Clause 72 is an ambiguous mess, purposefully leaving headroom for the removal of LGBTQIA+ books should they include a representation of transgender people, family members, friends, or history. Granting schools and parents enough plausible justification to censor inclusive materials, whilst claiming it is for protection. And in doing so, they declare the acknowledgement of gender diversity as an inherent danger, restricting a minorities representation to age requirements and trigger warnings.
…In stark parallel to Section 28, trans education is framed as a form of “indoctrination” or, as they politely put it, “encouragement.” Just as Thatcher’s government deemed queer identities a threat to ‘functioning’ society, the RSHE guidance implies trans visibility as a suggestive wrong, a political contagion.
Author: Carrie
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“40 years on, are we really doing this again?”
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The best laws money can buy
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.
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Safety first
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.
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A tsunami of scaremongering
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.”
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Home is where the hate is
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.
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Somewhere: for me
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.
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A kick up the arts
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.
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Ten years today
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.
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The end of the beginning
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.
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Doing the devils’ work
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.