January 8th Speech: "Thin Grey Gruel"

Structure:

JK Rowling, world famous transphobe and part time mediocre detective fiction author, tweeted right before the New Year - I had to change my speech at the last minute, she’s always tweeting something - she quoted a tweet that said “majority of Americans agree with JK Rowling, there are only 2 genders” and she said that she doesn’t believe there are only two genders, she just wants to focus on the distinction between sex and gender. She said that this was a “minor correction”. Didn’t seem particularly bothered by people using her name to perpetuate much more serious bigotry.

The ILGA Europe, who previously ranked the UK as top for LGBT rights in it’s equality index (we’re now 11th) said in their review of 2021 that JK Rowling had directly contributed to attacks on LGBT rights in the UK. I think that’s pretty plain to see, and I think it extends beyond the UK, with people across the world now using “I love JK” as a shorthand for “I hate trans women”, for “I think trans men are brainwashed lesbians” and for “I think all this trans nonsense has gone too far”.

When Rowling tweeted a questionable comparison between police recording the gender of perpetrators according to self-ID and George Orwell’s 1984, her tweet was shared by far-right personalities from big smart debate boy Ben Shapiro to open white nationalist Richard Spencer. Shapiro and Spencer each have a history of violent rhetoric that encourages acts of fascist stochastic terrorism.

I’m trying, here, to highlight the way that Rowling has been used by more extreme bigots to push their reactionary goals. Last year a republican quoted Rowling as he voted down LGBT equality legislation.

But I’m not here to talk about JK Rowling. I don’t really care very much about JK Rowling. Even if I did, she’s in the TERF career-death spiral now, with public figures distancing themselves from her over her bigotry and her continued campaigning against the freedoms of one of the most vulnerable and marginalised minorities in our society.

We’ve seen it before, well known people get pulled into the TERF cult and soon it consumes everything. One is almost tempted to imagine Joanne, haunted in her Scottish castle by the spectre of Graham Linehan - The ghost of TERF Christmas yet to come.

No, I’m not concerned by JK Rowling. I am concerned by institutions like the BBC, the Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and other news media that use the cloak of journalism to focus everyone’s attention onto the bigotry of people like Rowling.

A study by Paul Baker of Lancaster University found that between 2018 and 2019 the British Press wrote 6,400 articles about trans people. We’re flattered. Really. About half of the articles referred to incidents of transphobia using words like “alleged” or “supposed” and 15% of articles just put transphobia in quotes. Cute. There were hundreds of articles describing trans people as “aggressive”, “offended”, “demanding”, “threatening”, “militant” and “bullying”, and 151 mentions of “the transgender lobby”. Baker goes on to say that the reporting closely resembles the kind of reporting that muslims had to deal with in the period after 9/11, and that feminists faced in the 1990s. I would go on to liken it to the way gay people were reported on under Thatcher, and in my last speech I examined the similarities to the reporting around the Hillsborough Disaster.

In 2020, The Sunday Times wrote nearly one article every single day about trans people.

Doesn’t it feel like you’re being blasted by a constant stream of gibberish, and nonsense, and thin, grey gruel all the time? That’s the point. It’s a tactic called firehosing, in which the media overwhelms us with so much nonsense and misinformation and more broadly dishonest reporting that we couldn’t possibly have the time to sift through it all and refute it.

When JK Rowling said that “a man who has no intention of getting hormones or therapy can access women’s spaces”, Pink News called her out for misrepresenting the state of medical gatekeeping in the UK, and Channel 4 was quick to fact-check Pink News and tell them that JK Rowling hadn’t said anything incorrect.

From there we could get into a tedious discussion of how dangerous predators wouldn’t be deterred by laws around gender identity anyway, how the remaining criterion - a diagnosis of gender dysphoria - is incredibly difficult to obtain anyway, and so on and so on. See how we would be tricked into wasting our time, and having a conversation entirely on their terms? There is plenty of fact-checking, but nowhere I look can I see any critical analysis of what the media says, why it says what it says, and why it says what it says when it says it.

Welcome to my speech - we’re going to do some critical media analysis. Yayyyyy…

Last year, in August, we protested outside Downing Street. We explained in no uncertain terms that trans people face an exterminationist project from bigots in power and a human rights crisis in our country. The mainstream media didn’t even remotely touch it. We know they were aware of it. We know plenty of journalists. Nobody reported on it. The BBC are happy to report on JK Rowling’s tweets. They’re happy to regurgitate the vile lies of hate groups, but their commitment to impartiality doesn’t extend as far as showing the speeches last year where we talked about the people we’ve lost to suicide, the years of struggling against this system, the true human reality of trans people’s lives. What the media chooses to cover and what it chooses to ignore is incredibly telling.

After I gave my speech, it transpired that a fascist creep had been at the protest and had taken videos and pictures upskirting me to send to fascist collaborator Andy Ngo who published them to his audience of nearly a million people. Andy Ngo is a far-right journalist who shares the names of antifascist activists with known neo-nazi terrorist groups. These upskirt photos were more coverage than my speech got from the entire UK press!

I got sympathy from many for the harassment I faced, but still people weren’t actually engaging with what I had said in my speech. Eventually, I was interviewed by Vice - an American publication - about the harassment, and my one request for the piece was that they include a link to my full speech in the article.

My speech, for those unaware, was about the ways that the media lie and manipulate the public into fighting against our own best interests. I had to ask Vice to include it, because I made a whole speech about the corruption of the British media, and all anybody was talking about was my underwear!
Anyone aware of the basic facts here understands this as bog-standard bigoted harassment, but institutions like this one are somewhat invested in keeping the facts as far from people as possible. Gendered Intelligence and The Good Law Project are now suing the NHS in an attempt to end the medical segregation that trans people face, and mark my words they’re going to ramp up their attacks on trans people to distract from it as much as possible. The gibberish, the nonsense, the thin grey gruel is going to get worse before it gets better.

I am sure that at this protest today we will hear the details of Caroline Lowbridge’s article “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women” many times and likewise the story of how Lily Cade, a cis lesbian interviewed for the article was a known serial rapist that Lowbridge chose to interview for the piece despite being alerted that Cade was such by another interviewee who was cut. Or how Cade used the platform she was given to publish a document calling for the genocide of trans women only two days later. I won’t hash out all of the details again here.

The biggest journalistic institution in the country I have lived in almost my entire life published an article calling people like me rapists, associating our basic inherent characteristics with rape. The article’s only named source was herself a serial rapist. The author deemed this attack on trans women more important than the trivial information that Lily Cade was herself a serial rapist.

The surreality of this experience tests my descriptive powers, and I write for a living. Seeing this article I broke down in tears - this is the culmination of daily constant interrogation of people like me and speculation about our genitals and about whether we are a danger to others. It is constant. It never stops.

The BBC published an article platforming a serial rapist who used the platform that they gave her to write a genocidal manifesto calling for the execution of all trans women, the lynching of trans women in the public eye and the gang rape of the mother of a trans child. The BBC published this article, calling trans women rapists when the BBC, it is a known fact, covered up the vile predatory actions of men like Jimmy Savile for decades.

Doesn’t it feel like you’re being blasted with thin grey gruel all the time?

It’s a distraction while the government slips in terrifying authoritarian policies. Our government right now is organising to strip us of our right to protest. They’re pushing through bills to take away people’s passports for drug offenses and strip people of their citizenship without notice or warning. This country is rapidly becoming a police state and institutions like this one are publishing articles framing trans women as a threat to the safety of cis women. I know who is a threat to the safety of women. I know who killed Sarah Everard.

They gave JK Rowling an award for her willingness to stand up to us scary transgenders. They said it was for the defense of free speech. I say it was an award for producing their thin grey gruel for them. They would love it if I spent this whole speech talking about JK Rowling. They would love us to spin our wheels focusing on individual bigots. They might even give me an award if I would stand up here and give a moving enough argument for trans rights and a demonstration against the same people they’ve already given awards to.

So at the risk of repeating myself, if there are any journalists around here who are interested in the truth, I have some news you might want to report. We’re bringing the fight to you now. You don’t get to be invisible any more. We see you. We see your nonsense for the distraction that it is and you aren’t going to waste our time any more.

If the BBC or Channel 4 or any other major journalistic institution wants to break this cycle of pathetic craven pandering to the ruling class, I ask of you what I asked of vice : Share my speech in full. If you don’t, you’re cowards. But that’s okay, I already knew you were cowards. If you do, you’re done.

I respect journalists who speak truth to power, but I have nothing but contempt for institutions like this one that seek to divide and pacify people and to distract from the inhumanity of our government. I personally know many people who used to work for the BBC who quit because of the anti-truth, anti-democratic and anti-journalistic climate that has been intensifying there for years and years now under tory rule.

I’ll speak now to the people who the BBC will not show my speech to. If you would, please share this to them yourself. If you like, tell them the things I say in your own words.

They want you to think that the rest of the people around you are dangerous criminals so they can do whatever they want to all of us. They work hard at telling you that trans people aren’t working class ordinary people - we’re all dyed-haired university educated communists, am I right? - because they want you to not see us as having the same interests. The truth is this: we have more in common with one another than we could ever have with the ruling class or their media stooges.

I know you’re tired of their gibberish, their nonsense, their thin, grey gruel.

I know you don’t feel seen or heard or represented by the media. I know you don’t feel like they speak for you. We don’t feel like they speak for us either. This isn’t a tug of war between us, over who gets our side represented - everyone feels like the media aren’t representing them, because their job, their real job, that they really do for the people they really work for - the ruling class of this country - is to make me feel like they’re siding with you, and make you feel like their siding with me, when in reality they’re on the side of politicians, the big businesses, the side of power, against the people, against the truth, and against reality.

They don’t serve you, and they don’t serve me: they serve power.

I don’t want you to learn complicated gender theories, or finicky rules for interacting with me, I just want you to treat me with basic human decency and when I meet people in real life they do exactly that. Somehow, nonetheless, people come away with the impression that trans people are easily offended, socially domineering, quick to judge people for getting unspoken rules wrong. That is a picture of me that the media wants you to have.

All I want you to know about trans people is how wondrous the experience is of finding the person you were always supposed to be and becoming them. I want you to know about trans joy, about trans happiness, about how much better it gets for trans people when all the barriers are cleared and we can just be ourselves. I want you to be happy for us, so that when someone in your life comes out as trans, and they will, you can say what we always say. Good for them. I’m so happy for you. They look happier every day. I’m so glad you’re you, and I wouldn’t want you to have to pretend to be anybody else.

Share my speech in full.

So join me in no longer accepting their nonsense, their gibberish, their thin grey gruel. Join me in understanding exactly what it’s purpose is and saying to these institutions who want to remain invisible “we see you!” And once we can reject their nonsense and see what really matters here, they can’t distract any more. They can’t make us fight each other any more. Once we see what they’re doing for what it really is we can finally work together to make a society that works for the many, not for the few.