Category: LGBTQ+

  • Reds in her head

    If you had any remaining doubts that trans people are the go-to bogeymen for the bigoted, the venal and the incompetent, look no further than disgraced former prime minister Liz Truss. Despite only being in office for 44 days before resigning, Truss managed to spook the markets, send borrowing rates into orbit and tanked the…

  • Deny and distract

    Grief is a horrendous thing, and it’s something we all process in different ways. And Brianna Ghey’s mum, Esther, is grieving something no parent should have to go through: the death of her child, a death whose brutality and ferocity are beyond most people’s understanding. With grief comes guilt, an endless parade of what-ifs and…

  • When even The Guardian sees the bigotry

    It’s very hard to see any light at the end of the anti-trans tunnel; just yesterday, it emerged that a teenager has been charged for the attempted murder of a trans teen in North London. The 18-year-old trans girl was stabbed 14 times in a confrontation that began with strangers shouting transphobic slurs at her;…

  • The job

    It’s been said so often that it’s a cliché, but the job of journalism is to report the truth. Its job is to investigate, to find facts, and to follow those facts to see where they lead. It is a process of discovering, of uncovering, of seeing and telling what’s really going on. In order…

  • Study: transition works

    The biggest ever survey of trans people in the US has found, unsurprisingly, that transition makes our lives better. Which of course is why we do it, often at great personal cost. And why so few of us detransition, despite what the anti-trans mob would have you believe. Depending on the category, between 94% and…

  • Sunak

    Just three days after PM Rishi Sunak cried crocodile tears over the death of trans teen Brianna Ghey, he was back to making jokes about trans girls and women in parliament. While Ghey’s mother was in the gallery, and he knew she was there.

  • A gender traitor

    As I’ve said once or twice, Jude Doyle is one of the most insightful people writing about being trans today. This piece, about writer’s block, erasure and being “a gender traitor”, is particularly good even though much of the subject matter is horrible people doing horrible things. One of the reasons I love Jude’s writing…

  • Vultures

    I wrote yesterday about newspapers profiting from spreading anti-trans hate: “Trans lives only matter to them if they can be monetised – and the cash is in calling us demons or crying crocodile tears over our coffins.” Here’s the Daily Mail today.

  • Crocodile tears

    Content warning: child murder, transphobia, slurs When primary school children were massacred in Dunblane in 1996, the UK responded with severe restrictions on gun ownership – and when twenty children and six adults were massacred in Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, most people expected the US to do the same. No sane person can…

  • Faking the news

    There’s an excellent example of how newspapers create and maintain moral panics in the Sunday Times today, when Camilla Long notes with horror that: One school in Wales has written to parents saying it will not be providing “litter trays” for children “who identify as cats”. The reason for the letter was to debunk the…