Dear British Journalist

If you don’t work in the British media, and you’ve been puzzled by how it’s been treating the tiny UK trans community, here’s an open letter to help with that. I may have got some stuff in it right or I may not. Who cares? I'm on a deadline here. I can’t actually be bothered to check with anyone working in the industry, to be honest, and frankly, it might mess things up for me if I did.  But that’ll all be fine, you’ll see…

Dear Journalist,

First, let me imagine you.

Belsize Park or Crouch End? Hampton or Dulwich Village maybe? Wherever, I see you settled somewhere in leafy London. A comfortable urban spot - an Edwardian terrace, or perhaps a corner semi. Knocked through perhaps? Kids in their teens, and maybe even at university now. Two? Perhaps some from the first marriage as well. The eldest is a bit of a shit, but then you were away so much. It’s ok, because it's all civilised with the ex now. You even went to that talk on body politics at The Barbican together. A dog, that you take to the Heath or the Common or whatever it is that you signed a petition for it to be protected, on weekends, and a place in North Norfolk that you go, that is quiet, (it’s the open skies isn’t it?) and where you can work on the novel. 

An award or two, perhaps for that piece on the Nobel prize winner who filtered their money into the Caymans, or for exposing a sexual abuse ring at the heart of somewhere? You're a safe pair of hands now and more than capable of working to a deadline two or three times a week as long as you don't take up too much time actually thinking about what you write, its accuracy, or its effects. A slant is vital. That's Page 1 in the manual and it certainly makes everything easier. So when you've got one, you definitely keep hold of it. 

Your sister's out of rehab and there's money in the bank, though there wasn't always, and you remember the Oxford days with a mixture of sadness and relief. Then there were those first few jobs on regional papers, chasing stories and doorstepping grieving mothers whose kids had come off motorbikes. You drink too much, but that's a given. At least the wine is good now, at least the restaurants are Middle Eastern or French paysan, at least the ballet is contemporary and the theatre is something challenging upstairs at The Royal Court that your partner has been dying to see. You're in bed by 2 most nights and you can get a lunch booked with the News Editor of three major dailies next week if you want. You never miss Peston, although you think he's an overpaid self-parody, or Question Time, though you think Fiona Bruce is a lightweight, or The Papers on tv (because you were on it last year and you'd like to be again). 

You write and you write and you write and you write. Opinions flow and when you haven't got any, you can get some, to order, for money. That's what you do. Having had some, they become a signature, so you then make more that support them. Or else you're going to sound pretty stupid aren't you? Like you can't even be trusted to be consistent, which is what your paper really needs you to be, so as not to unsettle the readership. It's the brand. Especially these days, when everything has to be simple, not complex, instant not considered. You produce views, you're a judgment machine, and that judgment is always of others on any topic you like. What a ride! Your views, yes your views, matter. Who the hell are you anyway but what the hell does that matter? You are a commentator, a byline, a voice. You made it and it's wonderful. No one's going to cancel you and any of the ill-researched, stigmatising, even dishonest, generalisations you come up with - that stuff that just feels so right to the readers your Editor is desperate to keep. You’ll be offered a thousand words in any of five papers, maybe more from a Sunday, if some snowflake tries to shut you down. But hey, it's worth a ton of Twitter followers and a definite spot on a university conference platform if that happens eh?

So that's you, isn't it? You're all the same.

Or maybe it isn't? Maybe you're not?

How could I possibly say? I don't know you. In fact, I don’t know any journalists. Though there aren’t many of you really, for some reason I’ve been made to feel that you are everywhere. I might have inadvertently shared a changing room or a toilet with one of you once I guess. Creepy or what? What were you doing in there? Sitting in a cubicle with your Mac on your knees writing hate? You and your kind try and pass like the rest of us sometimes, but I know your sort. You can always tell. Claiming the right to do what you do, irrespective of who you hurt. You're not fooling anyone you know.

I certainly don't know your background, your motives, your enthusiasms, your fears. I don't know why you do it, or why you want to stop and open a tea room or something, or don't want to stop but carry on till your fingers bleed and you die in front of your laptop one day. I don't know anything about how it felt for you to have to file each week even though you knew your wife, or your husband, or your secret boyfriend, was fucking the lead from that edgy play at the Lyric all the time. I don't know about your cancer or how you lost your Mum to it when you were nine. I don't know that your daughter's actually a sex worker but you're too ashamed to tell anyone. I don't know about your mental breakdown when you were at Keble and how you missed a whole year. I don't know your industry or much about the realities of it. I don't know you as a person, I don't know your humanity. 

And, hey, breaking news, as you probably don't say. I don't care. I don't even want to meet you or hear about any of that stuff, in case it turns out you're not at all like any of the things that I’ve written about you. What might that do to all these pre-formed opinions-for-money that I have about you? I might feel the beginnings of an urge to change them and you can’t surely expect me to do that? No way. That’s how it starts. You people are not just sick but smart. 

It’s so much easier and quicker to write these words about you. You see I have a system. I’m going to categorise and stigmatise you. I'm not going to bother to think about what makes you who you are or why. I don't really think of you as a person at all, merely a cipher, a representation, perhaps of something that's actually going on for me inside and has little really to do with you at all. Not only that, but I'm going to say that people like you are all like this,  because that keeps it all simple, and I will keep saying it, and stand by that. Monstering you is good practice because then no one will want to check out the veracity of my words as they won’t want to go anywhere near you. 

I certainly don't want any readers of this blog to think that there might be more to all this, that there are some self-reflexive, thoughtful journalists who are actually trying to do a good job and avoid gratuitously smearing whole groups of people every week, as against others who are venal, ethics-free shits who'll hack the phone of a dead girl or go through someone's bins for cash. Such inconsistencies really are difficult for readers to cope with aren't they and let's face it how can I possibly cover all that without writing a 10,000 word essay? And I have stuff to sell to Editors, who have made absolutely clear that there’s a clear line to take on all this. Give me a break here.

Here’s the thing. I don't really give a damn about what's true. I have a deadline to finish this blog in an hour because I've got a school play to go to and who cares who you really are? I'm working with you as an object here, a caricature, the backfill dumped into a blog piece below a punchy headline, and my expectation is that people don't actually care how accurate my portrayal of you is, nor are interested in the place from where I get my information. If I have painted a picture of you and someone is reading this and thinking of you as a self-satisfied, complacent, privileged, self-serving cartoon cunt, then my work is done. I want that because it will make the reader detest you, maybe even think you are dangerous, because I'm very happy to embellish, misinform and or even lie in what I write if it gets me out there and builds my profile. The scarier I make you, the more readers will want from me because they'll want to keep tabs on you, checking that the threat you represent isn't climbing to the point when they must take things into their own hands (which they might do anyway, but hey that's nothing to do with me is it?). 

So, bring on the insinuations about you and your motives. You must understand; I need to keep my blog readers safe from people like you. Perhaps eventually I'll write about having your legal rights removed, because you must somehow be stopped, or tacitly incite people (ever so deniably of course, this is a quality blog) to beat you up before you do your awful worst (and then I'll point out that it’s all your own fault. You made people want to do it to you). Yes, I can see my stuff going there. Great copy. My concerns always sound ‘reasonable’, but I am pretty proud actually of how I and a few lunch buddies have changed the meaning of that word. ‘Legitimate’ too, even though just a few years ago my views would have been regarded by many as revolting. That’s how good I am. Perhaps I can get a book deal?

I am writing about you - all of you, in the same breath - painting you like this because you seem to write about me - and, as a trans woman, all of us - using this model. 

You relentlessly imply that we are, sometimes even call us, rapists, perverts and predators. You characterise us as sexual threats, or deranged, or dishonest, or helpless victims of some medical conspiracy. You talk of us as men, endlessly men, and keep coming back to genitals. Genitals all the time. You bend the facts, leave them out altogether, or lie about them. You barely ever speak to us, let us into your radio studios or onto your current affairs programmes, and if you ever do then you lie to us about why you want us there because it always - and I mean always - ends up being about our right to exist at all or us needing to prove that we are not all guilty of an imminent sex crime as a basic part of our nature. You are driven, seeking out stories to support the picture you have embedded in your readers' minds that we are dangerous fanatics, driven by some ideology (never mind that no one - and I mean no-one - in the trans community has ever figured out what the hell you mean when you use this term, that you co-opted from the hard right; gender ideology) and that we are motivated only by some sort of fetishistic, predatory, violent drive to hurt women. You take the small number of transgressions by trans women in society, ignore the consistent and deafening evidence that trans women are far, far more at risk of being victims of hate and violence than they are likely to cause it, and build grotesque conflations to create guilt by association - colouring trans women as a category, criminal by instinct. MPs and Peers then read out your stuff in Parliament, and you can report that they did, recycling the bigotry. You accuse us of putting children at risk, as a group, just like some of you accused gay people of the same, or black men, or your grandparents accused Jews. You call us groomers and insult those who want to help us, or even just be decent and humane, calling them 'handmaidens' or misogynists, or worse, much worse.

You provide a vocabulary and ideas that percolate through society and ended up getting a trans teenager killed recently. No that probably wasn't your column...but someone read it and talked to someone else, who shared it somewhere where it sat with all the rest of it, and the culmination of all that was that knife in that park and a girl dead, for what? 

And where does all this end? It might matter to you one day when the society you have done so much to help create comes knocking on your door. We'll be long gone by then I guess, removed from society completely. And removed as a group (because that's what you keep calling for, isn't it?) - irrespective of anything that we as individuals have actually done or not done of course. Collective guilt. It’s so much simpler for the readers that way.

And until then, just keep on filing, eh? Those columns and opinion pieces aren’t going to make themselves up, are they?

With fingers crossed for your stellar career, and all the school fees paid, 

Jo

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[Edited to add standfirst and revised images 19 Febsome, a small correction on the origin of the term 'gender ideology', 8 April and small stylistic changes, July 5]