Kierkegaard's Lunch

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30321133/?ref_=tt_mv_close Will & Harper has just launched on Netflix. In it, comedian Will Ferrell takes a coast-to-coast road trip across the US with his long time buddy Harper Steele. He does this because Harper, someone who has been a good friend since they worked together on Saturday Night Live in the late 1990s has sent him an email that he really was not expecting. Harper, known to Ferrell previously as Andrew, was transitioning, to live as a woman. Wanting to show up for his friend, and to understand as best he could, he suggests that they cross the country, taking in backwoods America. With A-lister Ferrell alongside her (and thus providing some cushioning to the bleak and raw potential terror of entering some of these spaces as a 61 year old early-transition trans woman), Harper takes up the chance to find her feet, experiencing as her new self the reality of places that she’s often frequented in her prior gender.   I am going to respond to

I got misgendered today. Out of the blue, in a Zoom call, by someone who runs a business where I work.  I wasn’t expecting it, at all. I transitioned 16 years ago – a full medical, legal, social process. As I went through all that, I was misgendered, often, which was hard. But it’s very rare now. These days, I look the way I want to look, which, to the vast majority of people, is taken as looking like many other middle aged, cis women in middle class, white Britain. That’s partly because it feels instinctive and it makes me happy to present in the world this way, a choice I have personally made (and of course  can make, as I have the cultural privilege of being middle class and being white too), and partly – and I hold this knowledge with some pain – because I know that I don’t have the courage or the resilience to navigate the world whilst standing out and attracting attention from a growing number of cisgender people in Britain who may feel that it’s ok to insult or attack me; who m

After some of the remarks made by Keir Starmer about trans women in the days leading up to the election, many in the trans community in the UK felt unable to celebrate the end of the grotesque Conservatives. Are his attitudes to us actually pretty close to those of the unhinged caricatures he replaced? It's easy to hate the grotesques. The ones with their faces, or minds, bent in rage; who wear their prejudice like a badge, crowing about common sense or decency or national values, or whatever it is, and smearing their victims with theatrical lies. The British Conservative Party has over the last eight years or so developed a thriving wing of these deranged fanatics. Ex Home Secretary, Suella Braverman - increasingly the Marjorie Taylor-Greene of British politics - has not lost any of her zeal, it's clear. Despite her party ending up with the lowest number of MPs since 1832 last week, she's spent at least two of the four days since  making speeches about how appalling tran

Watching trans actress Nava Mau play trans woman Teri in Netflix’s Baby Reindeer was, for me, the most grounding and affirming aspect of a powerful, though almost unbearably gruelling, drama. In a series drenched in the themes of shame and mental illness in which the main, cisgender, characters constantly make the worst decisions possible, Teri shows self-respect and courage. And in a country so gripped now in a spasm of political and media hatred of trans people, it made me wonder, are we actually the only sane ones left? It's currently at No 1 on the Netflix charts. Comedian Richard Gadd ’s semi-autobiographical story of being aggressively stalked, over several years, by a woman who one day walks into the pub where he is working, has received critical and viewer acclaim and is currently scoring highly on IMDb . Gadd based the story, broadly, on his own experiences - heavily disguised he adds, to protect the identities of those involved, especially that of his (actual) stalker wh

The Cass Review into the care of trans children and young people is out. With prejudice encoded into it from the outset and feverish, pre-planned weaponisation of it once released, it's hard to overstate the amount of despair it is going to cause. Well, I guess we knew it was coming. But, even after eight or more years of sustained abuse and hatred on the front line of the British Culture Wars, we had no idea it would be this bad. The Cass Review, a long awaited inquiry into the healthcare for trans children and young people, appeared just over a week ago - 4 years after Sajid Javid, Conservative Health Secretary, set it up. In 2022 Javid went onto television, with his Best Concerned Face, to say that trans children were in fact the  victims of "child abuse"  and this week he celebrated the arrival of the report as a  major defeat for "extreme gender ideology"  which had taken over the NHS. He added that he'd seen the state of services for young people in th