Well, yesterday was “interesting”, and might have been more productively spent. The outpouring of support for trans people, however, was amazingly heartwarming. More people spent more time defending the rights of trans people than I think they did in the whole of the past year. I haven’t seen that much support since the My Transsexual Summer TV series. And indeed I’d like to publicly thank the MTS7 for putting themselves out there so bravely and educating people. Had they not done so, I am sure that Julie Burchill would have got much more support.

Inevitably some of the commentary missed the point. I’ve seen people saying what a horrible person Julie Burchill is, and others saying that we should ignore the whole things because it is only Julie Burchill doing what she always does. This is true. Burchill has been busily offending people for as long as she has been a journalist, but it is also not particularly important. What matters is that staff at the Observer saw fit to publish her rant. I see that they have now removed the evidence, which conveniently also removes all of the comments complaining about the piece.

There has been some right of reply. The Guardian commissioned Roz Kaveney to pen something, and she’s been brilliant as ever. Laurie Penny also has something in the works (after having insisted that an actual trans person get the first right of reply). Brooke Magnanti has a nice piece in the Telegraph pointing out that sex workers get the same sort of treatment from Burchill, Bindel, et al. And the New Statesman is running an entire week of trans-related stories. However, neither Roz nor Laurie’s piece will appear in print editions (Burchill’s did), and I imagine that by next Sunday the Observer will be assuming that everyone has forgotten about the story.

Elsewhere some of the “support” has been a little less than helpful. We’ve had the usual outrage trolls searching Twitter for people who are being supportive but can be attacked for doing it in the wrong way, or who can be misinterpreted as supporting Burchill. And we’ve had the finger waggers lecturing at length on what people are allowed to say. Last night I saw a cis woman telling her readers that “transsexual” was a bad word and that we are not to use it. I guess she got that from some ardent transgender activist. I’ve also seen a supportive cis person being told off on the grounds that she has no right to speak on behalf of trans people. This sort of thing is not helpful. Last night I was in danger of having my own Suzanne Moore moment, so I gave up and went to bed with a book.

Which brings me back to the other area where people are missing the point. There’s no question that some people were extremely mean to Suzanne Moore on Twitter. Some of them were undoubtedly trans people. Others were cis people. Probably some of them had PhDs in gender theory. I say this because I’ve been told off for “doing trans wrong” by such people before. But in the telling this story has become one of Moore being attacked solely by trans people as a monolithic whole (or the “trans cabal” as Julie Bindel would have it); then her and Burchill responding by attacking all trans people (which they inevitably caricature as comprising only trans women). As ever, when large numbers of people are involved, it is easier to demonize a group as a whole, rather than respond to the actual people behaving badly. It makes a simpler, and therefore better, story. As a result, even though we got all that support, the dominant media narrative is quickly becoming one of trans people as a unified and vicious group of social media harpies. As we have no influence on the media, we can’t do much to challenge that.

I worry about where we go from here. On the one hand it is good that the message is occasionally getting out. On the other I’m sure that the campaign to shut down all health care for trans people will continue, and that more articles like David Batty’s will appear. In the meantime, someone has to try to turn things around. Firstly we need evidence. Things that can’t be dismissed as the “alleged” complaints of deranged people. One of Christine Burns’ colleagues has produced this helpful blog post detailing how GPs in the North West of England responded to attempts to find out how trans patients are being served, and to provide trans awareness posters for waiting rooms. It includes such gems as, “Another refused to use the poster on the grounds that ‘women and children come in here'” and “There aren’t many around here in Cumbria because they’d stick out like a sore thumb”.

Meanwhile I spent the morning talking to a friend who has done Equality & Diversity training for the NHS in Somerset about how we might continue to offer such training throughout the South West. And I’ll be doing a slot on ShoutOut about TransDocFail on Thursday evening. I also need to get on with running my various businesses.