Kierkegaard's Lunch

If you don’t work in the British media, and you’ve been puzzled by how it’s been treating the tiny UK trans community, here’s an open letter to help with that. I may have got some stuff in it right or I may not. Who cares? I'm on a deadline here. I can’t actually be bothered to check with anyone working in the industry, to be honest, and frankly, it might mess things up for me if I did.  But that’ll all be fine, you’ll see… Dear Journalist, First, let me imagine you. Belsize Park or Crouch End? Hampton or Dulwich Village maybe? Wherever, I see you settled somewhere in leafy London. A comfortable urban spot - an Edwardian terrace, or perhaps a corner semi. Knocked through perhaps? Kids in their teens, and maybe even at university now. Two? Perhaps some from the first marriage as well. The eldest is a bit of a shit, but then you were away so much. It’s ok, because it's all civilised with the ex now. You even went to that talk on body politics at The Barbican together. A dog, that...

"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...

Edit: February 22nd, 2023.  I wrote this in January. A couple of weeks later, a 16-year-old trans girl, Brianna Ghey, was knifed to death in a public park in the north of England. Two days ago, India Willoughby, who is trans and recently appeared on the BBC's Question Time programme to a volley of panelist and audience abuse that left her shaken, received a written death threat from British neo-Nazi group 'National Action'.  In the face of a rapidly deteriorating situation in the UK, created and exploited by the British government and the British media, my hope is that readers can pay particular attention to the final paragraph of this piece and then follow some of the links.   *************** In the fifteen years since I transitioned, I have felt many things. Initially, the expansive, sudden joy of finally being able to present myself to the world as me. In the metaphor first used by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, my ‘false self’ – the mask I had put on to stay safe and...

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...

As we are about to hear again, 'Gender Critical' views are a legally 'protected' position. But those who have them must also voice them; it's axiomatic. Another week approaches and with it another court case in which the rights of individuals with cultural capital in society to hate a marginalised group will be aired in public. One side will no doubt reheat arguments about free speech, cancellation, all the rest - and the other will look on from the sidelines, objectified, anxious, feeling that existential threat again. On Monday the Gender Critical Traveling Circus making its way through the British judicial system is back, as Maya Forstater's case for unlawful discrimination returns to the Employment Tribunal to see if the non-renewal of her contract with an NGO was unlawful. She does this, having established in an appeal that her Gender Critical views are a 'protected characteristic' under The Equality Act 2010 (on the basis, pretty much, that such be...

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...