19 Backxwash: I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES

2020 #36

Dad can you help me afford transition?

Disowned through a cell phone

The look in his face, soul displaced

He don’t know me no more…

Mom says Fenty won’t make me a woman

I beat my cheekbones

Conceal a jawline

Harder than the block stood on by a P-Stone

Now these shawties really wanna fuck me

Trust me, I don’t even feel lucky

That’s the best I’ll get..

I am just dick to these hoes

Throw out my heart tie my stomach in knots

I am just dick to these hoes

Why do you always assume I’m a top?

I am just dick to these hoes

Until the government says that I’m not

I am just dick to these hoes

I’m just a dick to these hoes

TERROR PACKETS

Hey, thank God that we’re all OK with trans people now, right? I mean, as Joe Rogan – the world’s premier ‘friend’s older brother who lives in his Mum’s basement smoking weed and telling you how 9/11 was orchestrated by Prince Philip’ – said “there’s not a lot of overwhelming, overt discrimination against people who are trans, like, publicly other than the sports thing“. We all agree with that, right? We entered he ‘post-racial‘ era in, apparently, 1971, so it’s good that everyone and every public body is now so accepting and welcoming of trans people that we’re obviously entering some sort of ‘post-trans’ reality. So much so, in fact, that Mr Rogan has also pointed out that we’ve maybe gone too far. Two months after declaring transphobia dead, he bravely pointed out that “men transitioning to women use male tactics and male behaviour as they invade feminist spaces”, that they “tend to be more assertive,” and also “dominate whenever possible if left unchecked. [Trans women] use male tactics and male behaviour as they invade feminist spaces [and] dominate them like men do.” And you have to kind of admire that. The guy announces that transphobia, effectively, no longer exists, and then proceeds to continuously and aggressively make nakedly transphobic statements! That’s like, so meta, bro! The guy’s a genius!

But enough about he (apparently) loveable oafishness of the Bro King (and there are many more examples), was he correct? Is there no overt discrimination against trans people, bro? I mean, it depends on what you term as ‘overt’, bro. If you murder a trans person – 375 trans people were murdered last year, bro, the most since records began – is that, like, against the law, bro? Well, yeah, bro, so I guess that’s not allowed, so they’re pretty much fully protected. And we cancelled JK Rowling, didn’t we, bro? Although… she’s still at her shit… Didn’t we cancel her, like, eight or nine times already? Why won’t these cancellations stick, bro??

But earlier this year, there was a case that really struck me, and showed how insidiously anti-trans sentiments have invaded the mainstream. It was from the BBC, a news service people from other countries may struggle to understand how well trusted and valued they are in the UK. The publicly funded platform’s stated aim is “to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain“. They’ve been attacked by governments in the very recent past, as they attempt to present evidenced facts so impartial and unbiased. And the British public generally believe in that. There was a major wobble during Brexit, when neither side thought their views were being pandered to enough, but however high or lo general trust in the BBC waivers, it is consistently the country’s most trusted news source by a landfill.

Then, in October 2020, the BBC published a piece of poorly researched and blindly hateful article about trans women.

(By the way, that version of the article -which I can’t believe is still up on the website – has had many changes to it since its first publication. It actually used to be much worse)

It alleges that cis lesbians are being sexually assaulted by predatory trans women en masse. Of course, individuals can do gross things whatever their identity, but this article wasn’t focussing on individual cases (ha! We’ll get to that), but warning its readers that there is a swarm of degusting trans women who will sexually abuse you! First of all, the way the article is written and headlined is atrocious. Even if we just take it as read that one, two, or even a handful of trans women have pressured cis lesbians into sex, the way that it is being sold as some kind of movement is unacceptable. If it said ‘Some Jewish people are eating pick and mix sweets before paying for them’ or ‘Some Muslims are taking outside food into the cinema’, it would be called out for obvious race baiting, but we currently live in an environment – where “there’s not a lot of overwhelming, overt discrimination“, remember – where transphobia is still an acceptable form of discourse.

So what are these examples? Well, one woman was raped by a trans woman. That’s fucking disgusting, and by all means report on that one incident between two humans if you find any evidence to back it up. Another felt pressured into having sex with a trans woman at university. Again, gross. Another… splits up with her girlfriend because her girlfriend suggests a threesome with a trans woman…? OK. Cool. You do realise that not a single trans woman was involved in that? And… that’s pretty much it, the vast majority of the article is cis lesbians creating hypothetical situations and then explaining why they don’t want to have sex with trans people. I mean… fine… I don’t want to have sex with President Erdoğan, but I don’t think that’ the basis for a full article of me creating stories about him hypothetically raping me.

Oh, but there is a survey involved, thank God, I thought it was just naked hate speech backed up with no evidence. The survey is by Get the L Out, an openly anti-transgender group that argues that transgender people are somehow attacking lesbian rights. In the freaking introduction to the survey they quote Janice Raymond by stating “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves” – so existing as a trans woman counts as rape-, and the report refuses to correctly pronoun trans women. So, yeah, nice and unbiased sources there, BBC. I’m not even going to talk about the survey results, because they’re nonsense – based on eighty replies to a Tweet, from people who already followed Get the L Out and so were the most echoey of echo chambers.

There would be much to dump on this piece of shite – that the BBC should be ashamed to use as an actual journalistic source – including things like categorising being mistaken that a trans woman wasn’t female at birth as harassment, but let’s just leave it as an actual hate speech dumpster fire pathetically smouldering in the corner. The original version of the article also gave a lot of space, and a big lovely photo, to porn star Lily Cade’s thoughts on the issue. Lily Cade who has been accused of – and admitted – several instances of sexual assault, and later called for the lynching of every trans woman. Great sources, BBC, definitely checked them thoroughly, didn’t you?

Also, the writer claims that “In addition to Veronica Ivy, I contacted several other high profile trans women who have either written or spoken about sex and relationships. None of them wanted to speak to me but my editors and I felt it was important to reflect some of their views in this piece”. OK, that’s a shame that you weren’t able to gather any opposing viewpoints, and I would have maybe hung on to this piece of nonsense until I could, but such is life.

Except, that’s a massive and provable lie. Chelsea Poe, an extremely notable trans sex worker and activist, was interviewed for the piece. In fact, in that interview she even politely flagged up Lily Cade’s gross past deeds and suggested maybe not featuring her so prominently. The BBC didn’t feature her interview, lied about it ever taking place, and also featured Lily Cade prominently despite at that point knowing that she was a rapist.

Fuck, dudes, I really want to think best of the BBC here, really want to just attribute this absolute fucking junk piece of an article down to laughably poor journalism, but… come on. This was clearly written and published as a veiled as possible attack on trans people. They couldn’t have just not known about the hateful biases of the survey’s publishers, we know for a fact that they knew about Lily Cade’s discretions and centred her anyway because of how much she fit the narrative, and we know for a fact that they interviewed people who would have countered their bigoted assumptions, didn’t include them because it didn’t fit the bile already flowing, and then lied about it to make it sound like it was a proper piece of fucking journalism. Gross, hateful, bigoted garbage. We can do better, we must do better, and we’ve got a fucking looooooooooooooong way to go!

Or just listen to the outstanding new record by Backxwash, she continues to be fucking awesome, and I kind of go on a bit sometimes, don’t I?

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