This is a nice, thoughtful and personal piece about Shon Faye’s new book, written by journalist Vic Parsons. I read the opening line after seeing a bunch of new anti-trans pieces in the UK press this morning:

Barely a day goes by without another hostile article about trans people.

Today’s pieces are claiming that the real bigots are people telling bigots not to be bigoted and that gay men are actually homophobic straight men. So another perfectly normal day in rainy fascist island, then.

The fixation on “trans issues” in the British media – The Times alone published nearly two articles a day between January and May of this year, about a group that is less than 1% of the UK population – is not really about trans lives at all. It’s a moral panic: an irrational fear, stoked by the media, that trans people are a threat to society, much in the same way that gay men and lesbians were portrayed as dangerous deviants in the 80s and 90s. Right now, trans people are a minority group that is being bashed by the press, which isn’t at all interested in reporting on the very real, urgent and serious challenges that make our lives as trans people more difficult than they need to be.

Anyway. I’ve pre-ordered Shon’s book and from what I’ve seen so far it looks like an important work and an antidote to the full-blown moral panic we’ve been in for so long now.