Category: LGBTQ+

  • Why are LGBT people so sad?

    Stonewall Scotland has published a worrying report: half of LGBT people have experienced depression in the last year, rising to 72% among trans people. More than half of trans people have thought about taking their life in the last 12 months. Here’s the thing, though. LGBT people are not more prone to depression or suicidal […]

  • Same boss, same bullshit

    The Sunday Times isn’t the only supposedly respectable newspaper to mislead its readers in order to parrot the homophobic and transphobic views of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. The Wall Street Journal does it too. The WSJ appears to have started the new year the way it means to continue, with an op-ed warning readers about […]

  • Truth takes time

    Another day, another admission by The Sunday Times that an anti-trans article by Andrew Gilligan was made up. This time it was the one about women’s toilets in the City of London, in which Gilligan completely misrepresented the Equality Act to scaremonger about nothing. As I wrote at the time: I regret to inform readers […]

  • Writers don’t use words by accident

    There’s been a bit of controversy over a new film, Girl, which is about a trans woman. It’s interesting to see how that’s been reported: almost without exception, the trans movie reviewers and reporters who’ve made legitimate criticisms of the film (such as a shocking scene of self-harm they worry might be imitated) have been […]

  • Green sheep, bendy bananas and boys having periods

    It’s Sunday, the day when the UK press likes to post multiple anti-trans articles. I want to look at  one from last week. It’s the story that virulently anti-trans MP David Davies described on Twitter as the “latest example of barking mad trans-activism”: the idea that eight-year-old boys will be told they can have periods. […]

  • “We” didn’t miss anything

    This week, The New York Times made a podcast called “The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It”. Esquire’s Charles P Pierce is not amused: who, exactly, does the NYT mean by “we”? To take the simplest argument first, “we,” of course, did no such thing, unless “we” is a very limited—and very […]

  • Bigots don’t read books. They burn them

    Here we go again. In the latest bout of anti-trans madness, washed-up comedy writers are comparing trans people to Nazis to the delight of their many thousands of followers. In the aftermath, Scots MSP and newspaper columnist Joan McAlpine approvingly retweets an anti-trans group – a group that had been invited to the Scots Parliament […]

  • “Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ argument”

    There’s an interesting opinion piece by an unnamed member of MassResistance, part of the anti-LGBT movement that suffered a landslide defeat in its attempts to repeal trans rights in Massachusetts. It includes a telling admission of something that’s widely known but rarely written down. The rallying cry of the pro-family groups trying to repeal the […]

  • Words have consequences

    The Daily Mail:   Elsewhere in an American high school, members of staff attempt to break into a locked toilet stall because a trans  teenager is in it. In a different school, a lesbian student is beaten up because of her boyish presentation. In October a lesbian woman was kicked out of a bowling alley […]

  • “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here”

    One of the weird things about being trans – and it’s one thing from a long list – is that if you’re male to female, you move from a life of great privilege to one where you’re among a minority. That’s not to say pre-transition you live a life of great power and glory, but […]