Category: Bullshit

  • Damn lies about statistics

    There was a very odd front page story in the Washington Post a few days ago: after months and months of polls showing that most people supported trans rights and were against anti-trans legislation, the WSJ ran with a story headlined “Most in US back GOP’s anti-trans policies.” The article goes on to say “Clear…

  • Attrition

    I should be annoyingly happy right now. I’m doing another book festival this weekend, and the day after I’m off to London for the British Book Awards where I’m shortlisted for Discover Book of the Year – quite exciting given that I wasn’t sure anyone would want to read my book, let alone enjoy it.…

  • Wars on woke don’t work

    The local election results demonstrate something we’ve seen in other countries, such as Australia: using a “war on woke” as your election strategy is a sure-fire way to be rejected at the polls. Byline Times: As the nation’s leading pollster Sir John Curtice told the Byline Times in an interview this week, “If you look…

  • 10,000 smoking guns

    One of the leading organisations fighting against women’s reproductive rights and trans people’s existence is the American College of Pediatricians, a right-wing evangelical lobby group that pretends to represent the medical establishment. The organisation has accidentally leaked over 10,000 documents, many of them damning evidence of its hateful, unscientific bullshit – hateful, unscientific bullshit that’s…

  • If you believe nothing, you’ll believe anything

    This, from Vice, is very good: America’s Most Influential Conspiracy Theorists Are Going All-In On Transphobia. It’s about how people with various agendas, from Qanon conspiracists to self-promoters, are finding transphobia the perfect vehicle for making the world demonstrably worse. And this is not a US-only phenomenon. The fact that these once-fringe subcultures and the…

  • The E stands for enemy

    The Conservative government has been stuffing the EHRC – the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – with anti-equality bigots for some time, which is why it recently and very publicly u-turned on its guidance regarding trans people and the Equality Act. But even knowing that, the latest minutes from the EHRC’s Scotland Committee are absolutely…

  • All the news that’s shit to print

    There’s been a very significant uptick in the amount of anti-trans bullshit in the newspapers this month, with papers such as The Express doing exactly what Express editor Gary Jones said in 2018 was “offensive… I wouldn’t want to be party to any newspaper that will publish such material”: running endless fabricated stories about a…

  • Revelations

    The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat. Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that: …That tipping point…

  • Breaking the law

    The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, EHRC for short, is technically the UK’s equalities watchdog. I say technically because in the last few years the Tories have been stuffing it with stooges who are actively and vocally hostile to minority groups. So it’s not a huge surprise to see it rubber-stamping the Tories’ war on…

  • Friends like these

    It’s trans day of visibility today, which means we get to see the rank hypocrisy of politicians tweeting about their supposed support for trans people while openly supporting the removal of trans people’s rights. The latest front in the forever war against trans people is pushing the idea of “parents’ rights”. Based on a report…