Category: Health

  • The wedge

    It’s been obvious for many years that if you vote for an anti-trans politician you get an anti-abortion politician; the whole trans panic has been manufactured by an unholy alliance of political and religious conservatives who believe that they, not you, should decide what you can do with your body. But even by their low […]

  • 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 […]

  • Another smoking gun

    This, by Jude Doyle, is horrifying: more email evidence of how the Christian Right is pulling the strings of the anti-trans movement, this time in pushing the narrative of “detrans” people or “detransitioners”, people who undergo (or sometimes just propose to undergo) transition and then change their minds. The piece describes a huge and highly […]

  • We don’t want to die

    I’m aware that I’ve written a few posts recently about the deaths of young trans women, largely from suicide. Let’s look into that a little bit. There’s a famous statistic that says 41% of trans people have attempted suicide at some point in their life. It’s from a US study of trans people, and the […]

  • A scandal at Sandyford

    The Sandyford clinic is where Glasgow’s gender clinic is based, alongside various sexual health and victim counselling services. I’ve been attending it since 2017, and I’ve been meaning to write a proper piece about it for some time: visiting in person, even before COVID, was like playing the abandoned-hospital level of a horror video game. […]

  • Say their names

    While the press continue to pretend that people who aren’t trans are being rushed into irreversible medical treatment, trans people continue to die from inadequate healthcare and disgracefully long waiting lists. The coroner’s report into the suicide of 21-year-old Northern Irish trans woman Sophie Williams, a report released this week, found that multiple failings by […]

  • “The sign of a severely broken system”

    Longreads has an excellent article by Mailee Osten-Tan about the people who travel to Thailand for gender confirmation surgery. It’s great journalism, based on extensive research and interviewing (there’s a behind-the-story piece detailing it all here) and the story Osten-Tan tells is interesting, insightful and empathetic. Thailand is famous in trans circles, and the more […]

  • Not Safe To Be Me

    Did you hear about Safe To Be Me? If you’re not on LGBT+ social media, probably not. It was the Conservative government’s sole manifesto commitment to the LGBT+ community, the establishment of an international conference to promote LGBT+ rights. The problem with that is that right now, one of the worst offenders against LGBT+ rights […]

  • Everything is awful

    Trans Actual has published the results of its 2021 Trans Lives survey, in which around 700 UK trans adults shared their experiences. The results aren’t surprising but they are saddening. 27% of trans people have been homelessness at some point in their lives. That rises to 36% for both trans BPOC and trans disabled people; […]

  • Salad daze

    This, by Amanda Mull for The Atlantic, is brilliant: Don’t Believe The Salad Millionaire. It’s about the CEO of a salad chain for affluent customers. Said CEO claimed that the solution to COVID wasn’t masks or vaccinations: it’s salad. Americans are too fat, too lazy, and it’s their fault if they get sick. As Mull […]