Category: Hell in a handcart

  • When ads attack

    In the US, the Trump campaign has spent nearly one-third of its campaign funds on anti-trans attack ads around major sporting fixtures and other popular events. Vox: Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most…

  • Killer conspiracies

    The BBC reports that members of an “anti-establishment cult” have been jailed for trying to kidnap a coroner. What the BBC hasn’t clearly reported (and neither has The Guardian or The Telegraph, the latter of which devoted three pages to the case) is why they were doing it. They intended to enact a “death sentence”…

  • Misreporting

    Let’s do this again, shall we? There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported. First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in…

  • The real trans healthcare scandal

    More than 200 trans people (that we know of) in the UK have been refused basic healthcare by their GPs, in many cases after years of receiving that healthcare. A new report (PDF) by TransActual goes into detail: in most cases it’s not that new requests are being refused; it’s that existing healthcare is being…

  • Acting up

    On Friday, a group of trans kids disrupted the conference of everybody’s favourite pretendy-gay organisation, the LGB Alliance, by releasing thousands of crickets into the white-haired audience shortly after JK Rowling delivered a short speech from her luxury yacht. The LGB Alliance is, of course, the Tufton Street-based, dubiously funded anti-trans organisation who admitted in…

  • Spot the difference

    The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review…

  • Librarians shushed over LGBTQ+ books

    Index on Censorship reports that 53% of school librarians have been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books from their shelves. In an Index survey of UK school librarians, 53% of respondents said they had been asked to remove books, with more than half of those requests coming from parents. Of those, 56% removed the book or…

  • Perverse incentives

    One of the “keyboard warriors” who fuelled the recent English racist riots, Twitter user WayneGb88, appeared in court yesterday and was jailed for three years. During the trial, he told the court that he earns approximately £1,400 per month from posting hate speech on the former Twitter. This is why hate speech is everywhere: it…

  • Anatomy of a scandal

    This, by Lydia Polgreen, is superb: The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids. It’s about the Cass Review. As much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, nonbinary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in…

  • Who goes Nazi?

    Via Benevolent Siren on Bluesky, here’s a piece written by Dorothy Thompson in 1941: Who goes Nazi? Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never…