Category: LGBTQ+

  • What should a trans woman sound like?

    I’ve just done a radio interview, with a preamble I’m used to: Me (on phone): Hello! Researcher: Hi! Can I speak to Carrie Marshall, please? Me: Speaking! Researcher: [pause] Then professionalism kicks in and the researcher tells me what they’re calling about. It’s not a big deal; just one of those things you get used…

  • Trans patients left in limbo

    My former doctor has been suspended by the General Medical Council. Dr Mike Webberley, who took over the care of trans patients when his wife Helen was censured over an administrative issue, is no longer able to treat patients in the UK. I don’t know the ins and outs of this one, but I do…

  • How can you edit a paper if you don’t read it?

    James Doleman’s Twitter account is providing an unintentionally hilarious account of Katherine O’Donnell’s employment tribunal. Today, Times editor John Witherow is giving evidence. A pattern appears to be emerging. Counsel for the complainant presents to the court another Times article, a “self-identification,” of gender. This refers to the Soham Murderer, Ian Huntley, and suggests he…

  • Fun with filters

    The chat app SnapChat is back in the headlines after its new gender-swapping filter went viral. The filter makes boys look like girls and vice-versa, and as you can see above the results are pretty funny – although I seem to have the dubious honour of being the only person who looks older when the…

  • The Times on trial

    Imagine if the BBC had been taken to a tribunal over allegations of bullying, bias and malpractice so serious the entire management team were made to appear as witnesses. Newspapers would be all over the story, with good reason. As award-winning journalist Liz Gerard points out on Twitter, if you swap the BBC for The Times…

  • “Extreme right wing fundamentalists with a history of abuse are being given the red carpet treatment at Holyrood”

    Scotland’s only openly transgender elected official has resigned over “institutionalised transphobia” in the SNP. Dundee councillor Gregor Murray has repeatedly clashed with senior SNP figures including Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine. Murray: The SNP has a major institutional problem with transphobia, and is doing nothing to rectify this. While they rightfully condemn Labour for anti-semitism, and…

  • “A level sufficient to qualify as a vendetta”

    One of the witnesses in Katherine O’Donnell’s employment tribunal against her former employer The Times  is Christine Burns MBE. Burns played a key part in the creation of UK equality legislation, and she’s been monitoring and reporting on the press coverage of trans issues for very many years. In her submission to the tribunal, she describes…

  • “I didn’t notice” doesn’t mean “it didn’t happen”.

    In Scotland, one of the most pernicious bits of anti-trans bullshit is the claim that gender recognition reform is a sudden development, something the Scottish Government is doing in secret and trying to rush through so that women’s groups can’t object. Not only does that overlook the extensive, well publicised public consultation on gender recognition…

  • “We are now living through the biggest anti-trans backlash since the 1970s.”

    I’m not the only one to notice the growing links between anti-trans groups, religious extremists and reactionary conservatives. Writing in Jezebel, Esther Wang explores “The Unholy Alliance of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists and the Right Wing.” In a sign of how their thinking mirrors one another, it can be remarkably difficult to distinguish between the talking…

  • On bathroom abuse

    While commentators whip up hysteria over the imagined threat of trans people in toilets, here’s the reality. Reuters: Transgender youth, along with those who do not identify as male or female, are at increased risk of sexual violence in schools that force them to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender assigned at…