We’ve been told repeatedly by the Labour government that the Supreme Court judgement that reversed decades of equality law, threatening trans people’s rights and safety, is final and must be respected: any Supreme Court judgement is carved in stone, permanent, impossible to change.
Today, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves “is considering overruling the Supreme Court over a £44bn car loan commission scandal after lobbying by some of the UK’s biggest lenders,” The Guardian reports.
There’s a good piece on the higher education site Wonkhe by Anna Bull: Safety must shape policy on single-sex spaces. And pushing trans and non-binary people into the wrong toilets and changing rooms is not the way to do that. The focus here is on educational institutions but the point is true more widely: we’re much more likely to be the victims of abuse than the perpetrators of it.
Trans and non-binary people are much more likely than cis people, including cis women, to be subjected to sexual harassment and violence. This is a well-established fact, evidenced by national studies of 180,000 students in the US; 8000 students in Ireland; and 43,000 students in Australia, as well as studies focusing on staff-student sexual misconduct (p.277) or on specific disciplines; and studies across campuses and that compare different sexual and gender minority groups.
…Taken as a whole, the Supreme Court judgement, and the EHRC’s interpretation of it, risks making trans and non-binary people even more unsafe by revealing their identities when it may not be safe to do so, and by creating a climate where targeting them for abuse on the basis of their identities is more acceptable. As a result, the figures given above on the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment against trans and non-binary people are likely to grow even larger.
There’s a good piece in Assigned Media: “A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream. It’s about the US but relevant to the UK too: our media is just as captured, and their reporting is helping the right-wing attacks on trans people’s human rights and healthcare.
It takes one pseudoscience peddler and uses their activities to show:
“the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.
This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.”
One of the anti-trans groups favoured by health minister Wes Streeting is the Bayswater Support Group, some of whose members advocate child abuse in order to make children “accept biological reality”. And in a new, heartbreaking report by Trans Safety Network, some of those kids describe how the group radicalised their parents into increasingly cruel behavior and opened the door for far-right extremism.
A very familiar pattern emerges: increasing alienation, paranoia, cruelty and conspiracism as people get drawn deeper into radicalisation and further from reality.
I’m in the new issue (issue 19) of Somewhere: For Us, Scotland’s LGBTQ+ magazine, talking about music and joy and the power of Pride. It’s a great magazine and I’d really recommend the print version: the ink it uses smells amazing.
One of the very best things about writing books about music is that you then get to talk about music with people who are just as mad about it as you are. So it was an absolute joy to hang out with Nicola Meighan and Laura Jane Wilkie for Nicola’s excellently named podcast, A Kick Up The Arts.
Nicola and I will also be at the Edinburgh Book Festival next month along with Chitra Ramaswamy, Emma Pollock and Cora Bissett to talk about mid-90s music in an event that I think is going to be a lot of fun.
Imagine an alternate timeline where the media and political anti-trans panic didn’t happen, Scotland passed its proposed gender recognition reforms, and the sky didn’t fall in: none of the problems predicted by genital-obsessed weirdos arose, and ten years after the legislation introduced gender recognition by self-ID it was crystal clear that the weirdos’ scaremongering about trans people’s documentation was entirely groundless and based on bigotry.
That’s the timeline in Ireland, which today marks the tenth anniversary of self-ID.
I’m sad to share the news that my wonderful publisher, 404 Ink, will be closing in summer 2026, but I’m immensely proud to be part of the 404 team: I was a 404 fan long before I became a 404 author. Heather and Laura are amazing people and working with them, and with the wider 404 family, has been a real joy.
During her appearance in front of the Women and Equalities Committee last month, EHRC head Baroness Falkner told MPs that the EHRC had an 81% approval rate; the implication, which Falkner did not correct or clarify, was that this figure represented public polling.
Thanks to another freedom of information request, we now know that it doesn’t: the figure comes from the EHRC’s own “media sentiment analysis” which “measures the tone and favourability of media coverage about EHRC, not public polling”.
In other words: the newspapers that hate trans people are pleased that the EHRC is actively helping their war on trans people.
“Positive media sentiment has improved from 35.2% in 2021-22 to 80.6% in 2024-25”. When that media is waging war on a marginalised group that the EHRC is supposed to protect, that should be cause for resignation, not celebration.
A powerful anti-rights movement is growing in the UK, threatening to roll back our hard-won freedoms and rewrite the rules on whose rights, bodies and lives deserve protection.
…These groups spent a staggering £106 million between 2019 and 2023, an increase of over 33%. All with the aim to undermine our freedoms, restrict access to essential healthcare and roll back the rights we’ve fought hard to win.
…The growing anti-rights movement in the UK, emboldened by what is happening in the US and increasingly well-funded, is targeting reproductive freedoms, access to abortion and the rights of LGBTI people. Their end goal is to roll back our hard-won rights, undermine equality protections and rewrite the rules on who deserves dignity and freedom.
We must name this threat for what it is: a deliberate and coordinated attack on human rights, led by actors who are weaponising misinformation, fabricating moral panic about abortion care and LGBTI people and exploiting existing prejudice to sow divisions and distract us from the real issues that matter.