No, trans people aren’t mad at Adele

Early Wednesday, articles appeared in Newsweek, and The Daily Mail, and an additional column in the Mail, were published alleging that transgender people were upset at singer Adele after she said that she was happy to be a female artist at a British awards show Tuesday night.

This was news to me, and I’m pretty deeply enmeshed in trans Twitter, said to be the source of the outrage. Taking a closer look at the matter, it appears that a single screenshot of a tweet from some random account claiming to be trans was the only apparent source for these stories.

Strangely, no links were provided in any of the news stories to substantiate the claim that trans people were upset with Adele. This appears to be yet another case of anti-trans campaigners inventing shit out of mid-air, which has become a real epidemic for their movement.

Last month, the Times of London was forced to issue several major corrections on previously run anti-trans stories. The first was a story from last year that claimed that a Brighton hospital had banned the word “breastfeeding,” which I personally debunked within hours of original publication.

A second claim was that hundreds of trans women were being held in UK prisons for rape. This statistic was based on an assumption amongst gender critical campaigners that under British law, rape must involve a penis and penetration. Based on this half-knowledge of law, anti-trans activists ran with wild claims about transgender women as rapists.

It turns out, however, that cisgender women (those without penises), can be and are charged with rape as accessories to the crime. So the truth is there is maybe a small handful of trans women in UK prisons for rape, those numbers aren’t explicitly tracked, apparently.

Anyways the point here is that gender critical activists have been lying a lot lately, and this Adele fib is yet another in a long line of lies. This latest lie is so obviously laughable on its face with even an ounce of thought. I, as a trans woman, absolutely love being a woman, just like Adele does. That’s why, you know, I spent thousands of dollars to transition.

Supposedly, Adele was taking a crack at the gender neutral format of the Brit awards. The change was made after comments by non-binary singer Sam Smith last year lamenting the gendered nature of the award show categories.

Back then, gender critical activists lamented that it would disenfranchise women artists, who, I’m assuming, they thought would be overlooked if forced to compete with men. That proved false this year, as women swept 10 of the 15 gender neutral awards.

The change to gender neutral categories wasn’t something that the trans community as a whole asked for. We have asked for non-binary inclusion in many walks of life, and I suppose singing awards would be included in that ask, but Adele’s comments aren’t some burn of the trans community.

Many of us, like me, love being a woman. Some, like many AFAB non-binary people and trans men, don’t want to be considered women. Either way, nothing Adele says changes any of this.

But what this lie does do is give people like Julie Bindal another opportunity to grind her axe against the trans community, a kick she’s been on for decades now. I suppose everyone’s gotta eat, even if it’s lying for profit in the pages of The Daily Mail.

Bindal claims that Adele was standing up to “sexists” who asked for gender neutral singing awards, but it would seem to me that the real sexists are those that believed that women could never compete against men in a singing popularity competition. But that’s just me.

These people claim to want an open and honest debate, yet never miss an opportunity to flat out lie to advance their agenda.

Trans people have largely refused to take part in this so-called debate, rightly recognizing the bad faith emanating from the other side. And I don’t blame them.