Owen Peter Jones is a British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist and political activist.
Owen writes:
One of the most important themes in ‘It’s A Sin’ was about gay/bi people and shame - caused by growing up in a society that saw gay/bi people as would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.
While HIV rates remain significantly higher among gay and bisexual men, treatments now allow those with HIV to live healthy lives.
Alcohol and drug abuse as a response to shame and trauma caused by homophobia is today a bigger problem in Western nations.
It’s important to make this point because the evidence suggests that mental distress is even more acute amongst trans people, who are today the most marginalised and oppressed part of the LGBTQ+ world.
Anti-trans activists use the same arguments as the homophobes
Today, anti-trans activists play the exact same songs about trans people: that they are would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.
Some of those anti-trans activists responded viscerally to being called out for enjoying It’s A Sin. They are furious at being compared to the monsters who victimised gay people, even as they obsessively target trans people in the same papers that obsessively targeted gay people.
Some of them point to their past association with pro-gay struggles, or in some cases simply that they have been to gay bars before, as though any of this gives them a lifetime freedom pass to say whatever they like about other minorities.
But as It’s A Sin shows, a society which made gay people feel unwelcome - as burdens at best and as menaces at worst - inflicts terrible damage on gay people.
The same is being done to trans people.
However those who, in some cases, spend a genuinely huge amount of their lives talking about trans people as would-be predators or threats to children justify it to themselves, they are inflicting the same injuries on trans people as It’s A Sin underlined is done to gay people.
The quadrupling of transphobic hate crimes, the 48% of trans people who fear using public toilets, the trans people discriminated against at work, the quarter who’ve suffered homelessness, all of this is erased from the “conversation”, such as it is.
Even the focus on contexts which don’t affect 99.9% of trans people - but which are used to attack all of them - namely prisons and sports deliberately excludes questions like 'Why are there no trans Olympic medallists?’ or 'How do we stop trans prisoners being assaulted?’
Inflicting the same damage
The hounders of trans people may hate It’s A Sin being used to hand them a mirror. But the anti-trans faction, who operate strikingly like a cult, are not only singing the same tunes - they are inflicting the exact same damage on trans people as gay people have long suffered.
oh and I’ve set this so only people who follow me can reply because, although anti-trans activists have made a conscious decision to relentlessly and obsessively target me, and I can live with that, I don’t want trans people to have to sift through their bile.
“Gender critical” parents who are harming their kids
Some other thoughts.
One of the most powerful themes towards the end of It’s A Sin is Ritchie’s mother being confronted by Jill for the damage she inflicted on her gay son, suggesting that the shame she instilled in him helped drive behaviour that led to his infection with HIV.
“Actually it is your fault, Mrs Tozer,” says Jill. “All of this is your fault." Jill adds: "The wards are full of men who think they deserve it.”
She was right. So many of the gay and bisexual men who died often lonely deaths in hospital wards were traumatised by their parents.
Today, most gay people have gay friends who have mental trauma which often leads to alcohol and drug abuse with absolutely catastrophic consequences. Many, all too many, have had friends who’ve died from suicide.
The culprits? Society in general but often parents in particular.
It’s A Sin showcased the LGBTQ family, of other LGBTQ friends filling a vacuum left by the absence of a loving family.
A big role of that 'family’ is to pick up the pieces because of the damage inflicted by parents on their children.
When parents refuse to properly accept their LGBTQ children for who they are, they insert ticking time bombs in many of them. That bomb may detonate in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, who knows, maybe in their 50s or 60s.
But in many of them, it will detonate.
This is why there is a genuine horror watching self-described “gender critical” parents ranting about trans people on the internet.
Because I can’t help but think, oh god, what if they have trans children. What damage will be inflicted upon them.
In some cases, the bigotry of anti-trans activists - often radicalised by newspaper columnists, online rabbit holes, and somewhat perversely, Mumsnet - will collide with reality.
Read this about an ex-'gender critical’ activist and their trans nephew.
But in other cases, transphobic parents will stick determinedly to their guns and inflict the same damage on their trans children as homophobic parents have always inflicted on their gay children.
We should be clear: homophobia and transphobia are forms of child abuse.
Hiding behind the argument of protecting their children
Both traditional homophobes and contemporary transphobes claimed they were protecting the welfare of children.
As anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant declared: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children”.
Today’s anti-trans activists use the language of 'safeguarding’ and often suggest that parents know what’s best for their children.
This is clearly not always the case. Lots of children need to be protected from their parents. That includes many LGBTQ children.
So when this Times journalist attacked Mermaids, a charity supporting young trans people, for including an 'exit button’, suggesting it was 'a major safeguarding breach’.
Many LGBTQ children don’t have supportive parents and need to hide their identity away from them.
Anti-trans rhetoric echoes anti-gay arguments
Anti-gay rights campaigners long focused on the danger posed by predatory gay men to vulnerable children, and pointed to scandals in, for example, the Scouts and the Catholic Church as evidence.
Today, anti-trans activists similarly extrapolate extreme cases to make their case.
In the 1980s, it was claimed an all-powerful gay lobby was putting political correctness ahead of people’s well-being.
The same language is used about the objectively marginalised trans minority today. The second screenshot is from this weekend’s Times newspaper.
That’s why so many gay people stand up for trans people.
Trans people, of course, are in our shared LGBTQ spaces, and their experiences do differ in important ways - but we see them going through the exact same things we’ve gone through.
It is, frankly, grotesque that gay people who for very obvious reasons stand with their trans siblings are then vilified as misogynists, or have obvious homophobic tropes about wanting to endanger children’s safety thrown at them.
It’s also perverse that many of the same people publicly cooing over It’s A Sin are the same people trying to hound the LGBTQ allies of trans people out of the media (they can’t really do this to trans people because there are very few trans people in the media).
LGB people attacking trans people
As for the LGB people who participate in the hounding of trans people. There have long been examples of oppressed groups who participate in oppression, often against themselves: women against the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism, right-wing black Republicans, and so on.
These anti-trans LGB activists are not only completely unrepresentative of LGBTQ people: many queer bars and spaces bar people who express their bigoted opinions for very obvious reasons: to ensure they’re safe spaces for the whole LGBTQ rainbow.
Watching straight people try and foment a civil war within the LGBTQ world by platforming these completely marginal bigoted zealots is actually completely and utterly grotesque.
Finally (!) in the 1980s, almost the whole media was anti-gay, and public opinion was overwhelmingly anti-gay.
Today, almost the whole media is anti-trans, but while transphobia is rampant, anti-trans sentiment is not as widespread as anti-gay sentiment back then. There’s hope!
But it takes huge courage to speak out in support of trans people in Britain in 2021.
One day, there will be TV programmes about the onslaught against trans people. Those who victimised trans people today will be portrayed in them. They’ll go down in history as hate figures.
Sadly, it’s too late to save all too many LGBTQ people who had ticking time bombs inserted into them both by society and by their homophobic and transphobic parents. They detonated.
But we can save others from that fate. So speak up.
