From Vice: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/paris-lees-mail-on-sunday-bullshit
May 22 2014
What a horrible pile of shit the Mail on Sunday ran on its cover last weekend: “NHS to give sex change drugs to nine-year-olds: Clinics accused of ‘playing God’ with treatment that stops puberty”. You know what that means, don’t you? That the NHS is definitely NOT giving nine-year-olds any “sex change drugs” and won’t be any time soon.
The Telegraph, a paper that revels in being openly hostile towards trans people, is now repeating the misleading headline. And what’s with the “playing God” bullshit? As one parent of a trans child pointed out by email: “The Mail wouldn’t be questioning the treatment of diabetic children or children with congenital hypothyroidism on the NHS, so what makes it OK to print this shite about children receiving another kind of endocrine treatment?”
I don’t quite understand everything she’s talking about, but you can’t argue with an angry mother.
Papers pull stupid shit like this all the time; six of them recently admitted they got it wrong by making irrelevant references to a woman’s transgender status in a story about her nearly dying in a stag attack. A stag attack. A stag whose antler pierced her throat, broke her spine and narrowly missed her spinal cord and a couple of major arteries.
As far as we know, the stag didn’t attack her because she was transgender. Nevertheless, six national newspapers decided to print various details about Kate’s history, including her former name and the obligatory “sex swap” headlines. Admittedly the Mail wasn’t, in this instance, the worst offender, and quickly corrected its mistake. And they do run sympathetic – or, at least, neutral – articles sometimes. The point remains, though: the British media, as a whole, can be really, really shit when it comes to covering stories about transgender people.
This article is going to contain a lot of “shits”, because I give one. But does the media? I may be completely wrong, but the people arguing against so-called “sex change drugs” on behalf of vulnerable under-16s don’t, as far as I’m aware, go out of their way to combat gender-based bullying in schools. If you’re not doing anything to stop transgender kids from being beaten up – AKA, the most important issue here – then how the fuck are you planning to get away with starting a moralising headline campaign about the choices they’re allowed to make?
Continue reading at: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/paris-lees-mail-on-sunday-bullshit
Women Born Transsexual 