Kierkegaard's Lunch

I'm a trans woman living in Britain. I once hoped that my country might learn to treat us with acceptance, dignity and understanding. It feels now like I was wrong. As the hate has mounted I have watched much of the country turn away from us; many complacent, others frightened to engage, others joining a bandwagon of fear-based bigotry as they hurl social media or legal threats at us. It's all part of an accelerating project to eliminate us completely from society. The world of 2007 seems long gone now. There are of course the headline differences. The impending World Financial Crash was still just ahead of us, in Britain stimulating 14 years of brutal Tory rule. The disaster of the Arab Spring and the refugee crisis that wealthy Europe was to face had not yet happened, nor the catastrophe of Brexit with its self-inflicted, deranged, rightward lurch for a lost national meaning that never existed and its perma-platforming of hatred, bitter grievance and ethnonationalism under th...

So Kamala Harris has spotted that Trump is pretty much the dictionary definition of a fascist. Who knew eh? Everybody? To my eye, he is almost the reincarnation of Mussolini - the same gait, the same posture, the same look in his eye. I started off, months back thinking he was going to win. Biden was a disaster on the campaign trail. Thank God he stepped away. Then Harris came along and the momentum started to go her way. In early September I thought, yes, she could do this . Now - I think I'm personally calling the US election - for Trump. A truly cataclysmic outcome, and there's just no way of feeling anything but dread and fear about that. Why do I think he's going to win? First, the more deranged he becomes, the more electable he looks - to a certain type of voter in key swing states. In his derangement he is publicly refusing to 'behave', to 'tow the line', or say what he 'should'. This is likely because of his deteriorating mental condition,...

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...

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 ...