Kierkegaard's Lunch

"Jo" she said, "Can I ask you something personal? Of course, you can tell me fuck off."  I always judge these requests in the moment. There's no foolproof way of handling them. As a trans woman, I am used to having to do the heavy lifting to help those around me try and come to terms with who I am and with my experience, and it can be tiring. But this was a new colleague, and I hope, friend, who had been very welcoming in my new role working alongside her. We had already bonded a fair bit and she radiated lots of supportive energy. So I said. "Sure". "When you started I was really happy that we had another woman in our group. And that's what I see you as, a woman, absolutely and completely", she said. She then reflected on my use of 'trans' and what, she wondered, it meant for me. This, she added, was particularly in the context of another friend of hers who (my guess) identified as non-binary and presented in a more gender non-c...

The situation is serious. Here's how it happened and three things we must do urgently.  Barely a day goes by now without more pressure being heaped upon the trans community in the UK. As part of that community, I wake almost every day to another story in the newspapers misrepresenting people like me, framed by threat, fear and usually downright lies.  During my day, I'll likely come across some current court case in which hostile forces are working to have trans people's sketchy rights reduced and maybe read how the increasingly partisan British judiciary is more minded than ever to support that objective. Later, I might come across the latest bad news from, for example, the Equality and Human Rights Commission as it retreats into a new reactionary and anti-trans stance. Eventually, I'll go to bed with some shitshow from the United States. A couple of nights ago it was the news that the Governor of Tennessee had signed into law a new ruling that any business allowing t...

In yesterday's What Fresh Hell Is This News, an attempt in court by a range of TERFs to try and get a Judicial Review into the Statutory Code that accompanies the Equality Act (issued by The Equality and Human Rights Commission) has failed. The aim was to try and legally allow businesses and other services to exclude transgender people on a blanket basis from single-sex facilities like changing rooms.  This was a preliminary hearing, and they needed to win it (ie establish that there was a case in law) to go forward to a full Judicial Review. The legal team behind the TERF campaign on this was the same one who worked so hard to remove puberty blocker treatments for trans kids in the Keira Bell vs. Tavistock Clinic case. Clearly, the Barrister in question hasn't just been Thinking Of The Children recently - he has it in for all trans people. How surprising, said no-one. The case got nowhere, thank God. The TERFs were told that their argument was "an obvious absurdity"...

What should we do, cisgender friends? I am part of a tiny group of people. No MPs. No Members of the House of Lords. No Judges. No Newspaper Editors. No CEOs. No Senior Civil Servants. No Senior TV Executives. No Heads of Banks. Read the article . Sheila Jeffreys has plenty of form, over decades. She has dedicated her entire adult life to erasing people like me completely. Her stance is very simple. I am a dangerous, male sexual predator. She and a few like her are becoming more and more influential. In a wider setting, like Trump (who was once a joke) did. Like Bannon or Miller, or Farage did. These people were once seen as fringe figures. But they cracked it. They worked out how to draw hate towards them like iron filings towards a magnet. How to use it. They took over the minds of an increasing number of people, as a parasite does, eating the organism from the inside. In fact, maybe ten years ago Jeffreys, and her attitudes, were seen as beyond the fringe. Five years ago they were ...

It's relentless. If I sound like a broken record, sorry not sorry as they say. This is my life. And the life of many friends of mine. And, as another weekend rolls around, that means more public attacks on the transgender community. Fresh from the success of preventing the reform of The Gender Recognition Act, turning a public consultation into a fiasco at the end of which trans people were pathetically grateful that their rights hadn't actually been pushed back, the Usual Suspects are moving on. The next target, we suspect, is the repeal of The Gender Recognition Act.  Some of us thought the bigger public health disaster for a century combined with a piece of voluntary economic self-harm unparalleled in modern history might give them something else to think about.  They didn't miss a beat.  At the weekend: a grotesque piece in The Mail on Sunday claiming teachers were now to be stopped from 'transing' children (something no teacher has EVER done) and a letter in ...

Another day, and now a move by a powerful British institution against transgender people. A piece of erasure so naked and stark that it barely seeks to conceal the prejudice contained within it. The BBC runs a service called Action Line - essentially a website to which it directs viewers and listeners who are dealing with particular problems, or who might be affected by the issues discussed in programming. It contains resources and links. Until a few days ago, it contained a section on gender identity, with links to three organisations which support trans people, including trans kids and their families. I have plenty of knowledge of two of them,  Mermaids and GIRES . They are respected, respectable and caring organisations. I have known Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids, for years. I know Bernard and Terry Reed, who founded GIRES, and who were both given OBEs for their work. All three started working in this field years ago when trans people were pretty much entirely ignored or jus...

It's been another difficult 24 hours. I am going to start this post with a lengthy quotation from Reni Eddo-Lodge, from The Guardian piece that flowed from her original 2014 post, and was in 2017 about to be turned into her best selling book, ' Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race ': 'They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong.  The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and r...

Trans Rights Protest, Parliament Square London, July 4th 2020.  I often find protesting a melancholy experience. How many have I been on since 2016 now? Several to fight Brexit; at one of them over a million turned up. Two to express my anger at our government's pandering to Donald Trump. A Women's March. I was there as a woman with my sisters. I even stood in a damp Trafalgar Square along with a couple of hundred EU citizens to show my solidarity with them. Each protest had a personal purpose, often to show my support for others. The cataclysm of Brexit still awaits, and though it will hurt me and take money out of my pocket, I am lucky to be able to hope that the effect will not be too great - economically at least - on me. It, of course, depends on how bad it gets. I went on the anti-Brexit marches thinking of the millions it will crucify (all the more so now). The anti-Trump marches felt like solidarity with Americans reeling under the boot of a proto-fascist, the W...