The medium is the message: either we’re all responsible, or nobody is.

The medium is the message: either we’re all responsible, or nobody is.

Hidden amongst the blanket coverage of the dispiriting reality show taking place in Downing Street this week, was an article about the fact that the small Dutch town of Haarlem has become ‘the world’s first to ban meat adverts in public’.

The city council signed off on the initiative after being convinced of the argument that, as a major contributor to the climate emergency, excessive meat consumption should no longer be actively promoted in their town.

Accompanying the story was the customary culture war panic about freedom of speech. We’re all used to this now. It’s the one where a false equivalence is drawn between (a)? decisions a publisher (or other commercial entity) makes about whether, where or how to promote a particular view and (b) genuine limitations on freedom of speech, where the state determines whether it is lawful to express a particular view. Spoiler alert: they’re not the same thing.

Anyway, in this case there wasn’t too much hand wringing about it, the reason being that, 20 years too late (thanks largely to billions of lobbying and advertising dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry), concern about the planet frying is a relatively uncontroversial view.

This compares starkly with the reactions surrounding another outdoor advertising campaign going on in the Netherlands right now. And it’s one that has received relatively little international attention. Perhaps this is because it doesn’t fit with the progressive, tolerant narrative the rest of the world tells itself about the Dutch (in my experience, things are a little more nuanced than that).

This one is a campaign being run by an opaque organisation called ‘Gendertwijfel’ (gender doubt). It’s a (perhaps deliberately) crude execution featuring silhouettes of two people dressed according to 50 year-old gender norms (they reminded me of the toilet door signs you occasionally encounter in public venues several decades overdue refurbishment). Under the figures is written (in pink and blue, naturally), ‘man’ and ‘woman’. The twist (I know… you weren’t expecting this) is that the genders identified are the opposite of what you might expect. Underneath, the headline reads: ‘The new gender law affects everyone’ and a link to a website. That’s it – no indication or explanation of who is responsible for this message, who is paying for it, what their agenda is.

A little background here: in 2014, the Netherlands introduced a new gender identity law, where it became possible for transgender people to change the registration on their birth certificate and passport, following a psychiatric evaluation. Formerly this was only permitted after surgery and sterilisation (yes, you read that right). Many desperate trans people underwent radical interventions that went far beyond what they were comfortable with, as the only route available to them to live authentically. The Dutch cabinet has recently apologised for what they themselves described as an ‘inhuman’ law, and victims of it are being financially compensated.

A change to the 2014 legislation is currently being debated in the Dutch parliament, which will remove the requirement for a psychiatric evaluation. Trans people and their supporters (including many of the psychiatrists whose job it is to provide these evaluations), argue that this change will address a demeaning obstacle that robs trans people of personal agency. This is an uncontroversial view among both experts and (unsurprisingly) the trans community, and I can see why. I can only imagine the humiliation I would feel if I was not ‘allowed’ to identify as queer without the endorsement of a doctor appointed by the state.

Further amendments are being considered, for example the removal of the requirement to return to the place where your birth was registered, and the opening of the possibility for people under the age of sixteen to change their registration (this would only be possible after an application to a court).

The two situations make for an interesting comparison. In Haarlem, nobody argued that a meat advertising ban would be pointless, because people are not unduly influenced by outdoor advertising anyway. The restriction, (and the opposition to it), took for granted the fact that, after encountering a picture of a juicy burger and a compelling slogan, people are likely to go and buy one. No one was disingenuous enough to suggest that between seeing an ad and going to the shop people will diligently research the health and environmental pros and cons of burger eating and base their purchasing decision on the outcome.??

And yet that’s exactly the argument rehearsed by supporters of the Gendertwijfel campaign when they pressured JCDecaux to reinstate the advertisements, after they were initially pulled in response to public pressure. NPV director Diederik van Dijk tweeted that "the commotion shows that open, democratic debate does not come naturally… it is distressing that progressive politicians in particular show so much narrow-mindedness… afraid that their argument will topple with the slightest headwind.”

The ‘slightest headwind’ claim represents the same deliberate sophistry that was on display during the UK Brexit referendum, when the promoters of the now-infamous ‘Brexit bus’ claimed that when people read the slogan?‘we send ￡350m a week to the EU, let’s fund our NHS instead’ they would obviously understand ￡350m wasn’t a actual cost (far from it, once rebates and EU investment in the UK were taken into account), or that there was any real promise to divert funding to the NHS (of course this never happened).

As those of us who work in communications (along with anyone else with a modicum of common sense) know only too well, there is nothing open or democratic about billboard advertising (or, more broadly, corporate lobbying). As has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt over the past 10 years with the rise of populism, conspiracy theories and ‘post-truth’ doctrines, money has the power not only to influence the debate, but to re-frame its terms entirely.

In the case of the climate emergency, (or the more benign-sounding ‘climate change’ as the fossil fuel industry successfully rebranded it for 20 years), the re-framing took the shape of a false equivalence between the views of the 99% of scientists who agree with the facts around anthropogenic global heating, and the 1% of (often bankrolled) dissenters.?

In the case of the targeting of the trans community, it’s a deliberate amplification of what was for a long time an extremist gender-critical perspective. This is promoted as if it were equivalent to the long-settled view of the vast majority of experts, psychologists, doctors and (most importantly) trans people themselves about the validity and the reality of the trans experience.

A little further context? might be useful here. Each year since the law was updated in the Netherlands, a total of 460, 530 and 640 people respectively have exercised their right to change their gender registration. This is in a country with a population of 17.4 million. The trans community represents a tiny minority that is no threat to anybody. These are simply people who want to live their lives truthfully and to be treated equally under the law (and yet, according to gendertwijfel, this law 'affects everyone').

The trans community is also an extremely vulnerable one. In the UK, a trans person is twice as likely to be a victim of crime as a member of the general population, and in 2020/21 2,630 anti-trans hate crimes were reported – a 16% increase on the previous year. And that’s in the context of an estimated level of underreporting of 88%.

And yet much of the media commentary – and the furore surrounding this new law is just the most recent example – focusses on the apparent 'threat' that the trans community poses – specifically the risk that predatory men will exploit these laws to invade women-only spaces and sexually assault them. The inflammatory, paranoid tone of this coverage is probably most aptly summed up in the Netherlands by Jan Kuitenbrower’s ravings in ‘HP De Tijd’ about the terrifying ‘bloodlust’ of the ‘trans movement’.

We’ve been here before. When I turned 16 in 1990 the age of consent for gay men in the UK was still 21 (there was no restriction for women, which was more a reflection of their invisibility than a progressive approach to legislation). The age was at the time, and is now, 16 for everybody else. Equality wasn't reached until the year 2000. The age for gay men was reduced to 18 in 1994, and the debate at the time was dominated by the view that predatory, older homosexual men would exploit a change in the law to sexually exploit and assault teenage boys.

The counter-argument then was the same as it is now: there are laws against assault; we don’t treat whole groups of people unequally because of the possibility people might break them. Instead, we enforce those laws. And lest anyone think that I am being complacent about risk, I am no stranger personally to the impact of sexual violence perpetrated by men – against both men and women. There is no reason why those organisations responsible for women-only spaces cannot institute sensible policies and practical measures to ensure the safety of those spaces. Of course, there is the more obvious consideration that if a rapist wishes to pose as a trans woman to enter a women-only space, he need hardly go to the trouble of changing his birth certificate first.

Commenting on the decision to re-instate the gendertwijfel campaign, JCDeceux general manager Hannelore Majoor commented, ‘It is not our role to take sides or to make a substantive judgement about a campaign.’ In the context of the very real physical risk (as opposed to the invented one) that trans people, and the much broader community of gender-nonconforming and queer people face every day, this view is hardly tenable. If you, as a media-owner, accept money to promote a fringe view that positions a vulnerable minority as a threat and places them at further risk of phycological and physical harm, should you not be held accountable for the hate you fuel?

Haarlem’s city council felt strongly enough about the meat consumption of this small community to regulate the undemocratic influence of advertising money. And yet the demonisation of a small, vulnerable group by powerful lobbyists is apparently OK, because to decline to promote their view (which they remain free to express in the press, on social media and by directly lobbying their MP), would apparently be an unacceptable limitation on freedom of speech??

The broader question – and one which the industry may be forced to face, sooner rather than later, through legal challenge – is whether the communications companies who facilitate the promotion of falsehoods, half-truths and inflammatory content (as well as those who pay for them), should be held accountable for the cost their activities impose on society.

If you own the media or control the message, then you may well find that, as much as you might wish to argue the contrary, it absolutely is your role to ‘take a substantive position’. Because if not your role, whose? And if not now, when?

#advertising #sustainability #transphobia #activisminadvertising #gendertwijfel #leadership