It is not a new insight to say that bigots always tell on themselves. The reasons they give for their bigotry never hold up to scrutiny, either in how they align with measurable reality, or in how they align with the actions of those bigots. For one glaring example, white supremacy in the United States has always leaned heavily on the idea of “protecting white women” from the violence and sexuality of non-white (usually black) men. At the same time, the people who lean so heavily on this narrative regularly deride the concept of rape culture, and are openly hostile toward efforts to hold white rapists accountable for their crimes. Regardless of what they might say, their actions indicate that they care more about non-white men being seen as a threat to white women than they are about the safety or wellbeing of those women. Because that justifies the policies and cultural norms that they want.
A similar pattern emerges when we look at anti-immigrant rhetoric, as is well illustrated in this Lonerbox video about the recent moral panic about “Muslim grooming gangs”:
For those who didn’t watch the video, the prevalence of the problem was grossly, deliberately inflated, and the term “grooming gang” was defined in such a way that it excluded the vast majority of sexual assault committed against children. Once again, the stated concern for the white victims of non-white assailants is not visible in their actions. What’s important to people like Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad is that the group in question be seen as a threat, because that justifies bigoted laws and violence.
When the struggle for gay rights began to attract more attention, gay men were all accused of being pedophiles, and the narrative was that they had to be oppressed to protect the children. Even leaving aside the children being murdered around the world by the U.S. government, this lie was being told at the same time as the Roman Catholic Church was shuffling rapists around to protect and enable them, and other homophobic religious organizations had similar problems.
The goal wasn’t to protect children, it was to maintain bigotry and oppression. The children were just useful rhetorical tools.
It’s a story that repeats over and over again – bigotry against a group is justified with lies about the evils of that group, while the supposed victims are ignored.
And so we come to the BBC’s latest efforts at upholding the UK’s reputation as “TERF Island”.
The overall moral panic about trans people has never been about the supposed harm they do, because that harm doesn’t really exist. The same people who wail and wring their hands over the “danger” of trans women having access to toilets routinely ignore the much greater threats posed by cis men, and in the case of this article, by cis women. In their eagerness to paint trans women as rapists, the BBC chose to use an admitted rapist as a source, who then went on to call for trans people to be murdered.
Because bigots always tell on themselves. They find something “icky” and work backwards from that. They think they should have rights over another group and they work backward from that. The state of oppression, repression, and demographic hierarchy is the goal. It’s the “lifestyle” they want to protect. It’s where they feel safe from people and perspectives that scare them.
That’s not to say they don’t believe their own bullshit. I think most of them do believe it, but debunking a lie doesn’t tend to change anything, because the lie wasn’t the reason for their hatred – it was a justification to prevent you from calling them what they are, and to obstruct efforts at building a more just society.
Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Nonbinary people are valid.
And bigots lie to hide their bigotry.
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Mild disagreement. In the case of catholic pedopriests and with the BBC protecting Jimmy Savile, it was misdirection. They blamed others for the crimes they were enabling rapists to commit, which is the same thing happening now.
Projection seems to be tool number one in the bigot kit. Fundies accusing people of persecuting xtians while they try to force xtianity on everyone, fash du jour screaming about pedos while every platform they’ve acquired has been drenched in child porn, etc.
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Good examples here of seeing what you’re predisposed to see.
Re: grooming gangs. First of all: I don’t give a shit what Carl Benjamin thinks about, well, anything. That being said upfront: newspapers – particularly the Murdoch press – can’t reasonably be expected to have a sense of proportion. It’s the 21st century and they thrive on clicks. So: they blow issues out of proportion, obviously. They lie, obviously. Anyone, myself included, who has had ANY connection to a story that makes the national press knows how little the “story” has to do with the truth. That said: don’t even fucking try to tell someone who grew up in Rotherham in the 90s (e.g. my wife) that there isn’t/wasn’t a specific issue with groups of mainly (but not exclusively) Pakistani (and therefore obviously mainly Muslim) men in that town preying on young working class girls. The videographer is at least honest enough to list a half dozen other towns besides where this was a recognised issue… and the issue absolutely is NOT just that it’s brown men doing the raping and there’s concern because racism.
For starters: “just” 56 convictions. Not many, says the videographer, in a country of 60 million people. Except it’s 56 convictions in a half dozen towns or so. This isn’t an evenly spread problem, it’s concentrated in a very few specific areas and comparing it to the entire population of the country is extremely disingenuous. Compare it to the population of the half dozen or so towns where it was recognised as a problem, and 56 stops sounding so few.
Worse: it’s the fact that it’s specifically organised. It’s not 56 completely unconnected perps. Society recognises that organised crime is qualitatively different, and somehow worse, than unconnected incidents. It’s not bigoted to claim the Mafia exists and it’s mainly Italians doing the Mafiaing, and almost entirely in places with large Italian immigrant populations. Not many people called Jimmy the Squirrel are getting whacked in South Dakota, it’s safe to say, compared to, for instance, Queens. And obviously the vast majority of murders nationally are NOT Mafia-related, but that doesn’t mean being concerned about the Mafia makes you racist.
Third: 56 convictions. Not many, as he said. Except: it’s an article of faith, is it not, that for every successful rape conviction there are dozens of prosecutions that fail, maybe hundreds that never make it to trial, THOUSANDS that are never even reported for a host of reasons. Didn’t he get the memo about this? Or does it just not fit his narrative? How many convictions of people proven to have operated as part of an organised gang raping young women would it take to make this guy think there was something of a problem that deserved some special attention? It’s astonishing to hear someone ostensibly of the woke left talking about how there are too few rape convictions for it to be something worth worrying about.
Next: the BBC article. I didn’t go into it predisposed to see anti-trans bigotry, and it’s accurately stated that there weren’t even that many cases in the story of the line from the headline, i.e. people talking about being pressured into sex by trans women. But it struck me hard that this was a very, very bad headline on a story that had a different point. The headline should have read: “Women being coerced into sex are afraid to report it for fear of being labelled bigots – and they’re right to be afraid”. And indeed basically every time I’ve seen the BBC story discussed, within two or three contributions someone has popped up to condemn the victims of sexual coercion as transphobic bigots (and while they’re at it quite often to say “but what do you expect? It’s the UK, TERF central”).
That bears repeating: LGBT people who were coerced into sex and were reticent to report it are attacked when they do… not by the “it ain’t natural” knuckle-draggers or the “what’s the matter darlin’, you love it really” toxic MRAs, or even Bod forbid the cops, but by other LGBT people policing their language and even personal sexual preferences. You couldn’t make it up.
Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Nonbinary people are valid.
And nobody who is coerced into having sex should fear reporting it.
One more thing: the association of gay men with paedophiles. You can of course in part blame the right wing press and conservatives. But it is either disingenuous or simply the ignorance of youth to leave out the contributions of a relatively small group of paedophiles themselves, who saw in the gay rights movement of the 1970s a potential opportunity to try to get themselves legal too. They publicly connected their campaign to abolish the age of consent entirely to the gay rights movement, and in my opinion definitely harmed the cause of gay rights as a result.
I’m old enough to remember, dimly and from when I was a kid myself, the existence and media profile of the “Paedophile Information Exchange”, a public campaigning organisation of self-professed paedophiles. It’s hard to believe now that such a thing could exist, or that it could gain any traction. Read the wikipedia page to be transported to a different, horrible world – Britain in the 1970s.
@sonofrojblake – did you actually watch the videos? ‘Cause it kinda seems like you didn’t, since you basically ignored everything in them.
Fuck off with that bullshit, roj.
Thanks as usual for your thoughtful response WMDKitty. Could you be more specific about which bit you consider bullshit?
1. not giving a shit about Carl Benjamin
2. newspapers thrive on clicks and lie
3. someone who grew up in Rotherham will have a different and more accurate perspective on the issue of grooming gangs than a newspaper story or some rando on the internet
4. organised crime is worse than unconnected incidents
5. the rate of convictions for rape and other sexual violence is scandalously low compared to the number of incidents
6. victims of sexual violence are silenced and ignored and the crimes minimised
7. the women in the BBC article were complaining specifically of feeling silenced about what had happened to them
8. they were condemned as transphobic as a result
9. trans men are men, trans women are women and nonbinary people are valid.
10. people coerced into having sex should not fear reporting it
11. the Paedophile Information Exchange existed
12. it harmed the cause of gay rights by associating gay rights with paedophilia
Do please tell me which of those things is bullshit, in your opinion.
@6: I read a blog post. I’m responding to the content of that blog post, in the comments section of that blog post. If I have a comment specific to a video, I’ll respond in the comment section to the video.
In other words, you’re deliberately excluding context that you now KNOW is relevant to the “arguments” you’re making.
And your thing about pedophiles is a bit like when tobacco companies pointed to non-tobacco causes of lung cancer – it seems like you’re deliberately trying to find a less powerful group to blame for a broader societal narrative. You could have argued that it was people with power, like those in the Catholic clergy, or Epstein’s client list, but instead you decided to insist on blaming a broad societal trend on a small group of shitty, powerless people.
To whatever degree the group you mentioned contributed to the broader narrative, it’s because the people holding economic and political power already wanted to perpetuate that narrative. Because you can always find an exception, or someone willing to pretend to be an exception.
Beyond that, we come back to your now openly deliberate ignorance on the subject. You don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’ve refused to learn more. You didn’t feel the need to only comment on the BBC article in a BBC feedback forum or something – you decided to discuss it here, as you could have done with the videos that are pretty clearly a part of this blog post, and provided as important context.
And that strongly implies to me that your goal here is to perpetuate bigoted narratives, rather than any actual concern for the wellbeing of the “victims” in question.
Kinda looks like you’re telling on yourself.
@4, 8 sonofrojblake
What people are objecting to here is incredibly obvious, so much so that it seems like the act of a troll to claim not to understand, which is why you ahve received a hostile response. However, I will choose to try to answer, despite, if I am being honest, a strong impression that you don’t want to listen.
This is where you are being a shithead. The point that is astonishing that you have missed it, is that the few women in the article were NOT talking about actual sexual coercion. There is a powerful, and quite deliberate, thread throughout TERF rhetoric, where they frame the mere existence of trans lesbians and the observation that prejudice inform everyone’s sexual preferences as “sexual coercion”. You should know this, it’s been discussed around here often enough. Indeed, the poll that the BBC has been using as the basis for their claims is QUITE explicit about this and is outright hateful in the framing of its questions.
This article is not about sexual coercion that actually happened involving a trans woman. This article is about all the people assuming that there’s a lot of this coercion going on. It’s a literal article of fait in TERF circles, based on an argument from incredulity – they cannot imagine any real lesbian would willingly be involved with a trans woman, therefore they must be getting coerced into it – and from the TERFish axiom that trans lesbians are by definition sexually perverted men out to coerce people.
This is a moral panic, based on bigotry. It is not ABOUT sexual coercion in the LGBTQ+ community; it is instead quite intentionally and very dishonestly pretending to be about that, so they can imply and suggest and hint that trans women do it all the time. This is proven by what happened in and to the article itself: if it was really about sexual coercion in queer spaces, they would not have interviewed a lesbian who has a history of committing sexual assaults in bathrooms, they would have interviewed her victims.
And they sure as fuck wouldn’t have responded to the backlash by quietly snipping her from the article and noting they had removed her for “inappropriate behavior” and “some comments”.
You’re either allowing yourself to be snowed by the hateful framing, or you are choosing to join in.
Do better, Mr. Blake.
Yeah, what Abbey said. I’m sorry, I don’t have the energy to dissect trollish TERF-y bullshit on-demand.
“Third: 56 convictions. Not many, as he said. Except: it’s an article of faith, is it not, that for every successful rape conviction there are dozens of prosecutions that fail, maybe hundreds that never make it to trial, THOUSANDS that are never even reported for a host of reasons. Didn’t he get the memo about this?”
hmm. Did you look at the RATE of convictions in those districts of white vs brown defendants? because across the western world, NONwhite people have a much lower conviction rate… across all crimes. Especially rape. and Abe did a decent enough job of pointing out that very issue.
I’m NOT saying there were NEVER crimes associated with specific groups. But implying immigrants in general are an issue because a few of them were crims is EXACTLY how this kind of bigotry works. You seem to be providing a case on point.
strike “Nonwhite people have a much lower conviction rate”
replace with “Nonwhite people have a much HIGHER conviction rate”
not sure why I wrote lower, not enough coffee today I suspect.
@11: on my phone, so needs be brief – you’re right. I think I was snowed. It’s annoying to admit it. I will do better.
Bugger.
@15 sonofrojblake
Decent of you. I withdraw and hereby apologize for the hostility in my response.
As a trans woman of many years & involved with the trans community. I have never once heard of, not even a rumour of, a single indecent of any trans woman, forcing any lesbian into any form of sexual contact. Trans women, on the whole, are to be found in sexual relations with straght cis men, straight cis women or another trans. Suggesting a trans woman wants to e with a lesbian woman is like a gay guy wanting to jump in bed with your best mates sister,it’s so rare it’s incosequntial.
There are however many tales oof very pushy porn directors & producers creating situation of lesbians & post/pre op trans women. All done in the name of profit.
The BBC article was written by & for TERD ( Trans Exlusionary Repugnant Dickheds ) to justify their pathetic & bigoted existence, nothing more. The Dictator General of the BBC is of the same ilk. A complete & utter transphobic, anti LGBTQI+ right wing TERD. As any LGBTQI+ employee there will gladly state. Most can’t wait to get away from the BBCs anti LGBTQI+ toxc environment.
TERF is reminiscent of beautiful green lawns, these bigots are akin to the stuff used as fertilizer, hence TERD, or s the OED puts it slang for shit. TURD 💩
@17 Andrrea
What the FUCK. What rock are you living under that you’ve never heard of queer cis women happily, consensually involved with trans lesbians?
@16, abbeycadabra – thanks. Not on phone now so longer response – I think I initially saw this as of a piece with something I responded to relatively recently about the collision between trans rights and the rights of rape survivors. As a cishetwhitebloke who does his best to be as woke as he can, it is really hard to hear/read/whatever a rape survivor describe their trauma at encountering a trans woman perhaps still sporting their penis in what is billed as a women-only, clothes-optional space, then hear/read/whatever that you know what? They’ve just gotta suck it up buttercup, and the rights of the penis-haver to be in that women-only space is more important than the feelings of the rape survivor. To me, that’s a tough one. I think I’m on the right side of history, but to be honest I’d rather not have to take sides. Everyone should be uncomfortable now and again though. /shrug/
I don’t see it that way now, on further reflection, btw. I do hate the way my home country’s reputation as TERF island has developed recently, with the active input of actors you’d expect to reject that shit, e.g. the Guardian and the BBC, usually lambasted as the worst of the woke.