Kierkegaard's Lunch

After some of the remarks made by Keir Starmer about trans women in the days leading up to the election, many in the trans community in the UK felt unable to celebrate the end of the grotesque Conservatives. Are his attitudes to us actually pretty close to those of the unhinged caricatures he replaced? It's easy to hate the grotesques. The ones with their faces, or minds, bent in rage; who wear their prejudice like a badge, crowing about common sense or decency or national values, or whatever it is, and smearing their victims with theatrical lies. The British Conservative Party has over the last eight years or so developed a thriving wing of these deranged fanatics. Ex Home Secretary, Suella Braverman - increasingly the Marjorie Taylor-Greene of British politics - has not lost any of her zeal, it's clear. Despite her party ending up with the lowest number of MPs since 1832 last week, she's spent at least two of the four days since  making speeches about how appalling tran...

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...

With the trial now over and the killers sentenced, the media festival of sham-concern-for-money will soon move on. But, if you are cisgender, please don't bother to even express your sympathy unless you are prepared to speak and act against the torrent of hate descending on Britain's trans community. Because your sympathy means nothing.   The Brianna Ghey murder trial today came to an end, with the sentencing of the two young people who brutally murdered her in a North of England park last year. Brianna Ghey was - for anyone outside the UK or who has been living in a dumpster for the last 12 months - a trans girl. And with this final chapter, the Money-Making Media Circus rolls on to its deeply monestisable, final chapter with the 'tv specials' and the ‘inside stories’ and the interviews and all the other things that have been embargoed till today. The killers' pictures are out there too, plus their names. It's an editor’s wet dream. After today, of course, read...

I transitioned - that's the process of finally starting to live in public in the gender I knew myself to be - 15 years ago. If you are cisgender - that is when the gender you were assigned at birth fits you just fine and you've never questioned it inside - you're possibly going to be struggling right there. Certainly, if you live in Britain or in many parts of the Mid-Western or Southern US you're going to find plenty of people around you (perhaps you are one yourself?) who'd respond to what I have just written by saying 'Wait, that's just rubbish. That notion of being a gender inside that isn't what got written on your birth certificate  isn't even a thing is it! ?'  Perhaps they - or you - think it's some sort of ideology - a web of lunatic theory that some pseudo-academic came up with about 20 years ago - into which I have plunged? An 'ism' of some kind? I could point out that the experience I went through has been experienced in ...

UK Athletics has banned all transgender women who have "been through male puberty" from competing in women's athletics in Britain with immediate effect. Voices are now being raised to have trans women banned from recreational athletics too. Trans women who have already entered events under old guidelines will be permitted to compete but will have their times and placing erased and will not be eligible to receive a medal. "Consideration" is being given to allowing trans women to join a renamed male category.  Meanwhile, the British government and voices of hate within Britain are working hard to ensure that no trans girl can avoid going through male puberty, by shutting down healthcare for them.  The announcement came on Trans Day of Visibility. Of course it did. The annual day in which the trans community around the world stands up - those of us who can, in the shrinking number of countries where to do so doesn't mean you'll be arrested, beaten up or k...