Category: Hell in a handcart

  • Bad sports

    One of the key tactics of anti-trans obsessives is to push the narrative that trans people are an existential threat to women’s sports, and the narrative is working. In fact, it’s working so well that a cisgender mother of four was subject to hateful abuse when she won a half-marathon in Exeter at the weekend…

  • Your mum’s a super spreader

    In news that won’t surprise anyone who’s been following the trans panic, a new study shows that some of the most prolific spreaders of fake news are middle-aged women. Just 0.3% of Twitter accounts were responsible for sharing 80% of links to fake news, and those accounts were more likely to be women (60%) than…

  • Snitches

    In Utah this week, the Republican administration introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report any cases of trans or non-binary people using the single-sex facilities appropriate to their gender. It’s easy to point at this as an example of US right-wing bigotry, but for anyone thinking such vicious idiocy couldn’t happen…

  • Illegal and cruel

    I’ve been loath to post about the current cavalcade of cruelties the Tories are heaping on trans people right now, but I wanted to point out something about the proposed NHS guidance that would force trans women out of single-sex wards: it’s illegal under multiple laws, especially for trans women who have gender recognition certificates.…

  • Complicity

    The Guardian has published a thoughtful article by playwright Jonathan Cash about the 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, which he was injured in. The bomb was planted by a far-right sympathiser, a man who believed that gay men should be put to death. If you’re going to read the whole piece,…

  • SLAPP happy

    One of the reasons that Jimmy Savile got away with his abuse for so long was the UK’s libel laws. Savile was highly litigious, and would send his very expensive lawyers after any publication that so much as considered reporting allegations about him. The fact that the allegations were true was irrelevant. Savile was rich,…

  • Snakes in the Cass

    The Cass review is a lengthy document and it’ll take time for detailed criticisms to emerge, but there’s already plenty of evidence to indicate that the worst fears of trans people and allies were correct. The review team included people vocally opposed to trans healthcare, applied different standards of evidence to trans-supportive and trans-antagonistic studies,…

  • The endgame

    In the US, the people who want to ban abortion will tell you that they don’t want to ban abortion; they just want to put some protections around some of it. This is a lie. Also in the US, the people who want to ban healthcare for all trans people – who, not coincidentally, are…

  • No surprises

    You’ll see a lot in the papers about the Cass review of NHS care for gender-questioning kids today, as the report is finally released. What you won’t see are any suggestions that it’s a political project, not a medical one. Its job was to undermine healthcare for trans people, and that’s exactly what it’s delivered.…

  • What’s coming

    AR Moxon has published another incisive piece about one thing that’s actual about another thing: The Thing That’s Coming. Cargo ship Dali lost power and from there it was only a matter of time before it destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge. We hadn’t maintained the bridge for collisions of this type, we’re learning. You’d…