THE DAILY FAIL
‘NHS told to give out £5,000-a-year lifestyle drug to prevent HIV as vital cataract surgery is rationed’, read a Daily Mail splash on PrEP in 2016. ‘The skirt on the drag queen goes swish swish swish: trans classes for kids age 2’, led The Sun in a 2017 report on Drag Queen Storytime. (If Drag Race has taught us anything, it’s that too many drag queens are gay men.)
And the big one: ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’. When published online by the BBC last October, those nine words (and the excessive 3,000+ that followed) made for some of the most inflammatory reading in recent memory. And while the Mail, The Sun and the BBC are hardly alone in publishing increasingly confrontational LGBTQ+ content — The Telegraph, The Times and even The Guardian are also common culprits — few articles have epitomised the problem so perfectly, or travelled as far, as this one.
In the article, journalist Caroline Lowbridge asked: “Is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners — then shunned and even threatened for speaking out.”
“My trans friends in the media and I are emotionally exhausted”
Among those ‘speaking out’ was lesbian porn actor Lily Cade — who, it later emerged, had published transphobic blogs calling for trans women to be “lynched”. (Her contribution to the piece was later removed.) The article was slammed as flimsy, sensationalist and irresponsible by many, with facts and data relating to a questionnaire seemingly completed by a small number of cis women.
Some 20,000 people called for the BBC to apologise. It didn’t. Instead, a statement issued to Attitude read in part: “The article looks at a complex subject from different perspectives and acknowledges it is difficult to assess the extent of the issue. It includes testimony from a range of different sources and provides appropriate context. It went through our rigorous editorial processes.”
Charlie Craggs, a filmmaker who is trans, and director of BBC Three documentary , tells : “My other trans friends in the media and I are emotionally exhausted. There are so few of
