Kierkegaard's Lunch

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"...

Here in Britain, the last few days have been filled with news of first the disappearance, then murder, of marketing executive Sarah Everard, in South West London. The story got even worse, if it could get worse, when it was revealed that the suspect in custody was a serving police officer for the Metropolitan Police. By the weekend it had branched off into a separate avenue of grotesque when the same police force then heavy-handedly enforced a Covid-era ban on public gatherings as a group of women gathered on Clapham Common to hold a vigil for Sarah. A PR disaster for the Met on top of a genuine disaster for the grieving Everard family. The whole story is awful indeed. We know it without even having had to read it. Woman walking alone is accosted by a violent male and abducted. Later her remains turn up in a wood. Or a garden. Or a lake. How many times before, how many times again? Our posturing government, which has decimated funding for women's refuges and for the rehabilitation...

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 ...

Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who spotted it? In the first of Trump’s delusional rants to camera in denial of democratic reality, early in the morning after the election, he took to the microphone to claim victory and allege massive Democrat fraud, even as many States were still counting votes. Yet, before he said these extraordinary, constitution-destroying things, he began by talking about having to cancel the party that was all set to start, in his honour. The big showcase adorationfest with him as star guest, in front of fawning, adoring and maskless underlings. A place he loves to be. A place he must be if his entire self-concept is to function.  It was striking. The four-year-old in action once more, tantrumming his way into ground zero of the election agenda and framing the entire situation around his upset at not being able to have a party in his own honour. That was his opener. To me, the rest of what he said just seemed like the typical psychological reaction of this bro...

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...