The Morning Star has apologised for a cartoon which overtly dehumanised trans people. This had caused widespread concern at a time when anti-trans hate crime and hostility have been surging: morningstaronline.co.uk/article/apolog… /1
The Morning Star offers their apology on the basis that the cartoon was "offensive to trans people". Yet the primary reason many people are concerned about anti-LGBT hate is that it causes real harm in real people's lives - not simply that discrimination is "offensive". /2
Attacks such as this are not only "offensive to trans people" - when newspapers demonise and dehumanise the most marginalised groups within our society, everyone who supports human rights & opposes discrimination has a reason to be concerned. /3
As the @DangerousSpeech project highlights in this article: "Metaphors that identify other human beings as pests, deadly animals, reptiles, parasites, disease, filth, zombies, or demons, are extremely dangerous rhetorical devices" dangerousspeech.org/dangerous-meta… /4
@dangerousspeech During the 1930s, the Nazi newspaper "Der Stürmer" systematically demonised Jewish people through a campaign in which dehumanising imagery was a recurrent theme: research.calvin.edu/german-propaga… /5
@dangerousspeech The link between dehumanisation and violence has been so common that Genocide Watch has identified it as one of the 8 Stages of Genocide: genocidewatch.net/2013/03/14/the… /6
@dangerousspeech More background here on why hate speech is a problem and why it's not simply about what people find "offensive": stopfundinghate.info/about-the-camp… /7
