Drip drip of fuck you in the media
How many news articles does it take to change your mind on an issue? One, if it’s a big bang, maybe. What about five, ten, twenty? What if the issue they are trying to changing your mind on starts off as a non-issue and then over months and years a constant drip drip drip of low key, but inflammatory, articles start to appear. Welcome to mainstream media representation of trans issues, and how the Overton window moved gradually right to the point we are at today.
Gender variance has a long and tawdry history in the press. As long as there has been a popular press stories of gender bending, gender misrepresentation, gender “crimes”, and general gender fuckery have been splashed across the pages. Be trans do crimes was a matter of life for many gender non-conforming folk when to simply walk while trans was enough to get you a criminal record. There has never been a point where all the press has been on friendly terms with the trans community, though for a short moment in the early 2000s there was a lull in absolute hostility.
Yet, Lucy Meadows’ tragic excoriation by Richard Littlejohn marked the moment when mawkishness and distain became outright hostility. Since 2016 the far right and right wing press have used trans identities as the pillar upon which to build a political platform to get back into power or retain power. People who could not care less about trans issues are suddenly confronted with a series of articles about a whole range of gender related matters written by cisgender people who have no skin in the gender game aside from wanting to sell more papers and cause moral panic.
Rights in a democracy are not lost at a single stroke of a pen, they are rolled back bit by bit, small cuts here, small cuts there. The people demand and politicians oblige, but if those demands are Astro TERFed and manufactured then who is actually demanding this rollback. Trans people simply want to live their lives on equity with everyone else. Demands for rights is not asking for anything special, simply the right to be ourselves. Right wing demagogues refuse to acknowledge this, seeing trans folk as the wedge issue that will drive votes towards them.
Thirty years ago trans folk were the butt of jokes, treated as oddities on TV, the revelation of trans identities enough to sell magazines and drive audiences. In the age of TikTok being trans should be just another part of the tapestry; that it is still radical to be trans lies in the fact that it is politicians, the media, and those who pay for both wish it so. This drip drip drip of fuck you is relentless, many small cuts seeking to roll back all the rights trans folk have won through blood and hoarse throats. There is not one big bang enough to make the final kill to trans rights, but we are already at the stage where walking while trans is enough to get you arrested and put in prison.
Simply not engaging or not reading this content is not an option because many others who vote and share are. The press needs to bring trans voices into the conversation, trans writers writing about more than trans issues. The media needs to own up to its own culpability, but there is more chance of Babe growing wings and flying the Atlantic than the media shifting from this profitable seam. Even tragedies such as the death of Brianna Ghey and the Pulse Nightclub massacre were not enough to stop them in their tracks. Yet, that is not to say that Babe may not fly if enough pressure is brought to bear. It will take the whole community, allies, and everyone who cares about equity to push back, but if we want the drip drip to stop, then we need to show that it is not profitable and will fail at the ballot boxes.
When rights go for one group they go for many others, and right now at this moment in history trans rights are the bulwark against a far wider rollback of rights. This matters for all of us, for trans folk are a minority that cut across all strata and sections of society. We are the folk in every community, every town, every city, every nation. To trample us is to trample all. First they came for the trans rights, and they will enforce rigid conformity. No-one wants that who truly understands what that means. They might say fuck you to the whole trans community, but in standing up to the media we stand up for everyone.
