Thread by @ValoisDuBins

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley It catches on on the right in the US, but doesn’t make much progress in the centre. It’s wrapped up with anti-abortionism and right wingers banging on about Critical Race Theory.

But then something bad happens in the UK. 2/

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley This anti-trans rhetoric from the US infests the mumsnet talkboards.

Mumsnet has a middle class white audience.

So in the UK, transphobia becomes part of the mainstream media.

lux-magazine.com/article/the-ro…

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley The thing about being white and middle class (and straight) isn’t a culture war swipe. It matters because it spreads among people who have very little experience of being victimised or persecuted.

Many simply don’t recognise the rhetoric of demonisation. 4/

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley This includes a depressing number of journalists at the Guardian in the UK. Again, seeding it in the mainstream

A classic example is the radicalisation of ex Guardian hack Hadley Freeman.



Guardian US staff openly protest at GUK transphobia.5/x.com/tabitasurge/st…

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley It pulls in JK Rowling, mistakenly gripped by the idea she would have been transed because she hated being a girl. That’s not how being trans works though.

Rowling backs a woman called Magdalen Berns, a vicious transphobe who promotes Bilek’s antisemitic conspiracy theories 6/

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley And then all hell breaks loose.

And half the media class and more can’t grasp that one of their own nice white middle class types might actually be promoting a hard right wedge campaign against progressive rights. 7/

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley In the mean time for actual trans people, nothing had changed in the law. Nothing. The tories under May had been preparing a form of self-ID law (making administrative sex changes easier) that the SNP passed later.

Trans people had been using spaces as their gender for decades.8

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley It’s mad. The UK is now being named internationally in the same breath as Putin’s Russia on trans rights.



9/ (nearly there)itv.com/news/2022-01-2…

@cojojonudo @JaneyGodley What’s going is called a Moral Panic: a group is targeted as a societal threat based on a kind of mass hysteria. Very often, the claim is that women & children are under threat. But the threat is imagined.



It’s horrible, & it can’t end soon enough. /enden.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_pan…

@pamtsquirrel @cojojonudo @JaneyGodley If you need help, Pam, the answer is a round zero.