Freya-Onions-report

The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,
Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods
To bring the house a message-

-E.B.B, Aurora Leigh

I am laying on the grass in Ruskin park, South London, drinking a glass of white wine. It is early May, and the hottest day of the year so far. Joining me are a few friends, all of us hungover from the night before but drawn out from our holes by the sunshine.

Coronation weekend.

The day before, the day of the coronation, it rained all day and I went to the Hilma af Klint exhibtion at the Tate Modern. We had an unrelated party planned at my flat that evening.

Later, ushered on by the anxiety I always get with a huge piss-up looming at the end of a day, we went out to get some Dallas fried chicken to line our stomachs.

We walked out the house: Grosvenor Terrace, wet and warm on a Saturday afternoon.

As we continued up the pavement towards Walworth road I spotted a red sticker attached to a silver post. It said ‘Terf: we know what a woman is’, stylised in the branding of the Coca-cola company.

Immediately I panicked, didn’t mention it to my friend Molly, and thought, for the sake of enjoying the party, that I should probably forget all about it. We bought the food, and headed back.

The burgers were tremendous.

After we’d eaten, and with the party-guests yet to arrive, I broke my silence:

‘Stan, what tools do we have? do we have like tools like a metal scraper’

‘What for?’

‘Someone has put a transphobic intimidation sticker outside our house.’ I stuttered a little when I said it.

We walked back outside onto the wet street with some white spirit and a metal scraper. We didn’t really need either, it turned out: it came off easily. We walked back inside and drank more beer and waited for the guests.

After a half hour or so I picked up the sticker, took it downstairs and stuck it in the centre of a piece of the nice quality, thick paper I bought to lend legitimacy to my change-of-name deed poll back in January. This post is my effort to try to make sense of the relentless transphobia that plagues our national media and public discourse.

To begin with, let’s take a closer look at the placement of the sticker itself. It was placed on a post around 15 meters from my front door, facing my house. I have not seen any similar stickers anywhere around my local area. As a result, I suspect that it was placed there with the specific intention of intimidating and striking fear into me- the only visibly trans person in the area who I’m aware of.

The goal, clearly, was to make me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in my own neighbourhood. It succeeded. But now I want to try make something out of it.

Beyond its placement, the language the sticker uses (‘we know what a woman is‘) is perhaps vague enough only to register to those already invested in contemporary anti-trans discourse. In fact, to most people walking by, it will make little if any sense at all.

The people it will make sense to are the only people it aims to affect: trans people. The message it brings, in its bright white lettering, is: you should not feel safe here. Its central dogwhistle, ‘we know what a woman is’, which has become commonplace amongst political pundits who want to turn the trans moral panic into votes, translates to: if you are trans, your identity is not legitimate and should not be respected in any aspect of your life; in fact you should be ridiculed and disrespected for you inability to meet our criteria of womanhood; if you are trans you should detransition immediately or kill yourself.

Without a doubt, I believe the sticker to have a genocidal intent, in the same way what all homophobic, racist, sexist graffiti are united by the goal of intimidating their victims beyond their capacity to exist safely or comfortably within society for an aspect of their identity they cannot change.

The visual language used by the sticker was, admittedly, a bit surprising. While many feminist-identified anti-trans ideologues tend to try to add a veneer of centre-left respectability in order to dodge the accusation of old fashioned bigotry, this one seemed to co-opt the branding of a major corporation, not to mock or subvert it, but to lend a catchy credibility to its message.

Indeed, this sticker seemed to quite proudly flaunt the way that cis-heteropatriarchal capitalism works in tandem with transphobia to facilitate- and sell– the lethal atmosphere in public discourse more widely.

The sticker was now stuck on the centre of the paper and placed in a drawer in my desk. My plan is to surround it with other newspaper clippings and estrogen prescriptions to make a Hannah Höch style subversion of the dominant culture that seeks to eradicate people like me.

A cutting up: a rearticulation of the very discourse that attempts to exclude me, and people like me, from public discourse entirely.

But, before I do that I’m gonna need some newspaper clippings from the rightwing press: the Daily Heil, the Guardian, the Torygraph, etc. But I refuse to pay for these vile rags so I shall have to get them somewhere else.

………………………………………………………………

The party turned out to be pretty good, as it happens. Not like a 10/10 amazing party, but enjoyable nonetheless.

I slept, had lunch, Molly left. Then I went for drinks in Ruskin park. The following morning, I wrote this steeped in the selfsame atemporal, convoluted haze that characterises the thudding repetitions of the anti-trans media machine in which the sticker locates its ultimate authority.

You see, the sticker meant nothing on its own. Its authority derived from its mothership, its spiteful genesis of misdirection and misinformation: the giant creaking orifice.

Its power came not from itself, nor the power of its argument- it, seemingly, had none- but from the way it slotted into and referred back towards the relentless onslaught of transphobia in the media/political arena and the alternate total omission of trans -or even trans-inclusive- voices.

The sticker was scary, and unpleasant, because of the way it signalled, to trans people, the complicity between the capitalist media, corporations, and politics in their callous attacks on trans rights.

As we waited for the guests, (apologies we had no track of time) who were by now late, and drank more bottles of corona, I started thinking about how that complicity, had played out in the previous week.

Two things had happened.

Firstly, some students protested the Oxford Union’s platforming of anti-trans philosopher of Aesthetics, Kathleen Stock, previously known for: not giving a fuck about feminism, writing books about Aesthetics, and working at the seat of academic institutional power as a Professor at the University of Sussex before coming out as a transphobe and promptly slotting herself neatly into the UK’s anti-trans media infrastructure thereby catapulting herself from obscurity to fame.

Counterintuitively, Stock’s journey into stardom, much like that of Jordan Peterson or Andrew Wakefield, is generally presented as a paradoxical story of silencing.

While I don’t have the time to detail the full story of how Stock essentially left her position at the University of Sussex because some students decided to protest her transphobic grift, I will link to Grace Lavery’s excellent, and entertaining coverage on her blog.

To cut it short, like Peterson and Wakefield before her, Stock was shot to fame and acclaim, and plastered over newspapers across the country, as an expression of her paradoxical ‘silencing’ by militant trans people and their allies.

Oxford Union debating society announced their plans to platform Stock, who most certainly will be voicing her anti-trans ideology in the hope of gaining younger adherents (transphobes tend to be ancient). Students responded by protesting, claiming that platforming her will only exacerbate the very real moral panic of misinformation which is currently by unleashed in the national press.

As a side note, obviously this anti-protest angle also serves the purpose of legitimising the UK Government’s rollback on protest rights, as well as the Met police’s decision to illegally arrest republicans preemptively during the coronation. Capitalism, transphobia and the media working hand-in-hand. Welcome to the police state.

Secondly, transphobe Joanna Cherry, who had planned to speak at Edinburgh Fringe Festival had her event cancelled because the employees required to run it refused to take part. This was not a decision made by the event space itself, but by the people employed by the space who were going to run it. Many prominent anti-trans activists were quick to argue that they should have been forced work. (The complicity between capitalist structures of work and labour and mainstream transphobia can be quite on the nose at times). In their opinions, the workers should be forced to work if it can help to extend the transphobic cause. (Read more about this debacle here)

So, these two things happened, I struggle to remember in which order, nor care, and immediately the anti-trans media apparatus kicked into gear, to respond to this double-bill of ‘debate’ being ‘silenced’.

To many, these two instances might well serve as occasions in which people using their own right to protest what they see as irrational hatred, either by withholding their labour or by peaceful protest. They might be trans people, for example, who don’t want their legislative rights eradicated from the Equality Act, or simply trans allies who think that it is ‘not good’ to eradicate legislative protections from one of society’s most marginalised groups during a whipped up moral panic.

To the UK media, however, this was clearly not the case. In fact, they quickly began to release their series of articles from various anti-trans pundits, all essentially taking the same line: “look! we’re being silenced! these militant, illiberal trans people are stopping me from being to speak”.

Clearly the irony that every time something like this happens, even when as small or insignificant as a small student-led protest, the national press is filled with the voices of the ‘silenced’ victims, is not lost on them.

Which leads me to this. If there is one way my being trans has altered the way I see the world it is this: the way the media can function as a propaganda machine to mobilise the public against minority groups. They did it with gays and lesbians thirty to forty years ago, now they’re doing it to us. Nothing has changed.

The issue with these anti-trans propaganda pieces is that they are so filled with misinformation and omissions that to even substantively discuss them I’d need to allocate hours and hours of time to fact check and comment on pretty much everything they say. As an example, the ‘trans runner’ to which the third times article refers (these were published within an hour of each other, so pernicious and rampant is the anti-trans machine) placed 6016th in the women’s leaderboard of the London Marathon, and received only a participation medal. She was bullied by the media until she returned the medal, which was exactly the same medal as she would have received were she to have run in the male race. She was erased from her existence within the race. Wiped clean.

It makes me want to cry.

That’s what the ‘Terf’ sticker did, it told me: look, we’ve got the media on our side, no one cares what you think or say. If you lash out at us, we will plaster it over every front page in the country. You’ll be playing right into our narrative, our trap. The media doesn’t want to hear from you. All you can do is stay silent, stay silent and disappear.

To the right wing press, it means nothing that they are transparently co-opting fascist, and in this case explicitly Nazified visual and rhetorical tropes. Nor does it matter that the media is entirely complicit with the dominant political discourse (both Starmer and Sunak have indeed even repeated the ‘what is a woman’ discourse used by the ‘Terf’ sticker, as well as fascist, antiabortion, antifeminist Matt Walsh, and JK Rowling, who has endorsed him).

It scares me whenever the media does this. I hear the machine whirring. More than anything, what scares me the most about it is the fact that I am utterly, totally voiceless. In fact, without doubt, in all of these so-called national ‘debates’, we can safely say that no trans people whatsoever will be consulted for their opinions (if it is a debate, why not bother to show both sides?)

This is because there is no debate: there never was.

There are trans people, simply trying to live their lives not in fear. And there are those who dedicate their lives to villainising and stigmatising those trans people, stirring up the public’s basest ignorance and prejudice in the hope of revoking the few long-fought legislative protections trans people actually do have.

This is why I call the sticker genocidal: because it signals and draws its authority from the capitalist media-mechanism that speeds us towards genocide. (I recommend this statement on the genocidal intent of ‘gender critical’ ideology).

Every day you work to make my life hell, and I can only hope that you will one day suffer as much.

I wish you could know what it’s truly like to feel voiceless.

I believe that the people in society who should be most unanimously dismissed are those who work everyday to further marginalise marginalised groups. I believe that they should be condemned. I believe that what they do is every day is far worse than the vast majority of criminals.

The sticker brought all these feelings up in me again: the same thoughts I have whenever I see these articles.

And I forget what day it is. Are the guests still coming? Should I check the door?!

But still, the sticker was a bit of an outlier. It seemed to participate in a different brand of feminist-identified anti-trans discourse than is customary to the likes of Joanna Cherry or Julie Bindel, both of whom, though totally happy to work with the right-wing press to spread their ideology, generally try to dissociate themselves from the explicitly anti-feminist, violent, fascist and capitalistic impulses of the likes of Kellie Jay Keen.

Using my phone, I scanned the QR code in the bottom left of the sticker. It took me to a website called standingforwomen.com – a site which is clearly either owned by, or closely affiliated with the fascist activist Kellie Jay Keen. Keen is more than happy to work with Neo-Nazis, used an image of a barbie in a Nazi uniform for her Twitter profile picture, and has advocated that cisgender men bring guns into women’s bathrooms in order to protect them from trans women. Presumably by shooting the trans women.

Keen is inarguably a fascist. She also rejects the label of ‘feminist’ and refuses to identify herself as such. Recently, when she hosted a fascist anti trans rally, the national media of New Zealand decided to condemn her and treat her as the fascist hate-monger that she is.

The UK media is not prepared to do this, and will still call her a ‘feminist’ and say she is being ‘silenced’. JK Rowling poses in her merch and applauds her on social media for Christssake.

I can’t imagine how quickly these fascist affiliations would be all over the news were it to be the other way around.

While it now almost feels commonplace to mention Sara Ahmed’s excellent insight into this situation and those like it, I feel it is worth repeating it here:

“Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.”

That is how I feel: caught up, surrounded, by the whirring judders of some great mechanism. It creaks, it drips oil.
It compels its citizens down below to put up little red stickers as tokened reminders of its omnipotence.
It sneaks out at night to put red stickers outside my house.
It knows ‘what a woman is’.

This all feels so unjust. And I truly do not know what I can do. There are so many other things I want to mention, about fucked up things these scumbags have done, or lied about, but I have a job and not the time.

Anyway, I’m gonna work on my cut-up piece. I’m gonna resignify the shit out of this sticker.

I believe things will change eventually. But how long that will take, I do not know. Until then all we can do is continue to protest, to reject, to resist.

I can’t even keep track of the days, let alone find out what a woman is. Cut up their messages and turn it back on them.

08.05.23