
National Student Pride hosted a panel of prominent trans advocates and allies, chaired by LBC’s Natasha Devon.
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National Student Pride: The Media War on Trans People
On the panel were Philosophy Tube founder Abigail Thorn, writer and activist Juno Dawson, creator and trans inclusion advocate Kenny Ethan Jones, and vloggers Shaaba and Jamie Raines. The group discussed the surge in negative coverage on trans people, the reality of being trans in the social media space, dispelling misinformation, and the ways in which true inclusion can be achieved.
When asked when they first noticed a significant uptick in media aggression towards trans people, 2017 was noted by several panellists as an inflection point. Kenny and Jamie spoke about the obsession with trans peoples’ physical attributes, lamenting that human beings are reduced to their genitalia in many cases. Juno pointed out a stagnancy in the staff of many major UK press organisations, drawing a distinction between the attitudes of Vice and gal-dem with those of legacy press titles. She noted that writers at these legacy organisations set the tone for social conversation, which in turn has a direct effect on the experiences of trans people.
The panel delved into the disparity between their real-life experiences of transphobia and the experience in both social media and the press. Juno referenced the «handful» of cases of transphobia she has encountered in day-to-day life, comparing it with the tirade of bigotry coming from social media, especially from Twitter. Similarly, Jamie spoke about the scale of aggression he receives online, which directly mirrors the transphobic language being used in the mainstream media. Abigail raised the «stochastic terrorism» perpetuated by the media, that legitimises transphobia and leads directly to violence towards trans people. To evidence this, Abigail referenced the case of Gender GP, an online pharmacy providing medicine to support transition which was reported on in The Times, and forced to cease operations shortly thereafter.
On the myths perpetuated by the media, Shaaba disputed the notion that cisgender women are advantaged by rigid policies around single-sex spaces, noting that male-passing trans men are “kryptonite to the TERF argument”. Juno referenced how the media present trans men as “deluded gay young women”, and Jamie called into question figures around detransitioning, arguing that they are hugely inflated relative to the reality. Several panellists remarked that the framing of trans liberation as a debate is extremely harmful, and that progress can be made only when the “false equivalence” of arguments for and against trans rights is laid to rest.
Finally, when queried on the imagined end point of this fixation with trans people, Kenny spoke of the need to systematically strip away layers of misinformation, closing the book on each and moving on. He imagined that this process could take between seventy five and one hundred years to achieve. Throughout the panel, Abigail raised the need for trans power, not just in representation but the acquisition of material power, as the only means of defeating transphobia. This was supported by Juno, who stated that “I don’t think there is a trans person in actual power in the UK”. She emphasised that social attitudes towards gays and lesbians changed throughout the 1990s and 2000s with the force of Hollywood, and gay men attaining positions of power in the media. Shaaba drew a parallel to the effects on anti-Islamic racism seen with Mohamed Salah’s tenure at Liverpool FC.