If you’re not like me, and you’re smart and cool enough to stay offline, you might be sufficiently lucky to avoid the outbreak of transphobia in the media. It’s never been great, but now it’s worse.

Though we have mostly managed to largely avoid the unhinged levels of the United Kingdom, where trans women doing such controversial things as having functional bodies is reported as “an onslaught against women”, we still have our moments here in Australia, where it’s clear there’s benefits for media to sensationalise trans issues.

The Australian in particular is known for its constant pushing of anti-trans narratives, Channel 7 attracted a protest last year for a particularly inflammatory report suggesting that trans healthcare specialists are manipulating children, and supposed left-leaning news outlets such as the ABC and Crikey have got in hot water for platforming anti-trans lobbyists too.

The weird thing is that while this anti-trans media push may be successful in giving new careers to the likes of failed comedy writer Graham Linehan and billionaire wizard-terf J.K. Rowling, it’s not a smart strategy for public approval.

We saw this not just in Linehan being an eternally divorced sad sack addicted to Twitter, but also in the political arena. When the former Prime Minister Scott Morrison made a “captain’s pick” for the Teal-held electorate of Warringah in the self-proclaimed “woman’s rights lawyer” (she compared trans activism to the Holocaust) Katherine Deves, it dramatically backfired when she suffered an over 5% swing against her. As was revealed in the ABC documentary series Nemesis, former Liberal MP for Wentworth Dave Sharma said the high profile of Deves and her Terfist comments during the campaign even contributed to a wider backlash against the Liberals in neighbouring seats, such as his, which he also lost to a Teal candidate.

This is coming at a time when media organisations are already struggling financially and trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low. This push is so unpopular across the world that the staff of the media companies themselves have publicly criticised their own publications. In 2020, several staffers at The Guardian UK signed an open letter to the editor-in-chief Katharine Viner in protest to a column which stated that “advocating for trans rights poses a threat to cisgender women”. In 2021, hundreds of employees at Netflix staged a walkout in protest to the streaming service’s platforming of anti-trans content and treatment of its transgender employees. And early last year, nearly a thousand contributors of the New York Times signed an open letter condemning the publication’s coverage of trans issues.

With the far majority of the Australian public being much more progressive about queer rights than the media suggests, why would news outlets from across the spectrum double down on pushing a narrative that the public simply don’t buy?

Turning outrage into headlines

As queer culture writer Aja Romano said in Vox, the far-right lobbyists have deep pockets and are all too familiar with knowing how to infiltrate organisations to pressure them into manufacturing culture wars.

These people are well experienced with intentionally courting controversy, grabbing the right headlines, and then getting the wrong people to “just ask questions” (such as “what is a woman”, over and over again), all down to a fine art.

It’s similar to how Donald Trump knew how to consistently turn outrage into headlines faster than fact-checkers could ensure that his wild claims about violence from immigrants, electoral fraud and all the rest could be properly held to account, and the same strategy these same groups used to spread climate change denial too. As soon as these headline-grabbers are given the validity of a platform because of their outrageous actions or statements, they can be backed up by a discredited weirdo technically from the field, and then treated with the sensitivity of “balance”, even if their views are dangerous, misinformed, and unrepresentative of the consensus.

This pattern explains how ‘Blocked’, the Four Corners documentary by Patricia Karvelas, came to be so offensively inconsistent.

The report attempted to “balance” the mismanagement of trans healthcare at institutions such as Westmead Children’s Gender Service, featuring the story of Noah, a trans teenager who passed away due to a failure to receive adequate healthcare. Several professionals were featured on the program, such as Dr Tram Nguyen and Professor Ian Hickie who are advocating for greater support for their field, “balanced” with Dr Dianna Kenny, a former psychology professor, and Dr Jillian Spencer, a psychiatrist stood down by the Queensland Childrens Hospital.

Dr Kenny was disclosed on the program to be an ambassador of Binary Australia, a hate group which rebranded to an anti-trans group from an anti-gay-marriage group in 2018, whilst Dr Spencer is shown speaking at an anti-trans rally in Canberra which was attended by One Nation and other far-right groups.

Both were on the program “balancing” the story by advocating for “psychotherapeutic approaches” such as “watchful waiting”, which essentially means denying a young patient the right to medical intervention and instead encouraging them to “wait” to see if the gender dysphoria subsides. Dr Kenny denies that such a practice is akin to conversion therapy, despite the medical community very much declaring that it is – it runs with the assumption that not transitioning is preferable and that transitioning should be a “last resort”; denying a trans child proper medication is the very thing that resulted in the death of Noah as highlighted in the same report (for god’s sake).

Outwardly glowing qualifications might make a commentator appear informed to a viewer (and potentially to an uninformed TV producer), it doesn’t make them immune from bigotry, vested interest and corruption. Including a discredited psychiatrist pushing for the horrific, deadly practice of conversion therapy, while simultaneously omitting crucial information about the practice to make it appear more substantiated than it is, all in the name of “balance”, is a crystal clear example of this problem.

Why are trans people the latest targets of the culture war?

The struggle for trans rights is more than just about the latest Ethel Cain album or how hot and happy Elliot Page looks these days.

The trans rights movement is a broader movement about bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, which we can see both in how trans people and cis people are simultaneously affected by shortages of hormones and gatekeeping which prevents certain surgeries.

A key part of queer theory is about how freedom of expression threatens the security of capitalism. Trans rights is part of a wider movement simply allowing people greater control over their own bodies and identities, which isn’t useful if bodies are needed to be cogs in the massive machine. This is why political parties which push against trans rights are also supportive of free markets, big business interests and aren’t friends of those of us on Centrelink.

As much as terfs like to push that “Big Trans” is a big business seeking vulnerable children, anti-trans lobbying has much more money flowing around from massive dark money donors. Given that trans people are poorer than average and rely so heavily on the healthcare system, it’s obviously in our best interest to campaign for free universal healthcare rather than keeping it corporate, privatised and overpriced. We shout “Trans Rights are Human Rights” so often it literally hurts, because our rights align with disabled people, people of colour, working class people – etc etc – and against the ghouls oiling the global machine. It just sucks that the global machine includes Parliament House and News Corporation.

What sucks even more is the impact of all this. While media narratives and public opinion being in direct conflict is nothing new, it doesn’t need to influence everyone to be successful, it just needs to reach the right people. With climate change, toxic narratives pushed in the media assisted by “experts” with vested interests, contributed to a deep culture of political inaction that continued even while millions of schoolkids took to the streets.

These days, anti-trans media narratives have been cited by lawmakers across America and Europe to justify anti-trans legislation. Transphobic hate crimes are hitting record highs in England and Wales, and the number of women experiencing domestic violence is also increasing as the ruling conservative government considers rolling back protections for trans people to “keep women safe” (it doesn’t). This pattern extends to social media too, with prominent anti-LGBT account Libs of TikTok being cited as motivating bomb threats against at least eleven schools across the US for being too queer-friendly, which definitely kept all the kids there very safe. Oh, and there was also the “Let Women Speak” rally in Melbourne last year that was totally unrelated to the Nazi rally that occurred at the same place and time and directed towards the same marginalised communities.

It only takes one person with a weapon, or a few people in positions of power, to do immense damage to a community. It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of this reality. When hormones are your lifeline, it’s extremely frightening and degrading to know that some weird billionaire dickhead could easily take them away. But we’re not powerless, and recent victories such as securing self-ID in Queensland show that love and community can win over the whims of the capitalism.

Legitimising atrocities

In the past, extensive media control has been very useful in allowing fascists to claim power and legitimise their countless atrocities. However, social media and grassroots publications have been invaluable in allowing marginalised creators to connect, collaborate and share their work. It also allows the more bold of us to make fun of fascists which can be good.

This new facet has led to an even greater mistrust in the mainstream, particularly amongst younger people, who also use social media more, and are politically engaged and trust their own ability to fact check more than boomers from The Australian. The mainstream is a temperamental beast and can easily push queers as cool and awesome one year, then deranged the next, then immediately go back to yaaaas queen!

Queer people have the rights we do today in spite of mainstream media organisations, not because of them, and we need to ensure we don’t get complacent as we find ways of uplifting each other. There’s no handbook on how to do this, but even the simplest acts can have powerful effects. As I’ve mentioned before, sharing queer art of all kinds can both empower trans people in everyday life and encourage cis people to learn more about our lived experienced. More directly, Erin Reed’s self-published blog on transgender rights has been mentioned on CBS and The Nation, and has reportedly led to her receiving countless messages from cis readers who credited her for changing their minds about trans rights. Love doesn’t just win – truth does too.

Artemis Press, which you are reading now, is one such initiative designed to help with this. We aim to platform trans femme writers from all backgrounds to tell our own stories unfiltered. Showcasing our experiences has been critical for queer empowerment across the world, and we shouldn’t have to ask TME people for permission to do so. Representation alone won’t win mainstream acceptance for trans people, but it is one very important tool in the kit.

Behind every anti-trans article in The Australian, there are hundreds of thousands of real-life trans women, from very young ages to much older, living complex, diverse, radical lives. Some are succeeding in their fields of IT, engineering, social work, modelling, and all kinds of other industries, but most are scraping by on poverty and still supporting their relationships, their children, their pets, with passions and aspirations in life.

These stories deserve to be told, and trans people deserve a platform that don’t actively demonise them for profit. Hopefully, in time, we can make all of that happen.

Originally published on the LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project, edited by the awesome Patrick Lenton.