transition is unacceptable to TERFs, for multiple reasons. Trans men are confused lesbians struggling with internalised misogyny and a patriarchal society, who ‘mutilate themselves’, betray the sisterhood and deprive cis lesbians of potential role models and partners (how selfish!). Trans women don’t really understand womanhood because they weren’t socialised as women from childhood (see points 1 and 2), and we can never truly be women. If we don’t get loads of gender-affirming surgeries, we are ugly broken dolls, half-women, pale shadows of pseudo-femininity who can never live up to the reality of womanhood. If we do, we’re disgusting Barbie dolls perpetuating the male-gaze-centric female beauty standard and artificially emulating a natural beauty we can never achieve and do not deserve. At best, we’re mentally-ill gay men. At worst, we’re sexual predators looking for a disguise, or weird fetishists getting off on performing as an oppressed societal group. And always, we are an invasive species. Ivy strangling the tree. An ugly duckling who will never become a swan. The late Magdalene Berns, whose face adorns many a TERF profile picture, called us blackface actors. Non-binary people don’t factor into this worldview at all, except as confused tomboys or method-acting drag queens.

So if, at every stage of a trans person’s life, there’s a ‘concerned citizen’-style argument from TERFs against transition, how do we square that circle? They tell trans kids to wait until adulthood, but clearly loathe trans adults. How does that work? It only works if you recognise the truth of TERFs’ aims, which lie in the ideology’s origins in the frankly disgusting ‘political lesbianism’ of the 70s, which dehumanised and fetishised lesbians as a tool to be used in the elimination of men from all aspects of women’s lives. In the light of this, trans people were seen as the patriarchy’s way of eroding away at a hypothetical cis lesbian-separatist paradise society where no men or masculinity existed: trans women were infiltrators, trans men were traitors. The foundational text of TERFism, Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, makes the TERF approach to trans rights abundantly clear:

I have argued that the issue of transsexualism is an ethical issue that has profound political and moral ramifications; transsexualism itself is a deeply moral question rather than a medical-technical answer. I contend that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.

And that, right there, is why there are so many hoops to jump through. Why there is no acceptable time to transition. Why no trans person will ever be acceptable. Because TERFs view us as a moral menace with no grounding in medicine — despite the centuries of scientific, medical and historical evidence for our existence, and the modern medical consensus — and they think the only correct response to our existence is to wipe us out. Much of the media refers to UK TERFism as ‘the trans debate’. This is not a debate. This is a group of mostly middle-aged washed-up former left-liberal activists, many of whom are in positions of power or with large public platforms at their disposal, palling around with the far right, Christian conservatives and the Tory press to wipe out an already-oppressed section of society. And while the outright hate speech and death threats are relatively easy to spot, what is far more insidious is the way in which leading figures attempt to give the ideology a veneer of respectability, again emulating the US far right. “It’s just a debate!” they cry, from their Twitter accounts and newspaper columns and seats on national talkshows, “There’s no need to censor me or get hateful, I’m just a concerned feminist who wants a debate about a difficult issue!” Meanwhile, they smile and nod as their allies systematically dismantle every medical and legal protection we have, frequently at the cost of protecting cis women, all the while sending us death threats, claiming gender dysphoria is a Jewish conspiracy, and telling us we’re Frankenstein’s monsters with no right to exist. This is not a debate. This is the UK’s equivalent of the US far-right’s culture wars, and its stated goal is to wipe people like me out of existence.

So what does this have to do with the Irish media? It all began when Roisin Ingle — the long-running author of a frothy, anecdotal, gossipy opinion column in the lifestyle section of the Irish Times, Ireland’s paper of record — retweeted Moore’s self-pitying confessional in the Mail, praising its merits as a piece of writing (again, as a third-level teacher, I promise you it has none) and calling it “challenging”. Irish Twitter didn’t take this well, with Ingle receiving far more blame than praise for her support for Moore. Moore’s only big supporter on the Irish Twittersphere was the author John Boyne — a man who has not only expressed transphobic views, but also picked a fight with the Auschwitz Museum after they said that his novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was too inaccurate to be used to help educate children on the Holocaust (and boy, isn’t it funny how many transphobes have funny views on Jewishness…). However, the Irish Times’ biggest political opinion writer Fintan O’Toole — a man who, as a theatre reviewer, has about as fine a grasp of political analysis as I have of mechanical engineering, and who sadly has ties to the Social Democrats, of which I am a member — devoted his big Saturday column to defending Ingle by explaining how trans people and feminists are natural allies against the heteronormative patriarchy and how we should just get along. He said that “Moore, alongside JK Rowling, has become the wicked witch of TERF”, as if the term is an evil slur made up to punish people! Most tellingly, he defended Ingle for praising Moore’s essay “about her whole professional life as a journalist”. As I suggested on Twitter at the time, for those members of the commentariat class who are not TERFs but chose to defend TERFism, this is less about an ideological battle and far more about defending the right of out-of-touch, unjournalistic opinion writers to earn large amounts of money by publishing ill-informed, illogical or outright bigoted bad takes without facing any consequences for doing so. This suspicion was borne out a few days later when Jennifer O’Connell took to the pages of the Times to ask “whether woke culture should be cancelled”, while lazily equating the vile harassment Elliot Page faced when coming out as trans to John Banville being dogpiled on Twitter for spouting misogynistic drivel about how the literary world has become biased in favour of female authors, a false equivalence in an article that failed to mention anything about the very real threats to trans people and managed to deadname Page.

This is how TERFs have thrived in the UK. It’s also, more worryingly, how Trump rode a far-right wave to victory in 2016. The normalisation of far-right bigotry and conspiracy theories by a complacent media unwilling to ask the tough questions, especially if doing so might threaten their audience engagement or force them to break ranks with their peers was the keystone tactic of Steve Bannon et al. And while other Irish columnists like Una Mullaly and Ellen Coyne spoke out against the platforming of transphobic nonsense in the Irish press, others went mask-off transphobic. Stella O’Brien took to the pages of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent to attack the concept of trans healthcare for minors, and then repeated this on the airwaves on Newstalk (owned by notorious non-dom-for-tax-purposes Denis O’Brien and no stranger to controversial rightwing claptrap) and Spirit FM (a Christian radio station owned by a patron of the Iona Institute, a far-right, homophobic, anti-abortion ‘Catholic values’ lobby group with a disproportionate number of members writing weekly opinion columns in the mainstream Irish press). Meanwhile, back in England, Irish journalist Brenda Power used her Sunday Times column to falsely equate gender dysphoria to an eating disorder, in order to advocate against providing supports for trans people. Somehow, despite this comparison being an outright lie flying in the face of DSM classifications and WHO advice, that claim made it through an editor. One is forced to conclude that much of the media simply doesn’t care about the potential harms, as long as they get clicks. At least the Irish Examiner commissioned three pieces from trans writers.

As an Irish journalist, I’m aware that our media is limited by a legal mandate for balanced, ‘both-sides’ coverage of political and social issues. Unfortunately, as we saw during the referenda on abortion and same-sex marriage, many of our journalists and pundits are too cowardly to provide real balance. When our abortion debates were being conducted between medical and human rights experts on the one side, and a handful of fringe Catholic fundamentalists and believers in the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy on the other, when one side used science to support its points and the other argued unlikely edge cases, cited the Bible, and was criticised by the Referendum Commission for lying, our media nodded and said “Oh yes, these two sides are equal and should be treated as equally sane and expert in debates we moderate.” Now, it seems, our media is starting to do the same thing with trans rights. This is the exact opposite to what should be happening. Think about it; on one side you have most of the LGBTQ community, most leftwing political organisations, the WHO, the EU, the UN, human rights experts and most pro-Choice groups. On the other, a handful of grifters and non-expert public figures who claim to a radicalism they might have briefly touched in the 80s, backed up by the Christian right and fascists, pointing to imaginary edge cases and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories while sneering at medical science. It really shouldn’t be hard to see which one of those is in the right, and which should be treated as at best a group of conspiracist cranks and at worst an attempt to normalise far-right beliefs using trans rights as a wedge issue to split the left.

Maybe letting some experts, or some actual trans people, into the pages of our major publications would be a start. I’d happily volunteer to do so if nobody else will. Another thing that could help would be editors forcing their opinion columnists to actually educate themselves about a subject before being paid large amounts of money to write about it in the national press. But really, at the core of this, is a simple point: stop treating a small group of angry British rightwingers playing at being leftist while brutally and systematically attacking a group of incredibly vulnerable people like it’s a fun academic debate to get column inches out of. Please? Our lives quite literally depend on it.