Social media has been abuzz with the news that National Geographic has done a special issue on gender. I haven’t managed to get a copy yet, but yesterday I saw this tweet from Sophie Walker.

So long as female = pink, we're still a long way from that gender revolution. #fail https://t.co/cf6aSV9Uou

— Sophie Walker (@SophieRunning) December 18, 2016

In confess that my first thought was, “on no, now we are going to have people claiming that WEP hates trans people”. Thankfully that doesn’t seen to have happened. My second thought was, “yes, I agree”. But until I had investigated more I didn’t know just how much I agreed.

I know nothing about Avery Jackson, the young trans girl that NatGeo has put on their cover. Possibly she likes pink as much as that photo suggests. There’s nothing wrong with pink. I wear it a lot. But the fact that she’s on that cover with pink hair and all-pink clothes very much seems to say, “look how pink I am, I must be a girl!” I suspect the photo was chosen as the cover — by the magazine, not by Avery — with exactly that message in mind.

This reminds me very much of the focus on appearance that gender clinics had when I transitioned. Twenty years ago, if you turned up for an appointment wearing jeans you would probably get sent home. Dresses, or a smart skirt with twinset and pearls, were the order of the day. Your hair had to be long, your make-up had to be obvious, and the decision about whether you were behaving in an appropriately feminine manner was made by a middle-aged man. These days we have made a lot of progress in helping the doctors understand that presentation and gender are not the same thing. Lots of cis women never wear dresses or makeup. They are no less women because of that, and trans women are no less women if they do the same.

Sadly the media is still a long way behind the curve. Whenever you see an article or program about trans people there is always an emphasis on feminine performance. Newspapers gush about how parents knew their kids were trans because they loved pink and wanted to play with dolls. TV programs always have a shot of the trans woman putting on her makeup. This gives entirely the wrong impression of what being trans is all about.

NatGeo goes further. In this article about why they did a gender issue they have this story:

Nasreen Sheikh lives with her parents and two siblings in a Mumbai slum. She’d like to become a doctor, but already she believes that being female is holding her back. “If I were a boy,” she says, “I would have the chance to make money … and to wear good clothes.”

Wait, what?

Liking pink does not make you a woman. Wanting to wear dresses and makeup doesn’t make you a woman, though it may make you non-binary in some way. The only thing that makes you a woman is the unshakeable belief that you are a woman. Equally wanting to be a doctor, and perhaps be safe from gender-based violence, despite being assigned female at birth, doesn’t make you a man; it makes you feminist.

Even NatGeo could see that there was something wrong with this, that it didn’t quite fit into the trans narrative. But that won’t stop the New Statesman running articles about how trans activists are encouraging parents to have their sons “mutilated” because they don’t like football, and their daughters “mutilated” because they want careers. We are not saying these things, but because the media keeps saying this is what being trans is all about its not surprising that people believe we are.

It is all very frustrating. And NatGeo, despite thinking that it is somehow riding the wave of a gender revolution, is actually providing ammunition to the very people who want that revolution stopped in its tracks.

One of the things that Berkeley and I do at the start of our trans awareness sessions is a little quiz about trans issues. Partly it is just a mixer, but also we want to get the class thinking about how little they actually know about trans people and their lives. It helps put people in the mood to learn more.

One of the questions we ask is, “Name a famous trans person in the media”. When we ask for the answers we have taken to saying, “and we want someone other than Caitlyn Jenner”, because otherwise she’s all we get. After Cait, the most common name we get is Kellie Maloney. Sometimes we’ll get a few others, but those two are by far the most common choices. The class always has to be prompted to think of a trans man, and often they can’t do so. To date, no one has come up with Paris Lees, despite the fact that she’s been on the BBC’s Question Time once or twice and is a regular columnist in national newspapers.

I’m not trying to get a Paris here. I think she does a great job. But people don’t notice her, and I have been wondering why. Obviously with the guys, the media tends to ignore them, and therefore the public won’t know about them. But Paris has a pretty good media platform. She’s also young, pretty, articulate and outspoken. Why don’t people notice her?

My theory here is that Paris doesn’t fit cis people’s view of what a trans person is. That is, they don’t have a “before” narrative for her. In the public imagination, a trans person is someone who was successful in life as a man, and is now known as a woman. It is the apparent magical transformation that sticks in the mind. The public doesn’t see Paris as a trans person, they see her as a young woman.

A possible exception to this is Laverne Cox, who also doesn’t have a “before” narrative. However, I note that her character in Orange is the New Black does have such a narrative, and even a part played by Laverne’s twin brother.

The problem we have here is that, when cis people think of trans people, it is a stereotype that comes to mind. The media, of course, does everything it can to reinforce that stereotype. Somehow we need to break this narrative, and that’s not going to be easy.

It was entirely expected that the media would use the publication of the government’s Transgender Equality Inquiry Report to say terrible things about trans people. Here are a couple of examples of the sort of thing they get up to.

Firstly poor Jack Monroe got ambushed on Channel 4 News last night. Jack turned up expecting to talk about the report, and was instead forced to “debate” a well-known TERF on the subject of whether all trans people are rapists.

Of course Channel 4 billed this as a “debate” between a trans person and a feminist, as if TERFs speak for all feminists. Which is kind of like asking someone to debate Donald Trump and billing it as a debate with “Americans”.

The claim that trans people are rapists comes, initially, of course from Janice Raymond. However, she was talking purely symbolically. She believes that merely by taking on the public appearance of a woman I am “raping” all women. These days the TERFS prefer to quote a Swedish study from 2011 which they say comes to all sort of horrible conclusions about trans women.

Sadly for them, the author of the study doesn’t agree with the TERF interpretation of her work and is rather annoyed about how it is being used. In this interview with The TransAdvocate she explains what her work actually shows.

Nevertheless, this paper keeps on getting cited in anti-trans articles and interviews. Last night it was quoted on Channel 4 by Julia Long, and Jack, having been ambushed, didn’t have the evidence to hand to refute it.

Julia Long, by the way, is one of the TERFs who picketed a London Dyke March in 2014 because Sarah Brown had been invited to speak.

Jack had agreed to appear on the programme for free but Long had apparently asked for a fee:

https://twitter.com/MxJackMonroe/status/687762934081142784

I put out to tweet linking to the TransAdvocate article asking Channel 4 to tweet the link themselves to show how their guest has misrepresented the paper she was quoting. They did not do so. They did link to a Huffington Post article about the show, but that too failed to expose Long’s dishonesty.

Naturally TERFs on Twitter thought they could “disprove” the TransAdvocate piece by quoting the original paper.

Meanwhile I understand that several media outlets have been going on about “sex changes for children”. This, as always, is nonsense. No one gives puberty blockers to a 4-year-old. Unless if course they are actually going through puberty in which case doctors would have no hesitation in prescribing them. Interestingly doctors give out puberty blockers like candy to girls whom they think are developing too quickly, but still claim that the same drugs are too dangerous to give to trans kids.

Also, puberty blockers merely delay puberty. They do not cause a “sex change”, no matter how often tabloid newspapers say they do.

One statistic you will hear quoted in these debates is that 80% of trans kids “grow out of it”. This one is quite dangerous in that it is almost true. The majority of kids who exhibit some sort of gender-variant behavior in childhood grow up to be cis adults. But that includes girls who like playing sport and boys who don’t like playing sport, both of which groups are likely to be viewed as “gender variant” by parents brainwashed by the Pink & Blue nonsense.

If you look only at those kids who express a very strong desire to transition socially, pretty much none of them grow out of it (as far as we can tell, given the small numbers involved). Equally some of the kids who “grow out of it” may end up identifying as non-binary but not want any medical intervention, or may identify as one of LGB. Medical treatment should only be given to kids who need it, and the job of the doctors is to sort out which ones do, not to refuse to treat any of them.

Saying that you shouldn’t treat trans kids because most children who exhibit some gender-variant behavior grow out of it is rather like saying that you shouldn’t treat brain cancer because most patients with a headache can get by on painkillers.

Here’s an actual gender specialist making the same point.

Today the Telegraph website has an article about gender-neutral toilets. In general it is pretty good. However, I’m quoted in it, and it makes me out to say something I very much do not agree with.

Update: following discussions with Radhika the post has been updated to much better reflect my views.

The basic issue here is whether trans people should be required to use a gender-neutral toilet. Cis people often get hold of the wrong end of the stick and think that there are three genders: male, female and trans. So they think that the solution to the toilet issue is to create a gender-neutral loo that all trans people are required to use.

The trouble is that there are some trans people who would very much prefer the option of a gender-neutral toilet. That includes those currently in transition who are uncomfortable about which loo to use but may change their minds later, and those who are non-binary and will always want something non-gendered. But there are also trans people who fully identify with one or other of the poles of the gender spectrum and will strongly resent it if anyone tries to make them use a gender-neutral loo.

The point I was trying to get across is that there is no single solution (though a long term trend towards less gendering of everything would be good). I absolutely respect the right of people who want a gender-neutral loo to have one. I just don’t want that to be a requirement for all trans folk.

Of course it is hard to get concepts like this across. I talked to Radhika mainly on Twitter and in a phone call while I was on the train to London on Thursday. Misunderstandings can arise, and she will have been working on a bunch of other pieces between then and this going live. It happens.

If you happen to see anyone on social media calling me out for supposedly being down on non-binary people, please point them this way.

And also, next time you see some trans activist quoted as saying something terrible in the media, ask yourself whether they actually said what they are supposed to have said, or whether it might be a misunderstanding, or a deliberate misquote to create controversy.