Kierkegaard's Lunch

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