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The Guardian, transphobia and do lesbians get a day pass?

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15:13 / 20.02.04

This is frustrating, in a sense, because I often get the sense that I am ascribed certain, rather simplisitic, positions because opposition is most easily understood as coming from a specific stance one is opposed to

Yeah, and I'm sorry about that if/when I do it to you. I'm hoping that formulating it explicitly will be helpful, at least to me, because then I'll be able to check more easily whether I'm responding to a simplistic Lurid that I've made up.

Theadrot again, sorry.

15:20 / 20.02.04

I don't think I was suggesting that the article was non-committal on trans issues. I think that the Guardian, either as a paper or perhaps through its editors, might not care or have a very strong view on transphobia. I could be wrong, but I see it as entirely plausible that the staff is allowed essentially free reign to express views on transpeople and their rights.

I suppose I'm saying that I find it quite believable that writers who are liberal by most considerations, turn out to be transphobic. Does that make the Guardian transphobic? Yes, in a certain sense. Is the Guardian progressive? I don't think so, though some of its writers may be.

I suppose I disagree that it is contradictory for a liberal paper to be transphobic in this way. Largely because I am prepared to believe that liberal opinion contains a good deal of transphobia. I mean, just look at some of the things you see in the Guardian....

09:34 / 26.02.04

Lurid: economically and hilariously put. But at the same time, insisting as a liberal that the Guardian's transphobia undermines its claim to be a liberal paper is part of the process of redefining what is and isn't acceptable "liberalism", which will (hopefully) be part of what drives the Guardian to change its position. Yes?

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:03 / 26.02.04

Ah, there's that sentence I was looking for. Yes. THANK YOU.

16:10 / 26.02.04

Deva: yes. Though I'd say that challenging or redefining liberal too radically, too strongly against common usage, could be problematic.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:15 / 27.02.04

Is the Guardian progressive? I don't think so, though some of its writers may be.

Yeah. I think we're all getting too hung up on "The Guardian" as an entity in and of itself... it has an editor, true, whose personal opinions may or may not match the content (may even be horribly fascistic across the board, but has decided that the demographic to appeal to is those who like to think themselves "liberal")...

(off-topic but pursuing this point- great article in last week's New Statesman by Mark Thomas about writing a column for lad mag Zoo Weekly, and why he quit the job after seeing the first issue).

Now, whatever the rights and wrongs of publishing such a piece in the first place, to not publish criticism of it would definitely be wrong, imho. And only the editor of the letters page knows how much was/wasn't printed... how skewed, in other words, the reaction of the "audience" was made to look.

As has been pointed out already, a newspaper is a work in progress. There's only a certain distance you can get on controversy alone- if you're alienating, or just plain pissing off, a chunk of your readership, it's gonna be a bad thing purely in economic terms. And papers can change. (Hell, even the Mail's softened slightly... well, ever so slightly... since it came out in support of Mr Hitler in the '30s...)

12:27 / 22.03.04

I have just read this interesting discussion. I don't know anything about the original piece, but i'd just like to respond to the suggestion earlier by quireboy that the Guardian's "gay" writers are somehow in fluffy parts of the paper. I work for home news, and write frequently about the government's policies regarding the media, issues surrounding the plurality (or otherwise) of media voices, press and television regulation, control and funding of the BBC, and so on . I am a reporter, not a columnist - my job is to get stories that will hopefully make the front page and set the agenda. (Previously I was education correspondent, assistant news editor and London correspondent of the Scotsman.) Equally, Gareth Mclean has established himself as a serious writer about television and its cultural impact - he's streets ahead of anyone else in the national press when it comes to this. And Charlie Porter's fashion writing was so good that he's just been poached by GQ as an associate editor. While I am (I think) the only gay reporter on home news, we have a gay assistant news editor, gay reporters on the City desk, gay subs, designers and planners. Personally, I thought the Libby Brookes article made many good points (it was great to have such a positive piece given such prominence) but i agree it displayed a certain metro-centric tendency that all papers are guilty of now and again, and said so internally and in an article for Attitude magazine.

ONLY NICE THINGS

22:18 / 22.03.04

Hi Matt,

So, now that you have had a chance to look at the article, how do you feel about it? It occurs to me that there is a broader issue here, it being essentially how queer space gets to define itself in broadsheets (which leads on to many other questions of course, not least whether it matters whether a news reporter is gay or not - it seems that it shouldn't; however, this is a bit different, as Julie Bindell is being paid to offer an *opinion*). Julie Burchill for a long time traded her sexuality against her ability to spit venom at others, which created a sense that Burchillspace was carved out, and would be fiercely defended - that being both the space of the middle-aged bisexual, and also the space people would pay her to fill with words. Julie Bindell appears to be following a similar line - the implicatiopn being that there is a certain amount of oxygen and no more, and thus for example the ladder has to be pulled up before the transgendered can get on it so that female victims of violence do not have to divide their rations. It strikes me as rather an odd viewpoint, especially since there is really no other daily national newspaper that is likely to give queer issues the same crack of the whip. Does this contribute to a general feeling of unease? I always suspected that Burchill, like the Barefoot Doctor, was employed as a kind of cowpox - a warning of how awful things could get on the other side of the fence - but perhaps that is overdetermination.

11:56 / 25.03.04

Quick point on the use of quotes in the reader's editor's piece (ie whether he or the psychiatrist was speaking when the article was criticised)

I'd hazard a guess, having read his columns before, that that is Ian Mayes (ie the reader's editor) speaking. His role seems to be that of an independent-of-newspaper critical voice, which is perfectly welcome to criticise the paper which he works as ombudsman for.
In fact, it is kind of the point of his job.

So yes, there was a criticism of the piece in the paper (although, as is often the case with these things, the criticism was far less prominent that the original article.)

I'm also wondering, if some of those who read this thread On Barbelith were then to voice their opposition to the piece, would we constitute a "lobby" of the kind referred to in the readers' editor piece?

Ex

12:20 / 25.03.04

Yes, I'm curious about what defining a set of complaints as stemming from an organised pressure group, or similar, does to that protest. On one level, it seems legitimate to point out that people who would not normally have gone near the publication (from overseas) have been alerted to it, thus apparently providing an unrepresentative display of outrage in proportion to the usual readership.

On the other hand, people get involved in organised lobbying and protest groups because they are each, individually, bloody ticked off. Why should the fact that their outrage has expressed itself through a degree of organisation (alerting friends and interested activists rather than just dashing off some personal green crayon bon mots) invalidate, rather than support, their point?
Particularly perverse as people often form organisations in order to give themselvs further clout, by implying that they represent a constituency or interest group. Whereas here, the very fact that something is organised and international makes it suspect.

This may be very obvious stuff - I'm just trying to sort out for myself what it means in terms of protest, and discourses which defuse it.

12:48 / 25.03.04

I like the idea of a Barbelith pressure group, though I'm not sure how it would work or how effective it would be. Maybe I'll start a thread about it.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

07:50 / 05.04.04

You know, the second question and answer in this column is supposed to be humorous...

13:38 / 08.04.04

If nothing else the column (I only saw Haus's excerpt) shows

1) how someone can go from radical to reactionary without changing their point of view

2) stupidity can be achieved through vigorous application of tortured logic as well as by lazy thinking

3) the oppressed doesn't necessarily learn tolerance

3a) or become any smarter

4) even radicals can only take so much change

5) you can't assume gays are progressive

6) we are all policemen

Anyway, Haus, thanks for bringing up the point about pulling up the rope ladder. Ms Bindell isn't very different from immigrants who vote for anti-immigration laws once they're in (is that assimilation or what?).

Liberal enough or not, columnists like her should at least be called on sloppy and/or disingenuous arguments.

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