Category: LGBTQ+

  • Love prevails

    Another beautiful NYT piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan, this time to mark the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. As a young trans girl, I could only assume that the odds against me were long. What would happen, I wondered, if I spoke aloud the thing that was in my heart? Even worse: What would happen if…

  • The song remains the same

    I’m writing about some really horrible things today so let’s start with something beautiful instead: here’s Swedish group Erato covering Robyn’s Call Your Girlfriend. Okay. Let’s talk about hate. Writing in Buzzfeed, Patrick Strudwick speaks to a man whose name should be more widely known. Terry Sanderson was a lone voice against the media bullying…

  • If only there were some explanation

    Today, in The Guardian: That’s the same Guardian that’s printed inflammatory drivel about trans people for months now. The same Guardian whose US staff were so outraged by its promotion of “transphobic viewpoints” that they took the unprecedented step of writing an open letter damning their UK colleagues. Maybe their UK colleagues should read it…

  • LGBT+ articles you should read today

    This is a powerful and important piece by Katelyn Burns, one of very few trans journalists, on the problem with mainstream reporting on LGBT+ issues: the lack of dedicated LGBTQ media is a disaster. It begins with something depressingly common: a major newspaper highlighting the views of a website crank as some kind of expert,…

  • True colours

    It’s no great secret that anti-trans bigots tend to be bigoted in other ways too; they just hide it. The ongoing hate-fest over the NSPCC working with and then dropping trans woman Munroe Bergdorf is a vivid demonstration. The NSPCC has apologised for dropping Bergdorf, but its employees aren’t happy: 148 of its employees have…

  • More straight pride

    Today is the third anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 LGBT+ people were slaughtered. It was the single deadliest lone gunman mass shooting in US history, the worst terrorist atrocity since 9/11. To commemorate it, a number of US Christian fundamentalists will hold a rally in Orlando. The rally…

  • Not in your name

    I’m going to resist the temptation to make too many obvious jokes about The Pope’s latest damnation of trans people; you can come up with your own variations of “…says a man in a dress who thinks his boss lives in the sky”, I’m sure. I’d rather talk about yet another survey that shows growing…

  • Toilet Terror

    I lived up to a negative trans stereotype the other day: I hid in a toilet because I shouldn’t have been there. It was the gents, of course. I should probably explain. Although I’ve transitioned legally and socially, there are times when I don’t present female: the days I’m getting electrolysis, which require me to…

  • Weaponising media

    Another day, another bunch of saddening headlines: armed neo-Nazis with a police escort intimidating Pride attendees in the US, lesbian women attacked in the street in England, the usual raft of anti-LGBT hatred in the press. Two UK stories stood out for me, because they demonstrate two elements of the same thing: how anti-trans individuals…

  • Straight talk about “straight pride”

    Most of the coverage I’ve seen of the so-called “straight pride” march apparently happening in Boston has demonstrated how broken much of the media has become. It’s been treated in “and finally…” style, a gently amusing little story in much the same style as a cat on a skateboard or a dog that can say…