Like most bloggers, I write in character: the character is a version of me, but it’s not the me that’s sometimes too sad to get out of bed or so angry I could twat somebody in the face with a shovel. So forgive me if I break character for a moment.

I am so, so tired of every new day bringing a fresh edition of The Sinister Silencing Wokerati Thought Police Trans Mafia Demand X It’s Political Correctness Gone Maaaaaaaad culture war bullshit.

I wish that the people who so loudly claim to have been silenced actually were, because the noise they make is deafening. Every single day trans and non-binary people are vocally blamed for some pointless non-story that’s got fuck-all to do with us and that none of us give the slightest fraction of a shit about.

I don’t care if you write “woman” or “womxn”, what the dictionary definition of female is, or any of the other pointless, manufactured nonsense that we get blamed for in this idiotic outrage economy. I’ve never met any other trans or non-binary people who give a shit about these things either, because the reality for many of us is that we have so much real-world shit to deal with that there simply isn’t any room in our brains for inconsequential bullshit.

But inconsequential bullshit is the only thing people want us to talk about.

Trans journalists are never invited on air to talk about healthcare, homelessness, hate crimes or any of the other horrors that disproportionately affect our community. They’re only allowed on to play fixed roles in a pantomime, the story set by whatever has been trending on Twitter, the questions framed in much the same way as “when did you stop beating your wife?”

And that’s if they’re given airtime at all. Most of the time you’ll hear cisgender people talking to other cisgender people about what they claim trans and non-binary people think and want (or as they put it, what activists are demanding). They talk about us without us.

If people actually asked what we cared about, we’d happily tell them. We’d tell them about being made to wait years to get basic healthcare, or for some of us being refused it altogether. We’d tell them about being unable to go for a piss without fearing for our safety. We’d tell them about what it feels like when most of the press repeatedly tells most of the country that we’re dangerous, deluded deviants. We’d tell them that sometimes the weight of this means that some of us are so scared or so sad we can’t leave our homes.

Maybe, and it’s a very big maybe, maybe one day that will all be solved and we’ll finally have the luxury of caring about what particular spelling of a word is used by an organisation we don’t deal with in materials we’ll never read. But I doubt it.

In the meantime, the agenda of The Sinister Silencing Wokerati Thought Police Trans Mafia is the same as it’s always been: for the love of God, leave us alone.