Daring to question the right-on hate mob? That’s REAL bravery
EVeRYBODY’S so brave on television. Tuneless contestants on The X Factor make ‘brave’ song choices in tearful tribute to their grannies. eccentric home chefs ‘bravely’ combine pistachio and raspberry in triple-decker sponges on Bake Off.
Irish writer and therapist Stella O’malley showed real bravery on Trans Kids: It’s Time To Talk (C4) — by daring to ask an obvious question that should be on everyone’s lips.
Is it right, she wanted to know, that 11-year-old children are being enabled and even encouraged to take powerful, puberty-blocking drugs?
By asking that aloud, even by merely thinking it, she risked the anger of a hate-mob that tends to howl down anyone who questions their methods and their motives.
at a public meeting in Bristol, called to discuss feminist responses to transgender issues, she saw the mob in action. Youths in balaclavas and masks barricaded the entrance to the hall, trying to prevent women from going in.
When police cleared a path, the yobs hurled foul-mouthed insults and shouted down every attempt at dialogue with an all-purpose chant: ‘Trans women are women!’
It is this fulminating hatred that O’malley risks bringing down upon her head, simply by suggesting society should consider the health risks before prescribing lifechanging drugs to adolescents.
She had every right to present the documentary because, growing up in Dublin during the eighties, O’malley was convinced she was a boy. Today, she’s married with three children — but at ten years old, she says, if someone had offered her drugs or surgery to change her sex, she would have seized it without hesitation.
That option didn’t exist 30 years ago. Today, she believes, the question for children shouldn’t be, ‘Do you want to swap gender?’, but, ‘are you prepared for a lifetime of medication and perhaps irreversible surgery?’
These issues were raised, with a very different spin, by last month’s ITV drama Butterfly. That story, of an 11-year-old boy determined to be treated as female, depicted anyone who objected as a neanderthal bigot, bully or wife-beater.
It’s a pity this documentary didn’t come sooner to counterbalance Butterfly. It’s a shame, too, that it didn’t include any calm debate between trans activists and dissenters: instead, we saw a series of one-sided arguments.
Calm debate seems increasingly impossible when a vociferous minority are determined to scream it down. By the end of the hour, O’malley was shaken: ‘I’m way more freaked out than I was at the beginning of this,’ she said. She has opened the conversation — will television be brave enough to continue it?
GP Zoe Williams, presenting a Horizon medical documentary looking at a different type of drug for altering sexual hormones, was far more mealymouthed and equivocal. The Contraceptive Pill: How Safe Is It? (BBC2) examined possible sideeffects of the Pill, from blood clots and breast cancer to mental health issues, and then told viewers not to worry.
The higher rate of breast cancer, for instance, was explained away in a flurry of statistics, with the added implication that we should not believe anything we read in newspaper headlines.
and one journalist’s personal account of depression triggered by the Pill was practically dismissed as unreliable, anecdotal evidence.
as usual with Horizon, the data was projected onto a whitewashed wall in a cellar, as though we were watching illegal porn in the Sixties. Does the Beeb really think this is edgy?
BASIC NEEDS OF THE WEEK: On London’s streets, Paul O’Grady met homeless people and their pooches, in For The Love Of Dogs (ITV). For many, furry affection proved even more important than a hot dinner. A mutt is truly man’s best friend.