Category: Bullshit

  • Why we decline

    I’ve written many times about the asymmetry of trans coverage: of the hundreds of stories and items published and broadcast about trans people every week, hardly any of them feature trans people or allies and most platform anti-trans activists, often misleadingly presenting them as ordinary mums or feminists with “reasonable concerns”. So you’d think that…

  • Rapid onset gender madeupia

    Julia Serano, one of the key academics writing about trans people, has updated her 2019 post about “social contagion” and “rapid onset gender dysphoria”, two supposed phenomena regularly mentioned by anti-trans activists, to add yet more evidence to prove that they’re entirely invented.

  • Hiding hatred in plain sight

    Have you ever wondered why bigots all seem to recite the same talking points and use the same words? It’s because they’re working to scripts, either literally – many Christian Right groups offer step-by-step guides for you to print out that teach you how to sign up for Twitter, how to post a message and…

  • Reversal

    There’s an acronym, DARVO, used to describe the behaviour of abusers: it stands for Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. And the press does it all the time with bigots, as two of today’s news stories demonstrate. The first story is that the head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is being investigated by…

  • Not breaking news

    You’d think that the UN publishing a damning criticism of the UK government might make the news, but as expected yesterday’s statement about LGBT+ rights in the UK and the associated fall of the UK in the Rainbow Rankings has barely been covered at all: one short piece in the Metro and one (anti-trans, of…

  • Don’t read The Times

    As Duncan Hothersall writes on Twitter, “calling out The Times and The Times Scotland whenever they use a lie of omission to mislead on a trans rights issue would be an endless daily task.” But there’s a particularly egregious omission in today’s paper, which features the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics – an organisation The…

  • 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…