Owen Jones explains how right-wing media is fuelling a transphobic ‘cult’
Owen Jones at the PinkNews Awards 2022(PinkNews Awards 2022)
Journalist and LGBTQ+ campaigner Owen Jones has hit out at the UK’s right wing media, during a speech at the PinkNews Awards 2022, slamming it for stirring up “mayhem and harm” against trans people.
The PinkNews Awards 2022 is supported by joint headline sponsors Lloyds Banking Group and United Airlines.
In his passionate speech, he addressed an “anti-trans moral panic” in the UK today.
He said this panic is being “stoked by almost the entire British media and an increasing fanatical cult”, and “has succeeded in causing unbelievable mayhem and harm”.
Jones recalled how in previous decades gay men were seen as “sexual predators”, which is now a similar narrative being pushed about trans people.
He went on to explain how homosexuality was thought of as a “mental illnesses, a fetish that we were forcing on the majority to the weakness of a tiny minority”.
“The same songs are now being sung about trans people in this country,” he said.
Jones commented on the 56 per cent increase in anti-trans hate crime recorded by police between 2021 and 2022.
Artist and filmmaker Topher Campbell with journalist and LGBTQ_+ activist Owen Jones. (PinkNews Awards 2022)
Jones described how Eddie Izzard has “paid the price and been hounded and victimised by a cult” due to her bid for a Labour seat in Sheffield.
He also pointed out how Graham Norton has been “hounded” off social media, saying: “It’s a cult that’s gone completely and utterly out of control, unless we stand against them it will go out of control.”
Norton recently deleted his Twitter account after suffering an anti-trans pile-on.
“Trans rights, the crisis facing trans people. This is a place where people are tortured through conversion therapy,” Owen continued.
“All of us together, we have to make an oath – don’t let them divide us. Don’t let them divide the LGBTQ+ movement. We need to stand together.”
Jones presented the Broadcast and Documentary Award to Topher Campbell for Moments That Shaped: Queer Black Britain.
