The following piece was written before the news of Brianna Ghey's murder in Warrington.
This event was an inevitability given the daily, never-ending, obsession of the media on the existence and validity of trans people in the UK - an important of the US Right's playbook of distraction. That's whether it's those on the Right who write many pieces every single day pushing this faux-panic to their audiences, like in print The Times, The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and on TV/radio GB News and TalkTV, or those portrayed by those in the aforementioned outlets as 'on the left' like the BBC and The Guardian, who have gone along with this moral panic, to soothe the fears of their white, cis-hetero 'liberal' audience. The news of a trans girl being killed was met, unsurprisingly, either by erasure of her identity being in any way noteworthy, or like The Times did, deadname and degender her, or effectively ignoring it all together, as according to their YouTube page, GB News did, although they did have the time to do and post two anti-trans segments on the same day, amongst other topics outside the scope of this piece that had over half-a-dozen each.
They were never good, and only saw us as something of an inconvenience in the good times, but the UK media are almost universally rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ now. There is no end in sight either, as it's a 'winning' strategy for the ruling class distracting the normies from their lives and future being made worse by these ghouls. That I used links to two, of all places, American articles in this section should tell you all you need to know about them.
Rest in Power, Brianna. One day, we will have true, long-lasting liberation for trans people, and for all. One day.
One of the key components of the Right's propaganda discourse is to use a lone non-white or non-straight, or even in some cases, non-cisgender, person to smooth over their political 'values'. This isn't anything particularly new, but it is a way of - especially in a time where conservatism and its accompanying hierarchies under neoliberalism are under threat and scrutiny from the masses, due to their own life progressively getting worse - smoothing any hang-ups that people who either are in a minority community (whether BIPOC, LGBTQ+ or non-Christian religious) or who support them, would have normally for 'traditional' conservatism, by convincing them by saying things that (today at least) aren't coming from the 'mainstream' that their 'vision' and 'values' are compatible with yours. Even if, in practice, they are antithetical to yours and are actually to ensure the continuation of those same systems listed above.
In the UK, since 2021, we have gained two what would be charitably called 'right-leaning' 'news' channels - Rupert Murdoch's TalkTV, in April 2022, and prior to that GB News, in June 2021, which is now fully backed by a hedge fund chairman and a Dubai-based private investment fund group. So clearly both they and this channel are on "the side of the common man". GBN (as styled in the on screen logo and microphones) is run by Angelos Frangopoulos, the man who previous ran Murdoch's Sky News Australia, introducing the infamous "Sky After Dark" prime-time shows that brought in conservative talking heads to give their opinion every night.
One of the earliest shows on GBN (and given the incredible amount of turnover in staff and programming, surprisingly still on air nearly unaltered) is called 'Free Speech Nation'. It's hosted by 'comedian' (one of many this channel employs) Andrew Doyle, who is one of many of the 'free speech absolutists' in this sphere. He regularly states that words and symbols cannot cause violence in and of themselves, and implies a version of 'free speech' where it's not just that you should be allowed to say whatever you want with no consequences for doing so (even interpersonally, let alone at a governmental or corporate level), but also - like others do too now in this grift machine - that you must also sit and listen to them too.
This is especially funny when the guy clearly institutes mass block lists on Twitter, given as someone who has never interacted with him (or any other GBN contributors) on the platform, I discovered after many others said they were blocked by him, that yours truly had also proactively blocked me - either by association with someone else or their tweets, or through my tweets or bio.
RIP me I guess. (ALT: a screenshot of XLCChelt discovering they had already been blocked by Doyle (andrewdoyle_com), taken from their tweet about it happening of 9th May 2022)
This is doubly ironic when you realise the guy's first authored book is called "Free Speech And Why It Matters" - which obviously mine, and many others who've never even once come into contact with him, have had withdrawn by himself. According to his Wikipedia page, Doyle says he's "left-wing" (even as his show will skew heavily in favour of criticising the 'woke left'), but more important to this particular post is that he is gay. A friendly gay to the 'gender critical' anti-trans movement, as the show will regularly platform to have friendly 'interviews'. And heavily on it in the same show - as the two examples I use will show.
Now, before I talk about two episodes that clearly show the agenda being pushed, these channels on TV do rarely get even 100,000 viewers. So the question you may be asking me is - why care what they've got to say? It's because on social media, when they post clips of anti-woke, anti-social justice, anti-trans or anti-gay segments, these are the ones that do by far the greatest viewership, and these numbers allow these messages to be spread much wider than the 'live' audience would do. It's also, for me at least, comforting to know, in a world where we individually have no power or influence, what the Right are planning to unleash next (usually it comes from America).
A screenshot of the GB News YouTube page attached to my tweet of 30th January 2023, with added arrows to three videos showing this show's obsession with transgender people, titled "Nicola Sturgeon 'not being honest' over transgender bill, Andrew Doyle says", "Teacher FIRED for questioning student's pronouns" and "Transgender prisoner row: Scottish Prison Service pauses movement of trans inmates"
This show had eight sections, and the anti-trans push begins right off the drop with Doyle's opening monologue, where he rants about Nicola Sturgeon over her assertion that the Gender Recognition Reform Act (blocked by the UK Tories to continue their own anti-trans discourse) will not be used by people faking being trans to get into women's spaces. This is over the Isla Bryson case - a transgender woman who was convicted of rapes committed before they announced they were transitioning to a woman, and sparked massive media panic over the possibility a rapist would end up in a women's prison.
Of course, the GRRA can't possibly be involved in this case at all - given Bryson said she was transitioning in 2020 - as unless they have some sort of psychic powers, this law, which took six years to get to the 'end', would 'save' them in some way. And after this episode aired, Sturgeon caved in to the reactionaries, saying they were "almost certainly" faking being trans. Which meant after all that energy herself and the proponents expended, she decided to just straight up throw trans people and their allies under the bus. It's just another example of to never revere politicians and how "politics" will never liberate minority communities, when the politicians will change what they believe for whatever is most expedient to their career.
Following this segment, two more 'comedians' Leo Kearse - a regular on this channel, so much so it makes me wonder how he can ever do his 'comedy' stands, but that's his business I guess - and Heydon Prowse continued the 'discussion' off the monologue. Kearse at least says he's a conservative, unlike many of the supposed 'lefties' stated amongst this troupe of comedians on the channel - I have no idea about Prowse's politics. But they all agreed that 'something has to be done about trans women getting into (real) women's spaces'. So that's neatly wrapped up. Everyone agrees, so I guess that's sorted.
15 minutes on - including two advert breaks - we're on to the second segment (these segments I'm calling the "trans (people) are evil" segments, by the way, as they are all anti-trans in many ways). As described by Doyle, this is the second time 'Free Speech Nation' have featured the story of this guy, Kevin Lister. How he is unwilling to use different pronouns for a then 17-year-old student in his class, and was then dismissed from his job as a teacher in a Swindon school, because he's worried about "social transition". That is literally the first step of affirming transgender identity, and if you can't pass that bar you at best believe it's a 'lifestyle' choice, and more likely you don't believe it should ever be allowed, whatever the age. Let alone demanding the ability to out an LGBTQ+ young person to a possibly anti-trans family in an environment where conservatives, whether media, politics, or the pundit-sphere, are actively targeting LGBTQ+ people.
We have to wait for after the news break at the top of the 8 o'clock hour before the third segment, which was probably the most enlightening to this whole discussion. It was a second segment on the "trans women in women's spaces" 'debate' that Doyle's monologue was on, and was a nice, friendly discussion with Kate Coleman of 'Keep Prisons Single Sex'. I'd suggest not checking this segment out, given Coleman made it a point to deliberately misgender people from the start, holding on to the phrase 'sex-based pronouns' as the way to invalidate any trans existence. The interesting section of this segment (at 1:04:43) was when Doyle, feigning 'objectivity' lightly asked her to respond to the charge from critics that she and her whole organisation existed solely for being anti-trans. She never answered it. Instead she immediately deflected by saying "we (both meaning herself and KPSS, and herself and Doyle) are always called transphobic, racist, homophobic..."). Doyle unsurprisingly given he often says this too, agreed with her, and that was that. The question was never meant to be answered - it was there solely to set-up the talking point that critics using those words to describe something are always based on malice and not objectivity.
The final segment of the four occurs in the second 'news discussion' segment between the three 'comedians', when one of the questions magically chosen by an audience member referred to the alleged transgender prisoner who wanted to identify as a baby. This 'story' was shared by 'sources' to the Daily Record (and then spread wider by the Daily Mail and Daily Express). Even more incredibly, the original story was posted to the Record's website on 9th April 2022! So why has this story reappeared nine months later in the aforementioned newspapers and on GBN? Because it fits neatly into their agenda. None of their audience will care it happened nine months ago. And the bigger question I have is, is it even true? But the audiences of these newspapers and this (and the other) right-wing opinion 'news' channel don't care. They, having been constantly told by them that this is true, see trans people as illegitimate and a threat to 'normal' people, and even if it was proven false, they wouldn't care. "It probably has happened somewhere else we just don't know or haven't been told about".
(In researching this long-form blog, I also discovered the "left-wing rag" Daily Mirror even got involved in this by regurgitating the nine-month-old report, again asserting its veracity. This just shows how skewed the whole of the media in the UK is to the Right.)
Now, having three whole segments and part of a fourth you will be expecting the amount of time spent on anti-trans pieces is extremely high. And even knowing the agenda of this show and this channel I was shocked when I calculated the length. Taking the time from the web stream copy of it, I removed the time spent in advert breaks and for the news at the top of each hour. In fact, I was probably generous as I kept in the intros/outros to each break, so probably could have removed two, maybe three minutes.
What we know from the results of the 2021 Census in England and Wales - which for the first time asked an optional pair of questions on sexual orientation and gender identity (and given what has followed since, makes me wonder if we'll even make it to the next one) - is that the non-cisgender population is 0.57% (when removing the "not answered"; 0.54% with them included). This episode's anti-trans segments came to a staggering 37 minutes, 24 seconds. The overall length of the show was 80 minutes, 59 seconds. That means this episode attacked both the existence and the safety of a niche population in this country for 46.2% of the time! (and if I hadn't been so generous on including intros/outros to breaks, it would have been around 48%)
That shows what this show is really about - weaponising their audience against minority groups, which for now the Right have decided trans people will get the best results for them, who they say have all the power yet have none when the majority can whip any ground they've been given away from them with a stroke, to find a target to deflect away their fears and anger at the world conservatives (social and economic) have built and overwhelmingly still run onto someone else.
It should alarm and anger everyone who supports the LGBTQ+ community. Because they use the same language as the gay panics of the 20th Century (which the anti-trans lot have moved into already, as I write this), who will they choose to pick on once they've finished off the transgender people?
Timestamps for all the segments from the archived web stream of this episode (linked at the top of this section), if you want to check or fact-check me.
As scary as that seems, I do not know if that first episode is even the most extreme example of the "trans are evil" agenda this show pushes.
I had though previously posted about what this show's content on YouTube was pushing back in October 2022. This time four out of the six segments posted to the page were anti-trans.
A screenshot of the GB News YouTube page attached to my tweet of 10th October 2022, with added arrows to four videos showing yet again this show's obsession with transgender people, titled "CPS proposes 'watered down' guidance on deception as to sex in rape and sexual assault cases", "LGB Alliance: 'About protecting the rights & interests of those with same-sex sexual orientation'", "Should 16-year-olds be allowed to change their gender?" and "Andrew Doyle on Mermaids: 'Regressive, reactionary, and a danger to those they purport to help'".
So you may say "that's only one episode" - however I had already tweeted about this show's obsession on trans people back in October 2022, so I went back and checked out this episode too.
This episode only had six sections, and no news breaks (whether that was standard or a one-off I don't know). And like the first example above, immediately it begins with the opening monologue and the ensuing discussion with more 'comedians' Scott Capurro (who plays the typecast "gay for laughs" role) and Francis Foster. It starts with a diatribe against the trans youth charity Mermaids. Now there have been some very perturbing issues around safeguarding amongst some staff. However, whilst that examination by the Charity Commission (seemingly only instigated by them after Mermaids brought a case against LGB Alliance's own charitable status) is of course included, this monologue is mostly about arguing that minors can never be trans because of their age. They
can't understand gender identity (or as once again is used here 'gender ideology').
This line is once again a direct corollary to gay people, where anti-gay people have, and still do, argue that there is no such thing as a gay child. It leads to the long-time position held by these people - that being gay, and now being trans, is a 'lifestyle' choice and not an innate held identity. That then leads to the 'trying to turn kids gay' by simply existing 'talking point', and makes it a lot easier to remove any rights and societal acceptance these groups have struggled to get, if you can convince the masses that it isn't a 'valid' state, unlike being cisgender, and heterosexuality. And Doyle even admits this is very similar, but instead twists this as being a continuation of homophobia.
This monologue then morphs into a defense of 'gender critical feminists' like JK Rowling and Helen Joyce, and how they are just women who want to secure 'sex-based rights' and how they've been called 'transphobes' and 'bigots', despite "never being transphobic".
This the same Rowling, who wrote a 4000 word blog that is held-up by anti-trans influencers, groups, and politicians as the opus for their 'righteous' pursuit of attacking the existence, validity and right to live of trans people to this day, to 'protect women from being attacked and erased'. The same one who will target through screenshots, tagging, and quote-retweeting LGBTQ+ people every day on her account, and who, to me it seems, wakes up every morning working out a quota of how many random accounts she'll go after today.
This the same Joyce, who in a podcast called trans people "a huge problem to a sane world". Another woman who clearly has "never been transphobic" and only speaks to 'maintain sex-based rights'. And to be honest, they don't even need to do anything themselves now. They've got large enough fan bases online, that they know will do anything without them ever saying direct words (which as we know from Doyle aren't violent ever anyway). And there are other anti-trans 'influencers' out there that either dog-whistle much louder than these two, or just outright say they want to eliminate at first trans people and their allies from society, and then maybe extend it to other 'LGB' people later.
That's not to say they themselves don't get harassment or even threats every day online either. But any and all harassment is always framed as being from trans people or more often trans-affirming supporters, when even if it has 'obvious' signs of being an account where the person or group is one of those two, the anonymity of the internet means people can just make up their online persona to assert you're supporting one side, when it is actually being done to purposefully harm that same side.
The second segment is the ensuing discussion between the three 'comedians', and it morphs even further into - yep, you guessed it - the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, and how self-ID is going to hurt (cis) women in 'female safe spaces' because 'predators will be able to go straight in and attack them'. Of course, every trans person today has to "self-ID" their own identity to even begin to transition, whether socially or medically. No-one has to show a certificate to enter 'female' spaces like toilets and changing rooms as it is today. Especially if you do have a man wanting to chase a woman into a space with a female symbol on the door to assault them.
But they don't want you to realise all of those facts, nor the biggest of them all - the society the ruling classes have designed for themselves to benefit from at the expense of the rest of them, enforces and promotes the power imbalances we have today between men and women (let alone different groups along racial or hetero-/homosexual lines), that means that many men see themselves as the 'dominator' at the top of the hierarchy. When there is no understanding of a common humanitarian 'mission', other than to make money (usually sending it upwards to the capitalist class), it's no shock that people decide they need to do violence to others to keep their place in that hierarchy 'safe'.
And I'm pretty certain none of the people who say this want the radical changes that our world needs to rectify all these ills, as they make a lot out of upholding all the systems in place. So it's much easier for them to find villains - whether that is criminals who assault women, or trans people - to say 'that's the reason your life is so bad'. And instead of even attempting to end it, the cycle of inter-gender violence will sadly go on.
The third segment is a puff piece interview with Bev Jackson at the Conservative Party Conference, promoting the LGB Alliance, which was to promote both the menace of 'gender ideology' and how it's actually good to 'split Ts from LGBs' as 'gender identity is so different to sexual orientation. Even though Ts can of course be LGB too, under either my correct definition of a trans person (trans men are men, trans women are women), or their incorrect one which if we accept it immediately invalidates trans people as being a real thing, especially if you also subscribe to there being "only two genders".
But of course, this organisation - in my opinion - is a pretty obvious Trojan horse, given its promotion by conservatives, to split the LGBTQ+ community in two, create as much in-fighting between us as possible, and then make it easy for lawmakers from the Right to remove all our rights later on. And they've done a pretty good job at that already, if the number and the persistence of online GC gays are to be believed.
The final segment was on some supposed new Crown Prosecution Service guidance on when to prosecute on rape and sexual assaults, where the gender identity was to be taken into account first or something. Boring stuff to me as someone who won't be offending, but more liberal usage of 'gender identity ideology' followed, with infamous Twitter-botherer Dennis Kavanagh the obvious legal voice to bring on for this show.
So the final segment length was a symmetrical 33 minutes, 33 seconds, in a show length of 104 minutes, 42 seconds, for a percentage of 32.0%. Now even though it's 'much' lower than the other example, many pundits in this right-wing reactionary ecosystem, and including Doyle himself, love to talk about moments of 'over-representation' by BIPOC or LGBTQ+ in media, whether TV, film or newsprint. And so this is a clear example of this show 'over-representing' LGBTQ+ and especially trans people. It would require a whole year before they ever talked about trans people again, let alone for the constant criticism ever segment this show puts out involving them has, which is in turn attempted to be masked to the audience by the sneaky concern-trolling. So it seems that it's fine for them to 'over-represent' us in a bad light all the time, and just not when it's the 'liberal' media that does it.
Again, the timestamps for all the segments from the archived web stream of this episode (linked at the top of this section), if you want to check or fact-check me.
And look, I know, these still are only two examples. Maybe these are the extremes. The rarity. So let's take a look at the YouTube playlist for the show. On the day I'm writing this part of the post (12th February), there are 560 videos in it. You can immediately remove 61 of them as they are archive VODs of the live stream of the episodes, and another 20 from the show's accompanying podcast. So now there are 479 videos that are segments from the show, that the social media editors have put on YouTube.
Now, by just using text search, let me show what some connected words reveal. Starting with "trans" (and including extensions like "transgender" or "detransition"), and you find 30 individual videos just from the title name. Now add "gender", as in "gender identity 'ideology'", and you will find there are 21 additional unique videos. So just from those two 'talking point' terms, there are 51 videos, totalling many hours of 'content', purposefully designed to promote anti-trans discourse. That's over 10% of all the videos!
This seemingly is what the 'Free Speech' in the show's title is actually about - telling, and having the ability to tell, trans people that at best you will never be seen as being equal to cis people, and at worst they will never be seen as real.
So why do the Right use people from minority communities as "The Good Ones" when they've historically despised and legislated away BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people? It is of course, obvious. It's for the 'aesthetics'. If you can convince the apathetic normie that this person is representative of the 'true majority' of that community, and what they're telling you isn't going to upend your life or the status quo in any material way - unlike those "radical woke Marxist 'trans rights activists'", who want to call you a 'transphobe' and 'bigot' because you get creeped out at the thought of trans people existing. You can keep what you perceive as a 'comfortable', 'safe', 'secure' life AND keep the aesthetic you want to have that you are being kind to gay and trans people - 'the good ones' at least, unlike that other mob. Once you hook them on that, you can then guide them to other more conservative policies - the main one for the capitalist class being the continuation of the hierarchies and, the rapidly failing, capitalism itself.
And of course under capitalism, using your own community for your own benefit by promoting conservative 'talking points' to push that group down is not only pretty common (see Candace Owens and Dave Rubin), it is both lucrative given the capitalists will fund you whatever it takes to make sure they're unaffected, but under our hierarchical systems, it is promoted. You have power and influence now, and the only way to maximise the chance of you keeping it that way is to make sure other people aren't able to come up and grab it off you. And obviously, I cannot see inside the minds of any of the people mentioned in this post as to whether any of them truly 'believe' what they say in public. They could quite easily say and do the exact opposite in private. But 'believing' something doesn't make it 'good' or right for humanity. And in practice, their public words and actions will always have a much greater affect on others, it doesn't even matter.
It doesn't mean that they're immune now they're currently "The Good One". Rubin was 'welcomed' when he became a 'conservative gay', but they were soon fine attacking him – including many of the biggest right-wing 'influencers' online – just because he posted that he and his husband were having two surrogate babies. Another is Caitlyn Jenner. She is 'accepted' when she is brought onto Fox News to talk about anti-woke issues (seemingly her specialty), but when she moves off that narrative into more 'moderate' positions - well the audience soon remind her what they think of her transgender identity. And this goes wider than LGBTQ+ personalities – DailyWire co-founder Ben Shapiro found this out when he mildly chastised Ye/Kanye West for his “I Love Hitler” rant on Alex Jones's show. Shapiro's own fans turned around and accused him of selling out via deeply anti-semitic tropes on 'who holds the real power in the world' and the like.
But even then, they are still gaining monetarily for their 'service' despite any, often fleeting, spells of backlash. And those at the top will likely be 'fine' once the Right have 'used' them for what they're promoting – they'll have got enough wealth and privilege from doing what they did over the years, that even though they will likely be silenced but otherwise they'll be untouched in the 'fascist revolution' (fascism is the inevitable end-state of failing or 'late-stage' capitalism, as the capitalist class will always choose it, as it allows capitalism to continue, even if temporarily before the ever-growing state ex-propriates it, whether 'legally' or violently, over any anti-capitalist movement - whether communist, socialist or anarchist - where they're guaranteed to have it removed immediately, unless they can manipulate the masses to remove them before they do). They may even be permitted to continue with their 'lifestyle' as long as it's done behind closed doors, and as long as they don't speak out against or otherwise stain their overlords' plans for their rigid society.
I don't care honestly what happens to those who benefitted from being a part of the grift machine. The ones I fear for their future are the 'hangers on' from minority communities who have been suckered into their ecosystem, that are just regular, often usually apathetic 'apolitical' normies, who bought into the 'culture war', and promote the right-wing discourse, purposely designed by them to divert attention to make sure the hierarchies and systems are maintained. Their place is at best to be assimilated into maintaining it and repressing and never sharing their gay or trans-ness in society and with the world, and at worst be exterminated from existence. They will in the end get harmed the same way as us "bad gays". But it's looking like they 'enjoy' feeling like they have a place they can change things - even if it's actually 'for the worse'. So instead they'll only realise their role in just being a useful soldier, and their true situation when it's too late, and that their purpose in the 'war' was in fact just to weaponise their own existence.
To finish with this blog - and I know it is long, and I may have rambled or over-analysed in some parts, so I thank you if you did read all this way - I know going into writing this piece that I'm not going to make even a small shift, let alone a seismic shift in understanding on the situation the Right are attacking us with, with just some words on this screen alone. What the real game they're playing for is. I am insignificant in this world, nothing, and I know few people will ever see this post's mere existence. And even if by some surprise some larger online account likes it and promotes it on further, alone I don't have the power or a way to gain influence to overpower their discourse. At most I will make a couple of hundred pounds in a good month, whereas the people backing this media 'project' have tens of millions to sink into promoting their hard right agenda on to mostly apathetic people, who are often disinterested in our struggle and have no skin in the game to care for the outcome.
But I hope for the few who do see this, some who may have been on the fence or even already be falling through the 'centrist-to-hard right pipeline', that I have shown that these are not simply "honest people with honest questions". They are obsessing over a non-issue to propagandise to you and more importantly distract you from the real issues that their worldview of conservatism and capitalism is doing to your life and your future every day. That they're constantly attacking one of the most marginalised group in our world, and diverting your anger at the world by portraying them as the villain, the enemy within, and the ones who are actually ruining your existence. And that the use of the "one good gay" as one of the main purveyors of it is deliberate. It's to make it out to you, the "enlightened centrist", that "supports the gays" that the trans people and especially the 'TRAs' amongst them and their cisgender supporters, are clearly the extreme ones if 'even a gay person is saying they are'. And not the mainly cis and straight promoters of this rhetoric who are actually trying to remove them from being a normal, regular part of this society the ruling class has forced on us, as if they're a perversion to what humanity should be.
Thanks again for reading all the way through to the end if you did. If you have any thoughts that add to what I've written here, or think that I have strayed from the correct path during this long opinion piece, please let me know.
Love you all. Peace.
Paul.
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