Kierkegaard's Lunch

World swimming body Fina has just overturned its previous guidelines and effectively banned all trans women from elite swimming. Each time a new piece of anti-trans discrimination arrives, its authors try to justify it as specific to just one context. But, behind them, the people pressing for each of these actions are celebrating as they build their bigger jigsaw of hate. They have a much larger goal in mind... So here we go again. After drawing breath from being told I am a potential rapist and ought to be banned from all women's toilets or changing rooms and after sitting through noxious comments from government ministers about how I can't be let into a women's ward if I go to hospital, my dreams of an Olympic Gold are now in tatters.  That moment when I cheat my way into the women's kierin final through my concealed yet secretly superior strength and power on my racing bike down the back straight to take the title is to be denied me. No matter, perhaps I can line up...

Perhaps I'll soon be calling myself a Galway Girl. But it's not something I planned.. . I am sitting in a café in Galway City on the West Coast of Ireland, spreading blackcurrant jam on a croissant while my partner works her way through a vegetarian fry-up that I wish I had ordered too. Above us, on several walls, large screens are showing Sky News coverage of the Queen’s Jubilee, live from The Mall in London.   Appropriately, the Irish Guards, a regiment first formed when the country in which I am now sitting was still part of the United   Kingdom, is parading with its enormous Irish Wolfhound mascot. The dog looks placid enough. I wonder in passing if a dog can have a   sense of conflicting loyalties and split heritage? Questions of loyalty, heritage and belonging are ones about which I have been thinking a lot since our plane touched down in Shannon last weekend. I am here in this café because I wanted to get out of the UK   this week and I wan...