Category: LGBTQ+

  • Trans Guardian staff quit over transphobic reporting and “face to face rows”

    Buzzfeed news: Two Transgender Employees Of The Guardian Have Quit Over Its “Transphobic” Reporting …Her resignation marks a flashpoint in what multiple sources at the Guardian have described to BuzzFeed News as a deepening internal war over the rights of transgender people – and how the organisation reports on them. Staff members across several departments…

  • Playing video games

    Writing in Metro, Owl Stefania writes about the importance of video games in her coming out process: “Growing up, video games were my escape, providing an avenue where I could explore who I was.” I’ve written about this too, and a version of the following article was originally published in 404 Ink magazine in late 2017.…

  • This is what a moral panic looks like

    Tea Uglow did an interesting thing. They took screenshots of articles containing the word “transgender” on a few English news outlets. Over the last 12 months, there were 878 articles. That doesn’t include publications such as the New Statesman, which has been home to a lot of anti-trans voices, and to regional press such as…

  • Old news

    Here’s The Sun newspaper in 1992. If you think that sounds familiar, have a read of Terry Sanderson’s Media Watch column from that month, May 1992. Sanderson spent a quarter of a century battling against bigotry in UK newspapers, and sadly the publications and the writers don’t seem to have changed much. There was Julie…

  • Stay in your lane

    In a study that’s caused much appalled amusement, researchers at Penn State have discovered that men avoid things such as using reusable shopping bags for fear others will perceive them as gay. It’s interesting but not surprising that the policing of this stuff is done by both men and women. In a series of studies,…

  • When stereotypes equal safety

    One of the many things that annoys me about anti-trans activists is that on one hand they accuse trans people of perpetuating gender stereotypes, and on the other they viciously mock trans women who don’t conform to stereotypical ideas of female beauty. As the wonderfully named Tranna Wintour writes in The Walrus, it’s very difficult…

  • “Gender critical” philosophy doesn’t make sense

    The culture wars over trans people have made their way to the philosophers’ community, with some high-profile anti-trans people wrapping their views in philosophical arguments. Unfortunately, Luke Roelofs writes, those arguments don’t make sense. This is a long read, but it’s interesting if you’d like to understand why issues such as policing bathrooms are so…

  • The best of both worlds

    I was having a bad day on Saturday so I went to the pub to cheer myself up. It wasn’t entirely successful. First, a young woman who’d been standing next to me at the bar heard me speak, turned, and stared at me with open disgust. A few minutes later a drunk thirtysomething man put…

  • I’m hacked off with it too

    I’ve written before about the toothless press regulator IPSO, which was set up by the press specifically for the purpose of not regulating the press. To take just one recent example, IPSO found that when The Times makes up quotes, doing so doesn’t breach the rules on accuracy. The ruling was on a story about…

  • Probably not coming to a newspaper near you

    One of the things anti-trans writers like to go on about is the spectre of “detransition” and surgical regret: according to them, trans-related surgeries are acts of mutilation that many people will go on to regret. As ever, the facts tell a very different story. I’ve mentioned previously that the NHS in England reported a…