No, Trans People are not a Threat to Your Freedom of Speech

Delving into the British media’s favourite transphobic trope

A trans campaign banner at Pride London, 2010. From WikiMedia Commons. [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Respect_and_Equality_for_All_Trans_People_(4764133272)_(2).jpg].

The trans community has a near-demonic reputation in much of the British media. Our political objectives are dismissed as vacuous, politically correct nonsense, and our motivations are questioned at every turn.

It was not without reason that Christine Burns, a leading light in the first wave of UK trans activists, described the British press as ‘the single most terrifying force in the lives of the average transsexual person.’¹ Journalists writing for major British news outlets have called us a ‘Monstrous Regiment of the Thin-Skinned,’² ‘puritan liberals,’³ ‘gender fascists,’⁴ ‘thought police,’⁵ ‘easily-offended,’⁶ ‘snowflakes,’⁷ the ‘trans Taliban,’⁸ ‘enemies of liberty,’⁹ and ‘nuts.’¹⁰ Trans allies, meanwhile, have been called ‘bed-wetting “cheerleaders.”’¹¹

This all stems from a pervasive belief that the trans rights movement is trying ‘to advance their cause by stealth.’¹² Debate is supposedly anathema to trans campaigners, who would much rather gag their opponents with punitive new censorship laws that prohibit the utterance of anti-trans opinions.

None of this is borne out by evidence, but the average reader of mainstream news websites could be forgiven for thinking these ‘facts’ well-established. Barely a week passes without a new article decrying the erosion of free speech in the name of trans rights.

To understand why these lies are so prevalent in British media, we first have to understand how they became so dominant, and what purpose they serve to those who spout them.

Headline from Nigella Lawson’s column in The Times, 6 February 1996.

Nigella Lawson (yes, that Nigella Lawson) was one of the earliest authors to argue that trans people hated free speech in the pages of a national newspaper. In 1996, she penned an article that complained of the ‘sheer vitriol and threatening aggression’ of trans rights advocates who, Lawson believed, were incapable of accepting any other narrative than their own. ‘[E]ven while transsexuals complain about the intolerance that the rest of us have for them and their condition,’ she wrote, ‘it is they who are so intolerant.’¹³ The article was titled ‘Sex change operations don’t work.’ From the very beginning, freedom of speech in relation to the trans community was characterised mainly as the freedom to express uneducated beliefs about the personal lives of trans individuals. (Lawson later apologised for the transphobic comments she made in the 1990s).¹⁴

It was not until 2013, however, that the supposed trans threat to free speech gained ubiquity in British media coverage. This came about as a result of two transphobic articles published in December 2012 and January 2013. The first, by Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, was a searing personal attack on a trans school teacher, Lucy Meadows,¹⁵ who took her own life a few months later.¹⁶ The second, by feminist journalist Suzanne Moore, contained a throwaway line about ‘Brazilian transsexuals’ that trans readers interpreted as flippant and ignorant.¹⁷

The trans community’s backlash against these articles fueled a moral panic among cisgender journalists. Why, they pondered, could their colleagues not publish openly hateful and factually baseless material without consequence or criticism? Allison Pearson of the Daily Telegraph lamented that ‘poor Suzanne Moore’ had ‘incited the ire of transsexuals on Twitter,’ warning trans people: ‘this is Britain, not Communist China.’¹⁸ Libby Purves, meanwhile, defended Littlejohn in The Times: ‘You see where this is heading? Right into the hands of those who want a legally enforced code preventing any criticism of personal lives and professional choices.’¹⁹

Snippet from Libby Purves’ column in The Times, 25 March 2013.

Another milestone was reached in 2015, when Germaine Greer, an experienced transphobic feminist author, was subject to ‘no-platforming’ campaigns at a number of British universities where she was due to speak. This prompted a new obsession in the anti-trans press: left-wing students and their use of safe spaces and content warnings.²⁰ A nearly endless stream of articles was published in both right-wing and left-wing newspapers over the coming years, all portraying progressive students as enemies of free speech.²¹

Many newspapers uncritically sided with academics who complained of a ‘culture of fear’ created by student rebuttals to their transphobic comments.²² They often held the entire trans community responsible for any threats of violence or intimidation tactics leveled by unspecified individuals against anti-trans lecturers. The possibility that these academics were in any way to blame for creating a fearful environment for trans students was never considered.

Other tropes to emerge in these years include the aggression with which trans people supposedly ‘shut down debate’ on social media platforms like Twitter,²³ and the ‘silencing’ of cisgender women who speak out against the perceived erosion of their rights by trans-friendly legislation.²⁴ From mid-2020, writers also began to connect trans issues with white middle-class fears about ‘woke’ ideology and ‘cancel culture.’²⁵

By this point, one cannot escape a paradoxical observation. Look at the number of examples provided in the ‘Notes’ section at the end of this article. These represent a mere fraction of the hundreds of articles I have found. If trans people are shutting down debate and undermining free speech, why do transphobic authors maintain a near-total monopoly over the British press? Why can they publish transphobic article after transphobic article with impunity? Why are their newspapers not fined or banned, as they so often warn will happen? Why, if the primary objective of these writers is to promote ‘debate,’ do they almost never provide space for trans authors to issue rebuttals?

The answer is self-evident: the threat is purely imaginary. So, how do we explain the popularity of this most uncritical of critiques?

The panic over freedom of speech in the trans rights debate has taken on an essentially memetic quality. This means it does not require factual sustenance in order to reproduce. That the trans rights movement is a mortal danger to free speech is taken as axiomatic and therefore, ironically, beyond debate, leaving the door wide open for the unthinking duplication of a simplistic narrative that resonates with a broader societal distrust of ‘political correctness.’

Free speech discourse also acts as a cop-out for anti-trans authors. By focusing solely on the narrative that the trans community is ‘shutting down debate,’ they abrogate the need to engage directly with the immense volume of trans advocacy material already in circulation, or to encourage their bosses to publish views different to their own. Again, this is deeply ironic. Anti-trans public figures use the meme of ‘free speech’ and ‘open debate’ as a foil to avoid back-and-forth discussion — a tacit admission that they lack compelling arguments.

In fact, contrary to the claim that trans people want to end freedom of speech and punish all dissenters, it is transphobic arguments that are affecting real-world politics in ways that reduce some people’s autonomy of action. Various politicians in the Houses of Parliament have parroted the belief that university students lack ‘the spirit of liberty’²⁶ and that progressive discourses are having a ‘chilling effect’ on personal freedoms on campuses.²⁷ With no trans voices in Parliament to counter these claims, the political establishment has acted based on a severely one-sided perspective.

In February 2021, the UK Department for Education published a report titled ‘Higher education: free speech and academic freedom,’ in which the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, condemned ‘cancel culture’ and wrote that ‘even one no-platforming incident is too many.’²⁸ This report is part of a general trend in the Theresa May and Boris Johnson premierships towards regulating against ‘no-platforming’ and other perceived threats to free speech in universities.²⁹

These measures focus exclusively on the ‘rights’ of openly racist and transphobic speakers while ignoring the rights of student communities to have a say over which speakers they would like to see and hear on campus. Stipulations against ‘no-platforming’ are, in effect, a Government subsidy for a set of arguments that, in the open marketplace of ideas, are losing badly. The freedom of speech of all manner of bigots is elevated to a mandate that student bodies must give them a platform, even if the full extent of their bigotry was not known when they were originally invited to speak.

If this is the precedent that the Government wishes to set, then why not mandate that newspapers give space to trans voices? That would do far more to promote an even playing field. But then, of course, this has never been about freedom or debate. This is about control — control over the platforms of public discussion; control over the imaginations of those who pay only passing attention to trans issues; control over narratives; and control of the levers of power in the form of legislation and regulation.

Transphobes in the British media establishment are terrified of losing that control, and so, despite having all the cards in their hands, they feign victimhood. They scream ‘Debate Me!’ from the rooftops, all the while avoiding a debate that they are woefully unprepared for. As a direct result of that unpreparedness, they continue to lose ground at an astonishing rate in the field of public opinion. And this, of course, is somehow the fault of trans people.

So, I issue Britain’s transphobic journalists a challenge: Stop using your enormous loudspeaker to complain that you have no voice. Use it to present a new argument — not the same old apocalyptic nonsense about bearded men in women’s changing rooms,³⁰ trans indoctrination of poor little children,³¹ the end of sport as we know it,³² and serial rapists taking over women-only prisons.³³ Grow up. Read something. Listen to trans voices. Then, perhaps, there will be cause for trans people to enter into your precious ‘debate.’

Notes

1. Press for Change report, ‘Transsexual People and the Press: Collected Opinions from Transsexual People Themselves,’ November 2004, B.3.c.
2. Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Why taking offence is the new national sport,’ 17 January 2013.
3. Toby Young in The Spectator, ‘The rise of the puritan liberals,’ 27 April 2013.
4. Andrew Pierce in The Daily Mail, ‘I’ve had it up to here with these gender fascists!,’ 1 March 2017.
5. Dominic Sandbrook in The Daily Mail, ‘March of the thought police,’ 17 June 2017; Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, ‘It’s time to stand up to the transgender thought police,’ 17 October 2018.
6. Ross Clark in The Express, ‘Free speech is at risk from the easily-offended,’ 9 November 2018.
7. Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Thanks to snowflake students, winter is coming for free speech,’ 27 March 2019.
8. Julie Bindel in The Daily Mail, ‘Bullies threaten rights of all women,’ 20 December 2019.
9. Toby Young in The Mail on Sunday, ‘The enemies of liberty are hunting in packs. That is why we must band together and fight for free speech,’ 23 February 2020.
10. Piers Morgan in The Mail on Sunday, ‘How liberals made the world nuts,’ 27 September 2020.
11. Julie Burchill in The Spectator, ‘“A screaming, grievance-hawking shambles,”’ 22 February 2014.
12. The Times, ‘The Gender Trap,’ 10 December 2019.
13. Nigella Lawson in The Times, ‘Sex change operations don’t work,’ 6 February 1996.
14. Hayley Spencer in The Independent, ‘Nigella Lawson apologises for 1993 comments on person’s choice to have gender surgery,’ 9 September 2020.
15. Richard Littlejohn in The Daily Mail, ‘He’s not only in the wrong body… He’s in the wrong job,’ 21 December 2012.
16. Helen Pidd in The Guardian, ‘Lucy Meadows coroner tells press: “shame on you,”’ 28 May 2013.
17. Suzanne Moore in The New Statesman, ‘Seeing red: the power of female anger,’ 8 January 2013.
18. Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Why taking offence is the new national sport,’ 17 January 2013.
19. Libby Purves in The Times, ‘Even foaming dinosaurs deserve free speech,’ 25 March 2013.
20. Helen Lewis in The New Statesman, ‘What the row over banning Germaine Greer is really about,’ 27 October 2015; Simon Kehlner in The Independent, ‘Let Germaine Greer speak — whatever it is that she has to say,’ 28 October 2015; Frank Furedi in The Daily Mail, ‘Death of free speech,’ 31 October 2015; Nick Ferrari in Express Online, ‘Let’s hear it for Germaine Greer… now that’s something I thought I’d never say,’ 1 November 2015; Abbie Wightwick in WalesOnline, ‘Don’t gag Germaine Greer,’ 11 November 2015.
21. Chris Green in The Independent, ‘Political correctness: Debate over whether it has gone too far rages at universities from Cambridge to Yale,’ 14 November 2015; Nigel Nelson in The Mirror, ‘Why student bans on free speech will turn the world into the Dull Men’s Club,’ 14 November 2015; Matthew Reisz in The Times Higher Education Supplement, ‘Corrosion of conformity,’ 7 January 2016; Andrew Anthony in The Observer, ‘Are campus “safe spaces” a threat to free speech?,’ 24 January 2016; Ian Johnston in The Independent, ‘Peter Tatchell hits back at LGBT student leader’s “witch-hunt,”’ 14 February 2016; Fiona Meredith in The Belfast Telegraph, ‘Thought police on beat in a college campus near you,’ 17 February 2016; Helen Rumbelow in The Times, ‘Campus wars! Fighting the PC brigade,’ 9 March 2016; Rowan Pelling in The Telegraph, ‘Today’s neurotic, Orwellian gender politics have no place on University Challenge,’ 26 November 2016; Rana Foroohar in The Financial Times, ‘Campus wars,’ 23 September 2017; Fionn Hargreaves in MailOnline, ‘Universities that allow students to ban controversial speakers could face fines for failing to protect free speech,’ 19 October 2017; Brendan O’Neill in The Sun, ‘Time to stand up to stupid bans of the student Stasi,’ 6 February 2018.
22. The Guardian, ‘Letters: Academics are being harassed over their research into transgender issues,’ 16 October 2018; Oscar Quine in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Professor says criticism of “transphobic” comments is attack on free speech,’ 29 October 2018; Joanna Williams in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘Apparently I am too dangerous to be let loose on innocent students,’ 18 November 2018; Margarette Driscoll in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘“There is a real culture of fear in universities,”’ 12 May 2019; Andrew Billen in The Times, ‘“I’m terrified. I’m one slip of the tongue away from genuine trouble,”’ 15 July 2019; Margarertte Driscoll in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Hounded out for having the “wrong” thoughts,’ 14 September 2019; Camilla Turner in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Law professor lives in fear of transgender activist threats,’ 8 October 2019; Holly Bancroft in The Mail on Sunday, ‘Professor: Trans trolls are a threat to our democracy,’ 26 January 2020; Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Transgender ideology can have a “corrosive impact”, study claims,’ 1 July 2020.
23. Libby Purves in The Daily Mail, ‘Oh the irony! Even Stephen Fry hates the PC Twitter mob he helped created,’ 16 February 2016; Emily Kent Smith and Isabella Fish in The Daily Mail, ‘Twitter ban for saying men can’t be women,’ 31 May 2018; Graham Linehan in The Mail on Sunday, ‘Speaking out against transgender extremists has made me the most hated man on the Internet,’ 9 February 2020; Gillian Philip in The Daily Mail, ‘Death threats, vile abuse and how the woke Twitter mob has killed off basic human decency,’ 17 September 2020.
24. Helen Hendry in The Sun, ‘The gender agenda,’ 3 December 2017; Judith Green in The Spectator, ‘Why are women campaigners being silenced?,’ 10 March 2018; David Batty in The Guardian, ‘Transgender law reform has overlooked women’s rights, say MPs,’ 17 October 2018; Julie Bindel in The Daily Mail, ‘Bullies threaten rights of all women,’ 20 December 2019; Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, ‘Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced,’ 2 March 2020; Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph, ‘“It’s frightening that women can be just shut down,”’ 7 March 2020.
25. Nick Craven in The Mail on Sunday, ‘What it feels like to be cancelled,’ 12 July 2020; Tanya Gold in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘Much of “cancel culture” is unserious — but its effect on us all is deadly,’ 12 July 2020; Piers Morgan in The Mail on Sunday, ‘Let’s wake up and wipe out wokery!,’ 11 October 2020; Piers Morgan in The Sun, ‘When will the world wake up to woke?,’ 13 October 2020; David Maddox in Express Online, ‘Woke Britain sees record number of free speech complaints,’ 20 February 2021; Dominic Penna in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘Campus cancel culture hits “trans critical” speakers most,’ 21 February 2021.
26. House of Lords debate, 26 November 2015, Vol. 767, c. 852.
27. House of Commons debate, 17 May 2018, Vol. 641, cc. 226–227WH.
28. Department for Education report, ‘Higher education: free speech and academic freedom,’ February 2021, p. 5.
29. Rosemary Bennett in The Times, ‘Students told not to ban speakers for “transphobia,”’ 2 February 2019.
30. Janice Turner in The Times, ‘How do you solve a problem like men in women’s changing rooms, Maria?,’ 29 July 2017; George Grylls in The Times, ‘Women win guarantee over female-only public lavatories,’ 31 October 2020.
31. Paul Bracchi in The Daily Mail, ‘Mixed-up-5-year-olds and the alarming growth of the gender identity industry,’ 25 February 2012; Sanchez Manning and Stephen Adams in the Mail on Sunday, ‘NHS to give sex change drugs to 9-year olds,’ 18 May 2014.
32. Luke Coppen in The Spectator, ‘Unfair sex,’ 23 October 2010; Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph, ‘Trans-athletes challenge a taboo that is best left alone,’ 13 April 2018.
33. Janice Turner in The Times, ‘Trans rapists are a danger in women’s jails,’ 8 September 2018; Barbara Davies in The Daily Mail, ‘Sickening proof our prisons have finally lost the plot,’ 15 September 2018; Tim Newark in The Express, ‘This transgender madness is now a danger to women,’ 13 October 2018; The Guardian, ‘The Guardian view on the Gender Recognition Act: where rights collide,’ 17 October 2018.

An Injustice!