Category: LGBTQ+

  • Transphobia is as British as bad teeth

    Juliet Jacques in the New York Times: Transphobia Is Everywhere in Britain: it’s a respectable bigotry, on the left as well as the right. …There are two main types of British transphobia. One, employed most frequently but not exclusively by right-wing men, rejects outright the idea that gender might not be determined only by biological…

  • The Guardian: don’t you dare criticise us

    There’s been a lot of online upset over yet another anti-trans column in The Guardian, part of its overwhelmingly negative and one-sided coverage of trans-related issues – coverage that has led three trans staff to resign and notable trans writers to refuse to write for the paper. This week over 200 notable feminists wrote to…

  • Bigots “not bigots”, say bigots

    Are the Ku Klux Klan racist? According to the Klan, they are not. They just have reasonable concerns about white people’s rights. As they put it in their flyers: “Why can’t pro-white rights organizations exist without being labeled racist?” As the Anti-Defamation League explains, the flyers are part of a strategy to “normalise white supremacy”:…

  • “A wholly unacceptable misrepresentation”

    The Morning Star has published a remarkable apology for its publication not just of a vicious anti-trans cartoon, but of previous anti-trans scaremongering too. The Morning Star recognises that it has a responsibility to oppose discrimination against the trans community and to tackle transphobic hate crime, as well as to promote positive action and reform…

  • “I demand rights for me, but not for thee”

    Every day, transphobes engage in social media pile-ons against individuals and organisations for being trans-inclusive, engaging in abuse that’s rarely if ever reported in the mainstream media. Two days ago it was the Royal Institution, the charity dedicated to promoting science, which received so much abuse for including an image of a trans woman in a…

  • There will be blood

    We’re having a bit of a moment here in Scotland over that favourite target of the US Christian right, drag queen story time. The current Scots story is a gift to conservatives: a drag performer booked to read to kids delivered a perfectly age-appropriate reading because, hey! Performers can have different personas for different age…

  • Some accident

    [Content note: slurs] The Morning Star has decided to prove once again that you don’t have to be right-wing to be hateful towards trans people. This is from the print edition: There’s a sour joke among trans people that anti-trans bigots have one joke, which is “I identify as / I’m transitioning to X”. But…

  • History lessons

    The former deputy editor of the New Statesman, now of The Atlantic, posted this to Twitter: There’s a lesson there, but it’s not the one Lewis thinks it is. The reason the GRA wasn’t turned into “culture war fuel” wasn’t anything to do with the Blair government. It was because we didn’t have people spending…

  • I know I can never be that idealised girl

    There’s a superb piece in Vox by Emily Todd VanDerWerff about the costs of being a trans woman. I found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of it. I’ve done exactly this, albeit not quite so expensively: I’m more of a Boots No.7 person. The thing about self-acceptance is that when you’re just getting…

  • If this is the fast track, I’d hate to be on the slow one

    The BBC has discovered that many trans people are stuck on waiting lists for so long they have to buy their own medicine from overseas. The report, while accurate and worthwhile, also serves to demonstrate that the BBC clearly doesn’t have any trans people or experts on trans healthcare anywhere near the newsrooms it so…