The Discourse Factory
The debate over trans rights is eroding them
The discussion around transgender rights is, to use a technical term, batshit. David Tennant is part of the “gender Taliban”, according to the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books. One of the guys who made Father Ted (remember Father Ted?) thinks puberty blockers are like Nazi eugenics programs. The female boxer who was meant to have a grossly unfair advantage by being trans isn’t actually trans, but never mind that. We should still be furious that women’s sports are being invaded by, um, women.
It makes a lot of people reluctant to engage, even when it becomes their job. British politicians who pass laws affecting trans people like to claim they’re staying out of the debate, and just focusing on the facts. Last year, health secretary Wes Streeting permanently banned puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria in under-18-year-olds. At the time, he said in Parliament: “The decisions that we take will always be based on the evidence and the advice of clinicians, not on politics or political pressure.” Earlier this month, he told Times Radio that “after years of what has been quite a rancorous and sometimes toxic debate, we want to move forward in a way that brings people together”. Isn’t that sweet?
Unfortunately, despite what MPs for Ilford North would have you believe, The Debate and The Facts are not easy concepts to separate. For years, The Debate has been skewing The Facts in favour of ignorance and hostility towards trans people. Ignoring that only allows the problem to continue.
We’re going to pass on this one
The debate has made mainstream news outlets reluctant to run stories exposing the marginalisation of trans people, two investigative journalists told City Rat.
“It is really difficult for journalists to get [that type of] stories commissioned and published by most publications,” said the first journalist, who works on social issues, including trans healthcare.
Speaking on condition of anonymity so as to speak freely about the media industry, they continued: “Even if their editor isn’t gender critical or transphobic, the editor might just be like ‘you know what, this is a bit too controversial: we’re not going to go ahead with it’.”
“I think the tenor of the debate makes a lot of cisgender journalists unwilling to do the kind of reporting that I do,” said Sasha Baker, a non-binary reporter whose work on transphobia saw them shortlisted at the British Journalism Awards 2024.
Last year, research and advocacy group TransActual found that dozens of trans people were being refused HRT by their GP, even after an NHS gender clinic recommended it. In other words, the NHS seems to be refusing to provide care suggested by… the NHS. Further barriers to gender affirming healthcare were then exposed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Both stories are usually the kind most editors would kill for, and provided valuable context in the run-up to the puberty blocker ban. They received almost no press pick-up.
What does get reported by mainstream news outlets is much less helpful for understanding the trans community.
In 2022, law firm Pogust Goodhead received extensive coverage over plans to sue the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), of Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust fame. Pogust Goodhead made the claim that children had been rushed into being given puberty blockers without proper checks, leading to long-lasting harm. The firm’s CEO, Tom Goodhead, predicted “that at least 1,000 clients will join this action”, a claim splashy enough to end up all over the news.
Come 2024, and Goodhead wasn’t so bullish. He admitted that those 1,000 litigants were yet to materialise, in an interview with The Telegraph. This hugely significant clarification received nowhere near as much press attention. This leaves the (cis) layman thinking not only that gender affirming care is being rushed, but so rushed that it’s the basis of a lawsuit. All the while, any trans person (or NHS statistic) will tell you it takes years to get just an initial appointment at an NHS gender clinic. Pogust Goodhead did not give City Rat even a rough idea of how many claimants it had managed to find. As of November 2024, no lawsuit had been filed. The firm declined to give further comment.
A similar thing happened with the Detransition Advocacy Network. Founder Charlie Evans claimed in 2019 that hundreds of people who had received gender affirming care were now looking to detransition. The BBC, Sky News, Daily Mail and The Telegraph all dutifully ran coverage. What received less attention was when Evans and the Network disappeared off the face of the earth around 2020, before those hundreds of people ever made themselves known (but not before a 2019 fundraiser amassed £980 for the Network).
Regrets over transition are a genuine phenomenon, but multiple studies point to its rarity, suggesting the mainstream media have a disproportionate level of interest.
“The media conversation, as well as being not very factual a lot of the time, and extremely cruel, is extremely overreported,” said Sasha Baker.
The press also tends to blame regrets over transition on hasty doctors, when there’s evidence to suggest the biggest reason for regretting transition is actually stigma around being trans.
How we got here
Press coverage of trans people exploded over the 2010s. Media monitoring entity Dysphorum found that the UK press produced around 60 stories about trans people in 2012, compared to roughly 7,500 in 2022 (a 12,400% increase).
This was not because the 2010s saw a 12,400% increase in trans people in women’s sports. What did skyrocket was interest in ‘culture wars’. Ipsos and The Policy Institute out of King’s College London have found that British newspapers’ coverage on culture war-flavoured topics ballooned in the mid-to-late 2010s:
To quote Ipsos and The Policy Institute’s report: “Since 2018 […] any divisive topic is quickly dubbed a new ‘fault line’ in the culture wars.” In the case of trans rights, media interest was piqued by a 2018 consultation on potential reforms to make it easier for trans and non-binary people to legally change their gender.
It’s important to note here just how reliant the media is on trends. When the articles commissioned today are based on what got clicks yesterday, it’s easy for the news cycle to get into a rut. If coverage of trans issues starts to focus on division, or differences of opinion, fact-driven reporting can quickly find itself out of vogue.
In tandem, coverage of trans people has got nastier. Going from 2012 to 2018-19, linguist Paul Baker found the media became roughly 10 times more likely to describe trans people as “demanding or aggressive” and “having a propensity to be offended or be involved in conflicts and trouble”.
Where we are now
A reporter wanting to identify problems the trans community is facing, then, is swimming upstream in more ways than one. Against the current media backdrop, and the wider rightward shift in western politics, doing your job can make you seem like an activist. Asking questions and reporting the answers can seem like bias. In an industry where careers are so precarious that layoffs get tracked in real time, that’s a risk a lot of hacks aren’t willing to take. Lack of dependable funding can also make divisive, click-worthy headlines – which are a great deal cheaper than investigative pieces – more alluring to struggling newsrooms.
“The overall climate at mainstream publications makes it harder for the people who are doing this work to be employed and successful in the career sense. It also makes those people who have those traditional markers of success [less likely to] want to do that stuff,” Sasha Baker said. “I was nominated for a British Journalism Award and also I can’t get a full-time job in journalism, seemingly.”
“It’s a vicious cycle where trans journalists are all burnt out and traumatised and frustrated, and then other journalists are like ‘I don’t want to touch this’,” they continued.
As a result, “we don’t get the stories that actually matter,” the first investigative journalist said.
“People have come to me with things that I would love to look into [but] they have to go on the backburner, because I can’t do months of work for no-one to want to publish it.”
“When trans people write these stories, they’re not taken seriously, because they’re quickly labelled a ‘trans rights activist’,” the first journalist continued. “If I were to publish a story on racism, it would be less acceptable for me to get labelled a ‘Black Lives Matter activist’ immediately, and for my story to just mean nothing.”
jane fae, a director at TransActual and chair of Trans Media Watch, has noticed the mainstream press become much less likely to approach trans organisations for comment.
“There was a point at which journalists would talk to us to try and trip us up,” fae told City Rat. “We would usually get a half-sentence in the last paragraph. Now, we don’t even get that.”
“We went from being covered fairly, to some degree, between 2012 and 2017. From 2017, it was on a downward slope, and in the last 12-18 months, we have moved to a position where they’re not interested in giving us a right of reply.”
“We’re now effectively erased from our own stories.”
And this hasn’t been helpful?!
There’s another vicious cycle here. Bad journalism makes trans people less willing to talk to the press, meaning it’s harder for the diligent reporters that are out there to produce good journalism.
“A lot of trans people have the impression that journalism is fully of evil, transphobic people,” Sasha Baker said. “I sometimes find that frustrating, but I also don’t necessarily blame them for feeling that way.”
Trans people have become less willing to talk to journalists since the 2010s, fae told City Rat.
“Before, [press coverage] was a bit ‘freakshow’ and ‘ooh, isn’t it funny’, and now it’s directed almost exclusively towards trying to eliminate trans people from public spaces, from public discourse, from pretty much everything. And that is what is scary.”
“There is absolutely no faith that the people we’re talking to can be trusted.”
With healthcare specifically, clinicians are also reluctant to speak to journalists. City Rat approached all seven gender identity clinics for this article, none of whom were willing to talk. The first investigative journalist has had similar experiences with healthcare professionals.
In other words, the cumulative effect of The Debate has substantially weakened the basis on which journalists can establish and distribute The Facts.
Rude health
Still, who needs journos? Wes Streeting didn’t ban puberty blockers because he read about them in The Telegraph. There was in-depth research – the Cass Review – into NHS England’s provision of gender identity services for children and young people. Those were The Facts that really mattered. And they found that puberty blockers weren’t safe, right?
No.
The Cass Review says “The evidence base underpinning medical and non-medical interventions in this clinical area must be improved [with] a full programme of research.” In other words, it advocates the continued use of puberty blockers, just in a trial environment. This was deemed unethical by the Yale Law School’s Integrity Project for coercing people into participating in the trial by giving them no other legal way of accessing blockers. Even that, though, was seen as too pro-trans by the press, which has begun a campaign to undermine the trial at every turn.
“Cass has declared there’s not enough evidence that what is happening is safe. She has not declared that’s what’s happening is unsafe,” said fae.
“It’s a subtlety, but you’d expect your average undergraduate to understand absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But the discourse has fallen completely to pieces.”
When the review was published, Amnesty International issued a statement on what it called “sensationalised coverage”, warning the review was “being weaponised by people who revel in spreading disinformation and myths about healthcare for trans young people.”
In the case of the Cass Review, that wasn’t only problem The Debate caused The Facts.
Six out of seven adult gender identity clinics refused to take part in a study conducted by the University of York for the Review. According to the University of York, staff at the clinics were worried, amongst other things, about “political interference”, or contributing to a “high profile national report that will be misinterpreted, misrepresented or actively used to harm patients and disrupt the work of practitioners across the gender dysphoria pathway [City Rat’s italics].” (The University contended at the time that a lack of existing evidence meant made it worth conducting the research even given the “potential for misinterpretation or misuse of study findings”.)
The study had to be abandoned, depriving the Cass Review of vital information on the quality of the NHS’s gender affirming care.
Even the selection of chairperson is cause for concern, and a direct consequence of (you guessed it) The Debate.
Previous independent reviews commissioned by NHS England have had chairs with relevant expertise. Makes sense, right? Fiona Ritchie, who chaired a 2020 review into the death of an autistic teenager, has an OBE for her work with people with learning disabilities. Her review called an earlier investigation into the death “highly inappropriate”, in part because it was conducted by someone without sufficient experience.
The Cass Review, however, actively sought out someone who lacked relevant expertise. The chair, Hillary Cass, was selected “as a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area”, per the final report. The report is explicitly clear that this decision was in response to “increasingly evident polarisation among clinical professionals”.
The Cass Review goes on to make elementary errors about the experience of being transgender. To give just one example, it seems to believe that puberty blockers should help alleviate gender dysphoria in order to be deemed effective. Blockers don’t exist to reduce dysphoria, but merely to stop it increasing, another subtlety that is obvious to any clinician with experience in gender affirming care.
Now, history looks set to repeat itself with a review into NHS England’s Gender Dysphoria Clinics, which treat adults. The review, which is ongoing, is being led by Dr. David Levy, who has no experience in gender affirming care. His profile on an NHS website lists a special interest in elderly medicine. (NHS England declined to comment. The Cass Review is no longer available for comment, having published its final report in April 2024.)
None of this has received significant coverage from the UK press. The Department for Health and Social Care did not return City Rat’s request for comment detailing issues with the Cass Review.
Well then
Trying to ignore The Debate when it’s already contaminated The Facts is dangerously naïve. The effect on government policy has been disastrous, creating a Britain that feels unliveable for a group of people already heavily marginalised. All the while, the cisgender public are so poorly informed that they rarely understand why trans people are up in arms. If lawmakers and mainstream journalists really do value The Facts, the time has come to confront what’s making them so weak.
TransActual has invaluable resources for trans and non-binary people in need of support
If you’re interested in improving the media you consume, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is doing some excellent, informative reporting with its Trans+ Voices project. For general, day-to-day news, the Financial Times is one of a small number of British publications managing to rise above the culture wars, and report what matters accurately. Meanwhile, the Integrity Project’s ‘evidence-based’ critique goes into more detail on scientific issues with the Cass Review than this article ever could, and with a lot more expertise (but don’t tell them I said that).