This week, our podcast will not contain any of our usual segments, including the news coverage that makes up the bulk of our show. We’ve given over the entire episode to a longform interview and discussion with Jasmine Qureshi about queering ecology, and queering as a practice. It’s some fascinating stuff, give it a listen. But sadly, as we all know, trans news in the UK is a firehose that just won’t stop, and we wanted to give time and space for some of it as part of our ongoing mission to counter misinformation and bust myths. And nowhere did we see more deliberate misinformation in the UK press over the past couple of weeks than in this story.
In our most recent episode two weeks ago, we said that we’d come back to this story and that we didn’t want to jump the gun and repeat any misinformation. There have been a flurry of developments since then. This is of course about an incident where a trans staff member of M&S had the temerity to approach a customer and ask if they needed help. Here’s what we know:
- The “incident” in question took place back in March.
- The staff member approached a 14 year old who was attending for her first bra fitting. But the thing is, customers in shops don’t walk around with big sandwich boards saying “I AM HERE FOR A BRA FITTING!” or “I JUST NIPPED IN FOR SOME SOCKS!” so staff members have to, you know, talk to them. The normal reaction when you don’t need help in a store is to say “No, thank you” rather than wait several months before going to the papers about it.
- A throwaway twitter account claiming to be the mother of the teenager has suggested that M&S adopt a kind of “Think 25” policy for trans femme employees so that they don’t approach teenage girls in the lingerie department (see attached screenshot). She also persistently misgenders the trans employee throughout her twitter interactions -which we’re not going to link to- and claims that “men” shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the lingerie department, presumably not even men who want to buy an ill-advised last-minute sexy valentine’s day present for a partner.
- JK Rowling has called for a boycott of M&S stores for slightly unclear reasons, but she’s just a grifter now so who gives a shit.
- There was a rush of news coverage claiming that M&S had stated that their bra fitting services were for “biological women” only. This is absolutely not even slightly true and any one of the outlets that published it – looking at you, PinkNews – could have contacted M&S to confirm it. Something QueerAF did too leading to this excellent article
- A Reddit post apparently written by the trans staffer herself has surfaced which said that at no point was the employee even remotely suggested to be the person who would actually measure the customer’s chest, she was simply asking “Can I help you?” in the way that all members of staff in shops are expected to.
- The post details the employee’s perspective on the incident and includes the detail that at times, her workplace has been the only safe place in her life given all of her colleagues, boss and management team are fully supportive of her transition. This isn’t a particularly important element to the story as such, but we were glad to hear that M&S are 100% behind their employee.
Sex Matters and groups like them are very keen to spin the apology that the customer received (we’ll come back to that) as a victory for common sense, and another nail in the coffin of “trans ideology”. For them, that’s where the story begins and ends. M&S did something wrong by “placing” a trans employee in the lingerie section – which they didn’t, the employee apparently stood between the menswear and lingerie sections. The trans employee was not specifically part of the lingerie section. Nor was she 6ft 2in, as has been widely claimed.
But surely M&S wouldn’t have apologised over nothing? Actually they very much would. The “apology” in question was a basic customer service response, a “we’re sorry you felt that way, let us look into this a little more”. The sort of apology that you’d be rightly suspicious of if it had come from a partner or family member. The sort of apology that does not, in fact, apologise for anything. This is literally Complaints Management 101, but has been puffed up by the anti-rights crowd into something much more substantial.
So our conclusion once we looked into all of this was that this entire story and its emergence into the news cycle (several months after it had actually taken place) suggests that its media profile was carefully managed by press releases, specifically by Sex Matters. Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns for Sex Matters, gave a quote to the Telegraph (archive link) which was then replicated in The Times and the Daily Mail, among others. It seems a little strange that a campaigns director would speak to the press over something not related to one of her campaigns, no?
As our friends at TACC have already said, this is simply manufactured outrage to keep the bullying of trans people as an integral part of our current news cycle, partly to intimidate trans people themselves, but also to keep linking trans people with negative stories in the public mind. To make sure the message that the wider public receives is “trans people = bad”
