Hi Subscription News App,
I thought we’d have a sit down over a coffee, I feel we need to talk. I’ve really enjoyed your articles, satire, and the amazing journalism you’ve been doing these last few years. Speaking truth to power and championing the rights of people. Yeah, you’re waiting for the ‘but’ aren’t you?
Imagine if you will, that your news app was a restaurant: well designed, good content, and I get the things I need. Sure, some stuff isn’t to my tastes, but that’s okay; I can skip over the restaurant equivalent of the sports section. All that good stuff, and then every, say, two weeks to a month, one of your staff would wander up and spit in my food. That, or maybe just at me. Sometimes both, even.
Ooo, a bit grim, you say? Well, perhaps, and you seem to have a blind spot. You champion the rights of women, people of colour, immigrants, LGBTQ+ folk, disabled people, etc. You hold corporate interest, and shady government behaviours to account… and then when it comes to trans folk, that high standard seems to be forgotten. Not just forgotten, but I looks like you amplify the voices that seek to oppress. Sorry, not oppress, just ‘critical’. 🙄
You seem happy to write articles that I’m a risk to women, that my identity is contested, that I’m secretly a perv, and that I don’t know how to raise my trans teen – that I’m either pandering or indoctrinating him. If I was a person of colour, followed a certain faith, or suchlike; I feel you would not write such things. Yet, here we are.
It’s a hundred quid to support your news app per year and I feel torn on this. I want to support you for all the good things you do and I want you to stop writing mistruth, shade, and lies about me and mine. It hurts and it’s cruel. I thought you were one of the good guys.
Listen to your sister publications, they’ve expressed worry at your behaviour.
It’s not me. It’s you. You need to stop and I’m voting with my purse as my words aren’t going in.
L x
I would, even if reluctantly, cancel the subscription and explain to them why.
The war against women has largely been lost in the West, the war against ‘the gays’ likewise. So a war against a much smaller, less cohesive group like trans people may seem like the next best option to the usual mob of xenophobes and paranoiacs. I’m afraid we’re the front line for a while yet, at least in the English speaking world.
Sue x
Hmm. I will give that a think over, Sue. Thanks.
As to a ‘war against…’, I feel that has been going backwards of late. The loss of rights for US women around the right to choose, numerous ‘tweaks’ to UK rights for trans people, etc. I feel there’s a selection of folk trying to turn back the clock on rights, even when many of us think choice around body autonomy and the freedom to love who you want openly, should not be up for debate. Or worse, revoked.
Still, as the old post apocalypse computer game, Fallout, closes on “War. War never changes.” 😔
By War on Women I was thinking more along the lines of deny women the right to own property, have a career, marry whom they please, vote, smoke, associate freely, receive higher education…. Not much of that in, say, Afghanistan. But, yes, we need to take care that things don’t slide here. Sue x
Ah, my apologies, Sue. I got the wrong end of the stick. Yes, Afghanistan and other parts of the world need to improve on equality.
Closer to home, less misogynistic idiocy, sexual violence, and equal pay would go a long way, IMO. I remember Mrs J saying to me that every woman she knew (natal or trans), has a #MeToo story.
Even one political columnist on the campaign trail couldn’t help but get some GC snark in when covering the Greens campaign launch. It is a trifle upsetting.
/S Today’s content is sponsored by Micro Aggressions, because a small fuss is just enough to cause big upset. 🙄