Category: LGBTQ+

  • All the world’s The Stage

    There’s been a thoroughly predictable outcry against The Old Vic theatre’s move to gender-neutral toilets, and trade magazine The Stage invited two cisgender women to write about it. A Twitter storm ensued and the articles were both taken down again, but it’s been reported on social media and on the BBC as the silencing of…

  • You can’t say “it happened to me!” if it didn’t happen to you

    Sky News, prop. R Murdoch, has given strange prominence to the launch of a new charity. Let’s start with a question. Detransitioning from what? What do you think transitioning means? To most, it’ll mean hormones and surgery. And as the article makes clear, to Sky it definitely means hormones and surgery. But that’s not what…

  • Might as well jump

    There’s been an interesting discussion on Twitter among some trans folks on the subject of transition and bravery. Did we have to transition? Are we brave to have done so? Here’s Emmy Zje: “Do you really HAVE to transition tho?” Yes. The horrific certainties of not transitioning eventually eclipsed the certainties transphobia was sure to…

  • How a lie can travel halfway around the world

    I mentioned recently that there was yet another junk science story doing the rounds about trans people: it claimed that thousands of deaths were linked to puberty blockers, when the actual number of deaths from puberty blocking were zero. The figures were based on the fact that the same drug is prescribed to help terminally…

  • Bad faith at work

    Here’s a simple question. What’s the purpose of anti-discrimination legislation? Is it (a) to protect vulnerable people from discrimination, for example in employment, education or health care? Or is it (b) to enable people to be howling arseholes to vulnerable people? If you answered (b), you may be a religious extremist. I’ll preface this with my usual…

  • The Sunday Times plays dirty

    It’s Sunday, so of course The Sunday Times is running more hit pieces on trans women. What’s wrong with this picture? The clue’s in the caption. Verity Smith isn’t a trans woman. He’s a trans man, assigned female at birth and now transitioning to male. The juxtaposition of headline and photo are clearly deliberate and…

  • That’s entertainment

    (Content warning: slurs) If it were possible to bet on the public pronouncements of terrible people, you could make a ton of money with a very simple rule: if someone has awful opinions on trans people, sooner or later you’ll discover that they have lots of other awful opinions too. Here’s just one day’s trawl.…

  • You still can’t trust The Times

    In Today’s Scottish edition of The Times, the odious yahoos at For Women Scotland – a single-issue anti-trans pressure group – get a headline claiming that women’s services are being “starved by trans funding”. Is it true? Of course it isn’t. Here’s Jeffrey Ingold, head of media for Stonewall UK, on Twitter. 1/ This anti-trans…

  • Why it matters that a trans dad can’t legally be a father

    The High Court in England has ruled that Guardian journalist Freddy McConnell, a trans man, cannot be named as the father of his child on their birth certificate. McConnell is his child’s dad, and as he has a gender recognition certificate he is legally a man. However, the court has taken the view that what matters…

  • Bigots’ feelings are better than facts

    A few months ago, Irish TV channel RTE gave airtime to a notorious anti-trans bigot and bully in order to “balance” the insights of people who actually know what they’re talking about. The wonky-eyed washed-up yokel impersonator from a village currently missing an idiot was given multiple opportunities to spout ill-informed, often malicious nonsense; when…