Trans Rights Protest Speech (Patreon)

The following is the speech I have written for the Trans Rights Protest I am speaking at tomorrow outside Downing Street. I wanted to provide the script for those who are interested:

Enbies, ladies, gentlemen

I want to talk about the truth. I'm here to talk to you today not about trans rights, but trans lives, and particularly I want to talk about the truth of trans lives that isn't represented in our country's media.

But first: I have an uncle who I never knew, and will never know. My dad's little brother Francis, named after his dad, was killed in a football stadium collapse known as the Hillsborough Disaster. My uncle and hundreds of other Liverpool fans were herded into an overcrowded standing area, resulting in its structural collapse which killed 96 people, Francis included. This collapse was caused by police incompetence and negligence, and when the collapse started, and people started climbing the fence to escape, witnesses report that police climbed up to push the victims back into the deadly crush. The police believed that they were dangerous hooligans trying to get onto the pitch, rather than panicking people trying to escape a deadly situation they had caused.

On the 19th of April 1989, four days later, the newspaper The Sun ran a front page piece under the bold letters “THE TRUTH” claiming that fans had picked victims pockets, urinated on quote: “brave cops”, and attacked an officer who was trying to provide CPR. These disgraceful lies, apparent to Liverpudlians for what they were, resulted in a campaign to boycott The Sun which lasts to this day. In Liverpool there are many who if they walk into a shop and see that it sells The Sun, they will simply walk out again. It remains difficult to even give The Sun newspaper away for free in Liverpool to this day, and let me tell you another interesting historical detail: Liverpool hasn’t elected as much as a conservative councillor in over 25 years. These facts are related.

In 2017, when the Hillsborough Inquiry concluded that the disaster was not the fault of the victims and that the misinformation spread by The Sun and other right wing rags had contributed to a cover-up, journalist Suzanne Moore wrote for The Guardian:

"This fantasy should be well and truly shattered by the Hillsborough verdict. This was a war crime committed in a war that was not then, nor is now, a figment of our imagination. Class war."

The especially bitter irony of The Sun’s lies there is of course that they printed them under the headline “THE TRUTH”. The phrase “Speak truth to power” is the journalists’ mantra. It is the phrase that journalists should see every time they close their eyes. It is the phrase that should define every act and effort a journalist makes professionally, and yet our country’s media speaks with a forked tongue.

The media loves to provide two options: one option being patently bad and the other being the option that they want you to agree with. Do you support football hooligans who urinate on police or do you support brave cops? That’s easy enough for the right-wing papers that thrive on bigotry, but for mainstream and left-wing journalists making acceptance and tolerance unpalatable is a little harder, so instead they make a debate: Debate whether trans people should be allowed to use public bathrooms, debate whether we should be allowed in sports, debate whether trans lives are even worth living. From there you can have all kinds of debates about the debate: debate whether it’s right to silence people for expressing bigoted views against trans people, all the while platforming them constantly so that they can argue their side of “the debate”. At the same time, never let trans people just tell the truth about our own lives. This is a debate for cis people only. The “debate” exists so that they can legitimise bigotry - a position that should never be legitimised or even tolerated.

When thousands of trans people marched through Soho at the end of June, myself included, the BBC didn’t report on it at all, and instead reported on a protest of anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists marching the same day. The Telegraph published an article the day of Trans Pride claiming that children’s TV shows are grooming children and coercing them into being trans, The Times published an article that day claiming trans equality legislation “bullies bosses” - you can’t make this shit up - and The Daily Mail published multiple articles that day talking about trans people brainwashing children, Sainsbury’s oppressing it’s staff by not allowing them to be transphobes and, most delicious of ironies, an article claiming that LGBT activists want to censor the news and control what information is allowed. The Guardian’s coverage of trans pride was limited to two pictures in a compilation of pride “celebrations” from around the world. It even ran a piece on the 26th talking about how busy police were with all the protests that weekend that mentions every protest except trans pride.

Left wing papers don’t get a break from this just because they sometimes also report on the horrific consequences of the same “transgender debate” nonsense that they peddle. Take, for example, Suzanne Moore, the journalist I quoted earlier. Moore is a prominent gender critical feminist who speaks out against trans people’s rights based broadly on the argument that our existence is somehow harmful to cisgender women and feminism as a movement. Moore has written in The Guardian advocating for vulnerable trans women to be excluded from women’s shelters, she has written multiple pieces claiming that using inclusive language for trans people will set back feminist causes, and she has written promoting the “social contagion” myth that implies trans people are coercing others into being trans through peer pressure. How is any of this different from what papers like The Daily Mail write about trans people, you ask? Well The Daily Mail doesn’t care about feminism, of course, but otherwise these fearmongering bigoted lies are the same, just disguised as concern for women, arguments against misogyny - a debate about “the trans issue”.

Suzanne Moore, not a member of the LGBT community herself, evokes the imagery of the AIDS crisis and the fight for gay and lesbian rights in an attempt to position herself as an ally to LGBT people while actually attacking trans people and advocating for our exclusion from public life. Moore actually left The Guardian after 300 feminists signed off on a letter calling out her bigotry, but she was unchallenged there for a long time, and she is utterly emblematic of the kind of bigotry that our supposedly unbiased media has been portraying as one equally valid side in a debate. Be it through complacency or cowardice, The Guardian has not improved.

Moore wrote that “It is not feminists who murder trans people, although this might be the impression you would be left with if you relied solely on Twitter for your information”. Ooh, throwing some shade. But frankly I agree with Moore here. It isn’t feminists who murder trans people. Most trans people, after all, are feminists. But it is people who call themselves feminists who get to write reactionary nonsense in The Guardian, it is these same people, people like JK Rowling, who get given awards by the BBC for writing misinformed transphobic defenses of bigotry, people like Helen Lewis, who many bigots credit as making space for their “concerns” in the british media, and her husband Jonathan Haynes, digital editor for The Guardian who perpetuates the moral panic around the online abuse a famous millionaire author receives, while quietly ignoring the abuse that the movement she is a figurehead of hurls towards trans people on a daily basis. It’s people like MP Rosie Duffield who gets interviewed in The Times claiming that trans people’s existence is somehow creating a situation for women just like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale - a book I would encourage Rosie to read more carefully for what it has to say about trans people. The book actually points out quite correctly that trans people are among the first targets of the same violent fascists who would love to take away all the rights of cis women.

So no, it isn’t feminists who kill trans people. It’s just feminists who act as the arbiters of a debate about whether we get to live or die. It’s just people who call themselves feminists who give talking points to violent bigots who do kill us. It’s just people who call themselves feminists who shy away from the truth and report divisive tripe instead.

Just a fortnight ago, after LGBTQ+ Labour called for Rosie Duffield’s bigotry to be investigated, the complacent centrist party leadership finally launched an investigation. We can make our supposedly progressive institutions do better if we demand change.

They have to stop treating our lives as a debate. Full stop. We have to challenge the organisations who make hollow gestures of acceptance towards our community while getting in bed with the same bigotry that would try to make us extinct.

The truth, if there are any journalists around here who are interested in the truth, if you happen to see any, is that trans people are incredible. Trans lives are so full of joy and unbridled happiness that it defies words. The joy of finding your authentic self, the joy of reclaiming your body in a way that you never felt before that you could, the joy of being seen by the people you love as your real true self for the first time - these are joys that can never be extinguished. I would ask cisgender people to imagine the joy that a trans person feels the first time they look in the mirror and recognise their reflection as themself.

Trans lives aren’t just worth living, trans lives are joyous and beautiful and inspiring. Trans people are a gift, a blessing, and people with trans people in their lives know that. There is no debate. There are trans lives and there are people who don’t know any trans people trying to use us as a distraction, to keep people from paying attention to all the ways that our politicians are failing us. There are, of course, truths that journalists eager to report on trans issues could speak to power - for example I will happily tell any journalist listening how trans masculine people have had their access to genital surgery quietly shut down, or how NHS wait times for trans people to access healthcare are many times longer than the maximum wait time permitted, or how cisgender people can access the exact same medications as transgender people without needing to go through any of the extra steps, or how the government is trying to legislate gender neutral bathrooms out of existence, or how I and many many people I know have submitted complaints to the Labour Party about their continued defense of transphobes like Rosie Duffield and how those complaints have fallen on deaf ears. If there are any journalists around here who are interested in the truth I’m happy to talk about how this country is trying to push trans people out of public life in an attempt that should be called what it is: genocidal.

There’s so much truth here if any journalists are interested…

We have to demand better from our news media, and not just mean the right-wing papers, but also the progressive paper of record. For as long as our media perpetuates the “trans debate” narrative which pretends that bigotry is an acceptable position, we shouldn’t be buying it, we shouldn’t be accepting it, and we should call it out every chance we get.

And I’ll say this too: Marching through Soho for trans pride is good. We should show London our pride. Demanding our rights outside Downing Street is good: The government should know that they’re letting us down. But we should be protesting Fleet Street as well as Downing Street. We should be protesting the offices of News UK, and The Guardian, and Broadcasting House too. We ought to go there and demand they do better. Maybe we’ll find some journalists there who are interested in the truth.