【Taro Kai Archives】

Tea Uglow was having dinner with her family when her brother proffered an impromptu opinion on Taro Kai Archives"the role of trans people in sport, women's spaces, and the 'danger to the kids.'"

"It was as surprising as it was personally devastating," said Uglow, who identifies as trans.

"After an emotional discussion it was even harder to persuade everyone that this was literally regurgitating ideas we’d seen on the front pages for the last few years," she added. "'Concerns' that were not concerning when I actually transitioned."

From the conversation with her family, an idea emerged. Uglow, who works for Google Creative Lab, said she wanted to see where those ideas about trans people emerged by doing a non-partisan review of headlines from the past year. "I just wanted to see, without cherry-picking the 'bad' headlines, how out of control the situation was," she said.

Uglow found 878 articles about transgender people published in 365 days. What started out as a passion project evolved into an inadvertent artwork, which Uglow has titled "Yours sincerely, the fourth estate". Printouts of the coverage are being displayed at the "From _______ To ________"exhibit at Manchester’s People’s History Museum.

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At the start of August, Uglow did a Google search for "transgender" on certain news outlets between Aug. 9, 2018 to Aug. 8, 2019. She filtered results by site, date, and location, and ordered them according to Google's 'relevance' filter.

In an outline of her methodology, Uglow wrote that she didn't edit the results regarding the positivity, negativity, or neutrality of the coverage, and no semantic filtering was added. Uglow also published the a catalogue of the headlines in a Google Doc containing every headline along with links to articles published in The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, BBC News,The Economist, New Statesman, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, the Guardian, and The Mirror.

One of the key things that stood out to Uglow when sifting through the results was the sheer volume of stories relating to a relatively small percentage of the population. "Nearly three stories a day, every day, all year (from only nine sources) is just not normal," she told me. "It’s not a news cycle. It’s a campaign. It’s like being the weather. And everyone always moans about the weather."

There is, according to the government equalities office, "no robust data on the UK trans population." In 2018, the equalities office tentatively estimated that there are approximately 200K to 500K trans people in the UK. Based on the most recent population data, that equates to between 0.3 and 0.75 percent of the population.

Back at the dinner table, Uglow's conversation with her family is one of many happening in a troubling debate about trans rights in the UK stemming from the government's consultation on simplifying the process to change legal gender. A conversation that has, as journalist Shon Faye wrote in a British Voguepiece, "become a vicious and distressing media debate on the validity of trans people."

"You may be hearing more about us, but when there are no openly trans editors, staff writers, directors or producers at major media organisations, and no openly trans people in Parliament, very often we are not in control of the terms of the discussion," Faye added.

In fact, digging through the coverage data, Uglow found a particular absence of trans voices from coverage about the community. "Mainly because our trusted voices no longer trust the press to report them, or to protect them," she said.

This media debate prompted GuardianU.S. staffers to pen a disavowal of the Guardian's official stance on trans rights in the UK, which was outlined in an op-ed. GuardianU.S. journalists stated that the editorial "exposed some of the fundamental divides between American and British feminism and progressive politics – and highlighted for us an alarming intolerance of trans viewpoints in mainstream UK discourse."

Another current that runs through many of the stories Uglow analysed is an obsession with so-called "reasonable questions."

"My community have become so used to seeing the word 'reasonable' that it is has become our equivalent to 'I'm not racist but...'," she said.

"Whether the obsessive quality of all these trans stories is innocent in intent, or malign, or sinister — is hard to fathom," she added. "I am a trans woman; I was raised a feminist. I don’t like the idea of women’s spaces being unsafe. I have children, I too respond badly to anything that says my children are at risk."

"But, even when the risks are real — rarely is the discussion framed as quantifiable risk assessment. Because through that lens, what is a veryminor risk for one community can be balanced against a profound, ongoing, and existential risk for the trans community." As the GuardianU.S. journalists pointed out in their op-ed, academic studies have found that "trans-inclusive policies do not endanger cis people."

Uglow said she's considering sending the stories back to those journalists because she felt "guilty of printing out two reams of paper to make a point." I asked Uglow what she hopes the journalists might glean from the project. "I’d love them to see how obvious their obsession is. It’s like, super creepy," she replied.

"Find answers to your 'reasonable questions' before you write or commission the same trans piece, by the same writer, about the same questions (again)," she added. "We’d suggest using the informed, global network of expertise for discussion topics rather than an under-researched opinionated columnist or sporting bodies who don’t understand what a trans body is."

The overarching message is written on the Fourth Estate site: "Do better / Or... perhaps, just leave us alone."