Hi everyone. Below is a reflection on a conversation from Episode 1 of the ‘Move Over Mother Theresa’ podcast, in which myself and Meera Kumar chat with Charlie Craggs. New episodes drop weekly - subscribe on Spotfiy, Apple, Youtube and pretty much anywhere you might be.
Meet Charlie Craggs.
Our interview with author, activist, public speaker, and self-identifying but-by-now-I-reckon-universally-agreed ‘GAYcon’, Charlie Craggs, challenged and changed a core belief of mine. One I had felt, until now, was an essential attribute to change making. One that I now accept is a privilege to have and an idiot’s ideal to expect.
On the Will of Grace
I experience proper, full body awe when I learn about beautifully simple, gracious acts of non-violent activism. Gandhi’s your man for this sort of thing. Sitting, reflecting, spinning cloth, waiting - on one particular occasion for many years - as Indians from top to toe pleaded with him to do at least something in the face of British colonial suppression. With unbound grace and only once ‘time had ripened’, he set out on his famous salt march and with it the first steps of Indian independence began. Cut and paste MLK Jr, Mandela, the Dalai Lama and co for obvious comparisons, but it’s the Polish community of Britain in 2015 that fleshes out my superfandom for creating change with a vibe that gets my goat for good. Facing pro-Brexit discrimination, 2,300 British based Poles donated blood on the same day as a gesture and metaphor for their contribution and commitment to the country that until then had welcomed them with open arms. In a row these blood bags would span half a mile which, in theory, would go on to save up to 6,900 lives. Stick me in a silent retreat with a deaf duck and I’d still tell it this story, such is the simplicity and win/win/win-ness of this beautiful act of humanity.
This is activism where everyone wins and a fucking love it.
Nail Transphobia
I find Charlie’s life work so fascinating because her pre-social media era spawned a campaign that sits pride of place in my depository of grace-fuelled goodness. She is the originator and orchestrator of ‘Nail Transphobia’ - pop-up nail salons providing free manicures to members of the public in public spaces (think museums, galleries, shopping centres, etc), enabling one-on-one conversations with a trans person and for people who likely had never met one. This method of bridging conversations reminds me of Daryl Davis, a black, blues musician who has helped 200 members of the Ku Klux Klan leave the organisation simply by taking the time to sit down and talk to them.
There’s a ripple effect to campaigning in this way, and it travels as a message that sits deep within the method itself. Of the 1.5 million(ish) animals on this planet, who in their various ways fight for survival amongst one another, only we humans can actually just talk it out. Even in the face of heinous prejudice, this can often be all that’s needed. No wars. Just words. Grace over grudge.
And Then Everybody Talked
Charlie’s activism has shifted in tone. By her own admission she wonders if Nail Transphobia as an idea and activation would work as well in today’s culture.
Because, social media.
Today’s culture is born from an entire civilisation reborn into a sudden existence within which everyone can communicate with everybody, literally all of the time. For only a decade and a bit, we’ve had phones in our hands and an ability to say whatever we want to whoever we want, whenever we want to. Right now, we’re in our teenage phase. We’ve no idea what we’re doing, and we’re dealing with that fact amidst a thunderfuck of hormonal incompetence. Unlike actual teenagers, however, in this shit-storm, everyone is a teenager at the same time. There are no babies to humble us, no adults to support us, and no elders to show us the way.
Yet Charlie’s Nail Transphobia initiative could absolutely work today. Both despite of and because of social media. These one-on-one conversations could well be watched by millions, dissipating prejudices through osmosis one precious view at a time. Charlie’s pop-up nail salons would then, in all probability at a certain scale, take on an open source spirit and be replicated and run by willing volunteers with an impact that becomes mind-blowingly exponential. In an ideal world.
But whilst the floodgates of possibilities have opened, hate is in the way.
One peer review study conducted by the University of Southern California analysed English-language posts from January 2022 to June 2023 on X, and found an overall increase in hate speech of 50% over the time period. The Trans community literally gets it worse than any other. Slurs directed at them spiked by a staggering 260%, and Charlie, being a public figure within this community, has surely had it worse than most.
It’s no conspiracy to suggest that social media platforms’ algorithms might actually recommend this more hateful content (research by the Anti-Defamation League & Tech Transparency Project discovered findings to this effect), and we discuss this with Charlie during the pod along with the suspected motives of our wider media ecosystem - but I’ll leave this topic for a future post. For now, let’s accept this state of hate in modern culture and communications and wonder what a gal like Charlie’s to do about it.
Nuts, Badgers & Privilege
To dream, as I do, of Charlie leveraging the potential of social media to scale the impact of her Nail Transphobia work is to ignore the nightmare she’s going through. It’s also a failure to acknowledge that I can dream.
Day-to-day, my biggest personal challenge is the cost of nuts at Waitrose. Or something like this. I dunno, maybe it’s the badger, badgering about my garden, destroying the grass at my two-up, two-down Victorian home I call the one I own. Grass which, if I think about it, is greener than almost everyone else’s grass living today or anytime before - a fact true simply by living now, here, and with a willy and white skin. I have, at least in relative terms, so few lived experiences of prejudice that my ideals around gracious solutions to the world’s problems ignore most of what is true beyond my own relationship of the world.
During our interview, Charlie spoke with crazy levels of vulnerability of a childhood being tormented by others for first being a gay boy and then being a trans girl. I’ve even heard her say the words “I was bullied by kids at school… and then by the world.” One nuance of this experience and many experiences of those from minority groups, is an expectation to turn the other cheek. To accept, whether by suppressing reality or, dare I say it, showing grace in the face of it, that the anger, resentment and injustice is on you to swallow. This is the role of the victim, right? But suppression is not the way. And grace, to this degree, requires Gandhian levels of strength. But Gandhi wasn’t on Instagram.
So who is Charlie Craggs 2.0?
A pig masquerading as a person once took to Charlie’s instagram and commented “once a man, always a man”. She went to his account, found some topless selfies and posted them as a response with the caption “..says the man with tits?” This is Charlie Craggs 2.0 - an archetypal ‘anti-hero’.
No one is more aware of the shift in culture brought about by the cataclysm that is social media hate. And no one I can think of is doing a better job at opting into it as a statement for others. She’s riding this wave on a surfboard of funny. She’s stealing power from those who think they have it, in order to give it back to those that need it. It’s Promethean. For thousands of real people, expected by the world to surrender to hate, Charlie’s voice and actions online are a signal that they too can clap back rather than cower. Just as she credits a moment in her life when she decided to no longer be a victim, she is providing these moments to all who follow her.
An anti-hero rejects the means and methods of a traditional hero character but is heroic nonetheless. This is Charlie Craggs 2.0. Still beautiful, still smart, and still busy with that grace fuelled activism an idealist like me yearns for. But she’s also in sync with the culture around her, and communicating with it in the language it communicates with her. It might not be what her past or future brand partners want. But it is integrity. And there’s no Maybelline concealer that’ll hide the importance of living life this way.
We all search for people we can model. People whose actions we can mirror. It’s our own individual search and our own interpretation of what to model and mirror. Until now, my search has been confined to traditional hero characters. But now I’ve met Charlie.