Category: LGBTQ+

  • Trans attacks don’t work

    The results of yesterday’s US elections make something very clear: attacking trans people, which Republicans did with great energy and at even greater expense, doesn’t work – and in fact such relentless demonisation of marginalised people may well motivate people to banish the bigots. This isn’t a huge surprise, because we saw the same in…

  • Dead cats

    In 2013, then-London mayor Boris Johnson described an Australian political trick which would come to be known as the dead cat strategy. There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true,…

  • Donating to hate

    The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK…

  • Acceptable damage

    My friend was humiliated on the Glasgow subway last night. My friend is a conventionally attractive thirtysomething cisgender woman with great fashion sense and brightly coloured hair. This, apparently, was enough to convince a carriage full of men that she was transgender. In between breaks to snort cocaine from a shared bag, the men loudly…

  • Unethical. Unscientific. Unsafe

    The ever-growing waiting times for adult trans healthcare have effectively privatised medicine for trans adults: good luck waiting 25 years or more for a first appointment if you can’t afford a private GP and a life of private prescriptions; shared care, where a private GP prescribes your medicine and your local GP oversees it, is…

  • Training wheels of hate

    I don’t generally comment on modern horrors such as the deaths in Gaza or in US classrooms because I don’t have anything to say beyond heartfelt but trite platitudes. But there’s a detail about the ongoing situation in Maine, where a man recently discharged from a mental hospital has killed nearly 20 people, that’s worth…

  • HRT+DNA

    Over at Stained Glass Woman, Doc Impossible has written a fun piece about HRT and what it does regarding DNA.  As ever, the “basic biology” crowd are ignorant about actual biology: the super-short version is that DNA is an instruction book but hormones decide which specific instructions your body will actually follow. Change those hormones…

  • Now that’s funny

    From Popbitch: The intensity of internet discourse can sometimes create an overinflated sense of just how interested the general public is in certain stories. For instance, Graham Linehan’s new memoir Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy sold 390 copies in its first week – including pre-sales. A figure that fails to…

  • Scared, tired and alone

    Huffington Post: The Conservative government has upped its anti-transgender rhetoric recently, leaving people “scared, tired and alone”, charities have told HuffPost UK. …It’s not just the prime minister, either. The health secretary Steve Barclay used the Tory conference to announce that he wants to introduce a policy where trans women would be banned from female-only…

  • The real UK opposition

    Jedward there, doing a better job than the Labour Party.