My publisher, 404 Ink, is running a promotion where you can get 50% off their ebooks – including Carrie Kills A Man, Small Town Joy and Fierce Salvage. They were all bargains at twice the price.
There are lots of really great books in this deal but you’ll need to move quickly, as 404 are closing down the ebook shop at the end of May.
The High Court has reversed the Office for Students’ (OfS) decision to fine Sussex University over half a million pounds for supposedly suppressing free speech (ie, not stopping people from criticising a vocally transphobic academic). The verdict is damning and makes it very clear that the OfS was operating from a position of blatant bias and a desire to set a chilling precedent: the OfS had a “closed mind” and a predetermined strategy.
As the University put it in a statement:
The Court’s judgement is a comprehensive vindication of that position. It is a devastating indictment of the impartiality and competence of the OfS, implicating its operations, leadership, governance, and strategy. It raises important and urgent questions for the government as it plans to grant ever more powers to the regulator.
The High Court found that the OfS erred in law in respect of its jurisdiction, in its interpretation of the law, and its understanding of freedom of speech and academic freedom, and that its process was fatally flawed by bias in the form of predetermination.
It’s important to understand that this is not a case of the OfS making a mistake. The OfS did exactly what the Conservative government wanted it to do, under the guidance of its head who was put in place specifically to wage a culture war on higher education. Exactly the same thing has happened in the BBC and EHRC and NHS, which is why those organisations have become the enemy of multiple marginalised groups. The Tories’ Kemi Badenoch boasted about doing this, but the current Labour government has done nothing to undo any of it. If anything, they’ve been even worse than the Tories.
This is a hard read: Trans people are dying of suicide more than the general UK population. And UK government policy, which is to deny trans kids healthcare, to underfund mental health provision and to push people into conversion therapy, is a key reason why that’s the case.
Data obtained by freedom of information request from the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD) shows that between 2019 and 2025, there were 647 child suicides in England and Wales. Of these, 107 children were LGBTQ+ and 47 of those were trans – meaning that trans children make up 43% of LGBTQ+ suicides of under 18s, and 7% of all child suicides over this time period.
…“Inquests into the deaths of young trans people have consistently exposed years-long waits for gender-affirming healthcare, and chronic under-resourcing of mental health and social services that leaves trans people without access to support they need,” says Deborah Coles, director at Inquest, a charity that campaigns on state-related deaths. “It is clear that too often, the deaths of trans people are preventable. We are at crisis point.”
There’s a good piece by Sasha Baker about how the UK has enshrined “trans panic” in law.
Trans panic is a variation of the gay panic defence, which is a tactic used in murder and assault cases to blame the victim rather than the attacker. In the UK it’s sometimes known as the Portsmouth Defence. It argues that if a straight person experiences sexual advances from someone who is gay, or has sexual activity with someone they then discover is trans, any ordinary person would be so horrified, outraged and disgusted that they would lose control and beat, stab or shoot the gay or trans person. It’s been abolished as a legitimate defence tactic in courts in many countries, but in the UK it’s been enshrined in law.
Baker:
Watkin’s case is not – as it may first appear – an aberration. It is part of a long history where Trans+ people’s right to privacy has been trampled on to flatter cis people’s self-perception.
The complainant’s assertion that he does not “swing that way” as he said in court, is one of the starkest examples of the legal system being wielded against a trans person to guard cis straight people’s sexualities.
…All we can really conclude from the available data is that if someone stabs you, the CPS is unlikely to prosecute you for being trans – but if you lie about your gender history to a sexual partner, even to protect your privacy, you could be facing jail.
It’s Trans Day of Visibility today, a day to celebrate trans people’s lives and raise awareness of discrimination. And like any other day, it’s a day when trans people continue to be invisible and powerless.
There are no trans people elected to any of the UK’s parliaments; no trans columnists with regular gigs on national newspapers; no trans newsreaders or TV presenters or radio hosts in mainstream media.
There are no trans people involved in decisions about trans healthcare on the NHS; no trans representation in courts deciding on our human rights; no trans judges in courts or tribunals; no trans voices in the endless obsessive coverage that is always about us, without us.
Two things can be true at the same time. Meta (and other platform providers such as X) is a wicked and dangerous organisation that does wicked and dangerous things. And Meta losing in court over supposed “social media addiction” is bad because it will have chilling effects.
Writing in the New Statesman, Séamas O’Reilly explains the incoherence of claiming that because adults are using social media to do bad things, we must ban children from social media.
How, precisely, are age limits meant to stop adults from sending pictures of children, without their consent, to other adults? Here in the UK, we may see an echo of this incoherence in technology secretary Peter Kyle claiming that adults using age verification are keeping children safe. To which the only reasonable response is: how, exactly? The ongoing rush to ban social media for kids following the murder of Brianna Ghey – a teen who found her community online, before being killed, in real life, at the hands of transphobic bullies – leaves out how such a ban would stop this happening to another trans teen. The only plausible link, that consistent use of social media makes one transphobic and thus a danger to trans kids, seems unlikely to be what they mean, since this would require a social media ban for 80 per cent of this country’s broadsheet journalists and the entirety of the government’s front bench.
The vast, vast majority of those negatively affected by this precedent will be smaller platforms and websites currently publishing the kinds of content already being targeted by far right movements: pro-LGBT content, especially that related to trans rights, websites related to anti-racism, feminism or political progressivism, and material related to, or documenting, what’s happening in Gaza. We know this because those celebrating this precedent are the very same groups who have lobbied, with less success, to ban exactly this material through other means.
Mike Maznick of Techdirt (who is also an investor in the Bluesky social media network) has been covering internet regulation since the very early days, and he explains why Meta losing in court isn’t cause for celebration.
if you care about free speech online, about small platforms, about privacy, about the ability for anyone other than a handful of tech giants to operate a website where users can post things — these two verdicts should scare the hell out of you. Because the legal theories that were used to nail Meta this week don’t stay neatly confined to companies you don’t like. They will be weaponized against everyone.
Two of the highest-profile anti-trans extremists in the UK have done what we always knew they would do: they’re standing alongside the religious right to restrict women’s reproductive freedom.
The Times reports that Sharron Davies and the former EHRC chair Kishwer Falkner are demanding a ban on “pills by post” as part of a wider push to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Other proposed amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill include a mandatory police investigation into any girl under 16 who accesses a legal abortion and the creation of the first new abortion offence in 100 years.
Davies has previously spread anti-abortion misinformation, claiming that in the UK we have “made it legal for healthy babies to be terminated up to the day before they’re due.” Since 1967 the limit in the UK has been 24 weeks unless there are serious fetal issues or risks to the mother.
Not all anti-trans activists are focusing on removing women’s reproductive freedom, however. Some of them are going after immigration instead. Again, just like we knew they would.
Writing for Queer AF, Ludovic Parsons has written an excellent history of the UK’s severely broken system of trans healthcare. It’s a tale of a system built to control people rather than help them, a system that even today considers trans people a problem to be solved rather than people who need healthcare. And it also demonstrates yet again that trans people are not a fad that began in 2015: the first UK gender clinic for the NHS was established in 1966, two decades after the first sex change surgeries and four decades after the development of synthetic hormones for trans people.
While the most brutal part of the history of British Trans+ healthcare has passed, the intent to control transition remains. The NHS Trans+ healthcare system is built on rotten foundations, still excluding many people from its criteria for transness. Its existence overlooks the fact that transitioning is a personal decision and a matter of bodily autonomy – like using contraception or having an abortion.
There’s nothing complicated or special about our healthcare, but because it’s segregated from mainstream healthcare and stuck in a neglected corner of mental health services – a throwback to a less enlightened age when being trans, being gay or being a feminist was considered a mental health problem – it isn’t fit for purpose. Any service whose current clearance rates suggest a waiting list of 224 years, as is the case for Glasgow’s Sandyford clinic, is broken beyond repair. As Parsons says:
The gender clinic system is structurally flawed, working not for Trans+ people’s health and wellbeing but against Trans+ existence itself.
NHS England has banned the prescription of hormones to 16 and 17 year olds, formalising a policy that already existed in practice, and as with the Cass Review they’ve committed medical fraud to justify a ban based on ideology rather than evidence. The review of evidence they undertook excluded almost 97% of studies from inclusion, because those studies demonstrated that hormone treatment is effective, necessary and sometimes life-saving care for trans people. The review then claimed that there wasn’t sufficient evidence that HRT was effective.
Former Conservative equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has made it very clear that people were put in important positions to target trans people’s rights and healthcare: “gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” The Labour government could and should have reversed this, but have chosen to double down on harming trans and non-binary people instead.
Since the puberty blocker ban was introduced, at least 46 trans and non-binary children have taken their own lives.
They will come for adult healthcare next.
British athletes have been told they’ll have to pay £185 out of their own pockets for compulsory sex testing if they want to compete internationally, but only if they’re women: men don’t have to do the tests. The goal is to ensure that trans women and women with DSDs (disorders of sexual development, such as being intersex) aren’t allowed to compete.
Blanket sex testing like this was scrapped in the 1990s because it was discriminatory, unscientific, humiliating, unethical and racist, but the bigots have brought it back and to add insult to injury they’re making women pay for it. This, apparently, is feminism.