Le mot juste

Why are our journalists lying to us?

While I’m always trying to locate the right word, as any writer might do, I’m writing so much at the moment that I sometimes neglect that discipline and find myself reaching for a cliché or a pat phrase. I can live with that shame because I’m just a lowly comedy writer; this was never supposed to be my main gig. But while professional journalists are calling Taryn DeVere a ‘genius’, I really have no choice but to keep doing what I’m doing. Despite my many limititations as a journalist, I do know one thing for certain; le mot juste for Taryn DeVere is not ‘genius’.

Perhaps Ingle is unaware that De Vere works for the notorious Helen and David Webberly and GenderGP, which prescribes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children? Is Roisin Ingle party to any evidence that puberty blockers are actually safe for children? Because if so, she needs to share that information with those conducting the Keira Bell appeal. If, on the the other hand, she has no new information, she should stop pretending that De Vere is anything other than a drug-pusher who targets vulnerable children.

A similar question might also be asked of Helen Lewis, who, in a recent piece on Nicola Sturgeon, had this to say about those opposing the use of puberty blockers.

There’s nothing vindictive about laws banning kids from taking end-stage cancer drugs to halt their puberty, but Helen’s career at the Atlantic would not last long if she didn’t throw her woke American readers this kind of spoiled meat from time to time. 

In the same piece, she helpfully tells us about the two groups gathered around the trans issue. 

 “Transgender-rights advocates argue that gender should be a matter of simple self-declaration, with no gatekeeping by doctors. They want to remove any distinction in law and policy regarding trans women, hence the slogan that “trans women are women.

Another group, known as gender-critical feminists—sometimes pejoratively called “TERFs,” or trans-exclusionary radical feminists—wants to carve out exemptions, such as keeping trans women out of female prisons.” 

The suggestion is that Helen herself is an arbiter when it comes to these matters, and the correct moral position is just to throw up your hands and say “Who’s right? Who knows?” All this while women are losing their livelihoods for saying, plainly and clearly, that puberty blockers leave these vulnerable kids infertile, without the ability to orgasm, and with smaller, undeveloped sex organs. Again, there’s nothing ‘vindictive’ about keeping these drugs away from kids and their homophobic/confused parents, and it’s deeply unethical for Helen to pretend she doesn’t have the information that is available to the rest of us.

Recently This Morning, perhaps accidentally, provided us with a dose of real journalism and proved that ordinary people have better values than most working in the media. Viewers saw, first-hand, gender identity theory at its most deranged: a couple of parents who have been groomed into thinking their gender nonconforming child is actually the opposite sex.

Family Education Trust @FamEdTrust

This Morning has been hit with Ofcom complaints following their segment on transgender children. The communications regulator said: “We are assessing the complaints against our broadcasting rules, but are yet to decide whether or not to investigate.”

entertainmentdaily.co.ukThis Morning hit by Ofcom complaints over interview with parents of four-year-old transgender childThis Morning has been hit with Ofcom complaints following their segment on transgender children.

Good optics, they were not. The parents are clearly deluded, obviously working from a script, and viewers saw what journalists like Lewis are paid to conceal: the sheer lunacy of the trans movement, its baked-in homophobia, the regressive stereotypes and most of all, the danger to distressed children.

Helen, of course, recently portrayed me as ‘cruel’ without ever linking to any of the supposed cruelty itself. She knows that accurately describing my ‘Her’ stunt would put her in the uncomfortable position of taking a stand on men inserting themselves into lesbian spaces. Say one thing on that matter and you’ll never be taken seriously by UK feminists again, say another, and you won’t be so popular at the Atlantic, which has form for misrepresenting gender critical people. No, better to smear those who are brave enough to address the issue while taking what I guess must be a sizeable cheque for every 1500 words.

These journalists are deceiving you, either deliberately or through ignorance, or through a kind of delirious mixture of the two that must make them feel like they’re high all the time. Helen Lewis, James Ball, Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal….they achieve this actively, by misrepresenting key people in the debate, or passively, by just pretending that everything is normal when it very much is not.

The therapist Stella O’Malley wrote this on Facebook a few days ago:  “I can forgive people who haven't figured it out, I can forgive people who are disengaged because they think (incorrectly) that it's a storm in a teacup, I can forgive people who incorrectly think that trans is the new gay and that they need to transition or they'll die by suicide, I can forgive people who would genuinely lose too much if they came out… but I just can't forgive people who KNOW what's going on and who are among the 5% most privileged in the country and still stay silent. Because they're afraid of being unpopular. That's it. They wouldn't lose their jobs. They would lose popularity.”

Meanwhile, it’s left to people like me, JL, Genevieve Gluck, Victoria Smith, Jane Clare Jones, and others to provide the journalism that this historic moment demands, while the journalists themselves snipe at us for having the temerity to fill the space they abandoned.