Open your mouth and say it: he's a man
The world becomes dystopian when we cannot speak the truth
At what point do you know you’re in a dystopia? Or even just in a Very Bad Sociopolitical Situation? This question bothers me. I thought about it in the pandemic; how odd it is that so many of the small details of your life remain the same even though the world outside is carrying on like the film set of Contagion. Do people always just trot blithely forwards, making sandwiches and love and shopping lists even in the apocalypse? What was it like around the average family dinner table in Germany circa 1943, for example? And how does the school run play out in North Korea? “Pass the salt”. “Have you remembered your swim kit?” “Turn that radio off dear, let’s listen to the birdsong instead. Ah, there isn’t any. Oh well, radio it is then.”
This morning the Metro newspaper tweeted the following at 7.21am.
I’m aware that in this atmosphere of mistrust, you might think this absolutely blatant misogyny is from a fake account or that it’s been mocked up as a joke. I thought the same when I saw it, and had to click through to check that it was, indeed, the UK paper The Metro, not a troll or a parody. And I’m astonished to report that this woman-hatred did indeed come from their official account with its 365 thousand followers. But of course, in this same atmosphere of mistrust, you might not believe me either as I’m telling you this story. Maybe I mocked up the tweet, or someone else did. How do we know who to believe?
The Metro’s now deleted tweet, in case you don’t know the backstory, refers to the case in the news of Scarlet Blake (and I’m going to be really clear here about this person’s sex), a man, a male person, who has just been convicted of a brutal murder, as well as the crime of making a four hour long video of himself killing and dissecting his neighbour’s cat, and then putting it in a blender. Because Scarlet Blake says he is transgender, the media reported this crime by describing him in headlines as a ‘woman’, and referring to him as ‘she’ throughout. For example:
Women objected to this, among them J.K.Rowling, who quote tweeted Sky News, saying, “I'm so sick of this shit. This is not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes”. Rowling, like so many of us, objects to this violent and horrific murder story being so publicly attributed to a woman - and to women as a sex class. I felt the same as I filled the car at a sleepy rural petrol station on Saturday and watched various older people popping into the shop to buy their copy of the Mail.
Maybe the people who write and sign off these articles and headlines are 25 and don’t really talk to older people much. If they did they would know that putting the word ‘transgender’ in front of ‘daughter’ and then writing ‘She led him to a secluded river bank’ will almost certainly cause readers with no knowledge of ‘pronoun debates’ and ‘bottom surgery’, either to be very confused, or to think we’re talking about a female person here. This means no disrespect to older people - this language is confusing for all of us - even those who are reading and writing about these issues and news stories regularly can lose track of reality.
We saw this in action last week when the use of the ‘inclusive’ term ‘human milk’ led to several major papers and even the BBC being confused about what sex of human this milk was actually being produced by. In their report, both the BBC and their ‘expert’, a woman named Kate Luxion, gave viewers the impression that there was no particular distinction between drug-induced male nipple excretions, and women’s breastmilk. If you haven’t read my exposé of the chain of misinformation in this story, you can read it here:
This same utter befuddlement led to the Daily Mail printing a paragraph in their coverage stating that ‘only a small number of trans women’ had given birth in the hospital at the centre of the story (they meant trans MEN - trans women can’t give birth because they’re male), and - in perhaps the most shocking example ever of this confusion - in 2022 Edinburgh Napier university midwifery training course created a module on how to catheterise a penis, because their students, ‘may be caring for a person who is transitioning from male to female and still has their external genitalia’. Errr…no they won’t. They really won’t.
All of this confusion is in some sense understandable, since in recent times we have witnessed the rapid, unagreed and unconsented change in use of long-established words like ‘woman’, ‘daughter’ and even ‘female’. What’s not understandable is why, when the mistake is realised, the outfit who made it won’t just say sorry. Edinburgh Napier never, to the best of my knowledge, said a single word to the press to explain how they came to teach midwives that men give birth. The BBC, in spite of many complaints, have said nothing to clarify their ‘fake news’ report that males can make milk of the same quality as women, or to say that they were wrong to imply that this idea was supported by the World Health Organisation. Not one single news outlet who ran the ‘male milk’ story have followed up with an admission of their error. And the NHS trust at the centre of it all have said only that they ‘stand by the facts’ - but what facts? Nobody seems to know. Apologies may bring clarity, but they’re so last century. Trump’s administration have taught the world a new way to ‘style it out’.
The journalist Louise Tickle has this week written to the Guardian editor Kath Viner to complain about their coverage of the Scarlet Blake story - her letter (link here) is brilliantly crafted and worth a read in full. She accused them of ‘deceiving their readers’ with this article and headline.
“News reporters should only report facts”, Tickle writes. “The public record is of vital importance in any democratic society (perhaps even more so when democracy and society are under strain). Falsifying the public record because of certain people’s beliefs is opposite of the role of a news organisation, and destructive to the public interest.” Telling people that this crime was committed by a woman, when it was in fact a man, is the ‘opposite of the truth’ and has ‘extremely serious repercussions’, she states.
Many people won’t speak up as Louise Tickle has because it inevitably leads to accusations of ‘transphobia’, or to a mainstream news outlet lamenting that you have ‘sadly opened your mouth again’, in the style of an abusive 1970s husband shaming you in front of his mates at the bar. But it’s attempts to avoid such accusations that have led us here in the first place - the wholesale transformation of language by menstruation, birth and breastfeeding organisations, for example, has been one massive exercise in damage prevention, everyone falling over themselves to publicly demonstrate their ‘inclusivity’ rather than see their organisation or business get attacked and their revenue damaged. This week I witnessed one such organisation change, not just their own language, but the words of an iconic feminist, Barbara Katz Rothman, in order to demonstrate just how enthusiastically they pledged allegiance to the new world order.
The original quote celebrates the transformative power of birth, not for PARENTS, but for MOTHERS.
To insure ‘motherboardbirth’ against unwanted accusations of transphobia, Rothman’s powerful words have been rewritten without her consent. To protect ‘motherboardbirth’s’ five year business plan, the transformative rite of passage of childbirth is taken from women and broken up into pieces to be shared out for everybody. To demonstrate ‘inclusivity’, the truth of Rothman’s original statement is no longer considered important.
‘Motherboardbirth’, along with so many other women’s health organisations, have capitulated in the very language changes that have enabled Scarlet Blake to be called a woman, and for this to be defended. They have sold women - and truth - down the river.
And of course, in spite of a backlash, ‘motherboardbirth’ have not apologised.
We can’t rely on every social media post to tell us the truth. But we should be able to rely on the national press, and the BBC, to be clear about the facts. This week as I’ve watched the lie be told again and again that a woman put a cat in a blender and then violently killed a man, I’ve begun to feel that, in spite of the school runs and the meal plans and the hoovering that perhaps this is it, we’ve arrived - this is dystopia. Not only do lies go uncorrected, but misogyny seems to be more and more blatant: one week, men’s breast milk is better quality than women’s; the next, a male killer must be called a woman and anyone who objects is the villain of the story. Yes, people really are prepared to go on record defending the right of this violent murderer and animal torturer to be called ‘she’. Yes, a national news outlet really did just publicly tell a woman to shut her mouth for pointing out the truth.
Like JKR I am sick of this shit. And like her, I won’t stop opening my mouth. We all need to speak up for truth and reality - and the fact that we still can is the only small sliver of hope.
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Thank you Milli! You hit it out of the park again!
The Barbara Katz Rothman quote is so important to refer to women, because sometimes women need to be able to argue the child’s case *to the father*. Sometimes we have to be strong in defending our children’s needs against their father’s selfishness, because we are far more likely to put our children’s needs first. My husband is good and kind, but he puts his own needs first. If women are not strong then our children are easily sidelined if we can’t stick up for them. Maybe all other readers have selfless husbands, but frankly, those are not the worldwide norm. Men don’t need any more cultural empowering as a general rule in my opinion, and especially not within their own families.