How Television Surrendered to the Trans Lobby
The trans lobby's capture of television was almost effortless. Addled television executives eagerly invited activists to correct their 'sins' and a bizarre murder helped pave their way.
Part Two: How a Misleading Sob Story led to a TV Coup
It should perhaps be no surprise, given how little the trans lobby is rooted in reality, that the events which led to its capture of the mighty television industry in the UK were both unexpected and downright strange. One involved murder, prostitution and a psychopath. We’ll get to that soon.
What few people predicted in the mid 1990s, when trans issues featured rarely on our screens, was the impact of an increase in competition within television which was to fuel an appetite for stretching editorial boundaries. Up to then (and with the unique exception of ‘The Wrong Body’ show on Channel 4 which looked at the Dutch treatment of adolescents) coverage of trans issues was fitful and focused exclusively on adults.
A sense of how ‘out there’ trans subjects were generally considered in the 90s can be gleaned from the Transsexual Beauty Contest that featured in one of the early episodes of Channel 4’s Eurotrash, taking its place neatly between the usual jokey diet of models with unbelievably humungous boobs and naff German swingers. Things began to shift in 1997 when a new channel, Channel 5, set out to steal some of Channel 4’s trangressive thunder with Dawn Airey’s infamous “films, football, and fucking”. In the end it was another F- Factual- that became a major focus of its schedulers.
Channel 5 did not have the resources to compete in prime time slots so began making documentaries for them which were much cheaper than drama or shiny floor entertainment shows. It turned out -to their delight- there was a sizeable audience that didn’t want to watch soaps or reality shows. A new golden age of documentaries had begun….and medical anomalies would feature prominently.
Eye-grabbing shows in a genre that was often dismissed as Medical Schlock garnered unheard of ratings. The firm I worked at, Mentorn, had a major success with The Boy Who Gave Birth To his Twin which 5 million people watched. In this new milieu trans subjects fitted perfectly.
One of the reasons TV turned to trans people 20 years ago was they were rare and therefore by definition exotic and fascinating to audiences. They also went through, or so we all assumed, painful medical procedures which sprinkled heroism over them.
When I made a series for ITV marking the Millenium called ‘Time of Our Lives’ (RTS nominated in case you’re interested) I had to choose three families of different backgrounds whose stories over the generations from WW2 till the present would allow us to relay a bigger story of national change. One of them, the aristocratic clan we chose, were the Corbetts, a Scottish family whose heir in the 60s had fallen in love with Britain’s first MtF sex change transsexual and ended up disinherited and divorced from the mother of the current Lord. The scandal led to a groundbreaking trial that saw Arthur Corbett’s marriage to April Ashley annulled.
April was an amazing character and part of ‘her’ appeal was the awe many felt for the fact she’d had the balls -so to speak- to remove her balls and everything else genital. In the series April described in gruesome detail ‘her’ operation in Morocco at the hands of Dr Burou. Surgery was a badge of honour for old school transsexuals; one viewers tended to respect.
April was the antithesis of the activists who would soon launch an assault on the television industry; well-read, elegant and open-hearted. I still cherish memories of filming April at the Chateau Marmont in LA where Matthew McConaughey doffed his Stetson to her and after filming she insisted on a bar crawl where she terrorised Rod Stewart. April claimed they were old flames. Maybe that’s why Rod looked so scared….he’d suddenly remembered.
April never once suggested ‘she’ should have undergone medical treatment as a child. Or that any other child should. The idea would have struck almost everyone at the time as absurd and dangerous. Little did April or anyone else know what the trans lobby was cooking up.
As competition between television stations grew in the first decade of the millenium (Sky had launched Sky digital in 1999, the UK’s first digital TV service with 140 channels) Channel 4 commissioned a returning series called ‘Body Shock’ which showcased the most extreme examples of strange physical or psychiatric conditions, complete with startling titles.
Channel 5 responded with Extraordinary People, for which I executive produced a number of shows. This tit for tat spawned some excellent films including Simon Dickson’s award-winning ‘The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off’ at Channel 4. But as commissioners became ever more desperate to fuel the appetite for shlock the genre soon plumbed the depths with ‘The House of Obsessive Compulsives’ and my favourite absurd title ‘The Man With Ten Stone Testicles’. Ouch.
It was this need to break boundaries and to provide the shock factor that played a key role in pushing television producers towards ‘trans kids’. This was acknowledged in 2015 by trans campaigner Paris Lees in a discussion on Good Morning Britain when ‘she’ wondered whether the media hadn’t reached saturation point with trans subjects. “now they seem to be looking for the more extreme examples …the pregnant man or kids”. Indeed.
Yet ironically, it was Paris Lees ‘herself’ who had played a significant part in the increase in trans coverage. But first let’s set the context.
In the first half of the ‘naughties’ sex change still rated but shows were already looking for new angles. In 2002, Channel 4 got a massive 3.5M viewers for a show about women becoming men, ‘Make Me A Man’. It beat the Commonwealth Games on BBC1!
Television doesn’t operate in a vacuum though and the passage of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004 turned trans subjects into a political minefield. The mines were soon being laid in broadcasters’ headquarters as trans lobby group Press for Change who had led the successful campaign for the GRA began pressing the media for what it called fairer coverage.
Unluckily for the television industry trans activists could cite a genuinely hateful reality show. It was broadcast by Sky the same year (2004) by gay run company Brighter Pictures. In ‘There’s Something About Miriam’, six guys were placed in a villa with Miriam Rivera, a 21-year-old model from Mexico. Whoever she chose to take on a luxury cruise would win £10,000. What the contestants and viewers weren’t told was that Miriam was a guy too. The final reveal, with mounting tension and trademark reality show pounding music humiliated the winner as well as Miriam and shocked reviewers, commentators and the audience. Sky eventually had to pay £500K compensation to the contestants as well as Miriam, who would die in mysterious circumstances in 2019, aged only 38. RIP Miriam. You deserved better from Brighter Pictures and Remy Blumenfeld who ran it.
It was partly in response to ‘There’s Something About Miriam’ and the ensuing hoo hah that a group of trans activists set up Trans Media Watch in 2009. In its first survey published in 2010 the group asked trans people about their ‘experience’ of press and television in the previous year. Naturally, and perhaps fairly they excoriated press coverage. As for TV they took aim at one show in particular. Broadcast in 2009, as part of Channel 4’s ‘Body Shock’ ‘Age 8 And Wanting a Sex Change’ was one of the first of what would become a growing number of shows that would focus on kids. It was later shown in the Real Families online channel which is where this clip comes from.
The problem, the survey highlighted, was that the narrator kept referring to the children by their biological sex. Though the quote was attributed to a survey respondent its prominence suggested TMW agreed. Apparently, kids who were not affirmed in TV shows somehow led to widespread misgendering. Who knew?
The trans lobby had set its guns on a new target: children, but Trans Media Watch made little headway at first. Then a bizarre event changed everything.
Later that year funding and organisational assistance from On the Road Media, a charity, was offered by its founder Nathalie McDermott, a former journalist at the BBC and Guardian. She has often explained subsequently that she felt the need to help TMW and counter the alleged forces of transphobia after she witnessed the death of the trans lawyer Sonia Burgess. At first everyone assumed Burgess had jumped to ‘her’ death at Kings Cross underground. But an even darker tale soon emerged.