TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK, helped along by media leadership from Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper.
When it comes to trans rights “polling shows that the public isn’t necessarily as hostile as the media, but the media [continues] to lead the conversation,” Shon Faye, trans advocate and author of “The Transgender Issue,” told CNN. According to her analysis, in 2020 the Times and the Sunday Times published “over 300 articles, almost one a day, and they were all negative.” CNN has reached out to both newspapers for comment.
In an essay for the Times decrying “wokeism” last November, Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips said: “The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the gurus of wokedom have persuaded thousands of idealistic young people who rightly want to change the world into supporting what is actually a deeply reactionary movement. The trans activists can only realize their aim of being able to enter spaces reserved for women by erasing the female sex.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/27/nhs-to-limit-trans-ideology-with-new-constitution/ Long article basically calling trans women men and citing Maya Forstater as a reliable source on the issue
The Telegraph sometimes quotes James Esses, founder of the anti-trans group Thoughtful Therapists, to give some quote from anti-trans therapists. This would not be too problematic except that by his own admission James Esses is not and has never been a therapist. He was expelled from his program for saying anti-trans junk.
I also note that they never ask anyone else for comment from Thoughtful Therapists but James Esses. There are other anti-trans figures who claim to be founders, like Stella O'Malley, but nobody else ever gets asked for comment on behalf of the organization. I suspect he may be the only active member.
Making a whole section for this because the Telegraph does this all the time. Usually it is specifically the group Sex Matters that they contact. They very rarely contact pro-trans activist groups like Mermaids or Stonewall.
experts at the ONS refused to admit that they may have overestimated the transgender population of the UKand strong implies that the survey overestimated the true population. The numbers the ONS got say that 0.5% of the UK population is trans, which matches well with other data internationally. (For instance, here are numbers from the US, which also say that 0.5% of adults are trans.) The Times and Telegraph have both done multiple articles on this, see here for a previous article.
The Telegraph ran five stories, none of which have been retracted, about a school that allegedly let students "identify as a cat" (or other animals). The school was named as Rye College in East Sussex.
The dates on the stories say they each ran on successive days, for what it's worth.
Naturally, this is not actually true. See:
TL;DR: The school explicitly denies that anyone at the school identifies as a cat. The story was based on a recording of a teacher chewing out a transphobic student. The student in the course of the argument compared identifying as trans to identifying as a cat for rhetorical purposes.
We in fact have a whole article on the litter boxes in schools hoax, as we call it.
There is also some evidence that journalists are being asked explicitly to collect this type of story.