It’s a common story: people tweet something nasty about a perfectly nice person, whose life then gets turned upside down. But over the last fortnight, as I’ve watched climate campaigner Mika Minio face a barrage of transphobic hate just because she’s a mum, I’ve noticed strong echoes of the abuse I and my gay friends got in the 1980s, when media and political hatred led to us founding Stonewall.
The social media testimony from people who have known her for years is that Minio is an “incredible friend”, “one of the biggest-hearted humans I know” and an “inspirational campaigner” for justice. She’s good at translating campaigns into everyday experience. So it’s hardly surprising that when ITV interviewed her about Thames Water – an interview about water supplies, for goodness’ sake – one of the points she made was that soaring water bills will be especially tough for mothers.
But Mika is trans and so, when they heard her mention mothers, some of the worst people on the internet leapt on it. They built and fed a controversy by exploiting personal posts that Mika had previously made about breastfeeding her child.
Can a trans woman “really breastfeed a baby?” demanded the literal front page of the Daily Mail. The article, spread over two pages inside the paper, could have ended after a single sentence because, yes, we all have milk-producing glands, meaning trans women can use the same procedure to stimulate lactation as any other mums do who didn’t give birth to their child; it’s not unusual. This didn’t stop a Tory MP claiming in Parliament that he was “extremely concerned for the welfare” of Mika’s child. Online trolls bombarded the NSPCC with demands for a safeguarding investigation – which could have resulted, if the NSPCC hadn’t recognised it for the scaremongering that it was, in a child being ripped away from its loving parents.
