A story took hold over the weekend that ‘snowflakes’ are demanding Santa is changed to female or gender neutral, eliciting outrage across the internet and fuelling hate from the right-wing.

The problem is, no ‘snowflakes’ are calling for this whatsoever. It’s called ‘outrage politics’ and it is a deliberate ploy from those on the right to demonise people who call for actual protections, making their reasonable requests to be treated equally harder to take seriously.

All weekend I had to deal with people I consider reasonable and rational human beings having a hissy fit over this ‘news’. I watched as the BBC helped fuel outrage that has been completely and utterly manufactured to harm trans people.

Why do I care about this? Because I’m trans, of course, but also because I’m human.

For the longest time, the most powerful media institutions on the right have been waging a war against trans people, costing many of them their lives. This is just another iteration of this and every time you help share this nonsense, you are complicit in the acts of violence that are perpetrated against trans people and those who fall outside our narrow gender norms (tip – there are more people outside the gender norms than inside).

I believe that all people deserve to be treated equally regardless of any factors they cannot control themselves. Hardly a radical concept, I know, but one that seems ever more important in this ridiculous world where money rules all and the real snowflakes – the cis, het white people in power – use their might to punch down so they can make themselves feel big.

When you read headlines like this just take a minute and think about what you are doing before you get outraged.

Who knows, as well as helping stop violence against a trans person, it might also stop you looking like a total tool.

Junkee looks at how newspaper claims that people want Santa to be gender neutral were invented: https://t.co/NyvomvOKB7

— Trans Media Watch (@TransMediaWatch) December 17, 2018