Pay no attention to that opinion behind the curtain

In journalism, being told that "Person X holds Bad Opinions" without being told the content of those opinions is a red flag

I

On the evening of July 31st I stumbled across this post from the Facebook page of All Together Now, an Irish music festival held from the 29th to the 31st:

Today we had two speakers here that do not align with the views of ATN Festival. We wholeheartedly and unreservedly apologise to all our festival community, artists and supporters for any hurt or anguish caused. We support trans rights. It is as simple as that. Our hopes for this festival is [sic] that it is a safe, supportive and loving environment for everyone.

All Together Now

My first thought was that it seemed pretty weird to have “speakers” at a music festival. Who the hell is going to pay attention to a lecture about intersectionality after subsisting on nothing but cocaine and energy drinks for two consecutive days?

Second, I was confused about the vagueness and ambiguity of the apology. Which speakers were being referred to? How, exactly, do those speakers not align with the views of the festival?

A quick Google search that evening only raised my suspicions further. It was surprisingly hard to find an Irish journalist willing to give a straight answer to the simple question “What have these speakers said which warranted an apology from the festival?”

On August 1st, the Mirror reported that “Feminist campaigners Rachel Moran and Stella O'Malley spoke on Saturday but had been called out by some on Twitter for their views, with some asking for them not to be allowed on stage” - no mention of which views they’d expressed, nor who found them objectionable enough to call for de-platforming. Buzz.ie ran essentially the same article, credited to the author of the Mirror article (and also a co-writer).

There was definitely an outlet who published an article on July 31st which described Rachel Moran and Stella O’Malley as holding “controversial” opinions on trans issues, or words to that effect. I’m almost certain the outlet in question was WLRFM, a radio station in Waterford, but I can’t verify this as WLRFM deleted the article at some point on August 1st (apparently without issuing a retraction notice), and the link now leads to a 404 page. I tried finding an archived version, but it appears that it was published on July 31st and deleted prior to 9:30 PM on August 1st, before it could be crawled.

GCN (Gay Community News) published a rather combative article titled “All Together Now faces backlash for programming controversial speakers” which maintained only the vaguest pretence of impartiality. It conspicuously quoted four individuals or groups who were opposed to Moran and O’Malley’s invitation to the festival (one of whom is quoted as having said “FUCK TERFS”¹) among passages like:

However, organisers have faced backlash for programming an event featuring Rachel Moran and Stella O’Malley who have been widely criticised for their controversial views.

The pair hosted a discussion entitled ‘Sex and Intimacy’ on the Saturday of the festival, with concerned parties condemning the event due to Moran’s “anti-Trans” and “anti-sex worker” opinions…

Once again - what are these so-called “anti-Trans” opinions?

WLRFM weren’t the only outlet to publish an article on the 31st and delete it the following day. Fortunately, some of these articles were crawled prior to deletion, such as this one from Breaking News, which was still live as of 7 a.m. on August 1st. From the article:

Stella O'Malley and Rachel Moran were criticised for elements of their speeches, which were reported to have alluded to anti-trans rights viewpoints according to the Waterford News & Star.

Irish author Emer McLysaght called Rachel Moran out on Twitter, saying "you are openly transphobic. ATN has stated that it supports trans rights".

In response, Rachel Moran said: "You Emer are a socially privileged twit who doesn’t give a toss about impoverished educationally disadvantaged women incarcerated with male offenders."

At last, a straight answer to the question. Rachel Moran (and also, I presume, Stella O’Malley) objects to the practice of housing trans women in female prisons, a view some people consider transphobic.

I scrolled through Rachel Moran’s Twitter feed and found that the reason these articles have been scrubbed from the internet is because Moran and O’Malley have been threatening to sue them for defamatory content. According to Moran, the speeches she and O’Malley gave at the festival were concerned with “sex and intimacy”, and made no mention of trans issues.

II

The first thing to bear in mind about this debate is that Moran and O’Malley are not tilting at windmills: there are male people currently incarcerated in the Irish prison system who identify as female but who have not medically transitioned (e.g. this person and this person). The risk of a female² inmate in an Irish prison being sexually assaulted by a male inmate may be low in absolute terms, but it certainly isn’t zero, and if the current state of the American prison system is any indication, it may soon grow larger.

The second thing to bear in mind is that, contrary to what one might reasonably assume if you get a lot of your news from Twitter or Instagram, Moran and O’Malley’s opinions are shared by most of the Irish public. According to this poll of a representative sample of 1,020 Irish adults, the overwhelming majority supported single-sex facilities in certain contexts (e.g. 64% want hospital wards to be single-sex). A mere 17% of Irish people agreed with the statement “A person should be able to change their sex on their birth cert as soon as they self-identify as or believe that they are a member of the opposite sex.” I don’t know what Rachel Moran’s specific views are on the subject of trans women in female prisons, but if she expressed a sentiment like “Male convicts who have not yet commenced medical transition or gender reassignment surgery should not be housed in female prisons”, fully 62% of Irish people would agree with her.

Perhaps one might look at the chart above and think “Oh God, the TERFs have won”. Fair enough. But it’s categorically wrong and knowingly misleading to pretend that Moran and O’Malley are expressing extreme fringe opinions, as opposed to opinions which enjoy a very high level of support among the Irish public.

III

Before I get to the object-level question of whether it is appropriate to house trans women in female prisons, I’d like to discuss the meta-level question of how this issue is being framed by certain activists and journalists. Why are they so quick to label Moran and O’Malley’s opinions “anti-trans”, “transphobic” or “TERF” etc., but so cagey about what those opinions are, and why they find them objectionable?

One amusing possibility is that some of the activists and journalists legitimately don’t know what Moran and O’Malley said to invite the wrath of the trans community and its allies - but are afraid to ask, for fear that merely asking the question would also invite the mob’s wrath, or of appearing ignorant in our culture of pathological knowingness. These are the Milhouses of the Irish activism/journalism set.

In fact, it’s perfectly possible that there are one or more chains of Milhouses leading all the way back to the original source (an individual who encountered Moran’s and O’Malley’s views unmediated). Even the All Together Now organisers may not have known which views Moran and O’Malley hold which got them in hot water. Call it the game of Character Assassination Chinese Whispers.

But surely some of the journalists involved know which specific views are under discussion. Presumably if a real smoking gun existed - for instance, if Moran or O’Malley had published an article stating that they did not trust trans women and would never feel safe around them - then the activists and journalists would have led with that, confident that most readers would arrive at the conclusion that these opinions (and the people who hold them) are transphobic. The fact that none of these articles included such a smoking gun implies that no such smoking gun exists: that, in fact, neither Moran nor O’Malley have ever made any public statements that the average reader would consider transphobic.

So here’s what I think is really going on. There are some journalists writing for mainstream publications who definitively know what Moran and O'Malley's opinions are. Many of these journalists unconditionally support housing any inmate who considers themselves a woman in female prisons, and consider it transphobic to object to this policy or point out potential downsides. But they also know that they can't come out and explicitly say that this opinion is transphobic: if they did, then the two-thirds of Irish people who share that opinion would think "hey, that's what I believe! Are you calling me a bigot?" and the journalists’ credibility would take a serious hit.

The solution they’ve collectively arrived at is to talk around the issue in a circuitous way, labelling the opinion in question as transphobic without informing the readers what it is, and hoping that when their readers see a word like "transphobic", they will fill in the blanks in their heads and infer that Moran and O'Malley hold opinions that the average person would consider transphobic, rather than the very popular and mainstream opinions they really hold. It's a classic motte-and-bailey fallacy.

Describing Moran and O’Malley as holding “controversial” views on trans issues is the same kind of sneaky rhetorical trick. “Controversial” means “causing disagreement or discussion”. No one says that evolution is a “controversial” theory among biologists, as only 3% of them disagree with it. By the same token, only 17% of Irish people definitively disagree with Moran and O’Malley. By describing Moran and O’Malley’s opinions as “controversial”, these journalists are essentially hoping that if they announce that the emperor is wearing clothes loudly enough, then anyone who thinks that he’s naked will keep mum and assume that they’re the odd man out.

The goal is not to change the minds of Moran or O’Malley, but rather to send a message to undecided bystanders watching from the sidelines: “Those People hold certain opinions. You don’t need to know what those opinions are, but I can assure you that they are Bad Opinions. If you ever discover what those opinions are for yourself, you’ll know in advance not to give them a fair hearing - after all, you’re one of the good ones, right?”

To be clear: just because 62% of Irish people agree with the statement “male inmates who have not yet commenced medical transition or gender reassignment surgery should not be housed in female prisons”, doesn’t mean that activists or journalists are obliged to agree with them. You’re perfectly entitled to disagree with that opinion or characterise it as transphobic, even though most Irish people disagree with you. You’re even entitled to assert that anyone who holds that opinion is a hateful bigot.

But if that’s what you think, just come out and say that, accepting the fact that by doing so, you may well be alienating many of your readers. That would be honest and straightforward. It’s deceitful, manipulative and cowardly to talk around the issue by labelling an opinion as transphobic without specifying what the opinion in question actually is, and thereby allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.

IV

Why am I getting so bent out of shape about what is, in the scheme of things, a pretty minor scandal? Because this rhetorical style increasingly seems to be the default in English-language journalism. I have personally spoken to several people who are absolutely certain that Joe Rogan is using his podcast to promote Covid misinformation, and yet when pressed cannot name a specific factual claim about Covid made by Rogan (or signal-boosted) on said podcast. Likewise, how many people believe that JK Rowling or Dave Chappelle are TERFs vs. actually know the specific beliefs they hold about trans issues? This is not necessarily to suggest that any of those characterisations are unfounded (they may well be justified), only that it’s kind of weird to confidently assert those characterisations while being utterly ignorant of any specific details that constitute those characterisations.

Alice: John is a criminal!

Bob: Really? What crimes did he commit?

Alice: Dunno.

(I suspect that many of these people are also Milhouses.)

There’s a growing cadre of Western activist-journalists who no longer believe that the general public can be trusted to come to the “correct” conclusions on contentious political issues. They view dissenting views as dangerous pathogens liable to infect anyone with whom they come into contact and spread virally throughout the population, except those members who have developed the appropriate memetic antibodies.³ (If you think I’m being hyperbolic, at least one journalist - writing in the New York Times, no less - even used the trite portmanteau “infodemic” to describe the supposed pernicious influence of “disinformation” on the general populace.) As such, it is the job of “responsible” journalists to circuitously talk around these dissenting views in order to prevent a Patient Zero - alluding to the existence of these views, but telling the readers essentially nothing about their content other than that they are “bigoted”, “hateful”, “ignorant” or similar.

Needless to say, I think this attitude is paternalistic and condescending. The people reading the news are adults: they are not going to be instantly converted to the side of bigotry and intolerance simply because a journalist mentions that Person X believes XYZ. The fact that so many journalists think their readers will be so converted suggests that, more than anything, these journalists have remarkably little confidence in their own beliefs to win in the marketplace of logic and ideas.

So, a general principle: if a journalist/activist informs you that Person X is known to hold Bad Opinions without actually telling you the content of those opinions, you can reasonably assume that at least one of the following is true:

1. The article is a hit piece intended to damage Person X’s reputation. It may be a piece of political activism masquerading as objective journalism, but the journalist could equally be attempting to inflict reputational damage on someone with whom they have a personal grievance.

2. The journalist/activist does not themselves know the content of Person X’s opinions, and only heard that they are Bad Opinions from a third party (who may in turn have only heard from someone else).

3. The journalist/activist does know the specific content of the opinions held by Person X, but doesn’t want to tell you because:

   1. They think their readers (including you) aren’t smart or decent enough to come to the conclusion that the opinion is factually or morally wrong on their own initiative.

   2. They’re worried that the opinions might actually win in the marketplace of ideas - they think that Person X can present a more convincing case for why their opinion is right than the opposition can.

V

So that’s my opinion on how this issue is being framed in the media. What about the issue itself?

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to understand that trans woman inmates in a male prison will probably face unusually brutal treatment from their fellow inmates. In order to protect these women, the obvious solution is to transfer them to female prisons.

But it’s equally obvious to me that, if anyone is permitted to change the sex on their birth cert without medically transitioning (thereby permitting male convicts to be housed in or transferred to female prisons at-will), there will inevitably be some number of male convicts who falsely claim to be trans women in order to be transferred to female prisons, thereby gaining access to vulnerable female prisoners who are very poorly positioned to protect themselves from assault.

I cannot emphasise enough that I am not making a ridiculous claim like “most trans women are rapists”. Among trans people who have medically and/or legally transitioned, the proportion who go on to commit a serious crime is no higher than in the general population, which is exactly what one would naively expect. My point is that policies rightfully intended to alleviate the suffering of trans people can carry unintended consequences if they are designed in such a way that they are liable to exploitation by bad actors (namely, cis men maliciously claiming to be trans women, solely in order to gain access to vulnerable female inmates).

I can’t help but think there’s a great deal of cognitive dissonance on display in the current trans-inclusive iteration of Irish feminism. Prominent activists in the movement had (have?) no trouble believing that numerous Irish men were variously

1. abusing their position as secondary school teachers to make creepy comments towards their students,

2. joining secret Facebook groups for the purpose of sharing revenge porn or

3. spiking women’s drinks with needles,

even though all three of these stories were unsubstantiated rumour and hearsay with no basis in fact. But many of these same activists apparently also believe that Irish men, in spite of supposedly being willing to try just about any trick to achieve sexual gratification (regardless of how devious, underhanded or outright illegal) - these men could never bring themselves to pretend to be trans in order to gain access to vulnerable female prisoners to sexually assault. That’s a line that none of them will cross, apparently: not even the subset of Irishmen who have actually been convicted of violent and/or sexual offenses.

I get the distinct impression that the question of how to deal with trans women who’ve been sentenced to incarceration is one that most cisgender activists would prefer not to actively think about. Most people (regardless of political affiliation) prefer to believe they live in a land of silver bullets and no-brainers, in which their preferred solution has no real downsides and the only reason one might object to it is ignorance, bigotry or both. Why bother grappling with the unintended but unavoidable drawbacks associated with making gender self-ID the sole determining criterion of the sex on one’s birth cert, when instead you could just recite thought-terminating slogans like “trans rights are human rights” and smear anyone who calls attention to said drawbacks as a bigot?⁴

VI

So let’s assume gender self-ID is a non-starter for resolving this problem. What are the alternatives?

My first suggestion would be that, if a male prisoner is currently serving a sentence for raping or sexual assaulting a female person, any requests they make to be transferred to a female prison should be dismissed out of hand. Yes, this may include trans women legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria who were nonetheless rightfully convicted of rape or sexual assault. Yes, I still think it’s an appropriate trade-off.

In the poll cited in section 2 above, 8% of Irish adults thought that legal transition for trans people should be conditional on having begun taking sex hormones, while 26% thought that it should be conditional on full medical transition (including gender reassignment surgery). While either of these solutions would probably reduce the incidence of rape or sexual assault in female prisons dramatically, I’m not even sure if the solution need be this strict. One potentially viable alternative could be for a trans woman housed in a male prison to be transferred to a female prison only after one or more consultations with a psychiatrist (or panel of psychiatrists) experienced with gender issues.⁵ This would likely succeed in weeding out the malingerers and bad actors from the people experiencing authentic gender dysphoria.

“If you do that, there will inevitably be some genuine trans women who don’t get seen by a psychiatrist in time, or who get misdiagnosed, or who otherwise slip through the cracks!” Yes, I know, and this is awful, but policy debates should not appear one-sided, and it’s unhelpful and reductive to pretend that they should. Is my proposed policy solution perfect? No, obviously not. Is it a better solution than allowing any male convict who claims to be a trans woman to be immediately transferred to a female prison? Yes, frankly, I think it is.

It wasn’t so long ago that most people collectively understood that the purpose of democratic legislation was to find compromises that took into account the interests and concerns of competing groups and tried to balance them as well as was practicable. The current dominant paradigm of “I’m more oppressed/marginalised than you, therefore you have to do exactly what I say without question, and I’ll assassinate the character of anyone who suggests otherwise” is one that came into vogue very recently; I don’t like it one iota, and I hope more people catch on to how unworkable it is sooner rather than later.

1. Last year I saw a discussion on Reddit where someone asked “Is there a term for that thing when a journalist writes an article which strictly speaking doesn’t libel Joe Bloggs, but includes numerous quotes which are negative or critical of Bloggs attributed to third parties, the clear intent of which is to undermine Bloggs’s reputation in the minds of the readers?” Someone coined the delightfully snappy term “delegated defamation”, which I hope catches on.

2. As is standard on this newsletter, I’m using “male” and “female” exclusively to refer to biological sex, not self-reported gender.

3. Ironically, many of these journalists and activists scoff at the idea that social contagion could play any role in the skyrocketing rates of young people identifying as trans. “Radicalisation for thee, not for me”?

4. As Moran herself points out, it’s also very easy (dare I say it, a hallmark of privilege) to say “I have no problem housing anyone who identifies as a woman in female prisons” when you yourself are a well-educated middle-class adult female, for whom the likelihood of being imprisoned for any crime is functionally nil.

5. This would include instances in which the trans woman in question had been receiving treatment for gender dysphoria from a qualified psychiatrist prior to her arrest and/or conviction, in which case the psychiatrist in question could submit a formal recommendation to the sentencing judge that the trans woman be housed in a female prison rather than male.