How the media spread transgender ideology

Introduction

The idea that the media exist to impart information might hold good when the news is something that no one is in a position to deny. In such cases they can state their message plainly, as in: “Reckless driver arrested” or “Body of fourth victim pulled from lake”. The more questionable their message is, however, the more subtly they must convey it, until when it is patently false they must convey it so subtly that they can deny that they ever conveyed it. In short, when the media are intent on outright deception, their modus operandum is covert. With this in mind, let us look at some of the techniques they use to spread transgender ideology.

Exposure

Their most obvious technique is to give the ideology exposure. In Britain the high-point in this seems to have been around 2018, when segments such as “Does Gender Self-Identification Put Women at Risk?”, “Piers Morgan Weighs in on Girl Guides Transgender Row” and “Munroe Bergdorf Clashes With Piers in Heated Debate on Gender Fluidity” continually appeared on breakfast television. It didn’t matter whether Piers Morgan was questioning the ideology or standing up for “transgender rights, freedom and equality”, to quote one of his favourite phrases. Either way, viewers of Good Morning Britain received another ten minutes of the ideology each time.

A discussion programme

A segment from a 2017 television discussion programme began with the presenter Nicky Campbell saying to a strange-looking girl called Emma: “You’re neither male or female, right?”[1] She replied: “That’s true. I identify as non-binary, which means I’m neither male nor female, and corresponding to that I use the ‘they’/‘them’ pronouns”. Nicky Campbell made no comment, failing to point out that calling yourself something doesn’t mean that you are that thing and that she was wrong to say that she used “they”/”them” pronouns, presumably meaning to refer to herself. The pronouns she used to refer to herself were presumably the same ones everyone else uses, namely “I”, “me” and so on. What she meant was that she sought to get others to refer to her using the plural pronouns, which is a fairly tyrannical thing to do. By letting these things pass, Nicky Campbell conveyed the idea that transgenders were a special case. Their statements were exempt from rational appraisal.

Crysta, Feb. 20th 2019, “Smart Woman Leaves Gender Fluid Person SPEECHLESS In Heated Argument.” You Tube comments available here. 

Emma went on to say that because there was a “huge variance of gender presentation and gender identity within humankind”, there weren’t simply men and women. Again, instead of ridiculing her Nicky Campbell treated the comment as though it might be worth listening to, when clearly a person’s “gender presentation” implies nothing about their sex. He went on to give Emma several more turns to speak, signalling that she was the most important person in the studio.

At some point he jocularly asked a journalist whether his newspaper would be using “gender-neutral language”. Peter Foster said that it pretty much already did, citing its use of the word “firefighter”. He had two daughters and would be delighted if they wanted to join the fire service when they grew up, he said, suggesting that they wouldn’t have been able to join it when its employees were called firemen. If that theory was true, no woman could have joined the political party called Brothers of Italy, still less risen to become its leader and then the country’s prime minister, yet there Georgia Meloni is.

As for referring to individuals as “they”, Peter Foster said that it was a question of whether such usages caught on, suggesting that the media follow the public preference. Was he a fool or being disingenuous? The only reason most people adopt a new usage, such as calling male transgenders “her”, is that the media model it. But Peter Foster said he doubted that “they” would stick as a pronoun for one person “because actually that’s not how most people see the world”. Language is organic, he maintained, and reflects the society it comes out of. Perish the thought that it might be influenced by the media!

On the old-fashioned side, a woman named Bethany Brown said: “We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that language does refer to a reality. As a writer I’m very aware of this. It’s very important.” The pronouns “he” and “she” referred to male and female reality, she said. She thought that there was something very serious at stake if we started eroding these concepts.

To judge from comments made by viewers of the video, many agreed with her. One wrote: “Thank you to the lady who spoke out against this insanity”. Another said: “This pronoun stuff is just crap. They need to start worrying about something that deserves to be worried about.” A third observed: “The fact that this is even a discussion shows how far we’ve fallen”. An American compared Bethany Brown to “the no-nonsense teachers we had growing up”, who had “had no problem tongue-lashing idiotic kids who said stupid shit. Good for you, lady!”, he concluded.

But Nicky Campbell asked her: “What about people who are non-binary? What about people who are gender-fluid?”, presupposing the existence of such people and teaching his audience these terms. “We’re all male or female”, replied Bethany Brown, “and the attempt to suggest that there is a third gender, as far as I’m concerned it’s an ideological and a political project. It doesn’t exist.”

Shock, horror!

Another media technique for conveying a falsehood, apart from throwing a spotlight on someone expressing it, is to present the truth as scandalous. Thus a BBC breakfast television segment was entitled “Feminist Blogger Believes Trans-Women Aren’t Real Women”.[2] Not real women? What an extraordinary person this must be!

While presenting the obvious as shocking, the media present the impossible as commonplace, as in their references to people “transitioning”, intended to suggest that they have changed their sex. In the same segment, Eamonn Holmes asked Kelly Jay Keen, the “feminist blogger”: “Why does she threaten you?”, referring to one of the media’s go-to transgenders, who was also in the studio. Kelly Jay Keen said: “I think when you decide that men can come into a women’s space, it’s no longer a woman’s space”. Holmes: “But she sees herself as a woman”. According to him, the other guest saw himself as a woman, therefore he was a woman, therefore what was Kelly Jay Keen worried about?

The need for “respect”

Going back to Emma, she said that using the “wrong language” to refer to transgender people was a mark of disrespect, perhaps “one of the greatest acts of disrespect” it was possible to perform. The media use the same tactic, describing anyone who says something that will not please transgender activists as lacking respect or sensitivity.

When Susie Green as CEO of the charity Mermaids took her sixteen-year-old son to Thailand to be castrated, the Catholic journalist Caroline Farrow put out a series of tweets, only to find herself being interviewed under caution by the police six months later in connection with the Malicious Communications Act, which makes it illegal to send or deliver letters or the like for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety. Susie Green had reported her for “misgendering” her “daughter”.[3]

Caroline Farrow had tweeted that Susie Green had “mutilated” her son and rendered him sterile while he was still a child. She had written: “I think it’s time everyone called out Susie Green and Mermaids for what it is: child abuse”. This was not purely personal, she maintained, because Susie Green was a public figure who ran a lobby group that had access to Westminster and influence over education policy and the police. Susie Green had herself given out highly personal details about her son, as when describing on television how his penis had been so shrivelled by drugs as to make the surgery particularly difficult. The Thai authorities were so outraged when they found out what had happened, Caroline Farrow said, that they had outlawed child castration. The police eventually dropped the case against her.

Susanna Reid, a presenter of Good Morning Britain, deemed the language of Caroline Farrow’s tweets “inflammatory”. We should treat even public figures with respect, she said. Piers Morgan thought that if the trans lobby’s opponents acted as aggressively as the trans lobby, they wouldn’t help themselves. But Caroline Farrow said that she was trying to strip away the lobby’s euphemisms, such as “gender affirmation surgery” and “bottom surgery”, which left many people with only a hazy idea of what such surgery involved. How could she do this if she had to use the euphemisms herself?

The presenters would not be moved. Susanna Reid thought that her guest’s comments were “incredibly personal” and couched in language that was “frankly insensitive”. Piers Morgan thought that there was a “more respectful way”. “But this is the truth”, Caroline Farrow said, “and on this issue we need to tell the truth”. In her opinion we needed a clear and honest discussion. Not according to the media, we didn’t.

The removal of the stigma

Another strategy the media use to spread destructive ideologies is to erode our defences against them, which take the form of stigmas. Thirty or forty years ago there were few transsexuals, as they were then called, because they were shunned and derided as freaks. The media have since taught us that this was wrong. Instead of shunning and deriding transgenders we should embrace them as perfectly normal. Indeed, we should see them as super-normal: so normal that we who are merely normal must defer to them at every turn.

Similar is the war on science and medicine waged by transgender activists and by the media on their behalf. Just as the anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing taught in the 1960s that schizophrenics were reacting in a sane fashion to an insane world, only to be locked up for it, so today’s transgender ideologues teach that psychiatrists are at fault if they say that transgenders are disordered. Far from it: transgenders have discovered their true, authentic selves. They are luminaries, who have completed a spiritual journey on which the rest of us might just be taking the first few stumbling steps.

Conducive language

In 2018 Susanna Reid, having pointed out that Girl Guides were aged 10–14, referred to a “transgender girl” in the Guides who “still obviously has a male body”. This wasn’t a boy, according to Susanna Reid, but a girl who happened to inhabit a boy’s body.[4] Her guest, Susie Green again, was well prepared to deflect any criticism of the idea of letting boys of this age share tents with girls. It wasn’t surprising, she said, that people thought of “transgender girls” as a safeguarding issue since this was the impression created by the media. In reality it was “trans girls” who were at risk, as we knew from the statistics “around self-harm and suicide”. And so we see that the media are quite willing to broadcast the idea that they themselves have been unjust if it will help to cast transgenders as in need of pity.

Susie Green went on to use the expression “trans girls” innumerable times, stressing that they were children, and insisted that there was “absolutely no evidence whatsoever to say that trans girls are a threat and that any issue around abuse has ever happened”. She went on: “It just seems that every time there’s an opportunity to have a go at trans girls — I mean, these are children!” When asked why parents should not be told that boys might be put in tents with their daughters, which was the main point at issue, she replied that the question was “picking on a marginalized group of children who have already been subjected often to abuse within their environment”. If parents were told, the children would be “othered”.

When Piers Morgan mentioned the recent case of a rapist in a women’s prison who had committed more sexual offences there, Susie Green pleaded for a change of subject. “Can we move away? This is about children, children being allowed to be children, and children — girls, trans girls, who are girls — being allowed take part”. We were conflating sexual predators with innocent children. No we weren’t, said Caroline Farrow, the other guest. We had already seen the case of a Scout leader being asked to advise the Green Party on its transgender policy, who had subsequently been sent to prison for 22 years for raping and torturing girls. “But he’s a man”, said Susie Green, looking puzzled. “He’s not trans.” When Piers Morgan asked Susie Green about a man celebrated as a woman, who only dressed as a woman once a week, she again looked puzzled and asked what this had to do with Girl Guides. The media make a point of giving a platform to such experts in misdirection and evasion.

Conclusion

In short, the media spread transgender ideology by exposing us to it night and day, or at least over breakfast. They obscure the falsity of is doctrines, such as that one can change one’s sex or partake of both sexes, largely by suggesting that words govern reality or by excusing preposterous statements. They show us people who can’t think or who pretend they can’t so as to stop us thinking, and obscure the grisly reality of sex surgery in the name of “respecting” those who undergo it. They do allow common sense to be heard from time to time. They do not present it as common sense, however, but rather as the outlandish voice of yesteryear. They present transgenders as our victims while dismantling our defences against their ideology.

This ideology makes a direct assault on reality and truth. A man is a woman; to classify someone as a member of their sex is to “misgender” them; to deny a person’s sex is to “affirm” it, and so on. It thereby makes an indirect assault on all that is good, for it is always the most reasonable and principled people, often Christians, whom the media oppose and who in the real world are visited by the police or lose their jobs. Correspondingly, it is always the most vicious and moronic who get rid of them. Unfortunate transgenders march behind their ideologues and their ideologues’ advocates in the media with the Father of Lies in the lead.

[1] Crysta, Feb. 20th 2019, “Smart Woman Leaves Gender Fluid Person SPEECHLESS In Heated Argument”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM5vzvfxJ_M. The programme was The Big Questions. The full segment, without viewers’ comments, is at Simpson Training, Aug. 23rd 2017, “Would Gender Neutral Language be Better for Humankind?”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX21PukO39g.

[2] BBC, Sept. 28th 2018, “Feminist Blogger Believes Trans-Women Aren’t Real Women | This Morning”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDSOP_j7HZE.

[3] Good Morning Britain, March 25th 2019, “Caroline Farrow on ‘Misgendering’ Tweets Row: ‘I’m Absolutely Not Regretful’ | Good Morning Britain”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpo4rsZUNPM.

[4] Good Morning Britain, Sept. 25th 2018, “Piers Morgan Weighs in on Girl Guides Transgender Row | Good Morning Britain”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrQM8VQQ-P8.