Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce on the turn-around in coverage of trans issues. 

Decades ago, when the first men who said they were women were admitted to women’s spaces, any commissioning editor who was told about it dismissed it as a sideshow. By the time vast numbers of people started identifying as trans, it was rejected because it had been happening for ages and was everywhere.

Also working against news coverage was a determined disinformation campaign. Youngsters were being taught at school and university that it’s impossible to define male and female objectively or to know which individuals are which. Older people were being convinced by lobby groups which wilfully misrepresent the law that if a man said he was a woman it was compulsory to play along.

Few people actively opposed the propaganda because those subjected to it mostly believed it and those spared it mostly didn’t know about it, and if they did, found it implausible that anyone could believe anything so dumb. Now that trans is everywhere, that mutual ignorance has ended. The two groups are increasingly clashing in workplaces, schools and everywhere else. And even if the new belief system doesn’t set editors’ news senses tingling, the clashes do….

More broadly, the narrative about trans issues is changing. Geoffrey Crowther, editor of the Economist from 1938 to 1956, used to tell young journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. That may sound like unnecessary advice in the era of churnalism and social media, but it expresses a timeless journalistic truth: a story can only ever be about one thing.

And for many years, every trans story stuck to a singular narrative: the struggle of the uniquely oppressed and suffering person born in the wrong body, with everyone else relegated to supporting roles if they were lucky and bigoted villains if they weren’t. Now the narrative is in flux: you can still easily find stories about celebrities’ brave trans kids but there’s room to point out that other people’s rights and interests matter too.

Once enough people got their heads around the story, it flipped like an optical illusion. The same facts and events that were once dismissed as too crazy to be happening became the sort of crazy that makes great copy.

Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Pretending men can be women has been destroying institutions and women’s lives for years now. And finally, it’s news.

It's got very little to do with people's attitude in general. The majority always understood the insanity of this belief that men can become women just by saying so. It's just that now, at last, the media have started to do a little more honest reporting.