NHS England is starting to use a new term in regard to trans people, and particularly trans and non-binary teens who kill themselves over lack of treatment and NHS support: gender distress. That’s not the term used in existing medical literature – that’s gender dysphoria, and more recently gender incongruence. And the reason the new term has been coined is to muddy the waters and imply that these dead kids suffered from a pathological condition.

As Sarah Clarke put it on Bluesky: “Young people who died with gender distress” just sounds so much nicer and cleaner than “Trans kids we drove into a state of suicidal despair”.

There is such a thing as gender distress, as Talia Bhatt explains in this excellent thread. But it’s not something that exists within us. It’s something that’s imposed on us. Bhatt:

This, by Girl on the Net, is very good.

Love doesn’t hurt you on purpose. Love does not repeatedly make selfish choices that will damage you physically or emotionally. It doesn’t yell at you, or lie to you, or gaslight you or tell you you’re worthless. Love doesn’t vote for someone who doesn’t believe you’re a person. Love does not sit hand in hand with those who hate you. Love should do its best to lift you up.

Love might make mistakes, sure. But actively practicing love means learning from those mistakes, not making them over and over and then wheeling out ‘I love you’ with ‘I’m sorry’.

One of the ways in which the Tories have tried to rig the electoral system is by introducing mandatory voter ID. Without it, you can’t vote. Here’s how to get ID if you don’t already have any.

Kate Watson’s blog post on the scourge of events, the “more of a comment than a question” guy, is worth your time. It does a great job of explaining why he’s a menace, and what you can do to stop him derailing the Q&A.

If and when the mic goes to someone and the dreaded “It’s not really a question, more of a comment…” is uttered – this is what you do: kill the roving mic (if there is one), or really prepare to speak up and over, and say with all the authority you can muster “Thank you, we’re taking questions at the moment, but if we have time left after the questions, I’ll open the floor for comments. Now, who has the next question?”

Due to a calendar quirk, here in the UK the winter solstice is a day later than usual. But now it’s here, so today is the shortest, darkest day of the year and the beginning of the road back to summer sunshine. I’m writing this at 8am and it’s still pitch black outside; it’ll be like that for a while yet, and it’ll get dark early again today. But tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, it’ll get a little bit lighter. And the light will stay a little longer.

This year’s second half has felt darker than most. There have been a lot of sadnesses in the last six months, sadnesses that have made it hard to do some of the things I’d planned to do this year. I’ve spent more time in hospitals and clinics than I’d have liked. And as someone who’s both trans and not a nazi, it’s been a frightening year politically. That’s likely to be the case in 2024 too.

But there has been a lot of light too. I’ve been exceptionally fortunate this year because I’ve been given the opportunity to go to interesting things and talk to interesting people. Whether it’s launch events, festivals or just hanging around bookshops, I’ve had an absolute blast spending time with book people this year. I can’t go into details just yet but there will be more book things with more book people in 2024, many of which will be themed around joy.

There will also be more music. I’m writing the best songs of my life, so much so that it’s become a problem: we’re supposed to be making an album but every time we agree on a track list I write more songs. So I’m going to force myself to focus and to actually release something in the next few months.

It’s been a hard year for many of us, I know, but we’re still here. And that’s something worth celebrating.

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, if that’s a holiday you celebrate. And I hope that your 2024 is full of light, of love and of laughter.

The trial of the teenage killers of Brianna Ghey, the young trans girl murdered in broad daylight earlier this year, has begun. And I’d strongly advise you not to read about it, because the details are horrific – a lesson I learnt the hard way. But on the basis of the prosecution’s evidence so far, her murder was in large part because she was trans. That makes the decision not to prosecute this as a hate crime all the more baffling.

The Daily Mail, which has spent years fuelling anti-trans hatred in the UK, is delighted by the horror: it’s titillating readers with the gruesome details and it’s now promoting a podcast promising “every twist and turn” in the “Brianna Ghey trial”, as if the murdered girl were the suspect and the trial a celebrity court case rather than a brutal and squalid tragedy. It’s a horrific reminder that as far as much of the press is concerned, trans lives don’t matter unless they can be used for profit.

There’s a fascinating piece in Scientific American that brings together many years of debunking: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong.

Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it’s wrong.

This appears to be one of those things that “everybody knows” but which turns out to be based on a bunch of guys making shit up, in this case in a collection called Man The Hunter published in the mid-1960s. The authors of the collection arrived at their conclusion – essentially, Men Are The Best Because Science – by ignoring all the evidence that disproved it.

The religious and social conservatives on the internet, inevitably, are losing their shit over this because the article makes it very clear yet again that many of the tenets of gender essentialism – that male and female roles are hard-wired in biology, so women should be kept barefoot and pregnant while men go out and do man stuff – are absolute bollocks. Man is not a hunter and woman is not a gatherer; that view is based on an interpretation of history that is increasingly proven to be false. Biologically speaking, women are much more suited to hunting – of the prehistoric kind – than men and there is no evidence that they were left to look after the kids while the men went chasing prey. And that’s an inconvenient truth for the faith over facts crowd.

Where the article gets really interesting is in its focus on a key hormone: not testosterone, but estrogen.

Given the fitness world’s persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance.

It’s well worth a read.

This commencement speech, by Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, is wise. It’s all over the internet but in case you missed it, Pritzker talks about idiots and empathy:

The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel.

When we see someone who doesn’t look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us—the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgement or both. That’s evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren’t familiar with.

In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges.

I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades… Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true—the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.

That’s been my experience too, and even more so for my friends who work in the hospitality industry: they dread the arrival of high-status, academically high achieving arseholes, people who prove the dating maxim that you can tell the character of a person by how they treat people they consider unimportant.

Smart here doesn’t necessarily mean academically clever; it means people who are receiving rather than broadcasting, people who are interested and interesting and who see their own success or status not as a treasure to be hoarded but as a joy to be shared, people who have imagination and creativity in spades. These are the people I gravitate to, and who I am lucky to have as friends.

I’ve said many times that I live an unusually charmed life compared to many trans people, the majority of whom are not middle-aged, middle-class media freelancers. A new workplace survey of trans people by YouGov demonstrates that for those people, things aren’t great.

The study found:

• 65% of trans employees hide their trans status at work, up from 52% in 2016;
• 56% of trans employees aren’t out to their colleagues;
• 32% have experienced workplace bullying or insults from colleagues;
• 50% say they’ve concealed their trans status when looking for jobs;
• 25% have been socially excluded by colleagues;
• 27% have experienced discrimination or abuse from colleagues outside work;
• 6% have been physically abused or threatened in the workplace.

There are some small indications of positive progress, though. Of those people who are out at work:

• 51% said colleagues responded positively, up from 50% in 2016.
• 5% experienced a negative reaction from colleagues, down from 10% in 2016.

Another good piece by Vice: “Gender Critical” feminism isn’t feminist. It’s just transphobic

If you read the news, it’s easy to think that gender-critical thinking is the dominant mode of British feminism. That can be terrifying for trans and non-binary people, especially when we are increasingly bombarded with transphobic headlines; an IPSO report in 2020 found there had been a 400 percent increase in coverage of trans issues in the previous five years.

…Gender-critical feminists may have the powers that be and the far-right, but they haven’t persuaded other feminists. 

I don’t like the term gender critical feminist, because like intelligent design or race realism it’s an attempt to rebrand the unpalatable to make it acceptable (and like those framings, it’s repeated by journalists who aren’t doing their jobs properly). There’s nothing critical or feminist about reinforcing patriarchal gender roles and trying to roll back to the clock on equality.