The Honour Oak pub in Lewisham, London, regularly hosts LGBTQ+ events, including a monthly Drag Queen Story Hour for families. Far right groups have responded to this by holding violent, transphobic rallies outside the pub for months now, most recently on Saturday, June 26, when a journalist with Trans Safety Network was injured while observing.
While the police have been no help in shutting this down, the local community have stepped up to the plate, showing up to every demonstration in far greater numbers than the right wing protesters and counter-protesting alongside activist groups, making it clear that fascists aren’t welcome in Lewisham. However, despite the locals’ success in repeatedly driving out these far right extremists, and the violence displayed by those extremists before retreating, the response from the mainstream U.K. press has been silent at best and irresponsibly misrepresented the facts at worst.
Events on Saturday began early, as the police have made it clear that the space in front of the pub is up for grabs to whichever group gets there first—despite the harassment and intimidation the staff and clientele of the pub would face should the anti-trans protesters be able to set up there. According to Jess O’Thomson, the journalist who was injured on the scene, in an account of the events published by the Trans Safety Network, the anti-trans protesters arrived just a few minutes after the first group of counter-protesters set up in front of the pub to protect it, and immediately began shouting insults and slurs at them. Soon after, these transphobic protesters advanced on the counter-protesters, quickly resorting to violence when they stood firm instead of ceding control of the space.
According to O’Thomson, much of this violence was instigated by Nick Tenconi, one of the leaders of Turning Point UK, a far right organization that branched out from Turning Point USA, and which is primarily responsible for organizing these rallies in front of the Honour Oak. O’Thomson reported that Tenconi offered to fight several of the individuals who were peacefully counter-protesting before the rest of his side began throwing glass bottles and other objects at the counter-protesters and the pub behind them. Turning Point UK would later claim that’s what the counter-protesters had done to them, and the Daily Mail, one of the only mainstream papers to report on it, shared that assertion uncritically in their inaccurate and sensationalist coverage of the incident.
O’Thomson reported that protesters could also be heard chanting threats, including threatening to follow the counter-protesters home, and that they then began grabbing hold of the counter-protesters’ flags, threatening further: “If you keep hold of the [flags which formed the line] we’ll hit you, simple as.” After managing to steal some of the flags, the far right protesters then broke the poles into pieces, using them as projectiles and breaking the window of the pub with one.
As you can see in videos, counter-protesters did attempt to repel the protesters’ attacks with the flag poles they were holding, which may be what inspired Turning Point UK’s laughably false claim that the counter-protesters were armed with clubs with sharpened wooden ends (although wooden flag poles do tend to get pointy when you steal and break them!), as well as the Mail’s extremely loaded statement that the video footage showed “masked demonstrators swinging sticks that appeared to double as pro-LGBTQ flags.”
The Mail also failed to specify that many of the masks were actually the kind used as Covid precaution rather than an attempt by counter-protesters to avoid being identified—especially relevant as Turning Point UK claimed O’Thomson’s obvious surgical mask was an attempt to conceal her identity, as a means of calling her status as a journalist into question.
Trans Safety Network also reported that one counter-protester, Ada Cable, was repeatedly punched in the face by a protester and left with injuries that include a concussion and a nose that is likely broken, which they are currently receiving medical treatment for. Other counter-protesters were also injured by the far right protesters and had to seek first aid on the scene, with O’Thomson reporting seeing one counter-protester pulled from the crowd by a group of protester’s and subjected to a violent assault. O’Thomson herself was injured when the protesters forced the counter-protesters back hard against the building, ending up with significant bruising as a result.
This kind of situation, with the risk of deadly crush injuries, is extremely dangerous, and TSN reports that police intervention only made matters worse, granting the transphobic protesters space in front of the pub, arresting a counter-protester, and causing injuries to others in the course of that arrest, which they originally denied but were later forced to admit was “possible.”
Despite the violence and the enabling behavior of the police, the growing counter-protest led to the transphobic protest groups abandoning the site by 11AM, when the Drag Queen Story Hour event was scheduled to actually begin. Outside the pub, the counter-protesters, suddenly absent violent far-right extremists to protect their community from, formed an impromptu street party with banners and a sound system and a speech from the performing Drag Queen, That Girl.
Large numbers of locals, including cishet elderly people and members of a local church that had previously been targeted by Turning Point UK, were present, going out of their way to show support to queer locals and emphasize that LGBTQ+ people are welcome in Lewisham but fascists and other bigots aren’t.
However, despite the non-violent nature of this final section of the protest, it was then that the police decided to shut everything down, arresting one of those present for “breech of a dispersal order” for good measure. It’s interesting that it was this peaceful celebration of the LGBTQ+ community that prompted the police to take real action rather than the extreme violence used against them earlier—and it’s even more interesting that uniformed officers were photographed having a sit-down chat with Tanconi in a café later.
The impressive win for the Lewisham community—and the widespread, active support from the people of Lewisham for LGBT+ people as a whole and trans people—should be major news, overcoming violence and intimidation, the inaction of the police in the face of serious violence and their seeming friendliness with far-right figures, hate speech, and public incitement to violence from far-right groups.
In a climate where libelous claims about trans people are discussed as serious concerns on the floor of parliament, where LGBTQ+ people’s, particularly trans people’s, human rights and legal protections are up for debate, and where transphobic organizations are trying to paint their extremist hatred as mainstream, the active resistance from the community of Lewisham is significant. It’s newsworthy, or should be, even for those who align with the fascists present, because it demonstrates the gap between the transphobic belief that everyone secretly supports them and their views, and what communities on the ground actually feel, think, and are willing to take action to prevent.
The only reason not to cover this and incidents like it, and do so accurately without an attempt to spin the account in the far right’s favor, is because you don’t want to. Because you don’t want the public to be aware of this reality, because you’re trying to spread the belief that transphobia is popular and normal, so transphobes feel emboldened, trans people and their allies feel isolated, and those who have no real opinion, or passively support trans people but don’t really know any in real life, start to question themselves as to whether the bigots aren’t actually right after all.
I’m not accusing any outlet in particular, but the British media as a whole has bought into transphobia, as well as the systemic hatred of other vulnerable groups, wholeheartedly in recent years. We only have to look at The Telegraph’s disability calculator for an example of how this is playing out. The mishandling of coverage of the far-right violence in Lewisham, and the community’s resistance to it, is absolutely a symptom, and a glaring example of the lack of journalistic integrity shown by the established press.
It’s appalling how little reporting there has been on this incident in the mainstream press, particularly since I provided a detailed account of events on the day. There seems to be an acceptance of violence as long as it happens to trans people. Even when I, as a journalist, have been injured, there has been very little outcry from my colleagues in the industry.
Jess O’Thomson, speaking to The Mary Sue
It’s been clear for some time now that the mainstream press in the UK is not reliable when it comes to issues and events impacting the transgender community, and that many papers have a clear transphobic agenda they’re not even trying to conceal. Outlets like The Canary and Pink News are doing their best to counter this, but there’s only so much smaller outlets can achieve when up against the large, well funded, and often politically connected, corporations that dominate news coverage in this country. There’s no easy answers here, but something is going to have to change, because the situation where established papers are increasingly acting as mouthpieces for either the government or far-right groups is unsustainable. People are already getting hurt.
(Image Credit: Trans Safety Network)
